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By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest 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 appearance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were doing behind it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and groove music”.

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 loose-limbed funk, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody 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 bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a hurry 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 collapsed completely after a disastrous headlining set 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 cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy series of extremely lucrative gigs – two new tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which additionally provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a aim to break the usual market limitations of alternative music and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their fans move. 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.”