Gary Mounfield's Undulating, Relentless Bass Guitar Proved to be the Stone Roses' Secret Sauce – It Showed Alternative Music Fans How to Dance

By every measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It took place during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill 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 main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely unlike any other act in British alt-rock 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 underneath it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist 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 completely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing 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 recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid 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 all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous top-billed set 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 rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and more distorted, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the front. His popping, mesmerising bass line is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, clubbable figure – the writer 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 show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of new singles released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that any spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 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 provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct effect was a sort of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”