🔗 Share this article

By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just 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 music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a much larger and more diverse audience than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point 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 rhythm section were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could move 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 somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music quite distinct from the standard indie band set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist 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 debut album: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing 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 not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a long series of hugely profitable gigs – a couple of fresh singles put out by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 18 years on – 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 reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their confident attitude, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a desire to transcend the usual market limitations of indie rock and reach a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of groove-based change: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”