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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a far bigger and more diverse audience than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely unlike any other act 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 move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music quite distinct from the standard indie band influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The fluidity of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s him who propels the point 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 focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat 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 first thing that comes to thought is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, sociable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy series of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of new tracks released by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that any spark had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to break the usual market limitations of indie rock and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct effect was a sort of groove-based shift: following their early 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, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”