5 Reasons Why... whoever suggested the Stone Roses' reunion is a floppy-brained chump.

1.       Ian Brown. Even with The Greatest Rhythm Section In Rock Music™ back together, the Roses will sound terrible. This is because Ian Brown will be honking his way over the top of everything like a depressed goose. Some will say, “But Ian Brown never could sing, that’s irrelevant”. These people are fools. His youthful cool disguised his complete lack of any other useful attributes, but he vapourised that at Reading ’96, the Roses’ last live performance. He was so out of tune that he sounded like he had been recently bereaved and was wailing at a loved one’s graveside. Now, he’s a creaking heritage act: the pop equivalent of Bruce Forsyth’s abysmal jokes on Strictly Come Dancing.

2.       There will be endless discussion of the Roses’ “legacy”. Actually, what is their legacy? Half an hour of excellent music, granted. However, is it worth the terrible human cost? Anyone who has been to Manchester in the last twenty years will recognise the poor wretches: usually called Gaz, Baz or Dwaz, they swagger around in Inspiral Carpets t-shirts, living permanently in 1991, describing turgid pub rock bands as “proper rock ‘n’ roll” and bankrolling the Courteeners’ feeble existence. Ian Brown is directly responsible for the emergence of lad culture. As such, libraries will place his biography next to those of Stalin and Mao in the ‘History’s Greatest Monsters’ section.

3.       MORONS ABOUND. Come with me, reader, to the wild and confusing world of the YouTube comments section. TriGGlety1974 seems to represent everything that’s wrong with the worst kind of Roses fans. He says, “UK has gone black, its gone rap, its gone urban, its gone geek, its gone computers. White boy guitar music needs to fill the charts again.” Now imagine this statement being made by a forty-year-old mouth-breather wearing a fishing hat. You may note that you have unconsciously started setting items around you on fire. Don’t worry, that is a normal reaction to this level of idiocy. The emergency services will be very sympathetic.

4.       Mani will tell the anecdote about how he stole a tractor again. Did you think about the consequences of your actions, Mani? That farmer was struggling to get by. His cows were giving sour milk. His egg yields had plummeted. In a last throw of the dice, he had spent £30,000 on a swanky new tractor in the hope of saving the farm which had been in his family for six generations, only for some gurning, pot-addled scally to nick it. He rang his bank manager, who told him that he was on the brink of bankruptcy. The farmer sighed, walked outside, turned on his threshing machine, and jumped in. OH HAHAHAHA YEAH REALLY FUNNY STORY MANI.

5.       Steps’ reunion will overshadow it. As we’ve established, the Roses have 30 minutes of excellent music. Yet, they will play for about two hours longer (or at least you’d hope so if you paid £55 to be there). Steps have exactly 42.3 minutes of greatness, and Lee will probably throttle H onstage. Thus, mathematics finally proves itself useful to humanity.