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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest London venue 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 conceivable state of affairs for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly attracting a far bigger and more diverse crowd than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point 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 dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that graced the decks 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 brought up on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically willing 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 track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of new singles put out by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that any magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which additionally provided “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a desire to break the standard market limitations of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate effect was a sort of rhythmic shift: following their initial success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”