The iconic gig took place almost 35 years ago
The iconic gig took place almost 35 years ago
A man-made island in the River Mersey may seem an unlikely place for a legendary gig which defined an era of British music. Lodged between the Sankey Canal and the Mersey estuary in Widnes, Spike Island was created in 1833 to extend the canal from Fiddler’s Ferry power station to the river but it became famous more than 150 years later for hosting a huge Stone Roses gig.
The 19th century industrial process had cut off part of Widnes from the rest of the town and created the island. 15 years later, Widnes’ first chemical factory was built on Spike Island and the town became a key site for the chemical industry.
But by the 1970s no factories remained and Spike Island was cleaned up to become a park. In 1990 it was on the shortlist for the Stone Roses, the Manchester band then at the peak of their powers, who wanted to find a suitable outdoor location for a summer gig.
The band’s eponymous 1989 debut album was released to huge acclaim and took the growing Madchester trend to new heights, marking a change in its sound. Tracks like ‘I Wanna be Adored’, ‘She Bangs the Drums’, ‘Waterfall’ and ‘I Am the Resurrection’ became beloved, setting the foundations for both Brit pop and ’90s rave. Rolling Stone’s David Fricke described the album as “a blast of magnificent arrogance, a fusion of Sixties-pop sparkle and the blown-mind drive of U.K. rave culture”
With a cult album under their belts, the band set their sights on a 1990 summer gig, and had looked around quarries, speedway tracks and parks but they settled on Spike Island. In a retrospective feature published by NME in 2020, promoter Phil Jones said: “It was Gareth [Evans, Stone Roses manager] who came up with the idea of Spike Island.
“It was near where he lived and they’d had events on there in years gone by, so myself, Gareth and Roger Barratt, who ran a company called Star Hire and who’d already agreed to do the staging, went out there, took a look around and said, ‘Yeah, we can do this here.’ The council were there, we’d already worked out what the capacity would be and we all shook hands on it that afternoon.”
For lead singer Ian Brown, it was the perfect site for the band’s alternative image. He 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.”
The gig took place on May 27, 1990, with close to 30,000 people attending. Though it was viewed as badly organised and there are disputing accounts of how good the gig actually sounded (with the wind whipping off the Mersey to thank for that), it became an iconic moment in British music, catching a rapidly burgeoning music scene in the sweetest of sweet spots.
Of the gig, the band’s bassist Mani told NME: “It was a gathering of the clans. We were always confident that if we just turned up, people would come.
“That was always the way it was with The Stone Roses. We knew what we’d started, we knew the reactions we were getting all around the country, and we just wanted to get everyone together.”
For a long time, it was believed no footage existed of the event, only increasing its mythical status. The band had asked a camera crew not to record it. Footage from a fan’s camcorder has recently been found and will form the basis of a documentary about the show.
About the gig, NME wrote: “Spike Island was to be the Roses’ defining statement, a celebration of not only their own success, but of an entire youth culture.” The magazine added: “It was a real moment in time; the beginning of a long hot summer that saw England nearly go all the way in the World Cup, the peak of a period when Manchester and the north-west felt like the centre of the universe.”
