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By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely covered 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 massive. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a much larger and broader crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their cockily belligerent 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’ rhythm section swung in a way completely different from anything else in British alt-rock 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 simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the usual indie band influences, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing 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 octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the drum sample 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 springs to mind is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising 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 more echo-laden, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a long series of hugely lucrative concerts – a couple of new singles released by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that any magic had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which furthermore offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct influence was a sort of groove-based change: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who aimed to make their fans 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.”