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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller 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 performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and broader audience than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely different from any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the songs 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 bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you recall 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 underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely 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 decline after the cool response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a long succession of extremely profitable gigs – a couple of new singles released by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that any spark had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music 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”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a desire to break the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”