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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place during a span of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The music press had barely covered their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London club 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 main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can find numerous reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader 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 burgeoning acid house scene – their confidently defiant attitude and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable 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 argument that the melody 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 doing behind it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you could not to most of the tracks that graced the decks at the era’s indie discos. You in some way got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the usual indie band influences, which was completely right: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s him who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from Motown stomp into loose-limbed groove, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

Sometimes the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the breakbeat borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that comes to thought is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a strong supporter of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws might have been fixed by cutting some of the layers of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He likely had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of highlights usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its increasingly turgid songs, you can sense him figuratively urging the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is totally at odds with the listlessness of all other elements 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 nondescript country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band following Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous headlining performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an remarkably energising impact on a band in a decline after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, weightier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – particularly on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to bring his playing to the fore. His popping, mesmerising bass line is certainly the star turn on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Consistently an affable, sociable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s preposterously styled and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a lengthy succession of extremely lucrative concerts – a couple of new tracks released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that any spark 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 focused on angling, which furthermore provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their confident attitude, while Britpop as a whole was shaped by a aim to transcend the usual market limitations of alternative music and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest direct effect was a sort of groove-based change: following their early success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their fans move. 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.”