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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able 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 appearance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a much larger and more diverse audience than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely different from anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were doing underneath it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music quite distinct from the usual indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing 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 disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect 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 more echo-laden, heavier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the front. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, sociable presence – 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 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything more than a long series of hugely profitable gigs – a couple of new tracks put out by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 18 years later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a aim to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”