🔗 Share this article

By every measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader audience than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the tune of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was completely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to add a some energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the front. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative gigs – two new tracks released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover 18 years later – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct effect was a kind of groove-based change: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”