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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest 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 draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a far bigger and more diverse audience than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music quite distinct from the standard alternative group influences, which was completely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and funk”.

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

Sometimes the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb 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 totally contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy succession of hugely lucrative gigs – a couple of new singles released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture 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 additionally offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a desire to break the standard market limitations of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate influence was a sort of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”