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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a smaller London club 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 attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and more diverse audience than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely different from 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 playing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the standard alternative group influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid 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 clearly trying to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic headlining 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 sound became dubbier, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is certainly the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once noted 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 show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of extremely profitable gigs – two new tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture 18 years later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a desire to transcend the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate effect was a sort of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”