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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack 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 imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader crowd than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step 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 drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a some pep into what’s otherwise just 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 imploded completely after a disastrous top-billed performance 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 guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the front. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely lucrative gigs – two fresh tracks put out by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years later – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to transcend the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate influence was a sort of rhythmic change: following their initial success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their fans move. 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.”