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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest 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 appearance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely unlike any other act 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 early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing underneath it really didn’t: you could move 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 felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge 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 hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample borrowed 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 bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid 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 given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the fore. His popping, mesmerising bass line is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, sociable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy series of extremely profitable gigs – two new singles put out by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which additionally offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a aim to break the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: following their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”