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By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack 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 most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a much larger and broader audience than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill 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’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike any other act 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 behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough 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 oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively willing 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 attempting to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact on a band in a slump 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 groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is certainly the highlight 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 magnificent.

Always an affable, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a long series of hugely profitable gigs – two new singles released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years later – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a aim to break the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of groove-based change: following their initial success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”