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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their most recent 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 debuted on the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd than usually displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely different from anything else 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 doing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually 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 hear him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance 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 audibly trying to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a style 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 entirely after a catastrophic top-billed set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively energising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, sociable figure – the writer 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 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely profitable concerts – a couple of fresh tracks put out by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which additionally provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to break the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate influence was a sort of rhythmic shift: following their early success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who wanted to make their audiences move. 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.”