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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly ignored by the established channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack 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 draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a much larger and more diverse audience than usually showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were set apart by their look – 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, unashamedly masterful 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 unlike anything else 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 early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were doing underneath it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds rather different to the usual indie band influences, which was absolutely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro 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 soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody 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 writhing, driving bassline. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing 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 proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but believed its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely contrary to the listlessness of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising effect on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the front. His popping, mesmerising bass line is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, easily the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the author John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a long succession of hugely lucrative gigs – a couple of fresh tracks released by the reformed quartet only demonstrated that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years on – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore provided “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and reach a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest immediate effect was a sort of groove-based change: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly 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, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”