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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London venue 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 main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for most indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and broader audience than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums swung in a way completely 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 behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the songs that graced the decks 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 standard indie band set texts, which was completely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing 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 effect-laden guitar work, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bassline. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a some pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a decline after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly smiling guitarist Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything beyond a long series of extremely profitable concerts – two new singles put out by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that any spark had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani discreetly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on angling, which furthermore offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d done enough: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to break the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: following their early success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”