🔗 Share this article

By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established 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 pack even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. 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 situation for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd 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 burgeoning acid house scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely unlike anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the tune 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 behind it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music quite distinct from the usual alternative group set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often occur during the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb 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 contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry 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 disastrous 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 decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the front. His popping, hypnotic bass line is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of extremely profitable concerts – two new singles put out by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which additionally offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of indie rock and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of groove-based change: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly encountered many 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 averred. “That’s what they’re for.”