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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely unlike anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the tune 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 behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you think of 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 stumbled artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually coincide with the moments 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 totally at odds with the listlessness of all other elements 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 style one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect 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 increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely profitable concerts – two fresh tracks released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture 18 years on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune 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 seminal in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident attitude, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a aim to break the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate effect was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”