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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely covered 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 massive. 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 alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely unlike anything else in British alt-rock 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 rhythm section were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks 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 music quite distinct from the usual indie band influences, which was completely 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’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really 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 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 opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly 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 everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn 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.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything beyond a long series of hugely lucrative gigs – two fresh singles put out by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their confident approach, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate effect was a kind of groove-based shift: following their early success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”