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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It took place over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill 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 attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a far bigger and more diverse audience than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that featured on the turntables 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 indie band influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

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

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His popping, mesmerising bass line is certainly the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of new tracks put out by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a aim to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate influence was a sort of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their audiences move. 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.”