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By any metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and extraordinary thing. It took place over the course of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a local cause of excitement in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to pack even a more modest London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their appearance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can identify numerous reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a far bigger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their look – which appeared to connect them more to the expanding dance music movement – their cockily belligerent demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a world of distorted aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely different from anything else in British alt-rock 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 rhythm section were doing underneath it really didn’t: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that featured on the decks at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on sounds quite distinct from the usual indie band influences, which was completely right: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good northern soul and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ self-titled first record: it’s him who propels the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his jumping riffs that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song isn’t really the singing 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, relentless bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the bass line.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit stiff”. He was a staunch supporter of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by cutting some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a valid argument. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can sense him metaphorically urging the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a some energy into what’s otherwise just some nondescript folk-rock – not a style one suspects anyone was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a catastrophic top-billed 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 sound became dubbier, heavier and more distorted, but the swing that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the laid-back funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his bass work to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line is certainly the star turn on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur 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 using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely profitable gigs – a couple of new singles released by the reconstituted quartet served only to prove that whatever magic had existed in 1989 had turned out impossible to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly declared his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money 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 definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly took note of their confident approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was shaped by a aim to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and reach a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate influence was a sort of groove-based change: in the wake of their early success, you suddenly encountered many alternative acts who aimed 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.”