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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a smaller London venue 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 main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and broader crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely unlike anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were doing underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the usual alternative group set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge 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’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks 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 totally at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of 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 impact on a band in a slump after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of new tracks put out by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which additionally offered “a great 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 range of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their confident attitude, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the usual market limitations of indie rock and reach a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct influence was a sort of groove-based shift: following their early success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”