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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely unlike anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument that the tune 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 behind it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music quite distinct from the standard alternative group influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s Mani who propels the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the bass line.

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

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often coincide with 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 metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some nondescript folk-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably 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 sound became more echo-laden, weightier and more distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything more than a long series of hugely profitable concerts – a couple of new singles released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of alternative music and reach a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct effect was a kind of rhythmic change: following their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed 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 stated. “That’s what they’re for.”