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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and broader crowd than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music 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 undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock 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 bass and drums were doing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good 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 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 focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering 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 increasingly sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the front. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, sociable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of hugely lucrative concerts – two new tracks released by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which additionally provided “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a desire to break the standard market limitations of indie rock and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct effect was a sort of groove-based change: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed 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.”