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By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a more modest 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 main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a much larger and broader audience than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to most of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely 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 playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized 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 “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous top-billed 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 tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing 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 – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always 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 moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy succession of hugely profitable concerts – two fresh tracks released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years on – 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 great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a desire to break the usual market limitations of indie rock and reach a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of groove-based shift: following their initial success, you suddenly encountered many 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, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”