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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill 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 performance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely unlike 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 underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was completely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, 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 opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent 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 at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a some energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a disastrous top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising 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 dubbier, heavier and increasingly distorted, 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 skill to push his bass work to the front. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely profitable gigs – two fresh tracks put out by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a aim to transcend the usual market limitations of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate effect was a sort of groove-based change: following their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”