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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It took place over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional outlets for alternative rock 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 venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader audience than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody 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 underneath 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 alternative clubs. You somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the standard alternative group influences, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier 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 skill to bring his playing to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of extremely lucrative gigs – two fresh tracks released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover nearly two decades 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 additionally offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis certainly observed their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the usual market limitations of indie rock and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate influence was a sort of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”