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By every measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a smaller London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. 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 imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely unlike anything else in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody 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 behind it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of hugely lucrative gigs – two new singles put out by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that any magic had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly observed their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a aim to break the usual market limitations of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly encountered many indie bands who aimed to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”