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The Stone Roses (album)

1989 album by The Stone Roses

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 29, 2026
Entity authorityQ300932
Source-derived summary

The Stone Roses is the debut studio album by the English rock band the Stone Roses, released on 2 May 1989 by Silvertone Records. It was recorded mostly at Battery Studios in London with producer John Leckie from June 1988 to February 1989.

Despite not being an immediate success, The Stone Roses has now sold over four million copies worldwide. The album grew popular alongside the band's high-profile concert performances, which also helped establish them as fixtures of the Madchester and baggy cultural scenes. Its critical standing also improved significantly in later years, with the album now considered to be one of the greatest albums of all time. It was voted number 11 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000), and in 2020, Rolling Stone ranked it at number 319 on its updated list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

Background

Based in Manchester, where the so-called Madchester musical movement was centred, the Stone Roses formed in 1983. Between their formation and the release of their debut album, the band had gone through different names and line-ups, trying out different sounds, and released several singles on several different labels.

Bassist Mani was a fan of producer John Leckie's work with the Dukes of Stratosphear and suggested the band work with him. Leckie found the band's demos for the album to be poor, noting that the tempos were too fast and there was too much reverb on the vocals.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Stone Roses (album)” is 1989 album by The Stone Roses. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Stone, Roses and album, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1989, 1988, 1000, 2000—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1989-03-13. For this dossier, Stone, Roses and album is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “1989 album by The Stone Roses” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q300932. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989, 1988, 1000 and 2000.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
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The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “The Stone Roses (album)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow The Stone Roses (album) primary sources, The Stone Roses (album) archive and Stone research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “The Stone Roses (album)”?
  2. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
  3. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from The Stone Roses (album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.