🔗 Share this article

By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It took place during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a smaller London club 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 attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in 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 appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody 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 bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element 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 not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws might have been fixed by removing some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him metaphorically willing 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 bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an friendly, sociable figure – the author John Robb once observed 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 customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything more than a long succession of extremely profitable gigs – a couple of new singles put out by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years later – and Mani discreetly 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”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate influence was a kind of groove-based change: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”