Music
The Stone Roses, Hampden Park, Glasgow
Three stars
If this set at a blustery Hampden is the final show for the reformed Stone Roses, then it is the correct call. That isn’t to say that the show wasn’t enjoyable, because it was, but entertaining through watching a vintage band going through the jukebox, as opposed to presenting a group with anything to say in 2017.
It was essentially the same set they’ve been hawking around for a few years, harking back to 1989’s seminal debut record in bulk, adding a handful of tunes from Second Coming and their sole new offering, All For One. A year on from release, it is still an extremely dull song, the work of B-list Britpoppers rather than an act who vastly influenced British music.
Reminders of old supremacy still crept through, despite a sometimes dreadful sound and Ian Brown’s vocal being even worse than usual, to the extent that it was grimace-inducing during She Bangs The Drums. Yet the rumble of I Wanna Be Adored still carried weight, the four colour co-ordinated figures emerging, swiftly obscured by huge clouds of smoke from flares.
There remains alchemy between Mani and Reni, and several of the hits were glorious – a spine-tingling Made of Stone, Waterfall’s jangle, the transcendent finale of I Am The Resurrection. Both Love Spreads and Breaking Into Heaven were fulsome, letting John Squire work through the blues influences without getting indulgent.
However the lack of new material left the whole enterprise feeling like pure nostalgia. “The past was yours but the future’s mine” cried Brown, but it seemed disingenuous given how rooted in looking backwards everything was, grooving to 1980s b-sides rather than anything fresh. The future is elsewhere now.
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