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

By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack 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 state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a much larger and broader audience 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 dance music movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely different from any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody 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 playing behind it really didn’t: 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 in some way 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 influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient wasn’t so secret. 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 bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting 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 often coincide with the instances when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively energising impact on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and more distorted, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything more than a long series of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of fresh tracks released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual market limitations of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate effect was a sort of rhythmic change: 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 artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”