🔗 Share this article

By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling 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 appearance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the tune 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 doing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that graced the turntables 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 brought up on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the breakbeat 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 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 groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig 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, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the star turn 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 produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy succession of hugely lucrative gigs – two fresh singles released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture 18 years later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which furthermore offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis certainly observed their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct effect was a sort of rhythmic shift: following their early success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands 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.”