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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling 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 scarcely imaginable situation for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a much larger and broader crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely unlike anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the tune of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s early 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 the majority of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the standard indie band set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

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

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left 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 next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of hugely profitable gigs – two fresh tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that any magic had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which additionally offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to transcend the usual market limitations of indie rock and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”