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Mani's Undulating, Relentless Bass Proved to be the Stone Roses' Secret Sauce – It Showed Indie Kids the Art of Dancing
By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London club 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 draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.
In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.
But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely unlike 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 old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing underneath it certainly did not: 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 alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and funk”.
The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who propels the point 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 ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the low-end melody.
Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.
He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a rush 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 collapsed completely after a catastrophic top-billed performance 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 tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and more 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 playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is certainly the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.
Consistently an affable, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything beyond a long succession of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh singles put out by the reformed quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which additionally offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.
Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a aim to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate influence was a sort of groove-based change: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”
Margaret Houston
A dedicated writer and theologian passionate about sharing faith-based insights and fostering community connections.
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