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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than usually 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 confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely different from any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were doing underneath it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a catastrophic top-billed set 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 guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a long series of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of new singles released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a aim to transcend the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct effect was a sort of groove-based shift: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences dance. 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.”