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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a more modest London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a much larger and more diverse audience than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely different from anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were doing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively energising impact on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the fore. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything more than a long succession of hugely profitable gigs – two fresh tracks released by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the standard market limitations of indie rock and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a sort of groove-based shift: following their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed 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 averred. “That’s what they’re for.”