🔗 Share this article

By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London venue 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 barely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for 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 confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely unlike any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point 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 bass and drums 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 songs that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the breakbeat borrowed 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 low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, 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 thought its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: 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 impressively galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the front. His percussive, hypnotic 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 best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, sociable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – 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 nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything more than a long succession of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh singles put out by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture 18 years later – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident approach, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a desire to break the standard market limitations of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of rhythmic change: following their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”