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By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a far bigger and more diverse audience than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely different from any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing behind it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. 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 fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping 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 isn’t really the vocal melody 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 writhing, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have 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 increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners 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 imploded entirely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role 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, heavier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the front. His popping, mesmerising 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 highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an friendly, sociable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably 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 inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything beyond a long series of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of new tracks released by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years on – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a aim to transcend the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a sort of groove-based shift: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”