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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely mentioned 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 huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house scene – their confidently defiant 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 truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way completely different from anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument 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 doing underneath it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the usual indie band influences, which was completely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden 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 initial element that comes to thought is the bass line.

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

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually 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 increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig 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 tone became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had given 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 skill to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is certainly the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of hugely lucrative gigs – two fresh tracks put out by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that any magic had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to transcend the standard market limitations of indie rock and attract a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate influence was a sort of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their fans 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.”