Stone Roses and Primal Scream bassist Mani dies at 63
- Richard Blowes
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 24 hours ago
Mani was the charming Stone Roses and Primal Scream bassist who put the fun and the funk into indie music. And his mother and Johnny Marr's lived up the same boreen in Athy.
“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms.
This one is hard to process. Dead at only 63, Gary 'Mani' Mountfield was good, gentle and brave. It seems this fucked up world wanted to make haste.
Like so many North West England musicians, Mani had Irish roots. For all his achievements, one of his proudest moments was being honoured with a Made of Athy plaque. The Kildare town birthed the mothers of Mani (Anne Patricia Farrell) and Johnny Marr (Francis Patricia Doyle): as well as sharing a middle name, they both grew up on the same boreen in one of Athy’s rural parishes. Which prompted Mani to note “There’s something in the bloody water in Knockroe, Maganey, I reckon.” As Johnny Cash also received the same honour posthumously, he probably has a point.
He took over low end duties in 1987 from Pete Garner, the original bass player for The Stone Roses who also died young at 59. Marrying his love of dance music, especially "good Northern Soul and funk", with the 60s chime of Squire's guitar and Reni's stunning drum chops, his loping bass rhythms transformed them from indie also rans into the colourful firestarters of the indie/acid/club crossover of the late 80s. As this review notes, their ecstatic grooves liberated a horde of NME'd up white kids by crashing the acid house scene "with a jangle of US West Coast psychedelia and setting free a generation of Smiths-fed indie kids into loose limbed freedom."
Many commentators have opined that The Stone Roses paved the way for Britpop. Whether they did or not is open to debate - if so it shows that even the best bands make mistakes. Their second album is underrated - compare Begging You or Love Spreads to practically anything produced in that mid nineties morass of indie shite.
Not content with being in one great band, he went on to join another as his pulverising basslines reinvigorated Primal Scream with a duo of punishingly great albums - Vanishing Point and XTRMNTR.
It was around the time that The Stone Roses reformed that me and a mate Phil saw Mani in town - just having a quiet drink in a regular city centre bar which says a lot about the man and Manchester. We argued for a while about whether to say hello and/or buy him a drink. In the end we did neither and we left happy in the knowledge that he was sound, somehow one of us. And also not, as evidenced by his skyscraping musical talent. Ladies and gentleman, his spirit may be floating in space but we are left with his earthly slice of heaven.
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