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

By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a far bigger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section 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 sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way got the impression 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 absolutely correct: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you recall 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 musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact 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 more echo-laden, heavier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the front. His percussive, mesmerising 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 standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything more than a long series of extremely lucrative concerts – two new tracks put out by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the usual market limitations of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate effect was a sort of rhythmic shift: following their early success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts who aimed to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”