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By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established outlets 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 big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely different from any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the usual alternative group set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient 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 drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought 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 likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid reception 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 point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy succession of hugely lucrative gigs – a couple of new tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis certainly observed their confident attitude, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”