Attack Of The Grey Lantern

Product Information

A bizarre pseudo rap about a transvestite vicar who cross dresses like his daughter, it seemed a good idea at the time and slightly subversive but seems a little tame by today’s standards where such things are pretty run of the mill. It's Kscope 1175 and is the usual 12 songs ( 11 standard tracks with 6 on side one and the usual 5 plus the " hidden track" making a total of 6) but only on one 12" record. The majority of the record is centred on the concept of a superhero, known as "The Grey Lantern", in the guise of Draper himself. Having spent my formative years going to [nightclubs] Cream in Liverpool and the Hacienda in Manchester, this really ignited my love for dance music, and ‘Egg Shaped Fred’ was one of our early tracks where we’d jam our distorted guitars over drum loops from an AKAI S900 sampler. Originally this song was entitled ‘Desperate Icons’, a song I’d began writing quite a few years as a teenager before the album’s release.

It was complex to work out how to piece all this together, like a jigsaw, but great fun, the mastering engineer didn’t think so though. This remix was included on Oakenfold's compilation Resident: Two Years of Oakenfold at Cream, as an indicator of being one of the most played songs at major UK nightclub Cream, as well as in nightclubs around the world, over the 1997–1999 period. I was 15 when I wrote it as I recollect and kept it tucked away and always thought it would make a nice album track, and it did.A sarcastic swipe at the music industry, Taxloss was originally 11 minutes long and encompassed my modus operandi of the time of jumping between genres and parody. We originally recorded this song with a hip hop groove and some exceptional swearing that was rejected by the record company, these versions appear on the outtakes disc of the box set and its really interesting to hear these early versions and how we finally arrived at the finished version of this song that closed the album.

Back in the high days of Britpop, Mansun released an album that sat askew from the pervading happy-go-lucky spirit of the times. Each Mansun album started and ended with the same style of track, something I thought I’d be able to continue through all our records, so they became like a journey from start to finish. This was the earliest song I wrote for the album, you can tell from the lyric it’s from an earlier, more naive me. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the release of ‘Attack Of The Grey Lantern’, a very limited number of this beautiful vinyl picture disc featuring the iconic roses design, are now available signed by Paul Draper.Attack Of The Grey Lantern’ was a dark, mysterious and quite strange album, filled with genre-hopping oddness, set in a fictitious northern English town and containing lyrics about a recurring character named Mavis. According to Mansun's Kleptomania liner notes, frontman Paul Draper states that "Take It Easy, Chicken" was their first song and the band really did not know how to play their instruments, let alone play as a band, when DJs Steve Lamacq and John Peel started to play the song on BBC Radio 1. We recorded a 32 piece orchestra on this track which we didn’t even use in the end, such was the avarice of the era, you can hear the recording on the outtakes disc.