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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a smaller London club 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 big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely unlike any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were doing underneath it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that graced the decks 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 quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist 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’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not 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 recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed 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 highlights usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely 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 inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His popping, mesmerising bass line is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, sociable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a long series of extremely profitable gigs – a couple of new singles released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the usual market limitations of indie rock and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate effect was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly encountered many 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.”