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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader audience than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were doing behind it really didn’t: you could move 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 felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the standard indie band set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic headlining 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 tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the fore. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, sociable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything more than a long series of hugely lucrative concerts – two new singles put out by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the standard market limitations of indie rock and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: following their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”