🔗 Share this article

By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest 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 big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a much larger and broader audience than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely unlike anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the tune of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the songs that featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce 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 taken 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 springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. 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 overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the moments 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 urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic headlining set 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 tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove 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 bring his playing to the fore. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, sociable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur 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 customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a lengthy series of hugely lucrative concerts – two fresh tracks released by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had existed 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 more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good excuse 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 swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to break the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate effect was a kind of rhythmic change: following their early 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 stated. “That’s what they’re for.”