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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London club 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 scarcely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader audience than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely different from any other act 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 bass and drums were playing underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the usual alternative group set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bassline. 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 groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed 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 decline after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a long series of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of new tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the usual market limitations of alternative music and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate effect was a sort of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who wanted 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.”