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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London venue 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 main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely different from any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument 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 bass and drums were doing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the standard indie band set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you recall 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 stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically 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 song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic top-billed 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 groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the front. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything more than a long series of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of new tracks released by the reformed four-piece only demonstrated that any spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident approach, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a aim to transcend 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: following their initial success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their fans dance. 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.”