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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a smaller London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly attracting a much larger and more diverse audience than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point 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 really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the standard alternative group 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 Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point 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 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 went wrong musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising impact on a band in a slump after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and more distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an affable, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy succession of hugely profitable gigs – two fresh tracks put out by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that any magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years later – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which additionally provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis certainly observed their confident attitude, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a aim to transcend the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate effect was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences 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.”