lemon revolution

Disappointed but I don't know why. Has a cornered hint of something reassuringly good. But feels like music contrived by a focus group in the offices of a major label. Sounds like PR-scripted tripe. Sounds like Coldplay. Why the fuck was Paul Epworth allowed anywhere near them. Parallels between Squire-Brown and Morrissey-Marr. Songwriting duo able to hit impeccable heights, writing together and uncovering something precious and infinite, timeless. Unable to ever recreate or reproduce those elements apart from one another, and Squire-Brown have proven that after 27 years, even reuniting doesn't make it any easier.

The backwards Stone Roses tracks deserve some serious explanation: why, when you play them backwards, do you hear the lyrics to the original song, rather than the overdubbed (on the original reversal song) lyrics backwards? My favourite is Guernica. Named after Picasso's famous painting on the horror of war, the tune is essentially Made of Stone played backwards. This fits well - the guitar notes and drum beat of Made of Stone are haunting, eery and together with the lyrics, evoke images of sudden destruction, of a world being burned to the ground before the listener's eyes. In reverse, the tune is accompanied by what sounds like rotor blades hammering through the wind, and which may be simply Reni's drum beat turned on itself and sped up. You wanna hurt me stop the row The both of us are stitched up now  This seems to me to be a commentary on the inevitability of war between elites, between the people commanding the horror. The only way for one to truly hurt the ot...

Rumours of new tunes. And thank fuck it wasn't to be. Because this is all starting to seem more PR agency marketing bullshit than the subversive spectacle of four unemployed lads dicking about the city. When TopShop begin tweeting about you, as per on Friday in regards to the Roses rumours, then you know the game is up. With regards to actual tunes, I'm not going to lie, I'd love nothing more than to hear some, as per Reni, 'new stuffs'. Hearing the Roses debut for the first time was unlike anything else I have ever experienced, a feeling of pure, unbridled liberation at a time in my life when I really needed it, and was one of those precious moments of indefinable musical glory: where you come out of a tune reborn, a different person to the one who went in. Anything that offers even a slither of hope that this feeling can be replicated, or even bettered, is something which I obviously find very hard to dismiss. Which is why I was just another dude on twitter o...

A song which you think initially, speaks of America's global dominance, the infiltration of British culture and a determination to break away, to run free from those haunting 'American satellites'. Yet the Roses never were nationalists, and Squire's bold cover-art here , a Union Jack splattered with the American stars, is about the closest the group ever came to acknowledging any kind of national identity. 'It's not where you're from, it's where you're at', of course, and emphatically, 'The British Empire? Just a bunch of public schoolkids playing about!' The latter offers a strong idea of exactly what Ian Brown and John Squire thought of imperial nostalgia. To me the song pens a beautiful tale of a ceaseless battler, the woman tirelessly threading a man's greatness and finally rising, stealing 'that which she never could own', and the immigrant 'racing from that hole' he calls home, lunging like the desperate...