I wanna be adored The Stone Roses

Few songs make longing sound quite as majestic as The Stone Roses’ ‘I Wanna Be Adored’, the opening track of their magnificent 1989 debut album. It begins almost imperceptibly, with a low, subterranean rumble, before the late Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield’s hypnotic bassline emerges.

John Squire’s shimmering guitar gathers momentum, and Alan ‘Reni’ Wren’s drums give the music its irresistible, unhurried propulsion. Ian Brown’s voice, cool and seemingly indifferent, floats above this gathering magnificence, expressing a desire that is anything but indifferent.

The song’s lyrical economy is astonishing. Brown's repeated insistence that he needs no worldly transaction, merely adoration, can sound like narcissism. It isn’t. Read it as, say, a shyamasangeet addressed to Kali, and the resemblance becomes deliciously persuasive.


Don’t get fooled by the English gendered pronoun in, ‘I don't have to/ sell my soul/ He's already in me.’ While the song naturally eludes to ‘oneself’, it can easily jump to the ‘divine her,’ if you’re inclined to ‘her-ness’.

Rejection of worldly exchange, obsessive repetition, yearning for unconditional recognition: these are as much bhakti as the late-80s-early 90s ‘Madchester' scene.

There is even something of the kirtan in the music's gradual, trance-inducing accumulation of sound. What begins as a murmur becomes an invocation.