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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a more modest London club 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 draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a much larger and broader crowd than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely unlike anything else in British alt-rock 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 doing behind it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, 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 groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the front. His popping, mesmerising bass line is very much the star turn on the fantastic 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.

Consistently an friendly, sociable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything more than a lengthy series of extremely lucrative concerts – two fresh tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture 18 years later – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a aim to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music 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 initial 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 bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”