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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. 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 imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly attracting a much larger and broader crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely unlike anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument 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 behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, sociable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of hugely profitable concerts – a couple of fresh tracks put out by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate effect was a kind of groove-based change: following their initial success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”