Turns into dust: The Stone Roses & Bon Iver at Blackpool

 1989, August. The Stone Roses step out onto the stage at the Empress Ballroom, Blackpool. The Berlin Wall is soon to fall. Margaret Thatcher’s reign is wilting and barely stumbling about on its last legs. Young people have flocked to Blackpool in droves, from all across the north: this is their band and the gig, a 3000-man sellout, is the group’s biggest to date. MANCHESTER IN THE AREA WE’RE INTERNATIONAL WE’RE CONTINENTAL… BUT WE’LL SETTLE FOR GLASGOW screams Ian Brown as he walks on, spinning a yoyo in one-hand, hurling ice-pops into the crowd with the other. Whatever it means, it fits. The Roses embody all that seems somehow hopeful, young and brave in a country that is crawling out of the decade much more tired and much more slow than it steamed in. 

I want to see him dead. I want to shoot him

-Brown on Prince Charles, 1989

Things didn’t quite work out like that, and the common sense is that the Roses bottled it. Alex Niven talks of how the progressive potential of the late ‘80s was lost as the Roses burnt out, and killed themselves in a fog of drugs and in-fighting. It’s so tempting to look back at the Roses’ tale and ask, what if? What if they had released three albums in the five years it took them to record their second? What if John Squire and Ian Brown had continued to write songs together after 1989? What if they had created an album blending the funk of Fool’s Gold with the meat of Love Spreads? Call me naïve, a complete idiot, but for some reason it feels that if the answers to these questions were only fractionally different, then the early ‘90s music scene, in fact the entire decade - fuck it, the whole bleedin’ state of British society could have been so much different, so much more positive than it turned out to be. Because the Roses were an Oasis with political energy: a band fuelled on grass-roots energy that craved global recognition without the rockstar lifestyle, that understood how poisonous Thatcher had been for the arts, the morale, for people’s damn sanity in Britain, and saw music as their own way of building a fightback. The very nature of nostalgia mean that we always look back on things to be more perfect than they really were. But if the ‘90s, with all its credit-card smiles and bourgeois excesses needed one thing, it was surely a loud, proud voice in popular culture that poured scorn on the idea that things were only going to get better, that stood up for the large swathes of communities that Labour were beginning to forget under Blair and that offered some hopeful grain, some idea that things could be different, that this was anything but the end of history. In Blackpool in 1989, where the Empress Ballroom seemed host to something more like a thundering rally than a rock-gig, where young people across the North converged upon a seaside town to hear songs that were at once introspective, existential, sensitive, powerful and desperately hopeful, it seemed, for a brief moment, as though the Roses were destined to go on to become that voice.

***

2017. The Winter Gardens, Blackpool. A youthful audience sits in silence as notes shimmer and whirl and whine upon the caved theatre walls. Bon Iver stand on stage, three men at three different musical stations. Stood simple, dressed down in dim-shaded jeans and canvas t-shirts, the time for fury and boiled rage long since passed, sold on and sold-off. But the music fits. Whatever it means, whatever the logic behind Justin Vernon’s riddled lyric, it fits.

Bon Iver’s music screams heartbreak, a heartbreak that is as social as it is personal. The sounds and words, spun together like a schoolboy’s collage, blend all that is dying and crooked with the world with all that somehow brings comfort in a time so rife in the depressed and lonely.

Walking on the town’s seafront, the setting sun burns in glimpses through a wall of grey cloud- the sea runs out to meet it and the ripples bleed away, as if land and sky are curved together into a dome. The promenade is falling to bits, old shops, old paintwork and signs pointing to VHS tapes, postcards, things stuffed in your loft, things you’ve always had, never want – it could be 1989 or 2017 here, and bar the iphone in your pocket, you’d never tell. Rise up small slopes into the town centre, pass arcades and fun parks that look ill with hunger and dirt. 50% of children here in poverty in some parts of town, google tells me. This is a town that typifies 30 years of economic neglect of the North of England, in the hands of a ruthless Westminster carousel of corporate chancers and smile-faced playboys.

The sun sets further, we pick up fish and chips and walk towards the gig. Most of the gig-goers it seems, and sounds judging by a draft of southern accents hanging out the front of the venue like a smog, are not from Blackpool. Wherever it is people have come from, it feels as though most of us form part of a generation that doesn’t have any concrete plan, present or future. Everything we do have feels only temporary, music like this one of the rare things we are proud to hold onto. And it’s different to the Roses. There was no stampede upon Blackpool from Manchester here, no murmurs of insurrection from the lead singer between key songs. Like a church prayer or a gospel hymn, the crowd sits and waits and hopes, and as the music flows through, begins to believe. Believe that Bon Iver’s music can be the new sound of a new place. Believe that Britain, like our spirits that crawled in tired to the Opera House, can rekindle a long lost fire.

Bon Iver’s music sounds exactly like the present. Distortions and samples and synths collide and spin in the background, while the lyrics, appear as the scrambled fragments that fly around your head as you struggle to get to sleep, lacking any obvious narrative.  But dig a bit deeper and the lyrics sound like desperate pleas for help, a search for something meaningful in a land where all meaning has been devoured by money and ‘progress’. It speaks volumes for an internationally renowned artist like Bon Iver to play a gig in a place like Blackpool. Me and my pal picked up tickets for twenty pound – an absolute steal in today’s music market, where even local chancers are trying to play gigs at £30 a pop, on the back of releasing one EP. Bon Iver’s ego-less, stripped back approach to his art comes as a complete and utter wave of fresh air amidst the hollow peacocking, and frankly crap output of contemporary English groups like Blossoms. As the set drifts on, I can’t help but think that it’s this kind of honest, ceaseless devotion to craft over style and image, coupled with a desire to hold influence over the mainstream that British music is absolutely crying out for right now. As the Conservative government appears more and more ill-placed and more and more weak with each passing day, there surely could not be a more fitting chorus to a Corbyn government than an artist which manages to achieve both of these things. The gig comes to a close. Only a few hundred yards away on an empty stage in the Empress Ballroom, a young Ian Brown is crouched on the ground like a lion, banging his bongo drums in agreement.