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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It took place 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 established 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 barely able to pack even a more modest London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly attracting a much larger and broader audience than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way completely different from 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 playing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the usual alternative group set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the secret sauce 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 loose-limbed funk, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes 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 drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – 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 performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-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 left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the front. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press 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 personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a long series of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh tracks put out by the reformed four-piece only demonstrated that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a desire to transcend the usual market limitations of alternative music and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate influence was a sort of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who aimed to make their fans move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”