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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that featured on the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the standard alternative group set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping riffs 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 isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. 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 clearly trying to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy succession of hugely lucrative concerts – two new singles put out by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of indie rock and attract a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted 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.”