Dadchester

 Got halfway through The Stone Roses: Made of Stone, Shane Meadows' love-letter to his favourite band, who briefly got back together in about 2012. There's lots of sun-bleached footage of Ian Brown with a peroxide flat top on a scooter in the early 80's, and then rehearsal footage, where the band - not Ian - sound pretty good (confirming my suspicion that Reni is the coolest one, the most musical one, and does about 40% of the singing). But I also had to sit through their vintage interviews. Squire, glassy-eyed and moronic, Brown following each belch of an answer with a simpering grin, like someone getting Johnny Rotten wrong. Like Johnny Rotten does these days. The only coherent thing said in the interviews is "We're the best band in the world", said deadpan. The interviewer asks why they're not number one to which they reply, fairly reasonably, "The album's not out yet."

Ian Brown on Mars, yesterday

It gets worse. They organise a free gig in Warrington. To get tickets you have to turn up at the venue with proof of fandom. What happens next are endless vox pops from middle-aged men telling the camera how they qualify as a fan. Never ask a middle-aged man to show you his credentials - he will do so until you're screaming for the heat death of the universe. Streams of tubby wannabe Mancs in salt and pepper Clint Boon haircuts, drifting past like clouds of dandruff, with their fascinating stories of going to a gig in the late eighties or buying a record in the late eighties. Again and again, in endless procession, lining up to show an old ticket stub, a sorry tattoo, a signed twelve inch of  Elephant Stone. It's like The King's Evil, the king being Ian Brown, King Monkey. 

I turned it off. I'm bored of middle-aged men telling me the music from when they were, not coincidentally, young, getting some and still had hope, was the best ever. I'm the same age as these men. It wasn't even the best music THEN, never mind now. 

The Stone Roses first album came out when I was 18. I liked it. I bought it. She Bangs the Drum was always on in Martines, Basingstoke's premiere nite-spot. They looked great, and you could tell Reni was doing a bit more than a standard stick-up-the-arse indie drummer. But I was never that bothered. They're all part of the holy worthies of Proper Northern Music: The La's begat the Roses begat Oasis begat fucking The Verve*. The Smiths' ostentatious cleverness somehow removes them from the pantheon. Joy Division, Magazine, even Buzzcocks need not apply. Too weird. Where are the meat and potatoes? 

We've endured thirty years of this. Fat blokes in bucket hats declaring themselves, "Mad fer it!", in a Manchester accent acquired at prep school in Salisbury. It arrived in the late 80's, stuck around to imprint on Britpop, and never really went away. Podgy dads with shelves of vinyl passing on the Holy Grail to their children, following the bands like they would follow a football club. Eighteen year olds, who play proper instruments properly, still pay fealty to The Stone Roses, a real band, whose singer can't sing, and managed only two albums in their on/off career, one of which was shit. Whose real gift to the world was a funny walk, meaningless "attitude" and "swagger", being impolite, chucking paint around when they don't get their own way, abusing cabin crew, sneering at people wearing face-masks during the lock-down, and a license to be proficient musicians whose songs mean nothing and say nothing. 

Not that it matters. It doesn't. It was all such a long time ago. 

(*Technically The Verve, as Verve, came before Oasis, but they utterly reinvented themselves in Oasis' wallaby-shod shadow. They were the biggest disappointment. I really liked that first album and the singles Gravity Grave and All in the Mind: psychedelic shoegaze with flutes and saxophones and "Mad" Richard still singing like Shaun Ryder. Wot a fucking shame!)