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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music 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 attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the tune of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing 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 alternative clubs. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the standard alternative group influences, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times 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 borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bassline. When you think of 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 stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. 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 staunch defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier 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 ability to push his playing to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything beyond a long series of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of new tracks put out by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which additionally offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt 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 whole was informed by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate effect was a sort of rhythmic shift: following their early success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who aimed to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”