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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller 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 appearance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a much larger and broader audience than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely different from any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the tune 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 playing behind it certainly did not: 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 indie discos. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge admirer 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’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you recall 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 musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely 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 pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect 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 swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the front. His popping, mesmerising bass line 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, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage 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 outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of hugely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh singles put out by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover 18 years later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to transcend the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate effect was a sort of rhythmic shift: following their initial success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”