Gary Mounfield's Writhing, Relentless Bass Was the Stone Roses' Secret Sauce – It Showed Alternative Music Fans the Art of Dancing

By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill 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 main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than usually 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 confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the tune 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 dance to it in a way that you could not to most 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 bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly 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 pick up the pace. His playing 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 bit of pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and more distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy series of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh singles put out by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music 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”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual market limitations of alternative music and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: following their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”