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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It took place over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a smaller 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 barely imaginable situation for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody 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 dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the usual indie band influences, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, 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 comes to thought is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch defender 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 six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a some 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 attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage 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 styled and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative concerts – two fresh singles released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate effect was a kind of rhythmic change: following their early success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts who aimed 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.”