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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a smaller London club 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 big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a much larger and broader crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – 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 virtuosic in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock at the time. There’s an point that the tune of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance 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 music quite distinct from the usual alternative group set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the initial element 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 groovy. 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 strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often occur during the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and more distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the front. His popping, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, clubbable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reunion did not lead to anything beyond a long succession of hugely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece served only to prove that any spark had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now focused on angling, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the standard market limitations of indie rock and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct effect was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their fans dance. 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.”