Great SOS article on The Stone Roses in the studio with John Leckie recording Fool’s Gold. I thought this quote explained a lot about both the quality of the guitar work on the first album and also the time taken to release the second album:
“John Squire always had his Fostex 16-track recorder in the tape cupboard at the back of the studio, and after we’d gone home he would sit there with headphones and work out all his parts,” says John Leckie. “He always did that, right through ‘Fool’s Gold’, up until the second album.
In fact, part of the reason for the breakdown of that second album was that John would sit in his bedroom with the Fostex while the rest of us waited in the studio for his guitar parts. He wouldn’t improvise or make something up in the studio, but he got to the stage where he was really good. For instance, on ‘Bye Bye Badman’ there’s a guitar that plays all the way through — a kind of counter-lead line, going through a Leslie — and I remember him playing that in about half an hour. However, we had to wait four days for that before he came out of the cupboard.”
Full article here.
