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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It took place during a span of one year. 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. Influential DJs 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 huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and more diverse audience than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely different from any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the tune 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 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 turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the standard indie band set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not 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 recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to add a some pep into what’s otherwise 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 unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a decline after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution 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 affable, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a long series of extremely lucrative concerts – two fresh tracks released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that any spark had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 18 years later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a aim to transcend the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct effect was a sort of groove-based shift: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”