Mani's Writhing, Relentless Bass Was the Stone Roses' Key Ingredient – It Taught Indie Kids How to Dance

By every measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It took place over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader audience than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely unlike any other act in British alt-rock 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 underneath it certainly did not: you could move 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 in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the standard alternative group set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely profitable gigs – two fresh singles released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that any spark had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a aim to transcend the usual market limitations of alternative music and reach a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate effect was a sort of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”