Mani's Undulating, Unstoppable Bass Proved to be the Stone Roses' Key Ingredient – It Showed Alternative Music Fans the Art of Dancing

By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid 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 alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved 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 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 really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that featured on the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

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

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing 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 suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just 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 unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, 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 decline after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and more distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the front. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably punctured 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 bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of new tracks put out by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which additionally offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident approach, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the standard market limitations of alternative music and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct influence was a sort of rhythmic shift: following their initial success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”