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By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London club 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 big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely unlike anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument 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 bass and drums were doing underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the point 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.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. 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 musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance 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 trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a catastrophic top-billed set 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 rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and more distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the fore. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an friendly, sociable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a long succession of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of new tracks put out by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that any magic had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover 18 years later – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which additionally provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate influence was a sort of groove-based change: following their early success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”