🔗 Share this article

By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a more modest London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered 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 indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a far bigger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely different from any other act 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 old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody 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 snaking, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled 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 little bit stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts 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 disastrous top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the cool response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the front. His popping, hypnotic bass line is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken 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 bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a long succession of hugely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh tracks put out by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of rhythmic change: following their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their fans 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.”