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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, largely ignored by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a much larger and broader audience than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section grooved in a way entirely different from anything else 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 early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it really didn’t: 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 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 standard alternative group influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing 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 think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is completely contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a some pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect 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 more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation did not lead to anything more than a long succession of hugely profitable concerts – two fresh singles put out by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a great 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 manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to transcend the usual market limitations of alternative music and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct influence was a sort of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly encountered many indie bands who aimed 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.”