Mani's Undulating, Relentless Bass Was the Stone Roses' Key Ingredient – It Taught Indie Kids How to Dance

By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack 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 appearance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and more diverse audience than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic 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 entirely unlike anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the standard indie band set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The fluidity 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 transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, 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 impact on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the front. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of hugely profitable concerts – a couple of new singles released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that any spark had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a desire to break the usual market limitations of indie rock and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate influence was a sort of rhythmic change: following their initial success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”