🔗 Share this article

By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs 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 club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on 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 late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and broader crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely different from 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 bass and drums were doing behind it certainly did not: 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 indie discos. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the standard alternative group influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you think of 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 musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. 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 sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising impact on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of new singles released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the standard market limitations of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct effect was a sort of rhythmic change: following their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”