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

By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London club 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 scarcely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely unlike any other act 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 early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the songs that graced the turntables 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 raised on music quite distinct from the usual alternative group influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not 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, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often occur during the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally 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 pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a decline after the cool response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the low-slung rhythm 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 contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything beyond a long series of extremely profitable gigs – two new singles released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which additionally provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a aim to break the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a kind of rhythmic change: following their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”