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By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. 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 traditional channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a much larger and more diverse 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 expanding dance music movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock 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 bass and drums were doing behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. 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 funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a decline after the cool response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had provided 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 push his bass work to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is certainly the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of hugely profitable concerts – a couple of new singles put out by the reformed four-piece only demonstrated that any magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a desire to break the standard market limitations of alternative music and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of groove-based change: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”