Attack Of The Grey Lantern

Product Information

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. They released four classic albums – Attack of the Grey Lantern (1997), Six (1998), Little Kix (2000) and the compilation Kleptomania following the band’s split – as well as a popular and now rare series of EPs.

Never did get to see them live before they split, which is a real shame because I've heard that they put on a great live show.In the US, Mansun enjoyed their only chart success with "Wide Open Space" reaching the modest position of No. The following three singles ("Stripper Vicar", " Wide Open Space", " She Makes My Nose Bleed") all made the top forty each improving of the previous singles' chart position. 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. Due to fan-driven popular demand, Paul then played an ambitious second solo tour in early 2018, performing Spooky Action as well as Attack of the Grey Lantern.

Being a huge Prince fan, I loved the way he wrote, produced and played all the instruments on a track, this was the first commercially released track I got to do all that on. There aren't that many metal artists or albums that I care for that much, but ISIS is certainly a band that I do enjoy a lot.

Wide Open Space" became a dance anthem after being remixed by DJ and producer Paul Oakenfold under the production alias Perfecto.

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. Can someone create a new listing for this one please as I care not interfere in official Discogs entries, sorry ? 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. 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. This special 21st anniversary vinyl edition comes as two LPs in gatefold packaging featuring the iconic 'roses' cover art.After we added the strings to the beginning of the track it started to sound like a James Bond theme, so we changed its title to something slightly more humorous. This was the earliest song I wrote for the album, you can tell from the lyric it’s from an earlier, more naive me. I wouldn't have a cape, but there are definitely characters on the record – Albert Taxloss, Chad, Dark Mavis. 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. It doesn’t make sense in this era of streaming and the resurgence of vinyl, however the idea of this track is to reinforce the idea that the album was a skit of a conceptual record, not in fact one itself, which is obviously a paradox, which my younger self would have thought hilarious.

Well, The Grey Lantern is like a comic-book hero – the album is about this village of people with really disgusting morals and the Grey Lantern sorts them out. The Kscope label has acquired the band's impressive catalogue and are creating a deluxe reissue series that delves into a treasure trove of previously unreleased audio and visual material. 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. The title was elongated as it seemed to earnest and this whole track was the most long winded and complicated to finish on the album. Panopticon is definitely their best album in my opinion, but the rest of their discography is worth a listen (in particular the almost equally fantastic Oceanic album).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.