Mansun - Legacy

by Chloe Kiely

No other band has ever looked as good in eyeliner

"The oh-so-familiar ‘Wide Open Space’ follows, and no matter how many times you’ve heard those opening strains before, you just try and stop the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end. "

Back in the mid-nineties, a generation of angst-ridden teens fervently listened to grandiose tunes from a bunch of made-up Cheshire outcasts called Mansun. These kids were a smidgen too young to have fully appreciated the Richie Edwards hero-worship of previous years, so for them Mansun became their Manics. And, like barnacles stuck to a ship full of misunderstood glam-rock pirates, how they clung to them!

Even though the group disbanded in 2003, their incredibly loyal fanbase remain today. A listen to ‘Legacy’ shows you why. At a time when their contemporaries were churning out identikit Britpop, Mansun were bravely creating a sound more influenced by 70's prog rock stylings and pop sensibilities. The beautifully honest ‘I Can Only Disappoint U’ – perhaps the only real epic from their third album – opens the album and paves the way for a role call of all the classics.

The oh-so-familiar ‘Wide Open Space’ follows, and no matter how many times you’ve heard those opening strains before, you just try and stop the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end. Paul Draper’s operatic tones soar across everything from ‘She Makes My Nose Bleed’ to ‘The Chad Who Loved Me’, while multi-layered guitars make for the band’s signature sound of otherworldliness. But there’s plenty more to enjoy besides this sonic excess: a penchant for witty tales of perversion and hypocracy like ‘Stripper Vicar’ are a joy.

On the downside, unless you’re one of the hardcore, a seventeen-track album demands a lot from a listener. Some, like ‘Negative’, feel like fillers while others, such as the snarly, joyless ‘Taxloss’, just haven’t aged well.

But with a back catalogue that’s as daringly inspirational and unconstrained by genre as this, it’s obvious that it still stands up today. Plus it’s a fact that no other band has ever looked as good in eyeliner. Not even The Manics. And that’s not a bad legacy to leave either.

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