Gary Mounfield's Writhing, Unstoppable Bass Guitar Was the Stone Roses' Secret Sauce – It Taught Indie Kids How to Dance

By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on 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 alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly attracting a far bigger and more diverse audience than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely unlike 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 doing 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 indie discos. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the standard indie band set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good 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 riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really 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 initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else 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 just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic headlining set 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 response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the fore. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything more than a long succession of extremely lucrative gigs – two new singles released by the reformed four-piece only demonstrated that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the standard market limitations of alternative music and reach a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”