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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling 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 main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader audience than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely different from any other act 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 early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step 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 wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bassline. When you think of 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 went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him metaphorically willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid reception 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 provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the front. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is very much 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 best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy succession of extremely profitable gigs – a couple of fresh singles released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money 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 variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to transcend the usual market limitations of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate effect was a kind of groove-based change: following their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for 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, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”