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.

Without Mani, this might not have been the case. When the charismatic bass player joined the Stone Roses in 1987, “it almost changed overnight”, the singer Ian Brown said. “It became a totally different groove … Straight away, everything just fell into place.”

Mani had been immersed in the fertile musical life of Manchester from the beginning of the 80s, originally as a guitarist. He was a member of the Fireside Chaps with Squire and the singer/guitarist Andy Couzens, and the group subsequently morphed into the Waterfront when Mani took up the bass. When Brown joined in 1983, the band became a forerunner of the Stone Roses, before splitting up.

Mani was then temporarily a member of the Mill, which also featured the future Inspiral Carpets keyboards player Clint Boon, while the Stone Roses evolved steadily, undergoing several lineup changes that included the addition of drummer Alan “Reni” Wren, while creating some of their early trademark songs including Sugar Spun Sister and Sally Cinnamon. After the departure in short order of bass players Peter Garner and Rob Hampson, Mani was recruited, making his stage debut in November 1987.

Despite the huge success of the first album, reinforced by its Top 10 single Fools Gold, and the band’s epoch-defining gig on toxic wasteland at Spike Island in Widnes, the group’s progress was stalled by a variety of problems. They became entangled in a legal battle with their record label, Silvertone, and though they signed a new deal with Geffen allegedly worth $20m, it was not until December 1994 that they released a second album, modestly entitled Second Coming. After a five-and-a-half year gap since their debut, it was probably inevitable that it would feel like an anticlimax, though it gave them their biggest UK hit single when Love Spreads reached No 2.

In 1996 the group dissolved, with Mani going off to play bass with Primal Scream, a band that had also embraced dance and club culture, and with whom he would record five albums during his 15-year tenure. His arrival brought a vital shot of creative energy to the group, who had been considering splitting up before his arrival, and he became a significant songwriting contributor. He co-wrote Kowalski, from the Vanishing Point album (1997), which reached No 8 in the UK, and helped write Country Girl (from the Riot City Blues album), which reached No 5 in the UK in 2006 and was the group’s highest-charting UK single.

In 2005, Mani became involved in a side-project called Freebass, a band comprising three bass players – himself, New Order’s Peter Hook and Andy Rourke from the Smiths. They released several EPs and the album It’s a Beautiful Life (2010). Mani explained to Guitar World magazine why the bass was so important. “With rock’n’roll you always get some shit-hot guitar player stealing everyone’s thunder, y’know? Bass is mega-important – anyone who’s got an ounce of groove in them realises that.”

Mani left Primal Scream in 2011, after they had toured performing the band’s classic 1991 album Screamadelica for most of that year, to participate in a belated Stone Roses reunion. This had apparently been prompted by Mani meeting Brown and Squire at his mother’s funeral in 2011. He commented that the event was “the cloud that gave us the silver lining” to patch up their differences. Their first reunion concert was to 1,000 fans at Parr Hall in Warrington in May 2012, and in 2013 they would perform at the Isle of Wight festival, Coachella in California, Finsbury Park in London and Glasgow Green. Following a string of large-scale dates in the ensuing years, in June 2017 they played Hampden Park in Glasgow, which proved to be their final concert, with Mani announcing his retirement in 2021.

He was born Gary Mounfield in the Manchester suburb of Crumpsall, the son of Colin Mounfield, a chef who would often cook for Manchester United footballers, and his County Kildare-born wife, Anne (nee Farrell). He attended the Roman Catholic Xaverian college in Rusholme, leaving school at age 16 and becoming involved in the local music scene.

He met his future wife, Imelda, during recording sessions for the Second Coming album. She died in 2023 from cancer.

Mani, who had announced dates for a speaking tour next year, died after collapsing at his home in Stockport.

He is survived by his twin sons, Gene and George, his brother Greg, and half-brother Steve.

• Mani (Gary Mounfield), musician and songwriter, born 16 November 1962; died 20 November 2025