Flaring Up: The Stone Roses at Spike Island

YOU CAN see them all over the North-West, drifting through Manchester’s arcades, doing the swim-dance in the high-tech Hacienda, travelling en masse to tribal events like the recent Stone Roses’ concert at Spike Island on the Mersey estuary: groups of young men and women wearing floppy fringes and baggy, Day-glo clothes; 24- hour party people chasing the Great God Now in a millennial hedonism straight out of Prince’s infamous ‘1999’.