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By every metric, the rise 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 channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest 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 state of affairs for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a far bigger and broader audience than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable 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 point that the tune 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 the majority of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist 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 him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping riffs 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 singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed 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 rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of all other elements 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 unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a hurry 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 collapsed entirely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the front. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy succession of hugely profitable gigs – a couple of new singles put out by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that any spark had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which additionally offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a aim to transcend the usual market limitations of indie rock and attract a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct effect was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their audiences move. 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.”