Gary Mounfield's Undulating, Unstoppable Bass Guitar Was the Stone Roses' Key Ingredient – It Showed Indie Kids the Art of Dancing

By every measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – 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 virtuosic 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 completely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the tune of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to 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 Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bassline. 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 opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed 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 next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of hugely profitable gigs – two new tracks put out by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a great excuse 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 ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a aim to transcend the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate effect was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”