Mani's Undulating, Unstoppable Bass Guitar Was the Stone Roses' Key Ingredient – It Showed Alternative Music Fans How to Dance

By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the melody 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 underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the standard alternative group set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong 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 stiff”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him metaphorically willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry 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 launch, 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 remarkably energising effect on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh singles released by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident attitude, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a aim to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate effect was a sort of rhythmic shift: following their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”