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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a smaller London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a much larger and broader crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely unlike anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that featured on the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the percussionist 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’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce 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 drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bassline. When you think of 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 stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting 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 really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging 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 track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a long succession of extremely profitable gigs – a couple of new tracks released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”