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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely ignored by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly virtuosic in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way entirely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument that the melody of Made of Stone bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were doing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the usual indie band influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing successor One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the groove”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was really 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 pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the swing 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 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 made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a long series of extremely lucrative gigs – a couple of new tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that any spark had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years later – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which furthermore provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering attitude, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a desire to transcend the usual commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”