Gary Mounfield's Undulating, Unstoppable Bass Proved to be the Stone Roses' Secret Sauce – It Showed Alternative Music Fans How to Dance

By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It took place over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a much larger and broader crowd than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock 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 playing behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity 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 transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you recall 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 insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by cutting 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 highlights usually occur during 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 figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone 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 release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had provided 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, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an friendly, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything more than a long succession of hugely profitable concerts – a couple of new singles released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their confident approach, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a desire to transcend the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate influence was a sort of groove-based change: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”