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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest 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 performance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely different from any other act in British alternative music 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 bass and drums were doing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the usual indie band set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step 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 drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively urging 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 track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript 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 collapsed completely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact on a band in a slump after the cool reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the fore. 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 highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of hugely profitable concerts – two new singles put out by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved unattainable to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore offered “a good excuse 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 undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a aim to break the standard market limitations of alternative music and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct effect was a sort of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”