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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main attraction 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 retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world 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 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 old 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 the majority of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music quite distinct from the usual alternative group set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

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

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable 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 launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything more than a long series of hugely lucrative concerts – two fresh tracks put out by the reformed quartet served only to prove that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to break the usual market limitations of indie rock and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate effect was a sort of groove-based shift: following their initial success, you suddenly encountered many 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.”