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

By any measure, the ascent 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 merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller 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 barely imaginable state of affairs for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a much larger and more diverse audience than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely unlike any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point 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 rhythm section were doing behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on 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 unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: 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 set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising 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 more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, sociable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything more than a long succession of extremely profitable gigs – two new tracks released by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to break the standard market limitations of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of groove-based change: following their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”