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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller 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 performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically 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 scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely different from anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument 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 playing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the standard alternative group set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing 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 loose-limbed funk, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really 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 bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized second album, 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 valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him metaphorically 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 song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had given 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 playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of hugely profitable gigs – two fresh singles put out by the reformed four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which furthermore provided “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly 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 whole was shaped by a aim to break the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate influence was a kind of groove-based change: following their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences 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.”