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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. 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 barely conceivable state of affairs for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader crowd than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely unlike anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing underneath it really didn’t: you could dance 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 percussionist 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 absolutely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody 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 writhing, relentless bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. 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 clearly attempting to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects 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 collapsed entirely after a disastrous headlining set 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 tone became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, sociable figure – 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 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything more than a lengthy series of hugely lucrative gigs – two fresh singles released by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music 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 influential in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident attitude, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a aim to break the standard market limitations of alternative music 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 early success, you suddenly 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 averred. “That’s what they’re for.”