🔗 Share this article

By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a smaller London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a much larger and more diverse audience than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the usual alternative group set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually coincide with the moments 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 increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just 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 unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising impact on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything more than a lengthy series of extremely lucrative concerts – two new tracks released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which additionally offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a desire to transcend the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate effect was a sort of groove-based change: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”