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By every measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London club 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 situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a much larger and broader audience than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the 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 entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the melody 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 underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the usual alternative group influences, which was completely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing 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 follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often 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 sense him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

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 top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a decline after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, sociable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a long succession of extremely lucrative concerts – two fresh tracks released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to break the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”