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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It took place during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. John Peel 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 entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the main draw on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely imaginable situation for the majority of alternative groups in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a much larger and broader audience than typically displayed an interest in alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their look – which seemed to align them more to the burgeoning dance music movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of fuzzy thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ bass and drums 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 bore a distinct resemblance to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the usual alternative group set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song isn’t really the singing or Squire’s effect-laden playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, relentless bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong artistically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a staunch supporter of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks usually occur during the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s happening on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising impact on a band in a decline after the cool reception to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, weightier and more fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the front. His percussive, hypnotic bass line is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an friendly, clubbable presence – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the press was invariably broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a personalised bass that bore the legend “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a long series of hugely profitable concerts – two fresh tracks released by the reconstituted four-piece only demonstrated that whatever spark had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to recapture 18 years later – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore offered “a great excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to break the standard market limitations of indie rock and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a kind of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly 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 bass and drums are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”