🔗 Share this article

By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a much larger and broader audience than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely unlike any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the tune of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and more distorted, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the front. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of hugely lucrative gigs – a couple of new singles put out by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct effect was a sort of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”