Charismatic Stone Roses and Primal Scream musician acclaimed for some of the most memorable bass lines in indie music
The Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album, released in May 1989, became a benchmark British record by blending anthemic, 1960s-evoking melodies and chiming guitar work with what Rolling Stone’s David Fricke described as “the blown-mind drive of British rave culture”. While John Squire took care of the band’s Byrds-like jangling guitar, it was Mani, who has died aged 63, who played the powerful, hard-edged bass lines that put the rocket fuel into tracks such as She Bangs the Drums and This Is the One. The first sound you hear on the disc is his bass emerging, both tantalisingly and menacingly, through the sonic fog at the start of I Wanna Be Adored.
It was a mixture that helped redefine the band’s home city of Manchester as “Madchester”, a place that had magically become “baggydelic”, through a club-indie crossover scene that emerged out of venues such as the Hacienda and included the similarly genre-straddling Happy Mondays.
The author John Robb observed how the Stone Roses “grabbed British indie music from the doldrums and made it colourful and sexy at a time when most ‘credible’ bands were dour and soulless”. The album earned a tsunami of rave reviews, and the critical acclaim was long-lasting – in 1997 the album was judged the second best of all time in a poll launched by HMV (beaten only by the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), and an Observer poll in 2004 hailed it as “the greatest British album of all time”. Rolling Stone declared that it “single-handedly launched 90s Britpop”, and in 2010 it won the Mojo classic album award.
