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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

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 displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing behind it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you recall 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 not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a staunch 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 “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a style anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push 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 playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything more than a long series of extremely lucrative gigs – two fresh singles put out by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their audiences dance. 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.”