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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly mentioned 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 big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a much larger and broader crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely different from any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the melody 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 doing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the standard indie band set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his jumping lines 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 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 snaking, relentless bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, 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 removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a some pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a hurry 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 catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove 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 bass work to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of extremely lucrative concerts – two fresh tracks released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which furthermore provided “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their confident approach, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a desire to transcend the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”