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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely different from any other act in British alternative music 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 playing behind it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and groove music”.

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

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the highlight 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 affable, sociable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a long succession of extremely profitable concerts – a couple of new singles put out by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which furthermore provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”