Gary Mounfield's Writhing, 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 extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller 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 performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a much larger and broader audience than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely different from anything else in British alt-rock 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 bass and drums were playing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that featured on the turntables 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 music rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled 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 stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging 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 clearly attempting to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a long succession of hugely profitable gigs – two new singles released by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good reason 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 approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a aim to transcend the usual market limitations of indie rock and attract a more general public, as the Roses had done. 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 aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”