Stone Roses

I'd been tooling around Manchester with the Roses, picking up a giant print out of one of John Squire's paintings to use as a backdrop and with Mani making a mean brew at his flat when I though we should... read more do one last set of pix at a location that the band liked. John immediately said "Let's go up on this station I know". It later emerged that he was a keen train spotter! The lights had just come on and dusk was falling, commuters starting to head home and some how it felt just perfect to be there with a band that I knew were just about to release one the greatest albums of the decade.

The Stone Roses (Ian Brown, John Squire, Mani and Reni)

NMEI’d wanted to photograph the band (Ian Brown, John Squire, Mani and Reni) as a John Squire painting for ages. We finally set it up - they could only do it on a Sunday - in Manchester. I spent... read more the morning turning the studio into a polythene cube - I hadn’t told the owner our plan and I was worried about his studio looking like we’d played paintball for 24 hours in there. John brought the paint - we started with blue and white - for Manchester City - my team. Each time he added another colour he would paint himself then lie in the shot. After two hours without heating - lying in cold wet paint we’d got the shots. That’s when I broke the news to them that there were no showers in the studio. They all had to walk through Manchester City centre dripping in multi coloured paint and go back to Ian Brown’s flat to shower it off. The handprints are still down the stairwell of the building. In the NME 50th anniversary issue both Liam Gallagher and Richard Ashcroft said that this picture was the defining moment of the era and the greatest NME cover of all time.