Maybe this is how it should have been all along. Out of the spotlight, unacquainted with fanfare, there to be discovered like the concealed gates to a secret walled garden. Perhaps though the case was that Mansun, and Paul Draper in particular, were such oddballs that they couldn’t help but become famous. Destiny is an abused concept, but it’s hard now to imagine a late 90s without the colour of ‘Attack Of The Grey Lantern’ cutting through the relative regularity of everything else. That they themselves looked more regular than budget sliced white bread and had to be running a fair campaign for Ugliest Band in Indie made their adventurous achievements seem more heroic, there was no poster-boy bribery going on here, their success was genuine. The sticky stuttered end they met didn’t sit happily with the myth – that ‘real-world’ factors could interfere with the musical fantasies they pressed onto disc every couple of years seemed wrong. It was like you’d pulled the vines back to find the gateway bricked up without explanation.
So this final 3 CD set offers the closure that was needed and reassuring confirmation that the creative juices were still plentiful at source. The first disc features the ‘lost’ fourth album sessions, featuring detailed sleeve notes from Paul Draper where he talks of half finished demos, early mixes, missing improvements lost on unusable versions and rough guide vocals having to make the cut for this set. Which is just teasing us, really, when what we actually have is a deeply satisfying, impassioned clutch of songs much more complimentary and with much more cohesion than that assessment suggests.
Of course, as with all ‘posthumous’ collections we’ll never know exactly how far away from completion this is, but the energy and ambience perhaps exceeds ‘Little Kix’ in the form we find it. The vulnerable sounding ‘Keep Telling Myself’, the kinetic confidence and juxtapositions of ‘No Signal/No Complaints’ and bulbous opener ‘Getting Your Way’ would have surely become favourites no matter which angle you view them from, displaying the dynamics we’d come to love them for, but still without the impression that the same idea was ever quite used twice. Maybe they could have never matched the insane imagination displayed on their first two albums, but if this was them maturing we can only speculate as to the future they could have had, and deserved.
The second CD details a band that couldn’t easily be contained by the length limitations of an album, which as we find ourselves in an era of 2-track CD singles and single downloads seems more of a rarity than ever before. Featuring b-sides and tracks from their wonderful initial series of numbered EPs it could stand up as an album in its own right. Mansun after all were a band who could be fragmented without it being viewed as a weakness. ‘Take It Easy Chicken’ and ‘Skin Up Pin Up’ are electrifying baggy bombs, ‘Railings’ as subtle and OTT and epic as you like and ‘My Idea Of Fun’ a luscious pop/punk/folk/glam mash-up without giving the impression it was ever just for the sake of it. CD 3 carries on where CD 2 left off, with rarities, demos and unreleased material and while maybe less vital than the other two it ain’t short of gems, no sir. An extreme live reworking of art-pop masterpiece ‘Taxlo$$’ seals it and justifies the collection alone.
That this whole package has crept out barely touching pop culture’s radar is both criminal and fitting. A necessity if you still mourn their lost and as good a place to start as any if you didn’t even realise they were lost. Mansun RIP.