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By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a more modest London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader audience than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely different from anything else 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 behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that graced the turntables 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 raised on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing 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 Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. 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, relentless bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a disastrous top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had given 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 bring his playing to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely profitable concerts – two new singles put out by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which additionally offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a aim to transcend the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic change: following their early success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”