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By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly covered 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 huge. 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 conceivable situation for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a much larger and broader crowd than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely unlike anything else 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 simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the usual 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 “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of everything else 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 unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy succession of hugely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh tracks put out by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that any spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which additionally offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident attitude, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate effect was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences dance. 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.”