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

By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It took place during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely covered 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 debuted on the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and broader crowd than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung 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 bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old 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 could not to most of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the standard alternative group set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. 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 went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, sociable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy series of extremely profitable concerts – two new singles put out by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that any spark had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a aim to break the standard market limitations of alternative music and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate influence was a sort of groove-based change: following their early success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who aimed to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”