Indie icon Ian Brown has labelled walking in on John Squire doing drugs at 11am as his worst moment in The Stone Roses.
Emerging as bright young things from Manchester, The Stone Roses became icons to a generation. However after the success of their first album the band became submerged in label difficulties.
Prevented from recording the group found different ways to occupy themselves. For guitarist John Squire, it seems, the preferred method of blocking out the boredom was drugs.
In a new interview his former bandmate Ian Brown recalled the moment he walked in on the guitarist taking drugs first thing in the morning. The singer labelled it his worst moment in The Stone Roses, saying it clashed with the original vision of the band.
Asked about his least favourite memory of the band, Ian Brown replied: “Walking into John’s room and seeing him with another delivery of cocaine in a big pile on his table.”
“It’s 11 in the morning and he’s snorting lines of cocaine and I’m thinking, ‘Shit, is that what we are now? Do you have to take coke at 11 in the morning just so that you can come up with a guitar line?’ I thought we were against all that. I thought we were the real article. If he could have seen himself when he was 15, doing that, he’d have been horrified.”
Ian Brown has often been dogged with claims that he has experience of Class A drugs, something he has always denied.
“Because of my cheekbones people think I’m a crackhead,” he said. “Somewhere down the line, through all the Madchester thing, it became, ‘He’s a crackhead’. I’ve never even tried crack, I’ve never taken heroin. I didn’t start smoking weed until I was 22.”
Ian Brown released his new album ‘My Way’ on September 28th.
