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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. 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 reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader crowd than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely different from anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument 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 playing behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the usual alternative group set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a decline after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the fore. His popping, mesmerising bass line is certainly the star turn on the brilliant 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 superb.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of hugely profitable concerts – two fresh tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that any spark had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades 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 great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the usual market limitations of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a kind of groove-based change: following their early success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts who aimed to make their fans move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”