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By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the usual indie band influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically willing the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising impact on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of hugely lucrative gigs – a couple of new tracks released by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their confident approach, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a aim to break the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of groove-based shift: following their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”