10 Greatest Ever Stone Roses Songs
4. Fool’s Gold
Fool’s Gold is probably The Stone Roses’ best known and most loved song. It’s been included on the soundtrack to multiple movies and was their first top 10 hit.
What would come to be their defining song was actually quite a departure from what had come before. While the band’s rhythm section had long been its hidden weapon, hinting at the dance floor, their songs were, for the most part, straightforward guitar pop.
Fools Gold, at nearly 10 minutes without a chorus and built around a beat lifted from James Brown’s Funky Drummer, was something else again.
Ian Brown’s hushed vocals and John Squire’s wah-wah guitar licks add to the funky, atmospheric that goes down just as well in a dance club or an indie disco. They recreated the borrowed beat on a drum machine but at points during the track the drum machine is mixed out to reveal Reni’s more intense live drums underneath.
Fool’s Gold would become something of an albatross around the band’s collective neck, with nothing they recorded afterwards coming close to topping its majesty.