Mansun Biography

It was an "outsider thing". The kind of "outsider thing" that has lured lost souls into the dark labyrinths of obsession throughout the decades: Pulp’s twitching- curtain sleaze, the leopardskin gaudiness of the Manic Street Preachers" Useless Generation, The Smiths" NHS geek-chic, Joy Division’s catacombs of Camus. It was that defiant radiation-burst of savage individualism that often defines a band as a "cult" and its fans as "devotees". The kind of "outsiderthing" that gives the misfits some place they can fit. But even alongside rock’s lengthy parade of eccentrics and non conformists, Mansun stood out a mile. Mansun - poor Mansun, doomed to be crushed beneath the stampede of their own inventiveness - were the most "outsider" band on Earth.

They hailed from Chester - a town mid-way between Liverpool and Wales, scorned the length of L1 as being the breeding nests of Plastic Scousers - yet even here they were rock kid cast-outs from the Hollyoaks bar crowd. In 1996, as Blur went Benny Hill and Quoasis glammed like gimps for supremacy in the Britpop Wars, these enigmatic mis-shapes slunk out of the looking glass bearing numbered EPs of seditious and shimmering 80s flecked pop music, filled with stories of even more gruesome social outcasts. The stripping clergymen, the dark Mavises, the gentlemen of ovarian shape and alpine protruberance and all the other caricatures of humanity’s moral rot that inhabited the Grimm urban townscape of Paul Draper’s imagination. Hell knows these men were clearly neurotic, deranged and dangerous to know - one of them was called Stove for Christ’s sake - but they offered a sinister, Tim Burton-esque warping of the fabric of rock that seemed irresistible when all around were suggesting we roll with it, do the white line, feel aaaaalright.

So the poets, the loners and the dreamers flocked to Mansun for catharsis and companionship, and Mansun repaid them with their own strange devotion.
At a time when most guitar bands were dreaming of a week’s residency at Knebworth, Mansun eschewed the bigger venues they could easily sell out to play extensive small-town club tours from King’s Lynn to Aberystwyth. They produced non-album EPs of startling depth and drama (a glance over the track- listing for CD2 of this collection will shock you with the quality of material that never made it to an album "Take It Easy, Chicken", "Closed For Business", "Flourella", "Ski Jump Nose", "The World’s Still Open", etc.).
They made a video for "Taxlo$$" by simply flinging the entire video budget into Liverpool Street station during rush hour and filming the commuters scrambling for the notes. This was a band living by their own rules and conventions, with sonic ambitions far beyond sharing an "acoustic segment" with Paul Weller, making music a dimension away from the impotent Travisophonic strumblings of the time. It was an attitude that reverberates today in the guerilla gigging of The Libertines and Franz Ferdinand, and it paid off: when "Wide Open Space" reached that highpoint of cultural saturation that is "Goal Of The Week" and the twisted pop symphonies of Attack Of The Grey Lantern debuted at Number One in 1997, suddenly Mansun were the king of all cult bands.

"It was weird," says Paul Draper today, "because it was never, ever a mainstream band, but we were always dipping into that world. It wasn’t for me, really. I don’t even know how it got that big. I don’t know how we ended up playing at Glastonbury or V. Going from making your own piece of 7" inch vinyl to that seemed amazing."

It is the outsider’s nature, of course, to shun all forms of acceptance. Hence came 1998’s masterpiece of malfunction Six and Mansun’s true (ahem) legacy was unveiled. As an attempt to segue sections of music in tribute to the great Prince albums of the 80s, it was essentially around 30 song segments linked together into twelve tracks and proudly proclaimed by Paul at the time as featuring "not one chorus" (he was exaggerating, slightly). The public took one look at its Marrillion-esque sleeve packed with in-joke references to the Marquis De Sade, Winnie The Pooh and Tom Baker, clocked song titles such as "Negative", "Shotgun" and "Cancer", and fled screaming into the arms of The Verve. The reviews were a cornucopia of incomprehension and bafflement. But a select few saw Six for what it really was - one of the most inspiring, inventive and downright best records of the ‘90s. Radiohead publicly acknowledged it as inspiration for their own experimental endeavors and you can hear the vaulting eclecticism of Six in the current work of The Mars Volta and Muse.

But how do you follow it? Two ways: you either dive further into the obscurist abyss or you try to scramble back some cash-till credo. Little Kix (2000) was an attempt to re-balance Mansun within an outer orbit of popular culture before they meteored off into the void - how pertinent that it closed with a track called "Goodbye". See, there’s the rub - in medieval terms, once you’ve revealed yourself as a sorcerer and visionary you can’t just put the peasant rags back on and get back behind the market stall. And so Mansun fell victim to their own o’er-reaching talent, dying from an overdose of ideas. When the band reconvened between 2000 and the spring of 2003 to work on sessions for their fourth album progress was sluggish and uninspired. Mansun were unhappy with Little Kix and unsure of how to work together effectively. Suddenly they were outsiders in their own band.

"We went into the studio to start a new album and it just took forever," says Paul. "I don't think, any of us, our hearts were really in it. Everything was taking ages to do and we didn’t have any perspective on whether it was any good or not. We didn’t want to get in the situation we had with the last album, where we put out an album we didn’t believe in. It just disintegrated over a weekend at the last session where we all sat down and went "this just isn’t happening, why is it taking a week to record a song whereas in the past we’d do it in four hours?". It became very soul-destroying in the end. We thought it was the music but it wasn’t, it was us as people. The band was dead."

Without fanfare or fuss, Mansun passed away in its sleep in April 2003. Paul disappeared to America, living the Keroac dream for a few months. Dominic Chad turned to charity. Andie Rathbone started drumming in a new band in Chester. Stove King "left the music business". And there, for any ordinary band, our story would end.

But Mansun were an "outsider thing". And outsiders don’t like being left outside. "I was shocked when Parlophone called me up and said "we’re still gonna put this record out"," says Paul of EMI’s decision to release the unfinished fourth album sessions. "I said "well there’s no band, how can you put a record out with no band?" That’s usually reserved for dead rock icons and albums found in a vault. People thought the album was finished, I think, so we had to explain that the sessions hadn’t gone that great and it wasn’t finished, but in retrospect I did think the stuff was really good and an improvement on the record we’d previously made and well worth putting out. It’s coming out in a form that I guess the 3000 people who signed the petition for its release would want to hear."

CD1 of Kleptomania is the rough-hewn skeleton of what would undoubtedly have been a staggering return to form. Blasted through with the raw fire-shriek of their early EPs and billowing with the archetypal Draper concerns of bloody-minded emotional endurance ("Keep Telling Myself", "Good Intentions Heal The Soul", "Home") and satirical caricature (the spoilt daddy’s girl of "Getting Your Way", the hopeless booze-hound of "Slipping Away" and the staunch nationalist Little Englander of "Harris"). What’s more, it may well not be the last we hear from the partnership of Draper & Chad.

"There’s something new in the future," Paul lets slip. "We’ve been writing together. We don’t know what it is yet because it still hurts, the splitting up of Mansun. It seems mad us getting together and doing another project because essentially Mansun was me and Chad sitting down in a room and me writing songs and him coming up with parts and arrangements. That was the core of it, so it seems mad that we’re still doing stuff but not under the name. We may work with another singer, we may not."

Hey, I tell him, it’s a bright new world out there. He mis-hears me. "Yeah. It’s a frightening world." It’s an "outsider thing". You understand. (edit)

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