There’s a riot going on: The Stone Roses at Newport Centre remembered

Paul Davies was a young Stone Roses fan eagerly awaiting the return of his heroes to the stage after a long absence recording their second album in the Welsh countryside. Here he recalls their notorious gig at the Newport Centre, which has long since entered the annals of Welsh rock history.

I’ve been to loads of gigs at Newport Centre because it was a very popular venue in the 90s.

The most memorable, not necessarily for all the right reasons, was the Stone Roses gig, which has kind of become a bit of an apocryphal story in Newport.

Stone Roses had recorded an amazing debut album. This gig was on Monday, December 4 1995 and the band took a huge length of time recording the follow up, and clearly had a lot of problems with it.

They ended up spending nearly 14 months recording it in Rockfield. So got to know Newport really well, and kind of soaked into the bedrock of the place. So they had a massive connection with Newport. (John Squire even used the cherub off of Newport Bridge for the cover of the band’s comeback single ‘Love Spreads’.

Consequently, when they announced the tour dates and Newport was on the list, everybody was really excited about it. It was The Stone Roses’ comeback, and everybody was really up for it.

It was quite difficult to get tickets, as I remember, and on the night, the venue was surrounded by a lot of dodgy looking Mancunian geezers offering tickets at hugely inflated prices. So there was a real air of expectancy around the town and in the venue itself when they came on.

That’s when it all started going horribly wrong. Ian Brown is renowned as having one of those voices that doesn’t always translate in a live setting, and he had a really bad night. His vocals were all over the place, flat, the pitch, too low, too high, was pretty dreadful.

Even though they played some of their classic songs, it was a bit of a nightmare of a gig. And it all got a bit worse when one of the crowd threw a Cardiff City shirt onto the stage.

So Ian Brown foolishly decided to put on this Cardiff City shirt, and it all kicked off in front of the stage. Cardiff fans, Swansea fans and Newport fans all getting in the mix.

It petered out quite quickly, but it was a bit of an edgy atmosphere after that, and the hostilities continued outside the venue after the gig with the police making multiple arrests.

It was a really disappointing gig. Everybody was so up for seeing The Stone Roses, and it was probably one of their worst gigs.

I actually bumped into Ian Brown afterwards, and got him to sign my ticket, and with a bare faced lie, I told him how great the gig had been that evening!

Listen to more of Paul’s recollections of the Newport music scene via The People’s Collection of Wales website

See if you agree with Paul’s memories – watch a bootleg video of The Stone Roses at The Newport Centre in 1995