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By any measure, the ascent of the Stone Roses was a rapid and remarkable phenomenon. It took place over the course of 12 months. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a local cause of excitement in Manchester, mostly overlooked by the traditional outlets for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs wasn’t a fan. The rock journalism 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 huge. 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 scarcely conceivable situation for most indie bands in the late 80s.

In retrospect, you can find numerous causes why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a much larger and more diverse crowd than typically showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were distinguished by their appearance – which appeared to connect them more to the burgeoning dance music scene – their confidently defiant demeanor and the talent of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly virtuosic in a world of fuzzy 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 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 behind it really didn’t: you could dance to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to most of the tracks that featured on the decks at the era’s indie discos. You somehow felt that the drummer Alan “Reni” Wren and the bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been raised on music rather different to the standard indie band influences, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge admirer of the Byrds’ low-end maestro Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “great northern soul and groove music”.

The fluidity of his performance was the hidden ingredient behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection transitions from soulful beat into loose-limbed groove, his jumping lines that add bounce of Waterfall.

At times the ingredient was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the centerpiece of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, 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 went wrong musically it was because they were not enough funky. Fools Gold’s disappointing follow-up One Love was lackluster, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a little bit rigid”. He was a strong defender of their frequently criticized second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses could have been rectified by removing some of the overdubs of hard rock-influenced guitar and “reverting to the rhythm”.

He likely had a point. Second Coming’s handful of standout tracks often coincide with the instances when Mounfield was really given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more sluggish songs, you can hear him metaphorically urging the band to increase the tempo. His performance on Tightrope is totally contrary to the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s audibly trying to add a some pep into what’s otherwise just some unremarkable folk-rock – not a style anyone would guess anyone was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses attempt.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire departed the band in the wake of Second Coming’s launch, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a disastrous top-billed performance at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s next gig with Primal Scream had an impressively energising effect on a band in a decline after the cool response to 1994’s guitar-driven Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became more echo-laden, heavier and more fuzzy, but the swing that had given the Stone Roses a point of difference was still in evidence – especially on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his skill to push his bass work to the front. His percussive, hypnotic low-end pattern is certainly the highlight on the brilliant 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the finest album Primal Scream had made since Screamadelica – is superb.

Consistently an affable, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once observed that the Stone Roses’ hauteur towards the press was always broken if Mani “became more relaxed” – he performed at the Stone Roses’ 2012 comeback concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park using a customised bass that displayed the legend “Super-Yob”, the moniker of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and constantly smiling axeman Dave Hill. Said reunion failed to translate into anything beyond a long series of hugely lucrative gigs – a couple of new singles released by the reconstituted quartet only demonstrated that whatever magic had been present in 1989 had proved impossible to rediscover nearly two decades on – and Mani quietly declared his departure from music in 2021. He’d made his money and was now focused on fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Perhaps he thought he’d done enough: he’d certainly made an impact. The Stone Roses were influential in a variety of ways. Oasis undoubtedly observed their swaggering attitude, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was informed by a desire to break the usual commercial constraints of alternative music and attract a more general public, as the Roses had achieved. But their clearest immediate influence was a sort of rhythmic change: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for indie bands who aimed to make their audiences move. That was Mani’s musical raison d’être. “It’s what the bass and drums are for, aren’t they?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”