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By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had barely 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 massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely different from any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the melody 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 playing behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the usual indie band influences, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient 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 jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. 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 stumbled artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a style one suspects anyone 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 launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the front. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 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 produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation did not lead to anything more than a lengthy series of extremely profitable gigs – a couple of fresh tracks released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which furthermore offered “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of alternative music and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate effect was a sort of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts 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 averred. “That’s what they’re for.”