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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able 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 appearance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader crowd than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely different from any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the tune 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 really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music quite distinct from the usual indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s him who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights often occur during the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him figuratively 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 track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a slump after the tepid response 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 in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the front. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a long series of hugely profitable gigs – a couple of fresh singles put out by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture 18 years later – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to break the standard market limitations of indie rock and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate effect was a sort of rhythmic shift: following their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”