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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill 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 big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely unlike anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance 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 felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the usual alternative group set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not 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 artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs 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 standout tracks often coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising impact on a band in a slump after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone 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 – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic 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, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy series of hugely profitable concerts – a couple of new tracks put out by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual market limitations of alternative music and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct influence was a sort of groove-based shift: following their initial success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”