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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling 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 conceivable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a far bigger and more diverse crowd than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely unlike anything else in British alternative music 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 doing underneath it really didn’t: 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 indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the standard indie band set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising impact on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the swing 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 bring his playing to the front. His percussive, hypnotic 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 standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh tracks put out by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture 18 years on – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a aim to transcend the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of 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 bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”