🔗 Share this article

By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly mentioned 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 huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader 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 acid house scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely unlike anything else 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 rhythm section were doing 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 featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band influences, which was completely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, 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 lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers 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 instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising impact on a band in a decline after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything more than a lengthy succession of hugely profitable concerts – a couple of new tracks released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis certainly observed their confident attitude, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a aim to break the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of groove-based change: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands 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 stated. “That’s what they’re for.”