Gary Mounfield aka Mani, the bassist for The Stone Roses. As all Stone Roses listeners know, their rhythm section was pretty crucial, though I didn’t really understand why until I watched footage of some of their 1989 live concerts and realized Mani and Reni were playing their hearts out and not missing a note, whereas the lead singer Ian Brown seemed to be struggling.

He died in November of last year of emphysema. His wife had died of cancer in 2023. I only found out any of this stuff while reading the external reviews in the Wikipedia article for the second Stone Roses album, the one from 1994 that nobody really cares about. This is going to sound mean but I always thought he had a very simian looking face, he sort of looked like a simian version of Mark E. Smith. This is also going to sound mean, but he had a weird little side band called Freebass with Andy Rourke and Peter Hook. Uh…were they good? I’m not sure who would want a band consisting of just bassists.