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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a more modest London club 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 scarcely conceivable situation for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house movement – their cockily belligerent 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 undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely different from any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the tune 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 doing behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bassline. When you think of 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 disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed 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 decline after the cool 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 unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything more than a lengthy series of hugely profitable concerts – two new tracks put out by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that any magic had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their confident attitude, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate effect was a sort of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”