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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local 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 mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller London club 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 attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house 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 undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely different from anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance 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 simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way 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 influences, which was completely 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 playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not 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, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often coincide with the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb 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 totally 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 inject a some pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, 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 impressively galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the front. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the star turn 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 superb.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of hugely profitable concerts – a couple of fresh tracks released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that any spark had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which furthermore offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual market limitations of indie rock and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct effect was a sort of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”