(#566: 1 March 1997, 1 week)
Track listing: The Chad Who Loved Me/Mansun's Only Love Song/Taxloss/You, Who Do You Hate?/Wide Open Space/Stripper Vicar/Disgusting/She Makes My Nose Bleed/Naked Twister/Egg Shaped Fred/Dark Mavis/An Open Letter To The Lyrical Trainspotter
The last song on this album offers a fair warning to people like me. In it, Paul Draper suggests that those who spend endless hours analysing what he says are more foolish than he is, but also that those who consider his words "just gobbledy-gook" might be equally dim. This sermon - a fitting term for a semi-concept album which focuses on a deviant man of God - is delivered in broad Scouse over a misleadingly jaunty uptempo romp resembling one of those throwaway Oasis B-sides, although, as he warns us midway through, the music turns progressively weirder, culminating in random piano bangs and odd looped electronic blips.
Since I am a music writer who is far more concerned about how words are sung than what they're about, perhaps I should disqualify myself from the above category. The ambiguity of "Lyrical Trainspotter"'s words may of course indicate a double-bluff and that we should take Mr Draper's lyrics very seriously indeed. But the song's point is absorbed - stop the waffling and simply experience, and hopefully enjoy, what you're hearing.
In 1997 I bought, listened to and loved this album without ever quite knowing why I did (love it). Listening to it again almost twenty-eight years on inevitably lends a different perspective. If blur represented a detonation of Britpop, Attack Of The Grey Lantern - recorded by Blur's then-support act and released on the same (Parlophone) label - celebrates dancing in its debris.
Conceptually Grey Lantern is a florid mess, and I suspect Mansun would not have wanted it otherwise. Its messiness personfies its charm and quite substantial impact. The overall idea was for a superhero-type figure - the Grey Lantern, as it were - who comes across various sordid inhabitants of an English village and tries to put them right; although Draper admitted that the concept "ran out of steam," the album's basic plot does get resolved.
Certainly the village Draper chronicles is a precursor of places like The League Of Gentlemen's Royston Vasey, but the album's ambition, inventiveness and scarcely-suppressed rage is what engage the listener. It is as though Mansun cut up all the elements of Britpop into pieces, tossed them into the air and reassembled them as brightly and expensively as possible. Or simply take it as the benignly rabid ambition of a young band determined to make as elaborate and complete a debut album as possible.
We are never quite sure where Mansun stand musically. The opening orchestral flourishes of "The Chad Who Loved Me" suggest the introduction to The Lexicon Of Love as deeply as they do John Barry, but when Draper's hoarse vocal protests intercept the idyll halfway through, the effect is comparable to the suddenly-unleashed Barry Ryan in the final third of "Eutopia."
It is definitely clear that the group are looking back at key elements of eighties New Pop in what they do. "Mansun's Only Love Song" shimmers very agreeably with Draper's voice at times floating and swimming as high as Billy Mackenzie, like the mirage of a great pop song. But "Taxloss" is a justifiably vicious assault on unregulated capitalism, taking in not just "Taxman" - if anyone is entitled to evoke the Beatles, it's a fellow Liverpudlian - but also early nineties indie-dance (either mix of Paris Angels' "Perfume" will do) before culminating in machine gun fire and air raid sirens ("Two Tribes"! It's a Liverpool thing).
Interludes like "You, Who Do You Love?" disturb with their grinding of elements from mid-period Verve with aggressive hard rock - and if we listen to Draper's delivery of "I wish I could be you" we realise that we have again reached the looking glass stage of things, where we not only look at the group's precedents but also those who will come after them. But more about that in a moment.
At the time the album's two major selling points were the big hits which succeed each other - if not statistically, then in people's hearts. Both "Wide Open Space" and "Stripper Vicar" thrive in the shadow of Tears For Fears - The Hurting and Songs From The Big Chair respectively - but while the first-named of these songs, absolutely exquisite and perfect in its almost bisected despair (you really feel that Draper is singing in two distinct voices) as the world steadily crashes in on the singer's head, its knitting needle guitar/police siren motif and its gigantic chorus, is sui generis despair, with endless delightful small touches in its arrangement (for example, the fractured piano splinters and gusty male voice choir underscoring the final verse), whereas the second (as "Mother's Talk" also managed) is a shamelessly powerful romp through the back gardens of sexual perversity - what a powerful introduction the latter song has, with its initial drum track abruptly joined by a second one (Big Chair's producer Chris Hughes had once been Merrick, of Adam and the Ants). These two songs both come as close as anything to "perfect pop" and get played as avidly and regularly by me today as they did in 1997.
The second half of Grey Lantern continues in a maximalist fashion - songs like "Egg Shaped Fred" and "She Makes My Nose Bleed" are loud and anthemic ("Bring her on DOWN!"). "Disgusting," which features a very Thom Yorkean lead vocal, makes as brilliant a use of bells as Pierre Henry's "Yper Yper" had done thirty years previously, as well as outlining the record's essentially English nature in its deployment of that key English apology for a word, "regretful." Meanwhile, the exemplary hard art-rock of "Naked Twister" - which appears to be about exactly what it sounds like it's about - points its index finger towards the future, for if Draper sounds like anyone, it is a direct precursor to Matt Bellamy, just as Mansun themselves help lay the groundwork for Muse (and, to a lesser extent, bands like My Vitriol). Much like Bellamy, one is not entirely sure what Draper is going on about most of the time, but it doesn't matter because the point is he's going somewhere and you either follow or feel ridiculous.
The big finish (nearly) of "Dark Mavis," where the record's loose plotlines are tied up, makes me think of what a "Hey Jude" written by John Lennon might have sounded like. It is epic, endless and sad - and consider also Vampire Weekend's "Hope," one of last year's most resonant recorded songs - yet also wildly celebratory as hands clap, the strings (great arranging throughout by Stefan Giradet) steadily spiral out of control and synchronisation, and everything settles - with "The Chad Who Loved Me"'s main string line. We finish, Draper's warning coda notwithstanding, where we began.
In some ways Attack Of The Grey Lantern could function as a soundtrack for an episode of Inside No 9; I was in particular thinking of "The 12 Days Of Christine" with Sheridan Smith - its brilliantly frightening use of Andrea Bocelli notwithstanding - as the record might easily represent a "life review" of pop and rock, their histories flashing semi-randomly in our heads before the life disappears forever. Its success as a record again demonstrates that 1997's best number one albums come from those artists who decided just to do what they wanted, and to hell with any consequences. Mansun's second album, 1999's dissolute but fascinating Six, accentuated the art over the rock and doesn't appear in this tale. What happened with both the band and Draper afterwards is outside the scope of this piece. I wanted to concentrate on the Paul Draper of 1997, a gifted autodidact of a songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist (with whom the rest of Mansun just about manage to keep up on this record) with everything still open and welcome to him. I think Grey Lantern is ludicrous, overblown and pretentious - and I mean that trio of adjectives as the highest of compliments.
