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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack 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 performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically 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 guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early 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 the majority of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the standard alternative group set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely 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 bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry 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 completely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role 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 sound became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, sociable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything beyond a long series of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of new singles released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover 18 years later – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which additionally offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely 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 movement was informed by a desire to break the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate effect was a sort of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who aimed to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”