🔗 Share this article

By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It took place over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a smaller 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 appearance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a much larger and broader audience than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable 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 melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the usual alternative group influences, which was completely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece 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 first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and increasingly 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 push his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a long series of hugely profitable concerts – two new tracks released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture 18 years on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a great excuse 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 took note of their confident attitude, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of indie rock and reach a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of groove-based change: following their early success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”