🔗 Share this article

By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. 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 barely imaginable state of affairs for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a much larger and more diverse audience than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the tune of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the usual alternative group influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times 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 playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

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 suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything more than a long succession of hugely lucrative gigs – two new singles put out by the reformed four-piece only demonstrated that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to break the standard market limitations of alternative music and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct influence was a sort of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their audiences 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.”