🔗 Share this article

By every measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a more modest 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 big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a far bigger and broader crowd 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 expanding dance music scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely different from any other act in British alternative music 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 most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness 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 transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often coincide with 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 urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded 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 response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the front. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press 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 playing a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely profitable gigs – two new singles released by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that any spark had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the standard market limitations of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: following their early success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”