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

By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely 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 appearance was the big draw 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 find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely unlike any other act in British alternative music 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 playing behind it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the standard alternative group influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing 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 first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, 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 supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often occur during the instances when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to add a some pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners 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 launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a decline after the cool reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the front. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, sociable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a long succession of extremely lucrative gigs – two fresh singles put out by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that any magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a aim to transcend the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of rhythmic change: following their initial success, you abruptly 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, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”