“I Wanna Be Adored” by The Stone Roses

"I Wanna Be Adored" opens the Stone Roses' 1989 debut album, and it's one of the great slow-burn entrances: a bass line from Gary Mounfield creeping out of the dark, John Squire's guitar shimmering in, Reni's drums building patiently until the whole band swaggers into view. Squire wrote the music and Ian Brown the words, and Brown sings them with a cool, almost sleepy menace, a hunger for adoration stated so baldly it's hard to tell if he's confessing or gloating.

John Leckie produced it, with Paul Schroeder engineering, and the result is hazy, hypnotic and totally sure of itself, psychedelic guitar pop that treats a single ambition as a mantra.

It went out as a single in the US in 1989 and reached number 18 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart in 1990, and the rest of the world got it in 1991 with some previously unreleased B-sides attached. Copies of that single are no longer pressed and are now very hard to find.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.