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By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just 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 more modest 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 draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a much larger and broader audience than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful 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 completely unlike any other act 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 rhythm section were doing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority 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 brought up on sounds rather different to the usual alternative group set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you recall 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 went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch defender 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 likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely lucrative concerts – two fresh singles put out by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that any spark had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly announced 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 done enough: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a desire to transcend the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of groove-based change: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”