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By every measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible 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 melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar 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 songs that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the standard alternative group influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and groove music”.

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

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing 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 bass. When you recall 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 went wrong musically 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 oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a some pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly 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 best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely profitable concerts – two new singles put out by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover 18 years later – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which furthermore offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident approach, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a aim to break the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a kind of rhythmic change: following their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”