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By any measure, the rise 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 regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest London club 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 main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and more diverse audience 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 burgeoning acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point 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 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 turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the standard alternative group influences, which was completely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not 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 snaking, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often occur during the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact on a band in a decline after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and more 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 ability to bring his bass work to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, sociable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything more than a long series of extremely profitable concerts – two new tracks put out by the reformed quartet served only to prove that any spark had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which furthermore offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a aim to break the standard market limitations of alternative music and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate effect was a sort of groove-based shift: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”