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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly mentioned 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 performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a much larger and more diverse audience than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not 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 brought up on music rather different to the usual alternative group set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the fore. His popping, mesmerising bass line is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely profitable gigs – two fresh singles released by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that any magic had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the standard market limitations of alternative music and reach a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct influence was a kind of groove-based change: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences 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.”