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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly mentioned their most recent 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 debuted on the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and broader audience than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely unlike any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument 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 rhythm section were playing underneath it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music quite distinct from the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing 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 disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks 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 metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining set 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 rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the front. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly 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 press was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything more than a lengthy succession of hugely profitable gigs – two fresh singles put out by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover 18 years later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident approach, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate influence was a sort of groove-based change: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who aimed to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”