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By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional source of buzz in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established outlets for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely mentioned 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 entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, clearly drawing in a far bigger and more diverse audience than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely different from any other act in British alternative music 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 bass and drums were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could move 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 got the impression that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds quite distinct from the standard indie band set texts, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and groove music”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled debut album: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the groove”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a some pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed entirely after a catastrophic top-billed 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 cool response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur 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 nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of new singles released by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable 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 provided “a great 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 variety of ways. Oasis certainly took note of 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 effect was a sort of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed 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.”