{"id":303843,"date":"2025-11-20T20:13:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T20:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/303843\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T20:13:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T20:13:08","slug":"manis-writhing-relentless-bass-was-the-stone-roses-secret-sauce-it-taught-indie-kids-how-to-dance-stone-roses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/303843\/","title":{"rendered":"Mani\u2019s writhing, relentless bass was the Stone Roses\u2019 secret sauce \u2013 it taught indie kids how to dance | Stone Roses"},"content":{"rendered":"

By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses<\/a> was a sudden and remarkable thing. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn\u2019t a fan. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big attraction on that week\u2019s Top of the Pops \u2013 a barely imaginable state of affairs for most indie bands in the late 80s.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader audience than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look \u2013 which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house scene \u2013 their cockily belligerent attitude<\/a> and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.<\/p>\n

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses\u2019 rhythm section swung in a way completely unlike anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There\u2019s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream\u2019s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing behind it really didn\u2019t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn\u2019t to most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era\u2019s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan \u201cReni\u201d Wren and the bassist Gary \u201cMani\u201d Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the standard indie band set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds\u2019 bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were \u201cgood northern soul and funk\u201d.<\/p>\n

The fluidity of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses\u2019 eponymous debut album: it\u2019s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall. Sometimes the sauce wasn\u2019t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn\u2019t really the vocal melody or Squire\u2019s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd\u2019s 1971 single Hot Pants: it\u2019s Mani\u2019s writhing, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.<\/p>\n

The Stone Roses photographed in 1989. Photograph: Avalon\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Indeed, in Mani\u2019s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold\u2019s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it \u201ccould have swung a little more, it\u2019s a little bit rigid\u201d. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and \u201creverting to the groove\u201d.<\/p>\n

He may well have had a point. Second Coming\u2019s scattering of highlights usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip \u2013 Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You \u2013 while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of everything else that\u2019s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he\u2019s audibly trying to inject a bit of pep into what\u2019s otherwise some nondescript country-rock \u2013 not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Primal Scream: Kill All Hippies \u2013 video<\/p>\n

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming\u2019s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani\u2019s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the cool reception of 1994\u2019s rock-y Give Out But Don\u2019t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence \u2013 particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski \u2013 as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies \u2013 like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica \u2013 is magnificent.<\/p>\n

Always an affable, clubbable presence \u2013 the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses\u2019 hauteur towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani \u201clet his guard down\u201d \u2013 he took the stage at the Stone Roses\u2019 2012 reunion concert at Manchester\u2019s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the legend \u201cSuper-Yob\u201d, the nickname of Slade\u2019s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of hugely lucrative gigs \u2013 two new singles released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years on \u2013 and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He\u2019d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided \u201ca good excuse to go to the pub\u201d.<\/p>\n

Perhaps he felt he\u2019d done enough: he\u2019d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering attitude, while Britpop<\/a> as a whole was informed by a desire to break the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate effect was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly couldn\u2019t move for indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani\u2019s musical raison d\u2019\u00eatre. \u201cIt\u2019s what the bass and drums are for, aren\u2019t they?\u201d he once averred. \u201cThat\u2019s what they\u2019re for.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It took place…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":303844,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":{"0":"post-303843","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}