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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a smaller 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 situation for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a far bigger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely unlike anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument 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 rhythm section were playing behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression 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 set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul 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 loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, 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 opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of new tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a aim to transcend the usual market limitations of alternative music and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who aimed to make their fans move. 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.”