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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader 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 dance music movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely different from anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the tune 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 certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that featured on 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 raised on music rather different to the usual alternative group influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing 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 writhing, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, sociable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of fresh singles released by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years later – and Mani discreetly declared 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 thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to transcend the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a kind of groove-based change: following their early success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”