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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their appearance 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 find any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of distorted 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 alt-rock at the time. There’s an point 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 certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the songs that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the standard alternative group set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, 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 is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by removing some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising impact on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy series of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh singles released by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that any spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable 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 good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their confident approach, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a desire to transcend the usual market limitations of alternative music and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who aimed 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.”