Mani's Undulating, Unstoppable Bass Was the Stone Roses' Secret Sauce – It Taught Indie Kids How to Dance

By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely 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 debuted on the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely unlike any other act 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 rhythm section were doing underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the standard alternative group influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bassline. When you recall 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 disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified 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 scattering of highlights often coincide with 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 sense him metaphorically willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy succession of hugely profitable concerts – a couple of fresh singles released by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a aim to transcend the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct effect was a kind of rhythmic change: following their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. 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.”