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By every measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It unfolded during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional outlets for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel did not champion them. The rock journalism had barely mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a more modest London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the big draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely imaginable situation for most alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly attracting a far bigger and broader crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly 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 alternative music at the time. There’s an point 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 doing behind it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the standard alternative group influences, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but believed its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually coincide with the instances when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its increasingly sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively urging the band to pick up the pace. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to inject a bit of pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were in vain: 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 energising effect on a band in a slump after the tepid reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is very much the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative gigs – two fresh singles released by the reformed quartet served only to prove that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which additionally offered “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly left a mark. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a desire to transcend the standard commercial constraints of indie rock and attract a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate influence was a kind of groove-based shift: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”