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By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a more modest London club 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 end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons 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 set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely unlike anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the melody 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 underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the standard alternative group influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing 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, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: 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 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 dubbier, heavier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the front. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy succession of extremely profitable concerts – two fresh singles released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that any magic had existed in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct effect was a sort of groove-based shift: following their initial success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”