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By every metric, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary phenomenon. It took place during a span of one year. At the start of 1989, they were just a local source of buzz in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. John Peel wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism had barely mentioned their latest single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill 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 performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of alternative groups in the end of the 1980s.

In hindsight, you can identify any number of reasons why the Stone Roses forged a unique trajectory, obviously drawing in a far bigger and broader 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 acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, openly masterful in a scene of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely unlike 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 early C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the bass and drums were playing underneath it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you could not to the majority of the songs that featured on the turntables at the era’s indie discos. You somehow got the impression that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music quite distinct from the usual indie band influences, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his guiding lights were “great Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his performance was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s him who drives the point when I Am the Resurrection shifts from Motown stomp into free-flowing funk, his octave-leaping riffs that put a spring in the step 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 guitar work, or even the drum sample borrowed from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s snaking, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the first thing that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

Indeed, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were insufficiently funky. Fools Gold’s underwhelming successor One Love was underwhelming, he proposed, because it “could have swung, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed follow-up record, Second Coming but thought its flaws could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of Led Zeppelin-inspired six-string work and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually occur during the instances when Mounfield was truly allowed to let rip – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the excellent Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him figuratively willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the listlessness of all other elements that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to inject a bit of energy into what’s otherwise some unremarkable folk-rock – not a genre anyone would guess listeners was in a hurry to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

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 next gig with Primal Scream had an remarkably galvanising effect on a band in a slump after the cool response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His tone became more echo-laden, heavier and more distorted, but the groove that had given the Stone Roses a unique edge was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his playing to the front. His percussive, mesmerising low-end pattern is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his contribution on Kill All Hippies – like Swastika Eyes, a standout of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an friendly, clubbable figure – the author John Robb once observed 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 concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a personalised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently grinning axeman Dave Hill. Said reformation failed to translate into anything more than a long series of extremely lucrative concerts – two new tracks released by the reformed four-piece only demonstrated that any magic had existed in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly announced his retirement in 2021. He’d made his money and was now more concerned with angling, which furthermore offered “a good excuse to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d done enough: he’d definitely made an impact. The Stone Roses were seminal in a variety of ways. Oasis certainly observed their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a whole was informed by a aim to transcend the usual market limitations of indie rock and attract a more mainstream audience, as the Roses had achieved. But their most obvious direct influence was a sort of rhythmic shift: in the wake of their initial success, you suddenly couldn’t move for alternative acts who aimed to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once stated. “That’s what they’re for.”