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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller 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 appearance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and broader audience than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument 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 rhythm section were doing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music quite distinct from the standard alternative group set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element 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 funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often occur during the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining set 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 cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly 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 superb.

Always 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 took the stage 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 smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a long succession of hugely profitable gigs – two new tracks released by the reconstituted 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 earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate effect was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”