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By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest 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 big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and more diverse audience than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth 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 tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were doing behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the standard alternative group influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping 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 snaking, relentless bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising 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 dubbier, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising 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 produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness 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 playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything more than a long succession of extremely profitable gigs – two new tracks released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a aim to break the usual market limitations of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a sort of rhythmic change: following their early success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who aimed 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.”