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

By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely different from anything else in British alternative music 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 rhythm section were doing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way 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 influences, which was completely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really 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 snaking, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a some pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively energising impact 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 distorted, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn 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 superb.

Always an affable, sociable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert 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 guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh singles put out by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to transcend the usual market limitations of indie rock and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate effect was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”