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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 merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller 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 main draw 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 numerous causes 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 appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly 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 point that the tune of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody 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 opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely profitable concerts – two fresh singles put out by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years later – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate effect was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their fans 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.”