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By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable 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 more diverse audience than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point 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 underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the standard indie band set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. 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 funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just 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 departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the cool reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His popping, mesmerising bass line is very much the highlight on the fantastic 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 produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, sociable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a long series of hugely lucrative concerts – a couple of new tracks released by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which furthermore offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of groove-based shift: following their initial success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”