🔗 Share this article

By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a more modest London venue 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 main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a much larger and more diverse audience than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

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 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 doing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance 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 bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the usual indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic headlining set 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 tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of new singles released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which furthermore offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly observed their confident attitude, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of indie rock and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of rhythmic change: following their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”