Okay pop pickers, what’s this song about?

On the face of it, it appears to be about an old fashioned sail boat, leaving it’s dock and heading out to sea. References to brigantine sails, (the definition of this is a 2 masted sailed vessel) suggest this but there’s so much more in the lyrics and none of it is clear.

Take your time, we’ve got all day.

Chimes sing Sunday morn
Today’s the day she’s sworn
To steal what she never could own
And race from this hole she calls home

Now you’re at the wheel
Tell me how, how does it feel?
So good to have equalized
To lift up the lids of your eyes

As the miles they disappear
See land begin to clear
Free from the filth and the scum
This American satellite’s won

She’ll carry on through it all
She’s a waterfall
She’ll carry on through it all
She’s a waterfall

See the steeple pine
The hills as old as time
Soon to be put to the test
To be whipped by the winds of the west

Stands on shifting sands
The scales held in her hands
The wind it just whips her and wails
And fills up her brigantine sails

She’ll carry on through it all
She’s a waterfall
She’ll carry on through it all
She’s a waterfall

Girl drops tabs and goes to the coast.

Never really given it much thought to what its about but I love that song…consistently my favourite song over the years where other favourites have come & gone, never get tired of it after what must be 30 years. Just going off to play it again now

Stone Roses – good shout – fire up the Sonos

As favourite roses tunes go for me it’s between waterfall and daybreak.

Similar era

I never knew this until recently but the final words on The LA’s album are “the die is cast” (from looking glass – one of the greatest songs of that time)

And John power goes off and forms his new band, ‘Cast’

Eh!

I also like this song.

However, you are trying to interpret lyrics written by a man who believes that coronavirus is myth, and that vaccines are a waste of money. The song probably alludes to the fact that the Lizard People control us all, or something.

In a really tenuous claim to fame I’ve slept with the ex fiance of Lee Mavers from the La’s

While we’re at it then. I love that song ‘Birthday’ by the sugarcubes- but just what the hairy **** is she singing about?

In a really tenuous claim to fame I’ve slept with the ex fiance of Lee Mavers from the La’s

how very gentlemanly of you to broadcast that information 🙂

Several of the lines could be readily interpreted as references Britain/Britannia.

oh and it’s a 30 year old song, how the **** did I get this old?

I think Brown has said its about a woman fed up with her life (a lot of that album is relatively small p political IIRC) who takes some drugs and tries to escape – I guess this last bit is up for interpretation as to what form that might take as the words could be taken quite literally or as various metaphors.

I much prefer I Am The Resurrection though.

Made of Stone has always been my favourite.

Squirting

Oppressed, poor girl, stuck in a slummy town centre wakes up one sunday thinks sod it! Steals a nice car and drives to the coast, chills out on the beach and watches the boats go by, playing in the sand. Bad storm rolls in, she weighs up her options on what to do next. Go to safety and get caught or stay on the beach in peril.

Song, album and band that defined my teenage years. I even had Gary Mounfields hair….

Gary mountfield was at my cousins wedding. I was a 16yr old massive roses fan but didnt have the nerve to ask for his autograph.

Still got my original resurrection, sally and waterfall tshirts and Lionel Blair’s in my parents loft.

and Lionel Blair’s in my parents loft.

So that is where he has been hiding. I thought he was dead.

If we re doing claims to fame, I bumped into John squire in NWMTB in Cheadle . He’s mates with andy kiffin, the manager, peatys mechanic

John squire in a Yeti top

Honestly you forget how good they are, despite Brown’s vocals 😆

Just reading on Wikipedia that Squire is a mtber and now lives in Cheshire, somewhere nr Macclesfield. Watch out next time you’re riding though Macc forest or Gradbach, the guy coming the other way might be a musical legend.

Made of Stone has always been my favourite.

Second that. Remember buying the 12″ and my mate asking me if I wanted to watch them at Park Lane, Shrewsbury, just before the album came out. My mum wouldn’t let me. Devastated to this day, as the bootleg suggests they played a blinder.

Brown is an anti masker now I think?

While we’re at it then. I love that song ‘Birthday’ by the sugarcubes- but just what the hairy **** is she singing about?

Traditional Icelandic birthday celebrations. Are you telling me you don’t smoke cigars and sew birds in your knickers once a year?

Shoot you Down – Soul Hooligans remix.

And relax.

Brown is an anti masker now I think?

“Scientist”

Shoot you Down – Soul Hooligans remix

I like that……

Don’t under any circumstances listen to his latest Little Seed Big Tree. It’s almost unforgivable.

Browns solo career is patchy AF, but ‘solarized’ was great. By far his strongest album IMHO and is well consistent. Since then it’s been awful though

Squire’s solo stuff is not the best. People say he sings like Bob Dylan but I think his voice is exactly like Tom Verlaine’s

This will clear it up for you…

This will clear it up for you…

Just… Wow…

Having said that, there is a clear thread through Brown’s Roses lyrics of Christian imagery. I’d always read it more as a riff on Lennon’s ‘bigger than Jesus’ shtick than anything else.

Perhaps a pirate tale inspired by:

Rachel Wall’s biography is peppered with myths and legends, but if certain tales about her are true, she was one of the first and only American women to try her hand at piracy. As the story goes, Wall was a Pennsylvania native who ran away from home as a teen and married a fisherman named George Wall. The couple settled in Boston and tried to scrape out a living, but constant money problems eventually led them to turn to a life of crime. In 1781, the Walls procured a small boat, teamed with a few low-life mariners and began preying on ships off the coast of New England. Their strategy was as ingenious as it was brutal. Whenever a storm passed through the region, the buccaneers would dress their boat up to look like it had been ravaged by rough seas. The comely Rachel would then stand on the deck and plead for aid from passing ships. When the unsuspecting rescuers came near, they were promptly boarded, robbed and murdered.

Wall’s siren song may have lured as many as a dozen ships to their doom, but her luck ran out in 1782, when a real storm destroyed her boat and killed George. She continued her thieving on land, and was later arrested in 1789 for attacking and robbing a Boston woman. While in prison, she penned a confession admitting to “Sabbath-breaking, stealing, lying, disobedience to parents, and almost every other sin a person could commit, except murder.” Unfortunately for Wall, the mea culpa was not enough to sway the authorities. On October 8, she became the last woman ever executed in Massachusetts when she was hanged to death in Boston

It’s a boat tale from start to finish. Chimes are part of the hull.

I love them to bits , they were the soundtrack to my youth before Raves and house nights. I saw them in Glasgow green back in the day and twice since , Even at Heaton Park and the Etihad they were ace but its was more about the nostalgia of getting old but feeling young.
That said Ian Browns last two albums have been fairly woeful and you can kinda see why they didnt write more than two songs for the comeback. Imagine a totally shite 3rd album , folk berated the second and it was pretty class.
What struck me on the two comeback tours was how good Squires and Renni are .Mani seems a lovely good fun guy and they wouldn’t be the same without Ian though he has a dubious past but no one is perfect .
As for Waterfall I havent a clue what its about , though Ten Storey always breaks my heart and I Cant hear the first few bars of ‘Stoned Love’ by the supremes without getting excited.

Long Live ‘The Roses’

Long Live ‘The Roses’

Hmm, forgetting that awful comeback single from a few years back?

Plenty of actual living bands around to get excited about.

Hmm, forgetting that awful comeback single from a few years back?

Plenty of actual living bands around to get excited about.

Kinda thought I covered that in my post to be honest DezB . Your obviously down with the kids and way cooler than me , so cool you spend all your time on a mtb forum or listening to the latest talent in the hit parade. #swoon. 😀

Haha one of the key lessons on STW is to ignore certain posters on any music threads

As said above, it’s about drugs, about tripping on acid. The idea of the waterfall as a metaphor for tripping and being “drenched” in sensation has been around for ages. Loads of trippy references: being at the wheel, lift lids up of the eyes, land begin to clear, hills as old as time, shifting sands, scales etc. All alluding to the heightened consciousness of tripping.

Certainly when I were listening to this back in tye day with my mates there was no question, it was just known

I had read somewhere that when they began the recording of the album, one of the first decisions they faced was “which recording methodology should we use?” This topic got a lot of discussion (and often heated debate) within the band.

Squire wanted to wing things a bit, with an iterative, team-based approach to writing and recording where all time was “time-boxed” into “sprints”, each with a defined duration and a running list of deliverables, planned at the start of the sprint. These were prioritized, and if any planned work for the sprint couldn’t be completed, the work was reprioritized and the information is used for future sprint planning. He was a big fan of Agile.

However, Brown wanted to go about it a different way where they’d gather and document requirements, write, test, test play to users (perform UAT), fix any issues, and deliver.

Ultimately, Brown’s way of doing things worked out and so they commemorated this in the song we’re discussing.

ignore certain posters on any music threads

oh, I do. The ones with **** all to say 😁

Ever notice Ian Brown’s cameo in “The Prisoner of Azkaban?”

Re. John Squire and mountain bikes. That’s why they cancelled headlining Glastonbury in 1995 – he had broken his collarbone coming off a bike.