John Squire

Used for the guitar on Second Coming, as mentioned by producer Simon Dawson in the January 14, 1995 Melody Maker interview "Diary of an LP: the Stone Roses' Second Coming, Part One" by Tom Doyle.

John Squire opted for a tried and tested combination of guitars, amps and effects that he's used for years.

"Most of the lead stuff on the record he did on a lovely old 1959 Les Paul, although he's got another Les Paul which is newer and he uses that for slide. Other than that he's got a pink Strat that we used for quite a lot of things. He's got a whole load of pedals as well — obviously the wah-wahs, but also Echoplex and a lot of the old Roger Mayer and Electro-Harmonix ones.

"He plays mainly through an old Fender Twin which has been hotwired — you can buy this hotwire kit from California, it's an amazing little thing that only costs about $50 and you get your technical guy to wire it in for you, and I dunno, it bypasses something or other and it just makes it sound great. I don't think it just works on Fender Twins, I think you can hotwire any amp, but it sounds great on his old Twin. John's got a newer Fender Twin as well, but mainly he uses the old one and sometimes an old Orange amp and cab. In front of the Twin — it was the most amazing thing — I just stuck up an SM57 and a 41, straight up the channels on the desk through a bog-standard DBX 160 compressor, and he got the most amazing sound. And that's it. That's the guitar sound on most of the record. We'd sometimes try different combinations of guitars and amps but we always ended up coming back to that. If you've got a great guitar and amp, it'll always sound great, as long as you can play of course."