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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely covered 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 entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting 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 seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible 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 argument that the tune of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section 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 featured on the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the usual indie band set texts, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed funk, his jumping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. 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 bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often occur during the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-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 completely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy series of extremely profitable concerts – two fresh tracks put out by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that any spark had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a aim to transcend the standard commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic change: following their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”