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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack 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 big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely different from anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music quite distinct from the usual alternative group influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly 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 pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic 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 standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything more than a lengthy series of hugely profitable gigs – a couple of fresh tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to transcend the usual market limitations of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct effect was a sort of rhythmic change: following their early success, you suddenly encountered many 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, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”