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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and more diverse audience than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung 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 sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were doing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the standard alternative group influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping riffs 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 effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing 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 underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising impact on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently 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 performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a long succession of extremely profitable concerts – two fresh singles put out by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that any magic had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a aim to break the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate influence was a sort of groove-based change: following their initial success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts 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.”