How Do You Sleep - Stone Roses (1994)

This is a true gem of a tune. It’s probably the most poppy song on Second Coming, and I much prefer it to it’s sister song on the album, Ten Storey Love Song. Ten Storey is a good song in its own right, but lacks the lyrical anger and bitterness of the first album’s snake-fanged bite. Ten Storey is also the showcase of the new Ian Brown vocal: a voice which no longer slips and bleeds through the instrumental fabric but, ala Gallagher, tries to roar over and even fight against it. John Squire’s meatier, bold guitar lines demanded a louder, more potent vocal than the soft whispers of Fools Gold, and the smothered wail heard on This Is The One. Instrumentally, The Second Coming songs lacked the loose, almost improvised roll of the first album. There are fewer empty spaces, fewer moments of pure bass and drum and therefore, fewer moments for Brown to intone gently without competing against the lead guitar. 

The lyrics on Second Coming were written entirely by John Squire. This signalled a further shift away from the sound of the first album, of which all songs are credited to the Brown-Squire partnership. The Second Coming, criticised by the unified voice of pretty much the entire music-media industry, was seen to be a project of egoism and musical vanity. Ostensibly, Squire’s obsession with Led Zeppelin and drugs had ballooned into the sound of rock’n’roll excess and self-righteous introspection. At a first glance, the lyrics of Second Coming, released in 1994, are markedly more personal than those of the 1989 album, The Stone Roses. The 1989 album is littered with references to social insurrection. Bye Bye Badman nods to the Mai 68 uprising in Paris against Charles De Gaulle, Elizabeth My Dear threatens to pull the curtain on the British monarchy while songs such as This Is The One, Elephant Stone and I Am the Resurrection channel the theme of a sudden, explosive liberation from suffocating oppression. Sonically, The Stone Roses is spaced wide, with each note of each instrument crafted precisely to fit, fill and colour the band’s sound. Squire strums in jingle-jangle, Mani’s bass backbeats each tune with feet-tapping rhythm, and Reni’s drumming is fluid and dextrous: roaring, soaring and crashing like a tide. The Second Coming’s sound is much heavier and more condensed than its predecessor. Reni’s drumming in particular, sounds dense and thick, and How Do You Sleep stands out on the album for its relatively soft percussion sound.

Squire remarked that he was no longer trying to imitate ‘the sociologist’ in writing up lyrics, and as Mani has described, at the time of recording The Second Coming, the band members were starting families, ‘no longer lived together’ or even socialised together. This isn’t an album dreamed up by four bookish, unemployed 21 year-olds in the south of Manchester. It’s an album from a group growing up and out of adolescence, into a world of cold carnival and broken promises. Ten Storey Love Song represents every change in the band’s raison d’etre and sound from the songs of 1989 and 1990. It is a heartbreak song buried in pain and fatigue, a song with a whimpered, hollow claim to some sort of lasting liberty, a tower of love which somehow stands firm as everything around it crumbles to dust. It cannot, nor even tries to find the energy and sprinting optimism of She Bangs The Drums.  

On the starting verses of How Do You Sleep, Brown’s voice is croaked and sits softly inside the track’s instrumental. The whisper of Fools Gold and One Love is now worn and tired, but unlike TSLS, there is little wrestle, barely a hint of strain against the surrounding sound. After a short, soft percussion intro, Squire and Mani kick the tune into loud life. The song has an underlying hum and kick that is reminiscent of Mersey Paradise and Elephant Stone: an understated, melodic rhythm which stands out as a contrast to the crunching furore of Driving South and Begging You. Squire’s guitar is heavy and striking, but, for the first time on the album, resembles something of a clear progression from the soft jangles of 1989. The guitar strokes on this track are loud, but hold together with a loose, at times bluesy-feel.

I’ve seen your severed head at a banquet for the dead,

all dressed up for dinner looked so fine

Squire’s first two lines are delivered with cold distance: with the eyes of a hushed observer, a man who can only watch from afar as disaster unfolds over a gathering of friends. The scene is a dinner, of the severed head of a foe resting on a silver plate. The decapitated head looks incredibly fine, and is dressed with the highest grade military quicklime, a ancient powdered war weapon. It seems as though Squire and his foe go way back, to the days when chemical powder took the place of live ammunition.

                                                                                                            

As the chords rise gently, Brown talks of tucking into his foe’s head, kissing a lifeless mouth and prising out an apple from rotting teeth. The lyrics begin to evoke visions of vengeful pleasure – a pleasure derived from toying with the corpse of an enemy.

Music is playing and friends are joking and laughing, sipping on wine while they feast on sweet revenge. This lyrical feature, of a releasing, intensifying bitterness as the guitar chords climb towards something triumphant, is a key feature of the band’s early music. Tunes such as Shoot You Down and Mersey Paradise combine lyrical anger, on themes of drowning and smothered, premature death with moments of jingle-jangle and near-euphoric climaxes. How Do You Sleep is very a much song from this tradition of Roses writing.

So raise your glasses

Here’s a toast to wasted lives

May all their ghosts come back to haunt you

Tell you how they died

In this, the song’s first bridge, Brown wails in delivery of some of the album’s best lines. Far from the confusion of the opening two stanzas, where line-by-line, Brown swaps images of dinner-dressed sexual pleasure for chemical weaponry and decapitated corpses, here the curtain is pulled to reveal the true enemy at hand. The playful imagery could only last so long.

How do you sleep

How do you last the night and keep the dogs at bay

How does it feel

When you close your eyes and try and drift away

Does it feel any better now

Does it feel any more

When the angel of death comes knock-knockin’

And bangin’ at your door

The chorus arrives to unleash the boiling anger built-up by the song’s opening lyrics. Brown’s voice breaks into a strain. He can no longer hold it in. In a stanza reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s Masters of War, the lyrics here burn in desperation, in a tired resolve to confront a group bathing in luxury and delight from misery and murder. Yet for the Roses in 1994, unlike in 1989, there is no chorus of promises to shoot down the enemy, to deliver the final push to a drowning oppressor. The visions of vengeance which litter the verses cannot be sustained any longer, and Brown can only ask how it is that his foe sleeps with the guilt of murder on their conscience, hoping that they too, will some day be visited by death – by the very bloody end they so joyfully impart onto others.

A second, final verse arrives after a short, sweet guitar solo from Squire. Squire’s licks continue to feed in and out of the sound as Brown arrives at the end of the party to gleefully carry the half-eaten corpse home, to be mounted on a wall, a badge of marksmanship to be shown off to all who visit. Once more, the mood of anger is intensified as Brown strains to describe this cruel parody of an aristocratic hunting tradition.

Are my dreams your nightmares

I hope they all come true

Get off your knees the party’s over

I’m coming home to you

The second bridge offers a final vow to turn the tables. There is no third way, no reconciliation to be found here, for Squire’s dreams are his enemy’s nightmares. The battle lines have been clearly marked, and the song is progressing towards a furious pace. The chorus is delivered once more.

How do you sleep

How do you last the night and keep the dogs at bay

How does it feel

When you close your eyes and try and drift away

Does it feel any better now

Does it feel any more

When the angel of death comes knock-knockin’

And bangin’ at your door

A longer John Squire solo follows, which slides and slips down the fretboard, wailing in sadness and finishing in a short bright flourish, a resolve to keep going. A final chorus is then delivered, the song’s anger drawing out to abrupt, smothered halt as Brown paints a final vision of the angel of death, knock-knocking and banging on the door of his oppressor.

After the first album’s release, the Roses were tangled in a battle to extricate themselves from an unforgiving recording contract. The contract typified the notions of elitism and corruption that the band had spent so long trying to artistically subvert. Even the Roses, a band famous for publically deriding the BBC as a ‘bunch of amateurs’ and calling for Prince Charles to be executed, would fall twisted in the traps of industry and exploitation. The Second Coming exudes sadness for this loss of innocence: a dream of youth turned sour and corroded by the cold hard curb of time and money. How Do You Sleep is a tired return to this dream: an elegy for everything the Stone Roses had tried to achieve, and in its verses, a bruised cry of insistence that the bitterness of failure would only serve to sweeten the taste of success. And in its chorus, How Do You Sleep bleeds with the hurt and fatigue of a group no longer able to wriggle free from the games and schemes of faceless puppet masters. Not long after the release of Second Coming, the Roses would collapse in a series of hurtful, personal fallouts that shattered their claims of invincibility: the naïve, brilliant idea that as a group, they could outrun and bring down the march of a world rife in detachment, isolation and suffering. In 1994, the Roses found themselves cornered and very nearly silenced, forced to face this world head-on. How Do You Sleep is their final statement of anger and rage against the world all around, and a strained, teary acceptance of a tragic, oncoming end to their battle.