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By every metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established outlets for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely covered 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 performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, clearly drawing in a far bigger and more diverse audience than typically displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding acid house scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a scene of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the incontrovertible truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely 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 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 alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on music rather different to the usual alternative group influences, which was completely 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 smoothness of his playing was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing groove, his octave-leaping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you recall She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that comes to thought is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch defender of their frequently criticized follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by cutting some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly attempting to add a bit of pep into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were in vain: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded entirely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising impact 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 dubbier, heavier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the front. His popping, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was always broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously styled and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a long series of extremely profitable gigs – two new tracks put out by the reformed four-piece only demonstrated that any magic had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture 18 years later – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he felt he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly took note of their confident approach, while Britpop as a movement was informed by a aim to transcend the usual market limitations of alternative music and reach a wider general public, as the Roses had done. But their most obvious immediate influence was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their early 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 rhythm section are for, aren’t they?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”