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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest 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 imaginable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

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 more diverse crowd than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely different from any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the songs that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him 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.

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

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely 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 country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything more than a long succession of hugely profitable gigs – two fresh singles released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate influence was a kind of groove-based shift: following their early success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”