According to recent reports, the Stone Roses have agreed to reform for 21 dates this summer.

For people of a certain age (eg. me), this is extremely exciting but initially I was a little surprised it was considered sufficiently newsworthy to make page three of today’s Daily Mirror (albeit underneath a much bigger spread about Corrie’s Jack Duckworth finding love again).

Either Mirror staff were getting all their Manc news out of the way in one go or the Roses were a bigger cultural deal than I thought.

Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe the Stone Roses belong in the most exulted sphere of British guitar music.

You know, the place where the Beatles and the Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Smiths, and a handful of others hang out but Oasis, for all their record sales, have only ever peered longingly into.

What surprised me is that their mooted reunion should excite mainstream media attention when they only released two albums (five years apart), didn’t have a number one with either, and have never been a household name.

I am not, as I have been accused recently, equating commercial success with quality. The Smiths, for example, never troubled the charts much. What they did do, however, was leave behind a decent-sized body of work. Few would argue they failed to live up to their potential. 

The Stone Roses, on the other hand, were recently referred to by their own bass player (who now plies his trade with Primal Scream) as the George Best of music for the manner in which they threw it all away after their first sniff of success.

Although few Roses fans will thank me for the comparison, I’m hoping this will turn out like Take That’s reunion. How brilliant would it be if, like Take That, they are overwhelmed by public reaction to the tour and are inspired to write new material?

How brilliant if that new material turns out to be as good as if not better than anything they came up with first time around?

You see, the thing with the Stone Roses is that no band has ever left a bigger question mark over what might have been.

The fact that we might be about to find out is why the news deserves to be in ALL the papers.