🔗 Share this article

By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London venue 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 situation for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a much larger and more diverse audience than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their cockily belligerent 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’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike anything else 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 early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the standard indie band set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, 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 groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a some pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining 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 tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the front. His popping, mesmerising bass line is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative concerts – two new tracks released by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture 18 years 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 provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe 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 attitude, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a aim to transcend the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”