🔗 Share this article

By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. 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 scarcely imaginable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a much larger and more diverse audience than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely different from any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. 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 stumbled artistically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. 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 strong supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising bass line 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 finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, sociable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely lucrative concerts – two new singles put out by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual market limitations of alternative music and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic change: following their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted 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.”