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 rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It took place over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press 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 massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in 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 expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely unlike anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point 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 rhythm section were playing behind it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the usual alternative group influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing 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 insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the fantastic 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, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything more than a long series of hugely lucrative gigs – two fresh tracks put out by the reformed quartet served only to prove that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident approach, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a desire to transcend the standard market limitations of indie rock and reach a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct effect was a sort of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences 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.”