Gary Mounfield's Undulating, Relentless Bass Guitar Proved to be the Stone Roses' Secret Sauce – It Taught Indie Kids How to Dance

By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely covered 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 huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely different from any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point 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 really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the usual alternative group set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into free-flowing 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 is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a disastrous headlining set 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 sound became dubbier, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy succession of hugely profitable gigs – a couple of new singles released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly 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 whole was shaped by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”