The music world last saw former Stone Roses guitarist John Squire sharing a blissfully indulgent rock-guitar moment onstage with Oasis at last summer's Knebworth festival, wailing away on "Wonderwall" and "I Am the Walrus" with one of the bands his neo-psychedelic pop helped inspire. He had kept a low profile since quitting the legendary progenitors of Britain's Manchester sound in March, and the festival marked his only musical appearance, onstage or otherwise, since that time.
\\Almost a year later, Squire has returned with a new band, the Seahorses, and an adventurous debut, "Do It Yourself," that will be released on June 17. Considering the frustratingly tedious pace his former outfit worked at (five years lapsed between the Roses' 1989 self-titled debut and their much-ballyhooed, poorly received follow-up, "Second Coming"), the apparently hassle-free manner in which all this happened surprises no one more than Squire.
\\"The music came very quickly and very easily," Squire says, sitting in a Geffen conference room and staring out a window overlooking New York's hectic Seventh Avenue. "And while it was important to me to capture the birth of the band -- sort of like a snapshot of the rehearsals and the live sound -- I didn't want it to become as anal as the Stone Roses did. I think that would have just swamped the band's personalities."
\\Although Squire wrote most of "Do It Yourself" before putting together the Seahorses' final lineup -- which includes Stuart Fletcher on bass, Andy Watts on drums and former street musician Chris Helme on vocals and rhythm guitar -- he was careful not to let the band turn into Keith Richards and the X-Pensive Winos or the Joe Perry Project. "When I formed the band, I tried to make it as real as possible by avoiding any sort of super-group connotations and working with people who weren't publicly known," Squire concedes. "But I never wanted to be a solo artist, either. I always wanted to be a member of a group, a band."
\\After working through much of the material on "Do It Yourself" as a three-piece -- drummer Watts was the last to be bridled -- the Seahorses packed ship for America, having landed a recording window at Royaltone studios in North Hollywood, a move which Squire says enabled the group to focus on the songs at hand. "We had been rehearsing together in a very closed environment in the north of England," Squire says. "We tried to condense time by living together. I wanted to get that sort of community spirit going early and hoped it [would be] reflected in the music. When the schedule was announced for recording, we just transplanted the whole set-up to Burbank so there would be very few distractions overall."
\\Recording with veteran producer Tony Visconti (David Bowie and T-Rex), the band took barely a month to cut the basic tracks for "Do It Yourself." The resulting album crackles with an energy derived from what Squire calls a "big, fat '70s guitar sound" and seems far brighter than one might expect considering that the bulk of its songs were written in the midst of the Roses' long, slow demise. (The Roses disbanded six months after Squire left, following a wretched performance at last summer's Reading Festival, although Ian Brown, Mani and Reni are all reportedly working on Brown's upcoming solo album.)
\\"The songs I wrote immediately after leaving the Stone Roses were quite varied," Squire says. "That was something I was aware of. I thought the album should be something of an emotional roller coaster. But I never had any doubt about the music. I had lived with it for so long that I knew the album inside-out before we even thought about recording it."
\\But while the Roses' shadow still looms large, Squire pinpoints the moment he overcame any anxieties he had about the new band at one of the group's secret shows in Scotland. "Things started off quite badly, because there was all this attention on me, and a lot of the crowd were chanting my name and ignoring the rest of the band," Squire recalls. "But three or four songs in, the focus shifted, naturally enough, to [Chris] and [the ba