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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest 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 performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a much larger and broader audience than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely different from any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point 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 simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and increasingly distorted, 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 skill to push his playing to the front. His popping, hypnotic bass line is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable presence – the writer 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 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy succession of hugely lucrative concerts – two new tracks released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their confident attitude, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a aim to break the standard market limitations of indie rock and attract a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate effect was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences 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.”