The Stone Roses – Shoot You Down

Variously described as a ‘Chill-out groover’ and ‘jazzy’ (?) this track was instantly one of my favourites back when I first heard it in early-summer ’89. This was during a car journey along the M62 to Stockport (to attend someones 21st birthday party). Someone had given me a cassette of the album the week before so it seemed a good time to listen to it. I’d already heard Elephant Stone but for some reason it didn’t click. My mate and I spent the journey there and back gradually playing it louder and louder as we got more into the album, even though, as a result of said party, he’d had one eyebrow shaved off whilst asleep. “I’d love to do it and you know you’ve always had it coming…” – the hooky line we belted out as we rolled past Ainley Top in his old-banger Peugeot.

John and his pink ’60’s strat

As a guitar player, obviously my ears pricked up at John Squire’s stellar playing on this number. I’d recently started to get into Hendrix and could hear nods to his more soulful/R n’ B style like on ‘Wind Cries Mary’ or ‘Castles Made Of Sand’. Plus, what was that chord he was playing every now and again? Sounded like a Major 7th but with something extra that I couldn’t make out.

Now, of course, I know he was using a capo to get that odd chord. Once I figured it out I must have spent about an hour strumming it once and just letting it ring, over and over again. Simple, but sounds amazing.

Anyway, over on the video page you can see for yourself and you can also find a link to the tab. I also recreated the backing track as best I could, although nailing Reni’s shuffling brush kit groove by programming it is nigh on impossible.

There’s other John Squire covers with animated tab on my channel and I’ll be adding more, so please subscribe to keep up-to-date. I also add random Roses-related guitar shenanigans to my Facebook page and Insta, including works-in-progress, so feel free to give me a follow or like.

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