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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock 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, openly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely unlike anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were doing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and funk”.

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 transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a bit of 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 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 next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the cool reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing 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 – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of hugely profitable concerts – two new singles released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with angling, which additionally offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a sort of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts 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.”