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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their latest 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 performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth 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 underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to the majority 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 influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. 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 taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought 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 underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by cutting 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 usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic headlining set 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 guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the fore. 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 standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of hugely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh tracks put out by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 18 years later – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”