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By any measure, the ascent 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 overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack 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 performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly attracting a much larger and broader crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance 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 in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the standard alternative group set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had provided 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 bass work to the front. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative gigs – two fresh singles released by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a desire to transcend the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct influence was a sort of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who aimed to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”