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By every measure, 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 source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had hardly mentioned 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 entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a much larger and broader audience than usually 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 virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock 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 bass and drums were doing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the usual indie band influences, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce wasn’t so secret. 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 snaking, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often 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 playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: 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 impressively energising effect on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of hugely lucrative concerts – two fresh tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture 18 years on – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident attitude, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a desire to transcend the usual market limitations of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of groove-based change: following their initial success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who aimed 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 averred. “That’s what they’re for.”