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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller 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 main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader crowd than usually displayed an interest in 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 attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely unlike anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that featured on the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the usual indie band influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely 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 slump after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the fore. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, sociable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a long succession of hugely lucrative gigs – two fresh singles released by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which furthermore offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual market limitations of indie rock and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct influence was a sort of groove-based shift: following their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their fans 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.”