Mani's Writhing, Unstoppable Bass Guitar Proved to be the Stone Roses' Secret Sauce – It Taught Indie Kids the Art of Dancing

By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It took place during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill 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 performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable situation for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely different from any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument 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 dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t 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 raised on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his jumping 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 playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the fore. His popping, mesmerising bass line is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything more than a lengthy succession of hugely profitable concerts – a couple of new tracks put out by the reformed four-piece only demonstrated that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture 18 years on – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a desire 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: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”