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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It took place over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. 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 imaginable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a much larger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely different from any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point 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 playing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. 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 stumbled musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry 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 launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an friendly, sociable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative concerts – two new tracks released by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that any magic had existed in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a desire to break the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate influence was a sort of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”