Mani's Writhing, Relentless Bass Proved to be the Stone Roses' Key Ingredient – It Showed Alternative Music Fans How to Dance

By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It took place over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a far bigger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely different from any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the tune of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing underneath it really didn’t: 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 percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was completely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece 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, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect on a band in a decline after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, sociable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything more than a long succession of hugely lucrative concerts – a couple of new tracks released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture 18 years later – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to transcend the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct effect was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”