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 basslines 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
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