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By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It took place over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely mentioned 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 debuted on the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader audience than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact 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 sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing behind it really didn’t: you could dance 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 somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the usual indie band influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not 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 snaking, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely 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 decline after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, sociable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy series of hugely lucrative concerts – a couple of fresh tracks put out by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that any spark had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which additionally provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought 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 approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a aim to break the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a sort of rhythmic shift: following their early success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who aimed to make their audiences 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.”