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By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a smaller 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 main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a much larger and broader audience than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely unlike any other act 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 early 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 simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that featured on the decks 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 brought up on sounds rather different to the standard indie band influences, 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 Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

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 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 could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a some pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, sociable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything beyond a long series of hugely profitable gigs – a couple of fresh tracks put out by the reformed four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”