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1. INTRO 7. SONGS (SIDE 2) TELEVISION This song was written about hotel rooms. It mentions obsessive compulsive disorder. It's not about television, that was just the focal point of the room when I was envisaging the hotel room while writing the lyrics in the attic. Watching Sky News was like wallpaper in hotel rooms, just there in the background. I brought the pro tools rig in and edited up the Sky News bits, the last one took ages to do. It cost a fortune for News International to let us use the sample, but it gave the record that authentic 'hotel room' feel. The 'abilene' was from a book in the bag called 'The Urban Dictionary'. It's a dictionary of things that don't have names for them. The 'abilene' is 'the refreshing coolness of the underside of a pillow'. You know the one. I was just creating some imagery for getting to sleep in a hotel. It's one of those songs to make yourself look more interesting than you really are. Spike and I set up the vocal to change effect between lines in places and Spike made it more ethereal on the chorus. The vocal at the end was a bit of a pisstake. Chad did the main chords on that vibrato sound of his from the zoom pedalboard in his studio setup next door and brought it through, and I edited it into shape and changed things round a bit so we could make a song out of it. The middle 8 uses the digitec whammy pedal off the opening track. I edited together some feedback to make a cool little entrance to the chorus and bridge in places. Essentially this was put together from his guitar bits which I moved round and got in order. I found it difficult coming up with melodies on these chords as I wasn't used to his melodies. I put the cymbals thru a phaser in parts to give it a more trippy feel. I spun a little zap effect in from the tc fireworx going into the middle 8. We set up one of the filter boxes on the guitar for the second half of the guitar solo on the middle 8 to differentiate it from the previous bit. SPECIAL/BLOWN IT (I NOW HAVE THE ANSWER THANK YOU...) The idea of this song originally came from my wish to write a song with one giant chord sequence. The longest chord sequence I could find and make work without going insane was a 32 bar chord sequence, beyond that, well, is there anything beyond that? I've not found a pop song in the history of the pop song with a longer one, but if you find it let me know. This whole song is just that sequence repeated 5 times. The reason I wanted to do this was because 'Wide Open Space' from the first album only had 3 chords in it, good chords mind you, but only 3 nevertheless. I wanted to do the polar opposite, this song was it. Incidentally after finishing this song I wanted to go in the other direction and do a song with just 2 chords. That was 'I Can Only Disappoint U'. Chad was messing about with two chords one day and the whole of that song was built on just those 2 chords. Just to be flash I added a load of extra chords just at the very end. Anyway, I digress. The track evolved and I moved the words around so it builds from start to finish. Chad improvised random notes and little riffs. I flew this comp of the random notes around the track to make it build from the start as if it was all played and built up that way. Incidentally, I sung Chad a Carpenters melody to play in at 1.49 .to 1.56, just for a laugh. I edited all the notes and parts into what sounds like a cohesive building melody then overdubbed the piano and rhodes with the tea on top. The guitar arpeggio at the end of the chord sequence is what I played on acoustic guitar when writing the song as I recollect. After the first 2 rounds of the sequence, I bring in the melody I had for the 32 bar sequence. I sing the melody 3 times as it evolves lyrically. I play my Les Paul for rhythm thru and AC 30 for a glammy sound over the bass I'd already put down. I play the last chord sequence, the fast bit on the vintage fender jag as it sounded more trashy. Lyrically it was an idea sparked from the chord sequence itself, from a point in the future looking back at what I was doing with the 32 bar chord sequence which I wrote along with a hum melody initially onto my dictaphone in the attic and thinking: "Is spending the weekend coming up with a 32 bar chord sequence really a good idea?" The BP store in the lyrics is the 24 hours garage down the road from my house in Chester, used by Cestrian nighthawks. After the lyrics over the first glammy bit the words become more philosophical about my predicament in a fictitious future after spending my time making records like this track instead of the simpler ones from the first album. About being happy with being the cabaret act I'd become off the back of the 'Six' album. About getting up in the morning, being happy but ultimately, the drive to make innovative music was gone, by making this self same record. The whim is the 'Six' record itself. Spewing on the motorway shoulder is just imagery for fucking up, I jotted it in my notebook after a particularly good night out. The last fast trashy bit was me looking at myself in, say, 10 years time. So what was the real outcome of 'Six', Special or Blown It? lol. To be honest when I get up in the mornings I'm not that focused anymore so I couldn't really tell you. Although I do enjoy my trips to France. ;) Luckily, there's no fucking books in this song. LEGACY The original lyric idea came from '120 Days of Sodom' By the Marquis De Sade. Using it to show relationships are worthless, but then as I knocked the lyrics into shape I just rolled that into a bigger lyrical idea about looking back at the sacrifice of your emotional happiness for material gain has had on your life and where it's got you. Trying to justify to yourself it's been the right path to take in your life by lessening the importance of relationships and justifying it by looking at the damage personal relationships can do in your life. The second half of the second verse asks what's the root of ambition, what character defect drives you? The line: "I wouldn't care if I was washed up tomorrow" is false bravado, a self-defence mechanism to hide the fear of failure from your ambition. It's just raising some questions about ambition and the futility of it because in the end. The price. The cost. What's left at the end of the day when ambition's drained the last drop out of you? Well I just pictured the view from the stage during a gig. The sea of faces looking back at you, that's what your doing it all for, just them people, and at the end of the day, after you've given everything, well nobody really cares when you're gone, do they? Musically we put a basic rhythm track down with Andie coming up with the groove for the track. We had the song down but no riff. So I worked out a main riff with Chad to sit on top of the verse chords, then dropped the chords out of the final recording. I added the height line over it and the chords on the chorus as well as bass and backing vocals. One of the simpler songs to record. It's almost a proper chorus too. Shit. BEING A GIRL The first part was recorded by me and Mike, the second half by me and Spike. 'Being a Girl' was an allegory for not being happy in the situation I was in and wanting something different. It was the last thing written, recorded and mixed during the sessions.It had an XTC stylee verse, but a powerful chorus during the first part, the guitar was played on a vintage Fender Jag, I wrote the part like that on acoustic but Chad played it as I'd written it on the record. Chad played the breakdown on an old organ knocking round the studio which I got Mike to mic up from across the room. During the mastering I really pushed the chorus so the track really exploded when it kicked in. Once the first part was completed I quickly wrote the second part. I like the little drop down before the 'Marx' bit. I play bass and guitar and Chad overdubs his lead line later on over the whole thing with me humming and pointing at frets n stuff which isn't really conducive to creating a good atmosphere in a band, but it got the job done. At 6.44 we hired a 32 piece orchestra to drop in 2 string plucks from the orchestra into the background of the track. No, not really it was some random fret buzz from the lead guitar on the master tapes that I sampled and dropped onto the tape in a strategic place to sound like an orchestra, and the most decadent use of a recording studio ever, which 'Six' actually was. Details you see, were important to this record. We were in a rush to finish the whole thing now, we only had a day or so left. I grabbed a load of reasons out of my notebook as to why things weren't going that great, using some other notes I'd made from the books, the Taoist stuff, some Buddhist stuff that I'd liked but to be honest didnt know that much about. I added some of my own thoughts about communism n stuff and a bit on my own thoughts on life in general Id jotted in the notebook. The little bit tagged at the end is just a few elements from the album in general, including a recording of Tom Baker leaving the pub after his voiceover. This is the actual footage of me writing the song in the attic. 8. "THE DEAD FLOWERS REJECT" PROJECT THE DEAD FLOWERS REJECT
1. WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE HATED When we recorded each album I had in mind that I would record another albums worth of material at the same time. These songs could be used to make the EPs we would release to promote the album. I never really thought we were a singles band, instead we would put 4 EPs out with every album. Miraculously all these EPs went in the bloody charts! But the real reason for doing so many tracks was that I was trying to make at least two albums worth of material. Now a lot of people have said about Mansun that the b-sides were our best material, well that's possibly true, because they weren't b-sides, they were an album in their own right in my mind spread across 4 EPs. I always planned to release these tracks as the albums they were meant to be at some point in the future, but the band collapsed before we got there. I wasn't surprised the band ended, just surprised we managed to finish the bulk of the recordings for the 4th album 'Kleptomania'. (Hence the last song on 'Little Kix' being called 'Goodbye'!) So in total we recorded 7 and a half albums, they just come out as 4 albums proper, 3 albums worth of EPs and the unreleased bonus CD. With the 'Kleptomania' sessions box set we released the guts of the EP material with the 'Kleptomania' album proper on the bonus CD3. Incidentally, some of my favourite tracks destined for these EPs were on the 'Kleptomania' bonus unreleased CD, including 'It's OK' and 'Drones'. 'The Dead Flowers Reject' project is how I envisaged the second CD recorded with 'Kleptomania' to be sequenced at the time, I've dug back through my notebooks to make sure I have the running order correct as it's important that you listen to these 'b-sides' for the first time as an album in its own right, that album was entitled 'The Dead Flowers Reject'. Click here to listen to the album for the first time. It's a better rock album than 'Six'. 'Six' was just an idea of making a vinyl record in the CD age, as I said, but nobody would go for doing the cover idea, even if we did a little CD inside it coz apparently we wouldn't be able to get 'rack space' in HMV. With a little more foresight the powers that be could have seen that to release 2 albums would have been awesome, one a straight rock album and the other 'the vinyl experience'. Radiohead did it a couple of years later with the 'Kid A' / 'Amnesiac' sessions, they really liked our first album as they were in the next room recording 'OK Computer' when we were finishing off 'Attack of The Grey Lantern', we shared the same A&R guy at Parlophone and Ed from the band really liked 'The Chad Who Loved Me', the segued different sections and mellotrons etc... I'd really liked 'The Bends' and it was really kind of them to praise 'Attack Of The Grey Lantern' when they collected their awards for 'OK Computer'. We got a Jo Malone candle each, if I'd have known who Jo fucking Malone was, I'd have kept it. Talking of 'Attack of The Grey Lantern' in relation to 'Six'; 'Six' wasn't a concept or prog rock record, as I explained earlier, just a 'vinyl experience' on a CD, but 'Attack of the Grey Lantern' was supposed to be a pisstake, like a Monty Python skit on a concept. A journo once asked me if it was a concept album and I tried to explain to him it was half a concept and I said it was a con album, meaning it as a joke i.e Half of the word concept is, ahh forget it. He thought I was a complete cunt. But it was only supposed to be a joke, we'd already made one album before 'Attack of the Grey Lantern' which we released over 4 EPs thru 1996. That was our early sound with samplers and drum loops. 'Attack of The Grey Lantern' was a separate project as a skit on the album format coz it was gonna be our first long playing release. If you think of 'Six' as our third album then 'The Dead Flowers Reject' could be thought of as the fourth Mansun album if you're that way inclined. I think the record would probably have been my favourite Mansun album, it's the closest to how we played live. The title, well it's obviously a nod to the Rolling Stones, and relates to it being recorded at the same time as 'Six'. WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE HATED I played bass and actually wrote it on bass originally. I recorded it in my home studio and played everything myself. I programmed drums up first but I got Andie to replace the drums when mixing the track, the same process as making 'Attack of the Grey Lantern'. You can hear the 909 kick drum I kept in the drop down and my tambourine in the chorus background. Chad might have doubled up my chords on the chorus to make it bigger, but I can't remember. Essentially it was me with Andie playing drums. The best lyric in it is definitely 'piss in the face of the sick'. LOL! Fucking brilliant! This song was omitted from promos sent out to journalists for review because of the lyrics. (Fucking awesome!!!) This is one of my favourite songs that I ever wrote along with 'Keep Telling Myself' off 'Kleptomania'. Here is some exclusive behind the scenes footage of me writing 'Keep Telling Myself' whilst getting the Jubilee Line to Canary Wharf. OBSCURE MANSUN MYTH NUMBER 7 - Have I made all this myth shit up to make us look more interesting than we really are? Well it would be cool to just go, yeah of course I have and laugh, as in the line from 'An Open Letter to the Lyrical Trainspotter': "If you believe all of this you're a bigger fool than me." That was specifically referring to 'Attack of the Grey Lantern'. But actually, it is all true. In fact it's all quite an underembellished version of the true events if there isn't such a word that doesn't exist. GSOH Chad plays the part of the guy placing the ad on the voicemail on the first verse and the reply in the 3rd verse, and he plays the girl answering the ad in verse 2. I was reading the paper and noticed how everyone in Lonely Hearts columns says looks aren't important but then always want a photograph. The best bit is at the end when I shout 'a fucking photograph'. I was rolling around on the floor listening to this 10 minutes ago, Chad's bit is hilarious. I've never listened to it since we did it and totally forgot about it. A Mansun classic, typical Mansun, Should have been the lead off single... BEEN HERE BEFORE I played acoustic guitar in the verse, the second guitar riff that comes in (the loud one), bass guitar and the big rhythm guitar on the bridge under "I'm sure I've been here once before." I think Chad played the other guitar riff. Andie put down the drums in the live room of studio 1 at Olympic. Lyrically this song revolves around self preservation. How you always retreat back to your ingrained character traits when looking for some security. A simple one. WHEN THE WIND BLOWS 'When the Wind Blows' was going to be part of my cartoon song 'Shotgun', but evolved into its own song. It's about the animated film of the same name. It was going to go with my 'Wacky Races' style theme tune which was the first minute of 'Shotgun'. The recording misses a big dirty guitar on the chorus but I didn't have enough time to fully finish it. The animated film (they're all cartoons to me!) 'When the Wind Blows' was apparently inspired by Simon Le Bon's worst ever lyric "You're about as easy as a nuclear war". Obviously that is a joke. You didn't? CAN'T AFFORD TO DIE Andie, Chad and I played this live. We went back to Parr Street in Liverpool for some time out of London. We recorded this with Mike Hunter. I might have wrote this one back at home in Chester as I remember. I'm on bass, Chad lead, Andie drums with a tambourine on his hi hat which he took off for the choruses, then I overdubbed piano and a chorus rhythm guitar. Chad might have added different inversions of my chorus chords underneath to fatten the chorus up. A trick I often used. I read an article about how expensive it was to die these days, so I thought it would just be better to go into a fucking coma and pay the hospital bills like a hotel than pay for the sodding funeral. A nice jolly little ditty. CHURCH OF THE DRIVE THRU ELVIS When I was in Las Vegas I saw 'The Church of the Drive Thru Elvis' wedding chapel which was hilarious. I thought about the idea of having a cult of 'The Church of The Drive Thru Elvis' from the chapel and developed the idea from there, about getting sucked into a cult. I recorded it playing acoustic guitar and singing then overdubbed the mellotron keyboard line and the pad guitar sound and me scraping the guitar strings above the nut in a few places. Andie added the percussion but importantly I added the finger cymbal at 1.14 and a few times after. Very important that! Chad sings the middle 8 and plays the middle 8 arpeggio. This is the real actual footage of me writing the song in the back of a stretch hummer on the way to 'The Church of The Drive Thru Elvis' wedding chapel in Las Vegas on my way to get married. I CARE %&$(£$*%* KING OF BEAUTY This song is about someone in a band... but not myself. BUT THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME This song is about Mussolini, the Italian dictator who apparently kept the masses in line by making sure the train system ran smoothly, keeping everyone happy. He had a big belly and liked hanging around train stations. (Sorry, couldn't resist that). You can hear right at the end of the song Steve Austin, the bionic man, runs into the control room of the studio and runs briefly past the microphone. This is the real actual proper authentic recording of me writing the song on a train carriage on the outskirts of Rome in 1944. CHECK UNDER THE BED From one of the books floating round at the time from the vinyl sports bag called 'Great Apes' by Will Self, I wasn't reading it, I just used it for the song. The lyric 'Fear looks like laughter' refers to apes grinning when they're scared apparently. I remember the padded cage referring to a monkey getting taken away as I remember. I DESERVE WHAT I GET This was me trying to do a Prince stylee track and get away with it, which is virtually impossible if you're white and from Liverpool! I should have sung it a bit rubbisherer. I did it with my LINN drum machine originally, which is how Prince made all his good records, except for 'Sexy MF' and 'Darling Nikki'. Andie played over the Linn Drum machine patterns that run through the track and played some cool hi hats and beats especially at the end. I play all the keyboards and the synth bass line (gimme a break, I had to try it on one track at least!) Chad overdubbed a single note lead line as usual onto the song thru Lovetone 'Big Cheese' pedal. I can't remember who played the zither on the bridges, but it might have been Chad as it backs up his 'Big Cheese' guitar part. RAILINGS My duet with Howard Devoto and the closing track on 'The Dead Flowers Reject'. Howard sent me some demos he'd done on a cassette and some sheets of lyrics which arrived at my house in Chester. Chad, Andie and I set about recording them. They were 'Everyone Must Win' which we did around the time of the 'Closed for Business' EP and 'Railings' which we tackled later. Howard wrote the lyrics on both tracks. While 'Everyone Must Win' was recorded by Chad, Andie and I in Liverpool, we recorded 'Railings' in London with Howard. 'Everyone Must Win' was from Howard's lyrics sheets, 'Railings' was a song Howard had written on piano on one of the cassettes. Chad, Andie and I recorded the backing track to 'Railings' using Howard's chords he'd used on the cassette demo which he played on piano and sang over. Howard came down to the studio to do the vocals and we recorded them with all the studio lights down to get the right atmosphere for the song. Chad's lead guitar on the chorus and at the end is great and there's a brilliant vocal by Howard. I played acoustic guitar. I don't remember who played piano, probably Chad. I deffo did drum sticks, I nicked this off 'Disgusting' off 'Attack of the Grey Lantern', where I'd done it before. You'll have to ask Howard what it's about. You'll also have to check out the Magazine gigs coming up if your a fan to see Howard live. SPASM OF IDENTITY (HIDDEN TRACK) This was Chad's song. You can see the footage of Chad writing it here. (Here is the band trying to record a version with 2 bass players - Ed). I didn't do anything except sit in a £99 plastic swivel chair from Do-It-All shouting: "Cue the fucking music." After this fiasco I was sacked as producer coz of the expense of the oil to constantly lubricate the swivel mechanism of my seat coz I used it to slide round the live room. Chad's ideas like 'Spasm of Identity', 'Witness to a Murder' and 'Face in the Crowd' were difficult to come up with melodies for me as his ideas during the 'Six' sessions were a bit off the wall. I managed it with 'Television' which was the best thing we managed to co-write from one of his melody ideas during the 'Six' sessions. While working on 'Spazm of Identity' he wrote 'The Soundtrack of 42 Bummers' which was his piano bit he came up with on the out of tune piano whilst messing about in the conservatory of Olympic Studios and I captured on a dictaphone and made a record out of it for the next album. I launched myself like, almost like Steve Austin, a bionic man almost, to capture this improv on a dictaphone I had in my pocket... from sitting in front of a giant SSL J series desk that I used to stroke with my fingers coz I don't understand buttons. EMI had rigged the conservatory with CCTV coz every time they turned up at the studio we'd all be in the back 'playstation room' playing computer games and eating sweets, so they were keeping a beady eye on us as it cost a lot of dosh to hire such salubrious surroundings to play computer games in... Now I can't make out if this is the actual footage or just a really good reconstruction from the 'new media' department at EMI to convey to the general public that we were, in fact, friends and band mates, but it looks pretty authentic to me, so I dug the CCTV footage of the writing session for "The Soundtrack of Lurve" out from the bowels of EMI specially for this anniversary, as they were keen to participate in such a historic event. I actually broke in to the offices to see if I could get my silver disk for 'Little Cacs' but it had been stolen so I stole this tape as a consolation, and I posted it on Youtube so watch it right now before we get a cease and desist order from Farrah Fawcett Majors. The footage starts of with me leaping from the SSL desk, of which I have no idea how to operate except the on switch at the plug hole, but I do get confused between red, on and white, off, or is it the other way round, whatever, it doesn't matter as long as the faders go, weeeee, weeee up and down, or is that neve plug sockets? Either way it's out of phase if I walk past it. You can just make out the SSL mixing desk behind the tree to the left at the start of the studio footage. Suddenly, as you can see from the footage I'm in the conservatory at Olympic, I jump over the pile of steaming shit left on the floor by God knows who and make my way into the depths of the conservatory where the piano is, which is played by Leonardo Di Caprio in this movie....no?...piano...made of wood...oh, forget it. You can just make out that I switch my dictaphone on as I jump over the ravine or a creek or the wiring loom coming from under the desk, I'm not sure which as we kept the lights dim in the control room, whatever. Now I'm being played by Lee Majors coz I would have played the part with a tracksuit on with two stripes down the sleeves, not the proper Adidas one and definitely no t-shirt underneath, like the credits where I'm running down the airstrip after I crash my spaceship. That's important to the plot of this writing session, so remember that, I'll come back to that in a bit. Now EMI have superimposed Lee Majors head digitally onto my body coz I cant train my hair to go to the side properly, it just goes straight down coz it's so straight without hair wax or a demi wave, so the make up girl came in and spat into her hand and pushed my fringe across to the side then cut my hair into the shape of a 'flick' while it hung straight down, so as you can see in the footage it looks like the real thing. Andie is on bongos but his second kick drum is a little ahead of the beat and we hired a full 32 piece orchestra to do the strings which Chad wrote and scored. It's probably best to get 2 windows open in your browser at this point so you can actually see this classic Mansun track being composed by Chad with me producing him whilst you can actually read this actual transcript of us working harmoniously together. Now as you'll see from the footage it's difficult to produce someone else in a band from within a band so I had to tread very, very carefully here as he wasn't prepared to be in Steve's backing band as you can see, although he was the only sasquatch who wanted it that way. Talking of treading carefully, from the studio footage you can see as I scan round the conservatory at Olympic Studios I see Chad's footprint in the conservatory floor, Andie does his drum solo, which is a bit prog rock, and the second bongo hit, if you listen really carefully is slightly ahead of the beat, but that's coz my bionic eye is just over calibrated and overthinks everything which didn't need do be, but it was the 'Six' sessions for fuck sake, so we allowed bongo solos, anyway we just kept the master tapes from the dictaphone recording of this song and used it for the next album you see, 'Little Britain'. From the footage you can see as I dodge the plants the studio buys and leave everywhere round the studio in case Elton John turns up. Now I don't actually run this fast in real life, it's just I speeded the tapes up when mastering it on to Youtube as I can't run as fast as Steve Austin in real life and he'd beat me fair and square as it was every man for himself. (The flares were acceptable as we were still ripping off the Stone Roses you see in the year 4BS (Before Strokes), and I got the shirt from the vintage clothes shop in Chester where I buy all my Steve Austin stuff. It's only at this point do I even attempt to use my bionic eye as I'm listening to see if the magic melody is in there and you can see my bionic pupil dilate as I realise we're onto something with this little piano riff stolen from 'Clocks' by Coldplay, you can just make out the crosshair over my pupil where I'm carefully listening for the sasquatch's magic melody. (N.B The sasquatch can easily be confused with the yeti out of Dr Who in 1968 with Patrick Troughton and not the Tom Baker version from Witness to a Murder Pt II featuring David Walliams and Matt Lucas, but you have to be very discerning to know the difference between a sasquatch and a yeti as the only real difference is they have different feet. Ozzy Osbourne has his own sasquatch which he uses in sasquatch throwing competitions). Now coz I was overthinking everything, which I did, but with the best of intentions may I add, I noticed at about 1 min 17 secs into the track Chad's peddling too hard on the footpedal so you can just about make out I use a quantec room simulator patched in parallel with an analogue delay coz we weren't using pro tools. It happens at 1.26 into the song, that's the sound I always make when beating people running in a fairly straight line as you can see. Now at 1.36 Chad presses the Fb minor deceased chord way too hard and I get pissed off, but I'm ovethinking things and quite rightly he gets a bit pissed off so we took a break from writing this song at 1.49 into the second bongo solo and went for lunch at Tootsies round the corner. As the studio footage shows after we take a break after lunch I start working on the top line melody. I start busking some lyrics and I'm planning ahead here so I start working out some love lyrics for the 'Little Britain' album (who the fuck would use Tom Baker for a voice over, it's got to be a joke, right?) I start throwing some lyrics into the mix about "understanding a woman" and stuff and "not wanting to hurt a woman" pretty much the lyrical direction I went in for 'Little Britain'. Chad, playing himself during this writing session footage starts to knock a few ideas around the studio, bouncing them off the producer, you can see this creative process unfolding around 2.25 into the song, where he's bouncing some ideas off me, he did this quite regularly. I try my spring delay on the track at about 2.28 as were bouncing ideas of each other here as you can see, Steve Austin's a bit perplexed as he thinks this is a mutual process, but he goes along with the sasquatch's ideas anyway. Now the footage suddenly cuts back to EMI world headquarters where the board are watching this writing session from the boardroom where they aren't happy with the lyrics so they intervene as they've been monitoring the album unfold. Everyone was always fucking siding with the sasquatch, the bastards. They never saw Steve Austin's point of view as the sasquatch totally had Steve Austin fooled, so Steve Austin goes along with it and ditches his creative principles, just for the one album and as you can see, I totally crash and burn, and from about 3.10 it all goes downhill and I'm pretty much spent as a creative force, don't bother listening to the rest of this song, it's just fucking repetitive, although Andie's hi hat work gets really good, Chad's on the orchestra and I'm on the spring delay. Chads guitar work suffers at about 4.35 into this song as he picks a much too heavy plectrum. I try to reason with him but I can't concentrate coz Andie just keeps going and fucking going on the hi hats then at about 5.50 he starts a drum solo, so in retaliation I think: "Right if you're doing your solo I'm gonna play the guitar solo from 'Kiss' by Steve Austin's hero and mentor, The Artist Formally Known as Prince." You can hear me retaliate to Andie's drum solo at 6.02 into the song with the solo from 'Kiss' and Chad samples the strings for the intro for 'Attack of the Grey Album' LP coz he's looking for his flute which he finds by 6.15 into the song. That's how we did 'Soundtrack 4 2 Lovers' and that's pretty much how we did most of our tracks really, no really, that's exactly how we worked together, ask anyone who knows the band, but there were some tracks that were hard to work on too. I think Stove was operating the video camera. I can't remember who Marlene was, I think she might have been shagging Robert Plant on the stairwell. Oh shit!! I'm really sorry about this. That was the wrong Youtube link. Here's the correct one. I remember now, I didn't have anything to do with that track, I forgot. Just re-read it watching the new footage. Compile your 'THE DEAD FLOWERS REJECT' album in that order. 9. EP TRACKS AND OUTAKES There were 2 other EP tracks recorded during the 'Six' sessions as well as 3 acoustic tracks destined for the 'Six' EPs: FACE IN THE CROWD This was an instrumental recording made by Chad. It was one of the backing tracks he brought in from his studio set up in the house next to the studio that I would try and make a record out of. I couldn't come up with a melody for it and it leant itself to being an instrumental anyway. The recording was made on a small portastudio and the released version is that same recording, mixed in the studio by Spike. I'm not sure where the title came from on this one as it was Chad's track but could have been from a book. HIDEOUT About the grey house. OBSCURE MANSUN FACT NUMBER 7 - Who the fuck is Dark Mavis? She's a bloke actually, someone who helped the band out loads at the start so I thought they deserved their own song. I just borrowed the name, the song's nothing to do with the real person. Last night I did a special acoustic recording of Dark Mavis in a grey attic while watching the Olympics as a tribute to the man himself. There is no strange fact number 6. MANSUN'S ONLY ACOUSTIC SONG An acoustic version of one of the tracks from 'Attack of the Grey Lantern'. I remember listening back to what we'd released so far and seeing which tracks leant themselves to being recorded acoustically. This song fitted the bill. We recorded this back in Chester in the grey house, we had a studio set up upstairs while taking a few days off from the 'Six' sessions back down in London. ACOUSTIC JUMP NOSE Recorded at the same time as the above. It was labelled 'Ski Jump Nose (Acoustic)' on the EP after I had a creative block. THE ACOUSTIC COLLAPSE OF IT ALL This is the actual footage of me recording the actual song that went out on the actual record, recorded at the same time as the 2 previous tracks. EXISTING OUTTAKES There are demos/outtakes of the following tracks still in existence:
Bobblehat As well as outtakes from 'Anti Everything' (instrumental), 'Six' (instrumental) and 'Legacy' (rough). Click here to listen to the demos. 'Dr Funkoffski' became 'Fall Out'. 'Dr Funkoffski' was the working title of 'Fall Out' because I'd programmed the drum machine and worked on it up in my studio in the attic and I felt like the character from the TV show 'Fame' called Bruno who also had a musical laboratory in the show. I had my Linn Drum machine, a Casio VL Tone (which was the first keyboard I'd ever owned) as well as a few other odds and sods. In the show 'Fame', Bruno wrote a song about his music teacher, Mr Shorofsky. As my drum programming was aping back to a bootleg of a Prince demo 'Irresistible Bitch' which was a Minneapolis Sound drum machine driven funk version of the track and not like the finished release, then it was settled. The track I was about to embark on would have the working title 'Dr Funkoffski'. The outtake is the unedited backing track I worked out with Andie, I cut some his drumming and my drum machine out to make the song work over the top. I gave Andie a plan where to drop real drums in, in between my drum programming and we had a rhythmic crimp off with me on my Linn 1 drum machine and Andie on his kit. You can hear me joining in on acoustic guitar trying to outdo Chad's bum note on 'Inverse Midas'. I think it was a score draw. I put my guitars thru the Mutator and Bel flanger as you can hear. Then put my acoustic guitar thru the bel flanger after it was recorded, moving the speed of the 'flange' round. Actual footage from the attic of me writing 'Dr Funkoffski'. 'Bobblehat' became 'Inverse Midas' but was known as 'Bobblehat' because Chad wore a bobblehat when writing and recording it. I think I came up with the title 'Inverse Midas' from the lyrics. This is absolutely true. 'Cancer' was known as 'Pentagram' as a pisstake in the studio because it had 6 different songs in 1. 10. SIX TOUR There was always shit going down on the tours and live appearances, amps going off, concerts and festivals not played, and it really didn't matter if I had 2, 4, 6, 8 or 10 monitors, all I ever got was bloody bass thru 'em anyway. Of course it all made sense many years later, but to go through all those events really was one step forward and two steps backwards. The gigs just petered out over time as it just became impossible to tour with all these events occurring. One night I was even close to choking to death on stage. We only did a few dozen shows after the 'Six' tour. During the 'Six' tour we went right round the UK and Europe, the Far East, Japan and one big gig in Hong Kong, but we never got back to the US, 'Six' was just too weird. By the time we reached the final date of the whole tour in Oxford the whole thing collapsed. 5 minutes before going on stage we had to abandon the concert. Silly that nobody would tell me why, it was all too cryptic, as things would have been so much different. We never did get to play the whole album live, and of course, there'll be no more greatest hits tours for the devotees. We taped the shows to capture the live performances for a DVD release after the tour had finished. That idea petered out along with everything else after the 'Six' tour. We included some unedited footage from Brixton Academy on the 'Legacy' singles collection released in 2006. Here you can see ' The Chad Who Loved Me' and ' Being a Girl'. We compiled a whole set of rushes for the DVD of the 'Six' Tour. It was filmed by Grant Gee who made the excellent Radiohead documentary, 'Meeting People Is Easy'. We recorded all the sound onto 2" tape and the unmixed taped remains unreleased. Here is our live performance of 'The Chad Who Loved Me' at Shea Stadium in 1966. 11. VIDEOS There were 4 promotional videos made for the 'Six' album. The most successful video we'd made at that point was the 'Taxloss' video which we didn't appear in. We were away touring and couldn't fit making a video into our schedule. When the video treatment for 'Legacy' was submitted I thought it would be a good idea to continue with this theme of not appearing in the videos ourselves. Instead we would make a series of short films to accompany the singles. The 'Legacy' video was a sarcastic dig at the whole idea of making a pop video, and being a band in general. It was surprisingly true to real life. It's been copied a few times since. Next came the 'Being a Girl' promo video. The campest video ever made, hilarious! A young Danny Dyer appears in this video. Third up was the video for 'Negative'. This was shot in the style of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. The way the title comes up at the start is great, very Hitchcock. Quite a scary video too. We were asked to appear in the video for the last single, a re-recording from the album version of the title track 'Six'. So people knew what we looked like! The re-recording of the record was produced by Arthur Baker. We went for a totally sparse video, and parodied Stanley Dorfman's videos for David Bowie's 'Be My Wife' for the main part of the track and 'Heroes' with the middle 8 section. 12. LIFE AFTER SIX The repercussions for the band after these sessions were far reaching and the sequence of events that unfolded from the sessions eventually led to the band's demise. The band weren't happy working with me in my capacity as a producer of the music. With hindsight I realise it's very difficult to have someone in a band trying to produce that same band. I had always tried to work round that. Mansun had started as my control room project, everyone was happy to go along with that until that method of working made the band successful. Then attitudes changed. I gave up the reigns after the 'Six' sessions, I had no choice, I was ousted, and we brought in an outside producer for the next record. Hugh Padgham was brought in and the record had to be recorded as a four piece for the first time (as opposed to all the recordings in this blog which were recorded as a three piece with me producing/co-producing). We recorded the whole album as a four piece but the recordings were rejected. We re-recorded it from scratch as a three piece with Hugh Padgham producing and that was the release version. After 'Little Kix' Cliff Norrell had been brought in to produce the band next, and I had been relegated to just rhythm guitar and vocals by this time. Everyone seemed much happier, pleased even, even though things were going downhill rapidly. Everyone in the band wanted different things from it. We went from recording as a three piece to a four piece again. Of course none of these recordings got released, they were rejected. So we were getting deeper and deeper into the shit because the band just weren't happy with the way the first two albums were made, and we had to find yet another way to work. A compromise was struck, I would be reinstated as a producer but we would have to record live as a four piece. Richard Rainey, U2's engineer, was brought in to co-produce with me. We did 3 weeks recording as a four piece. It didn't work. Finally, finally, we went back to recording as a three piece with me producing with Richard. So right back to the start of the 'Six' sessions. These final recordings you can hear on the album 'Kleptomania' which was released after we split. It was the finest body of music we had made. Before we had chance to finish 'Kleptomania', it became apparent that members of the band weren't happy about going back to how we'd recorded 'Attack of the Grey Lantern' and 'Six'. This caused a lot of tension during the sessions and the relationships fractured during the final couple of weeks of recording the album. We had to disband Mansun as there was simply no way to record any material happily as a band. The 'Kleptomania' album was released a year after we split. It remains to this day, and was released, unfinished. 13. OUTRO I never regret anything about that band or even look back these days. I wrote about that in the track 'These Days' as the band drew to its inevitable conclusion. That song, which was an honest assessment of how I'd come to feel about being in a rock n roll band, is in fact part of a bigger set of songs, the unfinished 'Kleptomania', that lyrically chronicles the death of a rock n roll band in real time, I just didn't know it at the time. Although I like the fact that we ended our recorded output on what I think is my best and most positive lyric, 'Good intentions Heal the Soul'. There's a lesson for you. I guess I spread myself too thin during those recording sessions, Jack of all trades, master of none, but in the end none of that really mattered. Because in the end your whole life turns on very small events, not the big ones. A conversation here, a phone call there, a wrong decision here, not taking someones advice there, not telling someone something somewhere else etc... As relationships break down people just don't see it. As time passes people start to see things as they really were. They just couldn't see it before. You see there was a lot of irony in those first 2 Mansun albums, but rock n roll and irony just don't mix, people don't get it. (Except for Achtung Baby, of course.) People might rediscover 'Six' one day, but for now, to all those people who love the record, to all the people who tell me to this day it's their favourite record, to all those people who came and loved the tour, then cheers to you all and long may it continue! The tour itself was tortuous but still voted tour of the year in Melody Maker (which is the only accolade we ever got, apart from that fucking Jo Malone candle). I suppose even the front cover's stuck over time. As for being the biggest cult band ever, or 'Six' being the biggest cult record ever, well that's shat, it just means you didn't shift as many units as Oasis. So it begs the question. What the fuck is 'Six'? What do I make of 'Six'? Well my personal belief is that it's essentially, at the core, just a rock n roll record. Because whatever it took, whatever the cost, I did exactly what I truly believed in. You've got to get out there and whatever they throw at you, get that fucking record made and get the shows done. That to me embodies the true spirit of rock n roll. It didn't matter how many amps blew up, monitors broke, bottles came flying over, collapsing mic stands. You never did get me off that stage. Sometimes I even have a little chuckle about all those events, firstly coz I lived to tell the tale of 'Six', the tour and the repercussions, but I suppose some things are best left firmly in the past. So all that remains to be said is this: Dust off your old copy of 'Six'. Stick it in the CD player and sit back and listen. When Tom Baker comes on, just take it out of the tray, flip the disk over, flip it over again, put it back in, and put side 2 on. Sit back, crack open a beer and listen again... So, as it's apt at the moment. Viva Rock n Roll! Viva 'Six'! Be seeing you...... |