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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a far bigger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – 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 truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely unlike anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that graced the decks 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 music rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat 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 vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat 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 comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit 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 guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance 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 audibly trying to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed 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 slump after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the front. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 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.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy series of extremely lucrative concerts – two new tracks put out by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with angling, which additionally provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their confident attitude, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a aim to break the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: following their initial success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”