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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established 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 barely able to pack even a more modest London venue 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 main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point 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 rhythm section were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the standard alternative group set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically 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 somewhat rigid”. 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 overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact 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 more fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly 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 certainly the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything more than a lengthy series of hugely profitable gigs – a couple of new tracks released 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 quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely 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 transcend the standard market limitations of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct influence was a sort of groove-based shift: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their fans dance. 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.”