By the time the Roses came on, it was a sense of relief as much as anything.” “They had also famously mistakenly booked a DJ called Frankie Bones, instead of Frankie Knuckles, who spent hours reminding the crowd he was from `Brooklyn, New York’. “There was no star-studded support bill – the other bands were Gary Clail’s Sound System and Thomas Mapfumo, a brilliant Zimbabwean musician totally unsuited to the crowd facing him. ![]() “The sun shone most of the day, making it dustier. “It wasn’t in idyllic countryside pasture – it was a scraggy, dusty strip of land right next to a chemical plant,” he reflects. ![]() Roddy recalls Spike Island as being a mixed experience. “We persuaded a friend to give us a lift but only after we’d been to Fat Sams, our regular Saturday night out.” “The coach to Spike Island was leaving from Edinburgh very early on the morning of May 27,” says Roddy. The lads got tickets via Groucho’s without difficulty – this was before the era of big gigs selling out months in advance. When the Roses announced they were headlining Spike Island, there was no doubt in Roddy and Paul’s minds that they would be going. “That was the tour just after the album had come about and they had a magical glow about them.” ![]() “Of the hundreds of gigs I’ve been to, the Edinburgh Venue gig remains my favourite. “My pal Paul Kiddie and I had fallen for the Roses in a big way in 1988, around the time Elephant Stone came out,” says Roddy. Roddy, who is now head of corporate communications at Dundee University, had seen the band play The Venue in Edinburgh on midsummer’s day the year before – on June 21 1989. Former music journalist Roddy Isles was 20 when he travelled from Dundee to watch the Roses headline Spike Island.
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