Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Rod the Mod finds his solo footing, headed for stardom, with the Faces in his wake.
6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
The Stones Roses
Second Coming
(Geffen, 1994)
Their bass player thinks it should have been called Premature Ejaculation. He's wrong.
No wait, hear me out. Whilst it could never match The Stone Roses' debut for seismic impact, Second Coming is anything but the malformed freak of legend. A mammoth, Zeppelin-aping folly produced to death by a cocaine-addled John Squire, while Ian Brown was too stoned to intervene? OK, there's some truth in that. But at least half this record is very, very good indeed.
Over eleven and a half minutes, opener Breaking In To Heaven travels up a Mekong River of swampy atmospherics and tribal drumming to find a band at the peak of their musicianly powers. It's heavy rock played with a serpentine dexterity and whispered menace, of a piece with Driving South and Love Spreads - swaggering, ice-cool injections of monkey-gland into the venerable blues-rock format.
Elsewhere, Ten Storey Love Song revisits past melodic glories while the stuttering dance-rock of Begging You remains suggestive of the proto-Big Beat then cooking chez Chemical Brothers. And although some of these goods are half-baked - Daybreak is essentially a six-minute groove looking unsuccessfully for a song - they shouldn't overshadow the sweetmeats elsewhere in evidence. Brown's delightfully laid-back Straight To The Man has a bozo-on-the-Bayou playfulness he captured neither before or since and the stripped-down folk of Tightrope is genuinely touching.
That it only took World War II six more months to complete is inexcusable, but, really, whatever the band produced after their eponymous masterpiece had the fortune to define its era was bound to be found wanting. Of course, it all went tits up from here: drummer Reni left, followed by guitarist Squire, and the less said about 1996's Reading headline slot the better.
"Second Coming," bassist Mani told MOJO in 2001: "it should have been called Premature Ejaculation." He's wrong - it was hardly premature, after all. But judged on its quality and not its gestation period, it deserves a better rep. Had we but known the fiascos that the Britpop era still had in store...
Chris Catchpole
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 02/06/2009
Further Listening
Ian Brown – Unfinished Monkey Business (Polydor, 1998)
The Seahorses – Do It Yourself (Geffen, 1997)
Primal Scream – Vanishing Point (Creation, 1997)
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