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By every measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able 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 main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums grooved in a way entirely unlike any other act in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an argument 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 could not to most of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the usual indie band set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and funk”.

The fluidity of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified 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 occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects listeners 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 launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a catastrophic top-billed 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 tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the fore. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of new singles put out by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved unattainable to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious direct effect was a sort of rhythmic shift: following their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands 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 stated. “That’s what they’re for.”