Mani's Undulating, Unstoppable Bass Guitar Was the Stone Roses' Key Ingredient – It Showed Indie Kids How to Dance

By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It took place over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly mentioned their most recent 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 entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big 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 identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely different from anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the usual alternative group set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step 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 wah-pedal-heavy 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 initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed 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 groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, sociable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken 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 displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of new tracks put out by the reformed quartet served only to prove that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with angling, which additionally provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident attitude, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a desire to transcend the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”