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By any metric, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were merely a regional cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the established channels for alternative rock in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had hardly covered 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 performance was the main attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable situation for the majority of indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously attracting a much larger and broader crowd than usually displayed an interest in indie music at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house movement – their confidently defiant attitude and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a world of distorted 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 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 dance to it in a way that you could not to most 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 brought up on music quite distinct from the standard alternative group influences, which was completely correct: Mani was a massive admirer of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “good northern soul and funk”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into free-flowing funk, his jumping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient wasn’t so secret. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s effect-laden guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, 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 stumbled musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat stiff”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by cutting some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s scattering of standout tracks often coincide with the moments when Mounfield was really allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to increase the tempo. His playing on Tightrope is completely at odds with the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the track, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly trying to add a some pep into what’s otherwise some unremarkable country-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His attempts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses imploded completely after a catastrophic headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a slump after the tepid reception to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and more distorted, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a unique edge was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to bring his playing to the fore. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an friendly, sociable presence – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always punctured if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion show at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously styled and permanently smiling guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy succession of extremely profitable concerts – a couple of fresh tracks put out by the reformed four-piece served only to prove that any magic had been present in 1989 had turned out impossible to recapture nearly two decades later – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with angling, which additionally provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering approach, while Britpop as a whole was informed by a desire to transcend the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a wider general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious immediate effect was a kind of rhythmic change: following their initial success, you abruptly encountered many alternative acts who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”