Mansun - The Grey Lantern storms the britpop scene

That bands having little or nothing to do with britpop were nonetheless lumped in with it has already been the subject of countless critical essays and discussions among fans. For Mansun, then, it's fair to say that the association isn't exactly baseless, but at the same time the repertoire of Paul Draper's band went well beyond both brit and pop in the broadest sense. While it's true that most of the group's singles certainly have a pop-oriented structure, and some of them, above all “Stripper Vicar” and “Wide Open Space”, have all the hallmarks of britpop, on the other hand albums like Attack Of The Grey Lantern and Six — the two released in the Nineties and the undisputed peaks of their discography — make ample room for other stylistic territory, closer to what was then called alternative rock. And we certainly can't leave the b-sides out of the discussion, which especially in that period made up a fundamental part of the repertoire, and in which there's absolutely nothing pop about them at all.

A group, in short, far more versatile than has survived in collective memory, which has always favoured the songs released as singles. A group that never did anything, artistically speaking, to shed its cult-band status, even when the debut album was climbing the UK charts, and whose career was experienced so intensely by fans that even today there are countless groups on social networks like Last.fm or Facebook commemorating the exploits of Paul Draper, vocals and guitar, Dominic Chad, lead guitar, Stove King, bass, and Andy Rathbone, drums, and who continue to hope for a return, if not of the full band, then at least of frontman Paul Draper, author of the vast majority of the music and lyrics.

The beginnings: singles and EPs for a rapidly growing fanbase

Mansun's career began much like that of many other bands: two musicians from a small English town, in this case Chester, start playing together, then two more join them: here it's Draper and King who form the founding core, with Chad and Rathbone coming on board later. The quartet believed in themselves enough to self-fund the release of their first single, Take It Easy Chicken; the gamble paid off immediately, as the second single, a “double A-side” called Skin Up Pin Up/Flourella, was already released by an EMI subsidiary, and shortly afterwards they signed a record deal with none other than Parlophone. At this point, before the long-awaited debut album, no fewer than five more singles followed: Egg Shaped Fred, the re-release of Take It Easy Chicken, the already mentioned Stripper Vicar and Wide Open Space, and finally She Makes My Nose Bleed, all with substantial content, meaning various b-sides on each.

Much as happened with many other bands, Mansun's style in this early phase is more impactful than ever, free of any sonic frills or melodic winks, with the mood of the various tracks built mainly around an expression of unease. As mentioned, “Take It Easy Chicken” is their first released song, and the mere fact that the first two lines bluntly express a sentiment like “Well, I'm sick of this England shit” makes things abundantly clear, especially since those words are sung in a clean but biting voice and set against a sound that stays sharp, matching the vocal timbre, while pairing the bite of the rhythm guitar with the aggression of the lead, over a tight, driving rhythm section. The song's structure follows a rigid verse-chorus alternation, with the chorus lowering the intensity except for a small final crescendo that reignites the verse's adrenaline. A development, then, that's linear but far from banal, and one that manages to keep the listener engaged for the whole track. The lyrics aren't as simplistic as those first two lines suggest, instead telling, in an interesting way, a surreal journey around the world, the theme of which is of course the need not to settle into the preconceptions it's all too easy to retreat into.

“Skin Up Pin Up” and “Flourella”, the two tracks from the aforementioned follow-up single, were later reissued as b-sides on two separate EPs in 1997, almost as if the band considered them lesser components of their repertoire. Indeed, in both songs the compositional inspiration doesn't seem to be at its peak, and as a result the sound's sense of immediacy takes on excessive weight, leaving the listener feeling progressively less engaged as each song nears its end. The listen isn't unsatisfying, exactly, but it's not the kind that leaves a mark either, unlike the song discussed earlier, or the ones released afterwards.

Having secured the deal with Parlophone, it was now time for the band to prepare the ground for the actual album, with five singles released ahead of it, naturally under the same label. This is where the habit began of calling the singles “EPs”, giving each one a title that was simply the number corresponding to its chronological order of release (so “Egg Shaped Fred” is the “One Ep”, “Take It Easy Chicken” is the “Two Ep”, and so on throughout their career). Starting with the “Three Ep”, the one for “Stripper Vicar”, each would be split across two different CDs available for separate purchase, a choice likely driven by the desire to let fans hear as many b-sides as possible. “Egg Shaped Fred” is the first Mansun song among those released so far that would end up on the debut album. The band's style still holds firm to what was established in the earlier tracks, whether in terms of vocal timbre, guitar sound, or rhythm section structure, and even the overall mood doesn't stray from that sense of unease which has so far been the throughline of the group's limited repertoire. The songwriting is a touch more elaborate, though: there's an actual bridge between the verse and chorus, and after the second chorus there's a melodic and sonic break — a device common in pop, which Mansun make their own here for the first time. Overall the track isn't so much easier to listen to as it is more likely to stick in the listener's head, thanks to decidedly catchier melodic lines and the opening and closing na na na, which undoubtedly has its appeal. The lyrics are perhaps the most surreal Draper has ever written; it's difficult, if not impossible, to grasp their overall meaning, but striking images remain in the mind, like “She only wants to get in your pants because she knows that you have played in a band” and “She sees you in hell, I'll go shopping instead”. Still, the song is important lyrically for two reasons: for one, the character of Mavis briefly appears here, turning up in other songs on the album too; and for another, we start to notice an important strength in the way Paul Draper writes lyrics, namely that he doesn't limit himself to describing concepts or telling evocative, imaginative stories, but takes great care to ensure the sound of the sung words fits the music, adding value to both the music and the words themselves.

Having covered "Take It Easy Chicken", we come to the third EP, whose lead track marks the first small turning point for Mansun. "Stripper Vicar" is in fact an exquisitely pop song: the melodic lines are extremely easy to remember and sing along to, the vocals are much softer, the sound smooths out its rough edges while at the same time showing more care in the arrangements, partly thanks to the addition of piano. This is Britpop pure and simple, right at the moment when the bands belonging to that movement enjoyed almost exclusive attention from the media and the public, at least in Britain. The lyrics, however, are quite far removed from the movement's usual themes, and once again turn their attention to the character of Mavis, this time in the form of an open letter. In it, Draper tells Mavis that he has discovered his own vicar is secretly working as a stripper, and that he's undecided whether to report the discovery to the cardinal or to encourage the clergyman to become a professional stripper, asking her for advice on what to do. The second verse is a new letter announcing the sudden, violent death of the stripper vicar, asking Mavis what her share of the blame might be, since she is the daughter of the character the song is named after. What meaning such a story might carry is anyone's guess, but it could be a veiled, classily delivered attack on the misconduct rife within the Church: after all, this is the first, but not the last, Mansun song in which, as we'll see, Draper's religious faith is shaken precisely by the real-world behaviour of those who are supposed to be God's representatives on Earth.

"Wide Open Space" and "She Makes My Nose Bleed", the last two singles released before the album, confirm that the band's repertoire is also built on catchy melodies and sounds that aren't necessarily aggressive. The first of these two songs has a lively rhythm but a rather relaxed mood, and its melodic style closely recalls Tears For Fears; the second, by contrast, is more nervous, combining acidic textures with a touch of glam. The lyrics, too, adapt to the character of their respective musical settings: "Wide Open Space" is about feeling suspended in something undefined, unable to tell what you can actually see from what you're missing out on, while "She Makes My Nose Bleed" tells of the urge to drag someone who has hurt you down from an undeservedly won Paradise.

The grey lantern strikes, surprises and climbs to the top of the charts

Based on the songs already known before the album's release, one might have expected a work balanced between indie-rock energy and pop softness, but certainly not an album that maintained that balance so differently from one track to the next. Attack Of The Grey Lantern hit record shop shelves in February 1997, and even managed to climb to the top of the British sales charts. As already noted, this is a record that is pop in some respects and not in others. The pop side comes first from the generally fairly linear structure of the songs, with only a couple of exceptions ("Taxloss" and "Naked Twister") that aren't even all that significant; then from melodic moments of real clarity and brilliance, which may make up only part of a song's compositional makeup ("Mansun's Only Love Song", "Disgusting", the aforementioned "Taxloss"), or may stretch across its entire length (besides "Stripper Vicar" and "Wide Open Space", there's the closing "Dark Mavis"); and finally from a sound that is highly varied and multifaceted yet never feels overloaded, remaining smooth and flowing throughout. What keeps it from being a wholly pop record, on the other hand, is mainly the presence, compositionally speaking, of many other closed-off, elusive passages that are hard to remember, along with the persistent feelings of negativity, aggression and nervous tension that dominate the emotional landscape early on, only slowly fading without ever disappearing completely.

Countless influences have been cited in connection with this record's content: from the David Bowie of "Ziggy Stardust" to Duran Duran, from Prince to Tears For Fears, from ABC to Talk Talk, from the early-career Beatles to the Beatles of the period running from "Revolver" to "Magical Mystery Tour". Put more simply, the band managed to fuse together different melodic and sonic styles into a whole that is remarkably organic, coherent and full of life. The strength of this record doesn't come only from particularly inspired songwriting and a production that is ambitious yet never pretentious; just as important is the added value of the way the tracks have been sequenced to create two genuine parallel journeys, one focused on technical craft, the other on emotional content. From the first point of view, the opening tracks have closed-off melodies, a generally darker vocal tone and a heavier, more layered sound, while the further the album progresses, the greater the melodic openness, vocal clarity and simplicity of arrangement become. This isn't, however, a straight linear path, since that would have made things too easy and not especially engaging for the listener: there are a few moments that deviate from this gradual progression, but only just enough to keep the journey feeling unified rather than broken up into disconnected stages. The vocals on "Mansun's Only Love Song", the second track, are rather soft; "Disgusting", already in the album's second half, has a verse with an elusive melody and a claustrophobic sound, before opening up into one of the record's best-judged choruses, which again helps preserve the overall unity of the journey; "Egg Shaped Fred", as we've seen, is tough and jagged, yet it comes second-to-last, at a point where things seem to be settling into calm, and it's precisely the easy assimilability already described that makes this placement work so well. In parallel, adrenaline and negative vibrations dominate at the start, but then gradually dissolve, giving way to moods that are certainly not positive, but are undoubtedly more contemplative. The sense of a unified journey, incidentally, is also reinforced by the fact that the songs are all musically linked to one another, with the ending of each flowing directly and harmoniously into the beginning of the next.

Each individual song would deserve its own in-depth look at its particular strengths: besides the four singles, mention should go to the beautiful lyrics of "Mansun's Only Love Song", the ability to deliver a tightly wound crescendo of contaminations between analogue and digital sounds in "Taxloss", the effectiveness of the abrupt shift between calm and despair in "You, Who Do You Hate?", and the juxtaposition of seemingly irreconcilable verses and choruses, as seen both in "Disgusting" and in "Naked Twister". To avoid overloading the discussion, we'll focus in more detail only on the opening and closing tracks.

"The Chad Who Loved Me" is a simply magnificent opener, thanks first to a string passage with a simple but irresistible melody, beautifully reinforced by the way the guitar steps in at a certain point to double it, and then to the sudden way an unprecedentedly intense sense of anguish creeps in, spilling over into final rage. The shift from an enveloping orchestral atmosphere to the desperate tone in which Paul Draper asks "Am I a God or am I Jesus, am I a man or am I a boy? Do I feel love or just possession? Do I feel holy or nothing at all?" is truly bold, before erupting into a direct, violent invective as he screams "You can't deny that your shit just tastes as sweet as mine, sweet Jesus". It's a genuine eruption of hatred toward whoever planted doubts of such weight and such difficult resolution in the author's mind. "Dark Mavis", on the other hand, is moving for the epic, affecting way in which, at the journey's end, it recounts the intensely charged encounter between Mavis and the stripper vicar, who, let's remember, is her father. The spaciousness of the sound, the sweetness of the melody, the expressiveness of the vocals, the long closing vocalise, and the way an orchestral element that has stayed in the background throughout finally takes centre stage in the last few seconds, closing things out with the same string passage that opened the whole thing, are spine-tingling.

At the very end of it all, there's also a hidden track, "An Open Letter To The Lyrical Trainspotter", already featured as a b-side on the "Stripper Vicar" EP. Its very stripped-back sound and its thoroughly disillusioned lyrics would have clashed within the album proper, but this placement is exactly right, offsetting the record's extremely high level of dramatic intensity. "The lyrics aren't supposed to mean that much, they're just a vehicle for a lovely voice", sings Draper, and it's a lovely way of releasing whatever tension is left, making it perhaps easier to feel the urge to dive straight back into the whole journey, knowing that afterwards you can so easily unwind again.

Attack Of The Grey Lantern is, then, a work of great quality and importance, one that deserves credit for expressing its own distinct personality by blending together, with great coherence, musical styles that are different yet closely related. In 2010 a collector's edition was released with two additional CDs, featuring all the b-sides from that period along with further acoustic and/or live recordings. In 2018, to mark the album's twentieth anniversary (even though it was actually already the twenty-first), a further remastered reissue came out on CD, double vinyl, and in a deluxe box set containing 3 CDs and a DVD.

Still evolving, even in the transition between the first and second album

In 1997 two more EPs were released, one for "Taxloss" and one for an unreleased track, never to appear on any album, titled "Closed For Business". The song brings together defining moments from specific tracks on Attack Of The Grey Lantern, namely the orchestral component of "The Chad Who Loved Me" and "Dark Mavis" and the abrupt shift between calm and tension already seen in "You, Who Do You Hate?". The combination of these elements, which had remained separate on the album, works rather well, and even today the song is among the best-known in the whole Mansun catalogue: this probably shows that the band had by now grown so comfortable with the breadth of its own stylistic range that it could use it to create new and stimulating interactions. This EP is also a good opportunity to say something general about the band's b-sides. Again for reasons of keeping the article readable, no specific song from this important part of the band's output has been discussed so far. Let's make up for that here, first by mentioning the most notable earlier b-sides - besides those already mentioned, "Ski Jump Nose", "Lemonade Secret Drinker" and "The Impending Collapse Of It All" - and then by briefly describing the best of the whole lot, namely "Everyone Must Win", found precisely on the "Closed For Business" EP. In general, Mansun's b-sides never strayed from the band's original style, which, as we've seen, draws on a direct, aggressive, sharp-edged brand of indie-rock with no interest whatsoever in flattering the listener. "Everyone Must Win" is the perfect demonstration of how, even by polishing the sound just a little more, you can strike deep into the listener's heart while still staying prickly and jagged. The song opens with a digital rhythm running in parallel to the bass and drums but on a separate track of its own, helping create a sound that has never been so dark and acidic. After the usual verse with its closed-off melody and claustrophobic mood, Draper's cry of despair in the chorus is a genuine knife to the soul: never has his voice been so torn apart, and so devastating, before this moment, and the way the plea "and everyone of us can win at last, like in the future, like in the past, everyone of us must win at last" is sung truly conveys the anguished feeling of standing on the edge of a precipice with no way out, the will to hold on curdling into terrible frustration. One of the most tormented, intense moments in Mansun's entire catalogue.

1998 already marks the time for the band's second album. The record, released in September, was this time preceded by only two singles, against four for the previous album, a sign that the need to prepare the ground had become much smaller, given the band's by-now-established popularity, at least in Britain. "Legacy" once again brings very clear melodic lines to the fore, both vocally and in the lead guitar lines. The sound is very spacious and rounded and the pace is steady, which is why the song can bring "Dark Mavis" to mind. There is, however, an important difference in terms of sound, in that the guitars take on a decidedly dominant role, with no supporting elements making any significant contribution to the overall result. There is indeed a piano lurking in the background now and then, but its role is far more of an accessory than it would have been on the songs from the debut album. Both the vocal melody and the guitar line are nonetheless highly inspired, and the song as a whole has great appeal. The lyrics return to the theme of unease, especially in the eloquent chorus "Life is wearing me thin, I feel so drained, my legacy, a sea of faces just like me". "Being A Girl" was released in a truncated form compared to the version that would later appear on the album, in that the single contains only the first of the two distinct parts that make up the song. Here the sound is more compressed, the rhythm far more urgent, the vocals more adrenaline-fuelled, and the guitars dominate the scene. Here too there is an adherence to conventional song form, and the underlying melody is decidedly open. The lyrics deal, through a series of metaphors, with a subject related to that of the previous single, namely the desire to be someone else, somewhere other than who and where you currently are.

Six: guitars take centre stage, and unbridled ambition

From listening to the two singles alone, it was impossible even to guess at the nature of Six, Mansun's second album, released in September 1998. Those two songs, in fact, are the easiest-listening tracks on offer, whereas the album as a whole is marked by a distinct lack of overall immediacy, both in terms of sound and songwriting. On the sound side, the arrangements are simultaneously more limited and broader than on Attack Of The Grey Lantern: more limited because, in all the other tracks too, and not just the two that preceded the album, guitars are the undisputed protagonists, with the orchestral touches of the debut completely set aside and a very marginal role left for keyboards and synthesizers; broader because, within these narrower boundaries, there is a huge variety of solutions on offer, whether in terms of guitar tone, degree of distortion, playing approach, or, finally, the ways the guitars interact with each other, with the rhythm section - itself given more scope for imagination than on the debut - and with the vocals.

Where Six shows the greatest level of ambition, however, is in its songwriting. Alongside the two singles already mentioned, there are several other tracks with a linear structure, albeit with some necessary distinctions: the next single, "Negative", undoubtedly has the highest degree of immediacy, even if it's a little less easy to listen to than the tracks mentioned earlier; "Serotonin" likewise has a steady pace, but its degree of melodic openness is further reduced; "Special/Blown It (Delete As Appropriate)" is clearer from a melodic standpoint, but the arrangement and rhythm are constantly shifting from verse to verse; "Anti Everything" and "Television", though each built around a single connecting thread, develop in ways quite removed from traditional song form, with the relationships between verse, bridge and chorus far from straightforward: in short, none of these are easily assimilable tracks, and all of them instead require repeated, attentive listening to be properly understood and appreciated. There are also a couple of interludes, "Inverse Midas", just piano and voice, and "Witness To A Murder (Part Two)", which layers operatic singing by two female voices over a narration read by actor Tom Baker. Above all, though, there are the songs that develop irregularly, made up of clearly distinct sections stitched together to form a single track: "Six", "Shotgun", "Fall Out" and "Cancer", and, as mentioned, also "Being A Girl", which features a second part added on to what had been released as the single. Setting aside that last case, which simply moves from one part to another, the other four songs are utterly outside any predefined template, moving briskly through sudden shifts between different sounds, melodies and moods. The one thing they all have in common is that there's always a moment when a previously played section returns, sometimes keeping the same arrangement and vocal tone, other times changing those too, adding yet more variety to the result. In "Fall Out", meanwhile, the arpeggio from "Legacy" is anticipated, though that song won't actually arrive until six tracks later. Naturally, there is always a great deal of coherence and fluidity in these shifts: everything is perfectly calculated so that there's never a sense of disconnected moments, whether within a single track or across neighbouring songs.

All this technical skill, in the songwriting as much as in the performance and the production, has the further merit of never seeming like the ultimate goal of the work, but always being at the service of the emotional side, as intense as ever, if not more so. Where on Attack Of The Grey Lantern the tensions gradually dissolved at a certain point, here they always remain in the foreground, and the sound described certainly helps convey them as well as could possibly be done. The lyrics, then, are completely pervaded by negative feelings: the first two songs, "Six" and "Negative", both deal with the anger of having to accept certain compromises as simply part of life, and they do so with simple but very effective words ("And you see, I kind of shivered to conformity. Did you see the way I cowered to authority?"; "Have you ever told a lie to hide a lie? Shame on you, you've compromised again"); "Anti Everything" says it all right there in the title; "Cancer" returns to the theme of frustration over the lack of answers to one's religious faith, with a new, extremely violent invective: "I'm emotionally raped by Jesus", Draper declares, before asking "What now of my faith? Just a desperate exercise to limit pain" and accusing the Church of being "those who nurtured Europe's war"; "Special/Blown It (Delete As Appropriate)" tells instead of the depression a superstar can fall into once forgotten, a victim of pressure and external mechanisms beyond his control. This track comes right before the last two, which are the two already-mentioned singles, and fits well with the famous "Nobody cares when you're gone" that closes "Legacy"; finally, it's worth noting the second part of "Being A Girl", the one found only on the album, because of the song's final line, and thus the final line of the whole record, sung by Draper with great emphasis: "The only pureness left is preached by Marx".

Six is, therefore, first and foremost a river in flood with emotion, and all the technical craft that defines it is really just the means by which the overwhelming force of that river is made as violent as possible. The album doesn't match its predecessor's number 1 chart position, but it still reaches a very respectable number 6. Among other things, this record finally brought Mansun on tour to Italy, in October 1998: first in Milan, supporting Manic Street Preachers, and then in Rimini and Aviano (PD) for headlining shows. Two more singles from the album would later be released: "Negative" and a much more conventional edit of "Six", which contains almost only the first of the three parts the song is actually made up of.

In 2019, to celebrate the album's twentieth anniversary (even though it was technically already the twenty-first), a remastered reissue was released on CD, double vinyl, and in a deluxe box-set containing 3 CDs and a DVD. One of the three CDs is The Dead Flowers Reject, which we discuss below and which has thus finally seen official release.

The Dead Flowers Reject, the album made of b-sides

For Six's tenth anniversary, Paul Draper published online, specifically here (part one) and here (part two), a very long account of every possible and imaginable piece of behind-the-scenes information about the record. The most interesting part is the one in which he reveals the conception of a project, sadly never realised, titled The Dead Flowers Reject. Quite simply, several tracks that served as b-sides to the Six singles had actually been conceived and recorded to be part of a genuine twin album. There had therefore been some thought given to the stylistic unity of the various tracks and to how best to sequence them so that they complemented one another, making the whole worth more than the simple sum of its parts. The style of these songs is very different from that of the album that actually came out, and instead much closer to what Mansun had released as b-sides up to that point, so an energetic, acidic, sharp-edged sound with melodies that are anything but easy. Draper claims that, had the record actually come out, it would probably have been his favourite Mansun album, because better than any other it would have captured their live side, but unfortunately he doesn't reveal what got in the way of actually making this idea happen. At least, though, besides revealing which tracks were involved and in what order they had been sequenced, he also made it possible to listen to the finished result in streaming, and the stream is still available here. This makes it possible to enjoy the aforementioned pairings and the added value of the tracks as a whole: some of these pairings work thanks to sonic continuity, for example the calm of "Church Of The Drive Thru Elvis" mirrored perfectly in the equally tranquil opening of "I Care", or the last two tracks, "I Deserve What I Get" and "Railings", in which the sound likewise stays stripped-back; in other cases the pairing works through a play of contrasts, as with "Check Under The Bed", with its more spacious sound and more relaxed atmosphere, followed by the harsh, icy "But The Trains Run On Time"; or it can happen that one track acts as a lead-in to the impact of the next, as for instance happens with "GSOH", whose brevity and straightforwardness sets up perfectly the lethal guitar riff that defines "Been Here Before".

The Dead Flowers Reject certainly wouldn't have won the band any more chart positions, but it would undoubtedly have further enriched their body of work in terms of versatility and emotional intensity. As mentioned, for many years this record didn't officially exist on the market, but that gap was finally filled with the 2019 reissue of Six. Of course, it's not possible to buy The Dead Flowers Reject on its own, only as part of the deluxe box-set, with the added expense that entails, but that's still something compared to the previous nothing. The CD's artwork came from a competition held on Paul Draper's website once the record's existence had come to light.

The rapid collapse of internal relations and the split

We arrive at 2000 and the third, controversial album, Little Kix. This time there's only one lead single, "I Can Only Disappoint U", a song that, like the singles that preceded Six, shows the band's more pop side: a brief piano intro, a sound built on the interplay between that same piano and clean guitars, a very clear and easily digestible melody, a rigid verse-chorus alternation. Compared to the past, the sound is both softer and, above all, more stripped-back: it feels as though the band wanted the listener to pay as much attention as possible to the vocal melody, the singing's intonation, and the lyrics. Overall, the song encourages optimistic predictions about how the album will turn out. But when the record actually hits the shops and fans get to hear it, the reactions are far more lukewarm.

The record's general approach is the same as the single's, namely clear melodies, strict adherence to song-form conventions, melody and vocal intonation placed front and centre at the expense of the sound, which ends up being little more than an accompaniment to the voice. An album of songs in an extremely classic sense, something Mansun had never even dreamed of doing before, and which, according to what at least a couple of the band's members later stated, marked the beginning of the end. Only the opening "Butterfly (A New Beginning)" has a slightly more elusive melodic line and a sound that carries some weight of its own in the overall result, and it is, tellingly, the only track in which there's still a trace of a troubled state of mind, as if the protagonists themselves weren't fully convinced of this "new beginning"; for the rest, we find a series of ballads or semi-ballads that are more contemplative and disenchanted than anything else, both in the general feeling the listening experience offers and in the themes dealt with in the lyrics. There would be nothing wrong with this, really, if this kind of songwriting – generally old-fashioned, but a new experience for Draper – were as inspired as it was on the single, but that's not the case, and there's nothing memorable about any of the other songs. The problem that arises in judging this record, however, is that you can't even call these bad songs, because in most of them – the first five plus "Fool" and the closing "Goodbye" – there's clearly a non-negligible level of vitality, different from what had characterised Mansun's output up to this point, but nonetheless present and capable of placing the listening experience in that halfway zone between bearable and pleasant, which is the trickiest territory in which to judge an album clearly and definitively, especially in the pop realm. The instinctive reaction of those who had followed the band from the very start was, of course, to dismiss Little Kix outright, but there have also been more forgiving verdicts, and listening to the record again now, ten years on and without the mindset that was inevitably in place at the time, when Mansun had released two masterpieces so different from this record only a few years earlier, certainly gives a different perspective on its analysis. The album, incidentally, sells less than its predecessors, missing the top 10, but still reaches a respectable number 12. Two more singles would be released from it: "Electric Man" and "Fool".

According to what was stated after the split, however, by Andy Rathbone and above all by Paul Draper, the events behind the making of Little Kix marked the start of the group's unity falling apart. Rathbone, in a 2005 interview, simply answered "Little Kix" when asked what had caused the band's end; Draper went into rather more detail in the account about Six mentioned above. According to the frontman, the other musicians no longer felt comfortable with the way of working applied up to that point, namely not recording the tracks all four together, and the fact that Paul Draper had the power to make decisions on artistic production as well, in close collaboration with the outside producer. Attempts to restore harmony within the band, by changing the approach to recording the tracks and taking away Draper's involvement in artistic production, had no effect, and the recording sessions were very stormy. As if that weren't enough, Draper, both in the account mentioned above and in the booklet of the singles collection released in 2006, speaks openly of disagreements between his ideas and the label's demands, according to which several things in the record were changed before its release was approved.

Mansun nonetheless go on tour and immediately afterwards start recording new songs. Unfortunately, however, something has by now broken in the personal relationships among the four of them, and every attempt to recover the unity of better days goes up in smoke. So, in May 2003, the band officially announces its split, even though several tracks for the fourth album were well under way. When the label makes it known that it has no intention of releasing the material the band left behind, an online petition is launched and achieves huge success. After that, in September 2004, the material is finally released, on the first of three CDs in a collection titled Kleptomania, which also includes, on the other two CDs, many b-sides, live recordings and rarities. Who knows whether the online petition had any real bearing on the label's change of heart: probably not, but it's nice to think it did.

Having noted that the second CD consists of the most representative songs among those that never made it onto an album, including of course "Take It Easy Chicken" and "Closed For Business", and that the first half of the third CD contains unreleased songs that wouldn't have made the album while the second half contains previously unreleased recordings of songs that had nevertheless already been released elsewhere, what matters most are the 11 tracks on the first CD, the tracks that would, in fact, have made up the fourth album. Here too the label doesn't give up its habit of a lead single, in this case "Slipping Away". The song is more energetic than those on Little Kix, both in rhythm and in the guitar sound, which once again takes centre stage, and also in the expressiveness of the vocals. Adherence to traditional song form remains high, but the track is quite engaging thanks to both a strong melody and the increased energy described above, which doesn't feel like an end in itself but instead gives the impression of once again highlighting the emotional vitality of the band's output, a vitality that, as mentioned, was present on Little Kix but somewhat hidden. The lyrics attempt to summon a wave of optimism, especially through the chorus: "My fear is slipping away from me, that lazy feeling filling my skin; my doubts are slipping away from me, my conscience keeps on saying move on, move on, move on".

The album fully mirrors the single's general traits: the sound is fairly rough and almost always built on the classic rock trio set-up, with keyboards appearing only on a couple of occasions. Among other things, the tracks were recorded without Stove King's input, with Paul Draper and Dominic Chad alternating on bass, and perhaps partly because of this reduced line-up the sound is direct and raw, though it can't really be called a return to the band's original style, since there's far less nuance, especially on the darker side of the sound, and the melodies are all fairly open. The record's strengths are also the same as "Slipping Away"'s: on one hand there's greater compositional inspiration, and on the other the sense of emotional vitality is much stronger, and one should also add a better balance between more driving moments and calmer ones. Many of the lyrics also pick up the single's theme, and generally speaking, from this point of view, Draper seems much more focused on his own personal affairs than in the past. To properly assess the work, though, it should be considered that, according to the notes in Paul Draper's detailed booklet, these are unfinished songs, apart from "Keep Telling Myself". Still, it can't be said that the tracks sound like mere demos, because in almost all of them you can hear an extra guitar line or the addition of some keyboard sound fleshing out the skeleton, so the idea that this would have been a more varied, more inspired and more vital record does have grounding in listening to these tracks, a listen that can hardly be dismissed as fan fetishism, but which has everything going for it to be enjoyable regardless of one's level of familiarity with and appreciation of Mansun's catalogue.

The last release under the Mansun name came in 2006, the inevitable singles compilation titled Legacy – The Best Of Mansun, rounded out by a couple of album-only tracks, "Getting Your Way" and "The Chad Who Loved Me". As we've seen, Mansun's musical history said far more than the more easily digestible tracks chosen as lead singles for the various EPs ever did. As a result, this compilation may be useful to newcomers wanting to get to know the band's best-known songs, but certainly not for forming a complete picture of their style. If you really want to buy it, the advice is to get the edition with the bonus DVD, to enjoy all the videos made to support the singles themselves, many of which are well made, particularly the one for "Legacy" with puppets standing in for the musicians, and especially the one for "Taxloss", for which the band chose to use their £25,000 budget in a very particular way, namely by converting it into £5 notes and throwing the enormous pile of cash inside London's Liverpool Street station at 8 in the morning, filming the hilarious scenes of everyone scrambling to grab the banknotes.

The long silence and the first signs of a comeback for Paul Draper

For a long time, no member of Mansun was involved in any musical project, and the only one anyone heard anything about in those years was Paul Draper, who contributed to a few songs by Skin, the singer of Skunk Anansie, and to a track by The Joy Formidable, the young and promising English indie band. There was a hope that these collaborations might be the prelude to his stable return to music, but as the years went by, that hope faded. Then, at a certain point, Draper first wanted to make sure, through a strong presence on social media, that people were still interested in a potential comeback of his, and after a widely positive response, he joined forces with Welsh singer and multi-instrumentalist Catherine Anne Davies, working simultaneously on her project, under the moniker The Anchoress, and on his own.

After Davies' album came out in January 2016, Draper's first EP arrived the following June. On Ep One there are far more similarities with his former band than differences. This is especially true of the two non-singles: "No Ideas", written and played with Steven Wilson, could easily slot into that whirlwind of melodic, sonic and atmospheric shifts that is "Six", while "The Silence Is Deafening" shares the same classic pop-rock attitude that characterised "Little Kix". Both tracks are top-notch on every possible level: compositional inspiration, vocal expressiveness, production skill and emotional impact, and while the first could hold its own even on the band's benchmark album given its quality, the second would certainly rank among the two or three best songs on a rather uneven record.

Paradoxically, the least convincing track is the single "Feeling My Heart Run Slow", which here also appears in a version remixed by The Twilight Sad, who gave it a character leaning heavily towards Depeche Mode-style '80s synths. The original version is Draper's first attempt at blending guitars and electronics, with the latter dominating the verse and the six strings taking centre stage in the chorus. The melodic quality remains strong, and it's impressive how he manages to pull off such a radical shift in sound so smoothly, but perhaps the synth in the verse is a bit too intrusive, and in any case the other two songs are definitely more captivating and emotionally engaging.

All things considered, this was a good way for Draper to start over, since listening to it makes clear that the man still knows how to write, perform and produce music. A few months later, Ep Two arrived, and thanks to it, looking at the overall picture of the six new tracks released in 2016, we find an artist still eager to explore every facet of the varied style that marked his previous work, while at the same time making sure the new songs didn't sound like a mere rehash.

After trying to revive the glories of "Six" and "Little Kix", with these new tracks the writer seems to have focused more on Mansun's early period. The lead track "Friends Make The Worst Enemies" (also featured here in an excellent acoustic version) and the following "Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid" recall, respectively, the dreamier and the more introspective side of Attack Of The Grey Lantern, while the closing "Don't You Wait, It Might Never Come" looks back even further, to when Mansun were rougher and more direct.

The overall quality of this EP is just as good as the previous one, if not slightly better. The only criticism one could level at Draper is that a melodic passage in "Friends Make The Worst Enemies" sounds a bit too close to a moment in "No Ideas". Aside from that, there's no shortage of quality, inspiration or the ability to convey strong feelings, and, as mentioned, there are harmonic and arrangement choices that avoid a revivalist feel while still hitting the mark, most notably the use of synth in "Don't You Wait, It Might Never Come".

The former frontman's comeback is complete

2017 begins for Draper's fans with an event celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Attack Of The Grey Lantern, held in Liverpool, in the very studio where the album was recorded. From here on, all eyes are on what the artist promised on social media: a debut album and a few shows. Given the promise shown by these two EPs, big things are to be expected.

The album, titled Spooky Action, duly arrives on 11 August 2017, preceded a few months earlier by the announcement of six UK shows in September, which sold out quickly. From a songwriting standpoint, more songs came out of collaborations than were written entirely by Draper alone. Five of the 11 tracks are co-written with Catherine Anne Davies, aka The Anchoress, with whom his artistic partnership keeps growing stronger; another song was written with composer Richard Ayres, and yet another credits none other than Dominic Chad as co-writer. This doesn't mean the two have patched things up — quite the opposite — but simply that Draper picked up, for this record, a song written back in the old band's days, when the two used to write together often.

Draper's touch is evident throughout the whole record, in every respect. The melodic style immediately recalls everything he's done before, and it's certainly the element that has changed the least over all these years.

From a compositional standpoint, there are almost free-form episodes like the hugely ambitious opener "Don't Poke The Bear", or prog-leaning ones like the already familiar "Friends Make The Worst Enemies" (here in an extended version compared to the EP), alongside others with a more straightforward structure that still don't fully conform to the standard song format (the following "Grey House" or "Who's Wearing The Trousers"), and still others where the verse-bridge-chorus scheme reigns supreme (the single "Things People Want"). It's on the sonic side that Draper pushes for as many ideas as possible, and almost every song has something that sets it apart from the rest. The biggest new element is undoubtedly the use of synths, which had already appeared in the very first track Draper released as a solo artist, "Feeling My Heart Run Slow", also included here, and which take an even more prominent role in other songs, always within a layered, detail-rich sonic context. Overall, the production is on average heavier than in the past, but at the same time the instruments are used in a more dynamic way: no track ever settles for simply holding a chord to support the melody, but there's always an effort to give the right push to every single instrumental line used. The same goes for his vocal tone: Draper's versatility was already remarkable with Mansun, but now he fearlessly reaches for even higher or lower registers, and isn't afraid to sing in a dirtier, rougher, almost shouted way if that's what the song calls for. The lyrics, always a key part of Draper's work, retain the introspective character of the past, but deal with different themes tied to the personal sphere of the individual, with language and an attitude balanced between autobiography and the ability to let the listener relate to the situations described, helped also by more direct descriptions, without the metaphors and fictional characters that were typical of Mansun.

Spooky Action is a dense, intense record, but never redundant, and every single moment strives to be meaningful — and succeeds. Sure, there are a couple of episodes that are less convincing, but all the other songs are flawless in form and compelling in emotion, and over the course of these 54 minutes, the listener is swept up, pushed around, supported, comforted or lifted in a genuine journey bound to leave its mark. Special mention goes to the two best songs of the bunch, namely "Jealousy Is A Powerful Emotion" and "You Don't Really Know Someone, Til You Fall Out With Them". In both, there's a particular skill in creating a very wide-open space, starting from round, enveloping melodic lines, into which it's easier to fit a large number of instruments without losing fluidity, along with variations on the main theme that make the song more interesting while keeping its coherence intact. The fact that Draper and his team gave their best with this type of track doesn't necessarily mean they should focus more on it in the future, but one can always hope they keep this willingness to range so widely, given how satisfying the results have been regardless.

With this record, Paul Draper gave everyone the chance to hear a beautiful, important album that deserves great attention.

After going through a rather difficult period on a personal level, the former Mansun frontman returned to the scene in 2022 with Cult Leader Tactics.

The Liverpool artist's sharp pen offers a satirical take on so-called self-help guides, specifically devising a particular manual useful for reaching top positions in one's career, life, and matters of the heart.

In Draper's script, these fundamental goals are achieved through Machiavellian strategies, which, once tested, lead laconically to the conclusion that the only real solution to all problems lies in love and complicity.

The tracks essentially take on tones that recall the sound of early Mansun, rather than the varied alt-rock leanings of his solo debut.

Cult Leader Tactics shows agility, tight and heartfelt rhythms, within which Paul confides personal experiences, as well demonstrated on the title track placed as the opener, which strikes with its vigorous guitars streaked with faint sounds drawn from the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone.

The album explores the worst of human behaviour while offering green shoots of hope. To frame these ideas, Draper draws on the whole eclectic stylistic range of Mansun and his solo work, relating it to today's spirit of the times; an always enjoyable choice, built on finely crafted stylistic structures that still struggle to shake off that security blanket it has always huddled under a little too much, but one that longtime followers will embrace as a trusted refuge.

Contributions by Cristiano Orlando ("Cult Leader Tactics")

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