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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place during a span of one year. At the beginning 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 barely mentioned their latest 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 entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely unlike any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing behind it really didn’t: 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 indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the usual alternative group set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, 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 initial element that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often coincide with the instances 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 metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners 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 launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the cool reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative gigs – two fresh singles released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their confident attitude, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a desire to transcend the standard market limitations of indie rock and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of groove-based change: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands 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 stated. “That’s what they’re for.”