Full recording of The Stone Roses’ legendary Spike Island gig unearthed
A full video recording of The Stone Roses‘ legendary Spike Island gig has been unearthed.
Up to three hours of footage, including show preparations and the soundcheck, shot by a crew member at the time is set to be used for a forthcoming documentary showing the 1990 concert in full for the first time.
Other than 10 minutes of footage from the outdoor show featuring on Shane Meadows‘ 2013 documentary The Stone Roses: Made Of Stone, very little has been shown of the concert.
NME previously reported that a camera crew from Central Music TV were present, but at the last minute the band instructed them to stand down.
Now, Martin Cornell, who was a crew member at the time, has told BBC News that he filmed the whole concert from the scaffolding tower in the middle of the crowd.
He said: “I didn’t know that they’d pulled their cameras. I didn’t know that they weren’t videoing it. I was just there as an independent, working for my boss, basically, on a health and safety tip on my day off, and I had a camera. Nobody else did.”
After the gig, he said he packed the tape away and forgot about it.
Cornell added: “I tucked it away with all my home videos and stuff like that. It went into a box. It got put away – not for future reference, it just got put away, as you do. I came across it again probably 10 years later and thought, oh that’s quite interesting, I’ll see if I can take this somewhere.”
He said he initially offered it to the band but they weren’t interested. Since then freelance journalist Matt Mead contacted Cornell and is now helping to plan the documentary with director and producer Paul Crompton who will use the footage alongside other material such as interviews, 300 unseen photos, and unheard audio of the band’s pre-show press conference.
Crompton said he hopes to use new technology, like that used for recent The Beatles documentary series Get Back, to enhance the original footage.
He added: “It’s not professional 30mm film. It’s not HD. Again, it captures the spirit of it. But he’s filmed all the key events – the whole gig, the soundcheck, the stage construction, the fans, all the queues and all that. He’s done a really good job of filming everything that you need to capture an event.
“There are things you can do now with AI and the latest tech that improve things in a really fascinating way. So that’s what I want to do as soon as I can.”
Speaking about the concert, Ian Brown previosuly told NME in 2010: “We wanted to do something outside the rock’n’roll norm and do it in a venue which had never been used for that sort of thing before. This was back in the days of raves, remember. We started out doing warehouse parties and we still had that mentality where we wanted to play different venues. We wanted to play places that weren’t on the circuit.”
He continued: “The organisation was shambolic. The PA wasn’t big enough for a start, and certain things were going on that we didn’t know about. The management were taking people’s sandwiches off them at the gate to force them to buy five-quid burgers when they got in.”
Meanwhile, John Squire recently downplayed the chances of a Stone Roses reunion, saying that the members “aren’t sending each other Christmas cards or anything”.
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Damian Jones
NME
