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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London club 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 scarcely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, 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 seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely different from any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the usual alternative group set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody 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, relentless bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful 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 turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic 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 highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, sociable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of hugely profitable concerts – a couple of fresh tracks released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that any magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to transcend the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct effect was a kind of rhythmic shift: following their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their fans 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.”