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By every measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly 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 struggling to fill even a more modest 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 state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely different from any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point 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 dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the usual alternative group set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat 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 comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often occur during the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic 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 slump after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of new singles put out by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that any magic had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which additionally offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly observed their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to break the usual market limitations of indie rock and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct effect was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for 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.”