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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a smaller London club 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 main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a much larger and broader crowd than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike anything else 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 playing behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the usual indie band influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a disastrous headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact 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 dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the front. His popping, mesmerising bass line is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 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 superb.

Consistently an affable, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything more than a long succession of extremely profitable gigs – a couple of new singles released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that any magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of alternative music and reach a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct effect was a kind of groove-based shift: following their initial success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who aimed to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”