🔗 Share this article

By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able 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 big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a much larger and broader audience than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely unlike anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the songs that graced the turntables 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 brought up on music quite distinct from the usual indie band influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but believed 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 instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic top-billed performance 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 response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest 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 “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything more than a long series of extremely profitable concerts – two new tracks released by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that any spark had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate influence was a sort of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who aimed to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”