Sounds From The Junkshop #25 - Mansun

 

"The lyrics aren’t supposed to mean that much, they’re just a vehicle for a lovely voice..." - Mansun, An Open Letter Yo The Lyrical Trainspotter, 1996

By early 1997, it's fair to say that most people kind of knew Britpop was living on borrowed time. With Oasis blundering through a cocaine blizzard towards the musical dog turd that was Be Here Now and Blur and Pulp both in the process of essentially abandoning the genre all together in favour of heading into more musically challenging waters, it left the scene running on fumes to all intents and purposes with none of the newer bands who'd sprung up towards the poppier end of indie really having anything much to offer beyond half-arsed rehashes of what Noel, Damon and Jarvis had done much better two years ago. It had had its moment in the sun but now it was just waiting for someone to administer the death blow to it which would duly come in the form of Blur's "couldn't be less poppy if it tried" Beetlebum hitting the number one spot before Radiohead's wilfully difficult OK Computer album finished the job that summer.

With a newly formed gap at the top of the alternative music scene, the music press started to scrabble around looking for something new to concentrate on and in late '96 and early '97 there were a number of attempts to try and throw something together by lumping in a number of superficially similar bands and hoping to try and generate some hype and a few more magazine sales (a classic example being the whole Teen-C/Bratpop thing which tried to sling in a bunch of bands who really had very little in common apart from being teenagers from the lo-fi screechiness of Bis through the supremely tuneful glam indie of Kenickie to the thrashy pop-punk of Symposium and predictably ended up being something of a stillborn movement).

Another such movement was New Grave which briefly was "a thing" in the early weeks of 1997 and was essentially again an attempt to try and crowbar of vaguely gothy bands who'd sort of been lurking on the Britpop fringes for the previous 12 months and calling them the future of indie. The truth is there were really only four bands of any consequence in the movement - Strangelove (who we've dealt with in this column already), Placebo (who were just on the cusp of breaking through properly with Nancy Boy following a couple of singles sneaking into the lower end of the Top 40 at this point), Scarfo* and the scene's unlikely figureheads, a group of lads from Chester called Paul, Chad, Stove and Hib, collectively known as Mansun.

* Without wanting to be harsh, calling Scarfo major players is a bit of a push - they were a perpetual support band who briefly looked like being big business but the anticipated hit never really happened (not helped by a lack of genuine top drawer tunes) and they were pretty much done after one and a half albums. They may feature in a Footnotes column on this thing at some point in the future.

It's a bit of a weird one because, when I first heard Mansun in the first half of 1996, they really weren't very gothy at all. Image-wise, they were all Liam-style cagoules, Reni fishing hats and Shed Seven-esque skinny T-shirts as evidenced on their debut major label single Egg Shaped Fred (they'd had a few releases on the indies prior to this but this was where I first became aware of them). However, listening to the first EP (Mansun were notorious for all of their singles being EP's back then and I think it definitely helped to build a bit of a mystique around them which proved important as we shall see) there's definitely a weird undercurrent bubbling away under songs like Ski Jump Nose with its distorted Hendrix style guitar, the laid-back foul-mouthed Lemonade Secret Drinker and a surfeit of lyrics which are pretty much borderline gibberish throughout ("Skinima Nosebreak, Fatima Toothpaste, Penelope Cheapskate, Claudia Farmgate")

Second single Take It Easy Chicken scraped the Top 40 similar to its predecessor and saw the band pretty much looking the same as they did before (apart from the fact that drummer Hib had been sacked to be replaced by a bloke in a gimp mask! New drummer Andy would take over from the next release onwards). Again though, there was a current of weirdness bubbling under there from the chugging riff of the main track to the sheer lunacy of Drastic Sturgeon on the B-side ("You're like the second coming with a much better hairdo" anyone?) But it was nothing as to what was to come...

It was on their third EP, headed up by Stripper Vicar that Mansun chalked up their first Top 20 hit and it marked a very drastic image change for the band with the video featuring them now looking like a glam/goth hybrid. The music was equally bizarre but great - with the band now multi-formatting the CD's the Three EP effectively felt more like a mini-album. The Edge was sinister gothy garage rock, Duchess sounded like a cocktail jazz version of the Stone Roses' I Am The Resurrection and No-One Knows Us sounded like '80s soul-pop bores Curiosity Killed The Cat with a rocket up their collective arses. Interestingly there was also An Open Letter To The Lyrical Trainspotter which took the rip out of people listening for meaning in the songs' lyrics. Mansun frontman Paul Draper was often quite open about the fact that his lyrics were essentially gibberish that came from the boredom part of his brain but listening to how weird and wonderful Mansun frequently were at this point, it's a bit difficult not to get drawn in and get a bit obsessive with this band's songs ("Things Keep Falling Off Buildings? What are they saying?")

It's Mansun's fourth single Wide Open Space that most people seem to remember them for nowadays and it was this that put them at the head of the short-lived New Grave movement. It was definitely quite gothy with its skeletal guitar line and swooping chorus (although it has to be said that the vocals are definitely reminiscent of Tears For Fears in places - trust me, you won't be able to listen to it the same once you realise this so I do apologise). Again, it had six new songs spread across two CD's with the sinister Rebel Without A Quilt and the swooping The Gods Of Not Very Much being standouts.

The group's fifth single She Makes My Nose Bleed (a swipe at Draper's Catholic upbringing) would take them into the Top 10 and Attack Of The Grey Lantern would follow soon afterwards and go to the number one spot on the charts. By this point, Mansun had definitely got a reputation as a Marmite band - some people loved them and some hated them (Select magazine I always remember as being particularly scathing about them for some reason) but this is definitely an album that's stood up well over the intervening twenty plus years (Christ...). Within the first four songs, you've got the gothed up Bond theme of The Chad Who Loved Me with its scathing lyrics about "desperate icons" and its killer kiss-off of "But you can't deny that your shit just tastes as sweet as mine, sweet Jesus". Before you've had the chance to catch your breath back, we've been slung headlong into Mansun's Only Love Song which sounds like Aladdin Sane era Bowie curating some sort of grand dance on Mars and the vitriolic anti-record label diatribe Taxloss which sounds like Curve's scowly goth electronica before the bizarre deconstructed power ballad of You, Who Do You Hate? allows you to catch your breath.

Side two is no less weird as the goth-baggy hybrid of Disgusting and the blissed-out pop of Naked Twister lead into the epic eight minute Dark Mavis to finish the thing. It's one of those albums where you'll definitely need to catch your breath after listening to it if you're not expecting it but you'll be cueing it up for a second listen as soon as you're ready. In an era where Radiohead's OK Computer was the big thing (the two could be considered to be distant cousins musically although Grey Lantern takes out the tedious navel-gazing of Thom Yorke and co's effort and replaces it with a mischievous playfulness which is why I much prefer it), Mansun had made the jump over with the times seamlessly and looked set to be the sort of band who would be settling in for a lengthy run at the top.

Unfortunately, as you can probably guess by the fact that this band are in the SFTJ column, it didn't work out that way. The group's second album Six would surface in late '98 and was a full-on concept album that saw the group flying way too close to the sun of weirdness to the point where it spilled over from being off-the-wall but brilliant into full-on unlistenability in places. Comeback single Legacy was seven minutes long and just sounded dull (to be fair, it made more sense when put into the context of the album) and while Grey Lantern had kept things just about reined in enough to keep your attention, Six was just way too out there and unfocused. It's maybe one that bears revisiting (let's be honest, it's two decades since I last heard it) to see if added age has allowed me to wrap my head around it a bit better but it threw nearly everyone for a loop at the time (it made the Top 10 but the press reaction was more one of bewilderment than anything and while Grey Lantern spent over six months in the chart, Six was gone from it within a few weeks) and the momentum was lost massively.

Worse, unfortunately, was to follow. Stung by the "erm, what?" reception that Six had garnered in the music press, the group's third album Little Kix saw them deliberately reining things right in and coming up with a straight ahead rock album. And, oh dear, it was terrible unfortunately just completely lacking anything to draw you in the way Grey Lantern did and sounding plain dull. The late great NME ranter/journalist Steven Wells summed it up perfectly when he said that Grey Lantern was like the euphoria of a drug trip, Six was the panic-stricken comedown and Little Kix was the tedium of the cold turkey afterwards. Although it did give them a Top 10 hit with the ironically titled I Can Only Disappoint U, the album itself failed to make the Top 10 and after sessions for a follow-up came to nowt, Mansun decided to call it a day. To be honest, it was probably the right time for them to do so.

Remember Mansun for their first album rather than what came afterwards - Attack of the Grey Lantern remains an absolute classic to this day and sticks out like a sore thumb among a lot of the dross from the dying embers of Britpop and Radiohead/Verve clones that 1997 threw our way. Incredibly weird but also way more listenable than it really has any right to be, it really is the album that defined that year for me and probably planted the seed in my brain that would eventually see me becoming a goth fan upon discovering the Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus and the Mission later on in life. It also led to several unfortunate experiments with hair dye and long-sleeved deep V-neck black T-shirts in my early days at Uni but let's not go there. Paul is continuing to put out solo material to this day and it's something I really should investigate more than I have but for Grey Lantern alone, him, Chad, Stove and Andy have my eternal respect. Cheers guys.