Shortly after I moved to Manchester in 2007, I invited my friend Aaron — a Californian — to stay at my place for a couple of days. Within a few hours of his arrival, Aaron had been offered several narcotics, downed a pint or four in Dry Bar, and stumbled out of a city centre nightclub to collide with Mani from the Stone Roses — who leant him a cigarette while they discussed the pros and cons of the New York club scene. In Aaron’s newby eyes, this was simply what happened when visiting Manchester, though for me — an obsessive teenage Stone Roses fan — the encounter with Mani was more of a disorienting, life-illuminating miracle.
This was very much in keeping with who Mani was, and the role he played in the ultra-mythical narrative that was the Stone Roses. In a band defined by an almost shamanistic mystique, it was left to Mani — a gregarious, lovable everyman — to try to explain to the world at large what had actually happened in that heady 1988-1996 interlude (while generously supplying Marlboro Reds to curious American listeners who’d just got off the train).
To some extent, then, Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield was the anomalous member of the Stone Roses — the proverbial ‘rogue Rose’ of legend. The latest arrival to the band’s line-up (in 1987, apparently the moment that everything clicked, according to the others), he brought much-needed groundedness to a project that tirelessly announced itself to be about aping the resurrection, playing with angels, and breaking into heaven. While this was all well and good, there had to be some element that would stop the Roses from disappearing up their own fundament. That element was Mani.
Though subtle differences in background were not the main factor here, they probably played some part. The other members of the band all hailed from south Manchester — and the Squire-Brown songwriting partnership often channelled a form of low-church protestant sloganeering (‘I am the resurrection and the life’, ‘I forgive you boy, the truth will prevail’).
Mani, meanwhile, grew up on the north side of Manchester — in an Irish-Catholic household in the mill town of Failsworth — and would eventually attend the same Xaverian Brothers school that nurtured Caroline Aherne, Anthony Burgess, and Martin Hannett. A Mancunian-Irish archetype if ever there was one, Mani always felt like a member of the Happy Mondays or Oasis who had somehow got lost in the Madchester processing factory and ended up in the slightly more serious, biblical, laddist-revisionist venture that was the Roses.
But when it came to the basics of political outlook, Mani was fully in solidarity with his bandmates. Given some of the later behaviour of his fellow Roses (notably Ian Brown), accusations that the band could be a little boorish — even, on occasion, outright reactionary — were not unfounded. However, there are limitations to this line of argument, which can often align with anti-northern, anti-working-class snobbery.
Whatever their occasional missteps, the Roses were at bottom a defiantly radical, socialist, anti-racist project (somewhat in the vein of their near-contemporaries, and avowed fans, the Manic Street Preachers — and indeed Primal Scream, whom Mani would later join). As has been widely noted, Mani’s first encounter with Ian Brown was during a confrontation with National Front skinheads in north Manchester in the early 1980s — and a large part of the identity of the band in its formative years was derived from such leftist and anti-racist starting points.
This thread can be tracked through Brown’s idolisation of Muhammad Ali and his and Squire’s flirtation with the Socialist Workers Party, to the mixed-race line up and obsession with African-American music that was always the alchemic element in the Roses’ sound (Mani himself was a noted soul and funk devotee) — and finally to the intended ‘call to insurrection’ of the eponymous 1989 debut album, with its lyrics about regicide, the May 1968 riots in Paris, and rising above the torpor of Thatcherite Britain to smash the English establishment.
In the thick of all this, though he was never a doctrinaire politico, Mani embodied a sort of instinctive, everyday socialism in his life and art. Commenting on the fundamentals of the Madchester movement, he maintained that it happened reactively, ‘because of Margaret Thatcher, and her policies against the working-class of Great Britain. She fucked us man.’ An enthusiastic advocate of subversive Roses gestures like the gifting of an exclusive comeback interview to the Big Issue in 1994, and in later years a supporter of grassroots football club F.C. United and of the boycotting of Budweiser at the Glastonbury Festival, Mani was also the ultimate team player, and a paragon of intra-band solidarity when it came to nuances of that golden, unsurpassable Stone Roses sound.
For me, the uniqueness of that musical strain — and the centrality of Mani to it — is nowhere better encapsulated than on ‘Shoot You Down’, one of the less celebrated songs from the eponymous debut album. What I find so moving about this piece of music is the audible sense of a magic synchronicity between these four young working-class men, as they suddenly discover they are capable of something miraculous.
On this song they are absolutely, perfectly, transcendently equal — an effortless, shuffling Reni drumbeat, a chiming, a Squire guitar part redolent of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’, angelic Brown vocals backed up by Reni harmonies in the service of a gorgeous, Paul Simon-meets-Northern Soul melody. And, propelling everything at the bottom of it all, a cool and indomitable Mani bassline that seems to say: this is what being young, conscious and empowered sounds like. This is the sound of solidarity.