🔗 Share this article

By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. 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 ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able 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 performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a much larger and more diverse crowd 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 movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely different from 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 certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the standard indie band set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce 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 funk, his octave-leaping lines 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 breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bassline. 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 went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a some energy 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 efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and more distorted, but the swing that had provided 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 playing to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern 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, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy succession of hugely profitable gigs – a couple of fresh singles put out by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a aim to transcend the usual market limitations of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate effect was a kind of rhythmic change: following their early success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who aimed to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”