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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels 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 attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and more diverse crowd than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful 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 alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section 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 percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the usual alternative group set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled artistically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “reverting to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually 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 figuratively willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the fore. His popping, 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 highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, sociable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media 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 personalised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything more than a long succession of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh singles released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had turned out unattainable to rediscover 18 years on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to transcend the standard market limitations of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate effect was a kind of groove-based shift: following their initial 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 averred. “That’s what they’re for.”