100 Greatest Songs of the 90’s #61 The Stone Roses – Love Spreads

Released : 1995

You can’t always get what you want want, but for a few minutes everybody did. Labeling any art The Second Coming was always going to come with questions, accusations and dismissals, but as The Stone Roses’ plucky disciples Oasis were constantly reminding us, hype was usually the way down Mancunian Way.

Still, after five and a half years of legally imposed exile, the follow up to their genre-making debut was the musical embodiment of a Holy Grail and – inevitably – on release was capsized by it’s own myth; seen as disjointed, passionless and self indulgent. The ecstacy generation and their newly found proper jobs and starter homes were not impressed.

Reassessment many times since has often posited the argument that without the fever of expectation and given the circumstances, Roses part deux was however a minor classic unjustly buried in a tidal wave of group think. Love Spreads provided a direct path between old and new, almost as if it had been welded to the end of I Am The Resurrection, although John Squire’s strafing blues chords were tougher, the embodiment of half a decade’s stifled anger. Ian Brown meanwhile was back from the dead, his sibling leading us all to the promised land

Here was what they did best, grooves, not pop, the latter mode a pretense which had always sat awkwardly with artisans who lead not followed. For five minutes at least, we all got what we wanted.