Mani's Writhing, Relentless Bass Proved to be the Stone Roses' Secret Sauce – It Taught Indie Kids the Art of Dancing

By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly mentioned 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 massive. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a much larger and broader audience than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely different from anything else 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 early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the standard alternative group influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic top-billed 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 reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the front. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once observed 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 customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything more than a lengthy series of extremely lucrative concerts – two fresh singles released by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that any spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good 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 range of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their confident approach, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of groove-based change: in the wake of their early 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 rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”