The Stone Roses: Our part in their downfall...

The Big Issue this week celebrates the 18^th anniversary of a exclusive Stone Roses interview.

The band are now on their third coming after a sell-out tour of the UK earlier this year.

But just before the release of the Second Coming, their 1994 comeback album, they rejected the music press and granted the Big Issue an exclusive interview.

We put them on our cover – pictured below – and sales were so huge that the edition had to be reprinted.

In the interview, frontman Ian Brown said: “If someone gets a house out of us talking, then that’s got to be good.”

He added: “The last time the NME had us on the cover it was one of the biggest selling issues of the year. We’d rather the money went towards helping the homeless rather than into the coffers of a big organisation.”

In this week’s Big Issue, Roses biographer John Robb looks back at the importance of this seminal interview, writing: “In one fell swoop they swerved the music press, maintained their mystique and kept to their punk roots by giving an interview to a magazine that was not lining corporate pockets, but the pockets of its sellers on British streets.”

Top photo: The Stone Roses, shot for NME cover, Manchester, November 1989 (c) Kevin Cummins