The Stone Ros­es: Made of Stone

Cin­e­ma is a tool with which to remod­el your dreams. As a whip­per­snap­per grow­ing up in Uttox­eter, direc­tor Shane Mead­ows decid­ed to drop acid for the first time on the day he was sup­posed to see The Stone Ros­es play their icon­ic Spike Island gig in Mersey­side. They were (and are) his favourite band, but, tem­porar­i­ly strand­ed in a hal­lu­cino­genic fug, he hand­ed his tick­et to a ran­dom stranger. It was lost. The Stone Ros­es: Made Of Stone is not just a cut-and-dried pro­mo­tion­al doc­u­ment of the feud-inclined combo’s long-await­ed ref­or­ma­tion, but a chance for Mead­ows to relive a moment he thought had slipped away forever.

This dream is ren­dered in styl­ish, high-con­trast mono­chrome, the same used by Mead­ows for his minia­ture pre-teen moon­light flit movie, Somers Town. This endear­ing­ly earnest doc­u­men­tary runs with the notion of rock stars as myth­ic crea­tures. Mead­ows cap­tures the sub-son­ic buzz of some­thing as utter­ly banal as Ian Brown wan­der­ing into a hotel room before a press jun­ket and con­tent­ed­ly clasp­ing hands with bass play­er Gary ​‘Mani’ Mounfield.

Though we’re giv­en a decent pot­ted his­to­ry of the band and the scene they grew out of, Mead­ows’ film is more con­cerned with explor­ing the idea of hero wor­ship. It’s about see­ing rock bands as brands, reli­gions, sects, cults, bod­ies for which one must pay penances and relin­quish earth­ly souls. It’s about what it means to adore a group of peo­ple beyond basic emo­tion­al and eco­nom­ic rationality.

This idea is brought to life most vivid­ly in an extra­or­di­nary, almost Felli­ni-esque sequence at the cen­tre of the film in which Mead­ows cap­tures the minute ger­mi­na­tion of a secret warm-up gig which is announced via social net­work­ing and radio mere hours before the fact. This seg­ment achieves a rare feat with­in the music film pan­theon in that it atten­tive­ly cap­tures the feel­ing of eupho­ria that comes with see­ing a band play live. It’s not just hear­ing your favourite tunes, pogo­ing in tides of sweat and quaffing over­priced watery lager from plas­tic cups. It’s the queu­ing, the wait­ing, the sac­ri­fice and final­ly, the fevered, post-coital come­down after the band has left the building.

Though fans of the Ros­es will no doubt feel sat­ed by the hit-hap­py song selec­tions and per­for­mances (culled main­ly from the sem­i­nal first album), it’s also inter­est­ing how Mead­ows has cho­sen to por­tray these artists. There’s a sense of unal­loyed rev­er­ence here not seen since Mar­tin Scors­ese trained his cam­era on The Band for their farewell extrav­a­gan­za. In one warm-up ses­sion, he films each band mem­ber indi­vid­u­al­ly and then presents them simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in a split-screen mash-up. It may come across like a throw­away piece of post-pro­duc­tion flash, but it also empha­sis­es the pre­car­i­ous delin­eation of their unique col­lab­o­ra­tion and that, like The Bea­t­les before them, The Stone Ros­es are these four peo­ple or no one at all.

For the film’s big encore, Mead­ows films a live ver­sion of ​‘Fool’s Gold’ at Manchester’s Heaton Park. He includes the entire coda which famous­ly con­sists of an intu­itive and lengthy noo­dle jam between the play­ers. It’s a love­ly moment in which the focus of the film switch­es from the songs to the music. It also taps into a lev­el of extreme devo­tion where­in a fan becomes immune to the cre­ative indul­gences of his or her idols.