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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a much larger and broader crowd than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing behind it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not 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 raised on music rather different to the usual indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive 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 debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece 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 snaking, driving 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 insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often occur during the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively 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 dubbier, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove 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 push his bass work to the front. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is very much the highlight on the fantastic 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 affable, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely profitable gigs – two new singles released by the reformed four-piece only demonstrated that any spark had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover 18 years later – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”