Mani's Writhing, Unstoppable Bass Was the Stone Roses' Secret Sauce – It Showed Alternative Music Fans the Art of Dancing

By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It took place 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 established channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a smaller London venue 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 main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader audience than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely unlike anything else 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 underneath it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the standard alternative group set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not 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 bass. 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 underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the front. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an friendly, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything beyond a long series of extremely profitable gigs – a couple of new singles put out by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture 18 years later – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which furthermore offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident attitude, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of indie rock and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early 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, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”