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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It took place over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their latest 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 big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely different from anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the tune of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had given 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 skill to bring his playing to the front. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of fresh singles released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that any spark had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate influence was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their fans move. 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.”