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By every measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It took place during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack 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 main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader audience than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely different from any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument 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 really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music quite distinct from the usual alternative group set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing 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, driving bass. When you think of 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 went wrong musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively energising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the fore. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press 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 using a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of hugely profitable concerts – two new singles released by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that any magic 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 furthermore provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate influence was a sort of rhythmic change: following their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences 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.”