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By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to fill even a smaller London venue 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 big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader audience than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely different from any other act in British alternative music 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 bass and drums were doing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the tracks that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music 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 “great Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step 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 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 first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering 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 more turgid songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s happening on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of 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 impressively galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, weightier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the fore. His popping, mesmerising bass line is very much 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 finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, sociable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy series of extremely profitable gigs – a couple of fresh tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their confident approach, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a aim to break the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate effect was a sort of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”