Mani's Undulating, Relentless Bass Was the Stone Roses' Key Ingredient – It Taught Alternative Music Fans the Art of Dancing

By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation 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, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader audience than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely unlike any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely right: 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 secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the breakbeat taken 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 bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically 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 little bit rigid”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually 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 figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous top-billed set 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 response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always 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 displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything more than a lengthy succession of hugely lucrative concerts – two fresh singles released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a aim to break the usual market limitations of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a kind of groove-based shift: following their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”