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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press 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 performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely 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 playing underneath 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 got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the usual alternative group influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step 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 guitar work, or even the breakbeat borrowed 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 view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a some pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a slump after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the front. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of hugely profitable gigs – a couple of fresh tracks released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a aim to break the usual market limitations of indie rock and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate effect was a kind of groove-based change: following their initial success, you abruptly 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 stated. “That’s what they’re for.”