🔗 Share this article

By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a smaller London venue 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 main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a much larger and more diverse audience than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the usual alternative group influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge fan 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’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you think of 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 went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed 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 handful of standout tracks usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically willing the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is certainly the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a long succession of hugely lucrative concerts – two new tracks released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that any magic had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore offered “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 observed their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”