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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It took place during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill 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 main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs 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, obviously attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for 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 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’ bass and drums 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 bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the standard alternative group influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled 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 little bit rigid”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically 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 song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic headlining 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 guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, sociable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the legend “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 concerts – two new tracks released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover 18 years later – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their confident approach, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a desire to transcend the standard market limitations of alternative music and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early 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.”