Mani's Undulating, Relentless Bass Proved to be the Stone Roses' Key Ingredient – It Showed Indie Kids How to Dance

By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a more modest 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 performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader audience than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely different from any other act in British alternative music 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 bass and drums were playing underneath 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 decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music 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 main inspirations were “great northern soul and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping 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 singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

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 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 thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a style 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 completely after a disastrous headlining 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 tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of new tracks released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which furthermore offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to transcend the usual market limitations of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a sort of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”