Attack Of The Grey Lantern

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The next day I came back and Ronnie Stone, our engineer / producer said to me the verse vocal was weak so I re-recorded it and that was the only change from the track that was completed in a day.

Written in the form of a letter from the transvestite vicar to his daughter, it sort of deepens the plot of the album’s narrative a bit before it’s all resolved on the final track, Dark Mavis. Back in the high days of Britpop, Mansun released an album that sat askew from the pervading happy-go-lucky spirit of the times. I remember being off my tits in Ibiza when Paul Oakenfold’s ‘Wide Open Space’ remix came on in Pacha and it blew me away. It was our early formula before we developed as a band and this was probably the best of the bunch of our early demos.

Created in May 2008 to provide a home for the growing post-progressive genre and an evolving, flexible and adventurous style of music without boundaries.

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. 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. I always thought the chords and melody movement were really complex on this song and I can only imagine they’ll make a West End musical out of it in the end, which would be a suitable ending to the life of this record I think. I was planning ahead and already had the idea of a skit on a concept record already written down, this song does what it says on the tin and describes a particularly debauched night in the life of the characters on the record. The audio has been fully remastered from the original master tapes by long-time Mansun collaborator P-Dub (Björk).

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.