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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press 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 huge. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader crowd than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable 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 move to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the usual indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the drum sample taken 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 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 not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming 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 frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the front. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the brilliant 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 magnificent.

Consistently an affable, sociable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed 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. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely profitable gigs – a couple of new singles released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident attitude, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the standard market limitations of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate influence was a kind of groove-based change: following their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”