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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable situation for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader 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 expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike anything else in British alt-rock 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 certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the usual alternative group set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

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

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic 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 slump after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, clubbable presence – the writer 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 customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything more than a lengthy series of hugely lucrative concerts – a couple of new tracks released by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that any spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly observed their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a aim to break the standard market limitations of indie rock and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct effect was a sort of groove-based change: following their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”