🔗 Share this article

By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a more modest London venue 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 barely conceivable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a much larger and more diverse audience than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He likely 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 hear him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, 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 impressively energising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and more distorted, but the groove 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 ability to push his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything more than a long series of extremely profitable concerts – two new tracks put out by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a aim to transcend the standard 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 rhythmic change: following their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. 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.”