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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 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack 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 scarcely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader 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 expanding acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic 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 different from 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 dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the standard alternative group influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity 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 transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping lines 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 vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit 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 layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him metaphorically willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a some pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a hurry 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 catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely profitable gigs – two fresh singles released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis certainly observed their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a aim to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct effect was a kind of rhythmic shift: following their early success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences 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.”