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By every measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It took place over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely mentioned 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 scarcely conceivable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a much larger and broader audience than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

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 argument 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 bass and drums were playing behind it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the usual alternative group influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, 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 comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, 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 proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch supporter 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 “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often occur during 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 willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect 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 more echo-laden, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a long series of hugely lucrative gigs – two fresh singles released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years on – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”