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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. 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 conceivable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a much larger and more diverse audience than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely unlike any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the tune of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the standard alternative group influences, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who propels 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 sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, 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 thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually 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 willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a some pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising impact on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier 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 skill to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy series of extremely profitable concerts – two new tracks released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a desire to transcend the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a sort of groove-based shift: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”