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

By every measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader audience than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were doing behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the standard indie band set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The fluidity of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bassline. 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 went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly 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 contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a some pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact on a band in a decline after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is certainly the star turn on the brilliant 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.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely profitable gigs – a couple of new singles put out by the reformed four-piece only demonstrated that any magic had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the standard market limitations of indie rock and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct effect was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”