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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable thing. It unfolded over the course of 12 months. At the start of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The music press had barely covered their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were struggling to pack even a smaller London club such as Dingwalls. But by November they were huge. Their single Fools Gold had debuted on the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a barely conceivable state of affairs for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In hindsight, you can identify numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a far bigger and broader audience than typically showed enthusiasm for indie music at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding dance music scene – their cockily belligerent attitude and the talent of the lead guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of distorted thrashing downstrokes.

But there was also the incontrovertible fact that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way completely different from any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an argument 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 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 turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the usual alternative group set texts, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a massive fan of the Byrds’ low-end maestro 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 debut album: it’s Mani who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

Sometimes the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the vocal melody or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy playing, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s view, when the Stone Roses went wrong musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “could have swung, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a staunch defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “returning to the groove”.

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

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous 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 decline after the tepid response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became dubbier, weightier and increasingly distorted, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – especially on the laid-back rhythm of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the fore. His popping, hypnotic bass line 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 finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Always an friendly, sociable presence – the author John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the media was invariably broken if Mani “let his guard down” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that bore the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s preposterously coiffured and permanently grinning guitarist Dave Hill. Said reunion did not lead to anything beyond a long series of hugely profitable concerts – two fresh singles put out by the reformed quartet served only to prove that whatever spark had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture 18 years on – and Mani discreetly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with angling, which additionally provided “a good reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a range of manners. Oasis undoubtedly observed their confident attitude, while Britpop as a movement was shaped by a desire to transcend the usual market limitations of indie rock and reach a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a kind of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for indie bands who wanted to make their audiences dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”