Mansun have announced details of a super-deluxe reissue of their hugely ambitious second album, SIX.
Released little over a year after their No. 1 debut album, Mansun’s SIX was nothing less than a revelation. Arriving at the tail end of the Britpop era, SIX was a hugely ambitious spiralling, sprawling record that charted in the Top 10 on release and spawned four Top 40 singles.
Concept driven and spanning myriad genres, SIX was a record out of time made by a band at the peak of their creative powers – a collection of songs that fizzed with ideas and inspirations and fused elements of pop, electronica and progressive rock to Tchaikovsky sample, electronic drums and spooky synth lines. Lyrically, the songs referenced religious scepticism, gender dysphoria, Winnie the Pooh, L. Ron Hubbard, Stanley Kubrick, Orwell, Marxism and that most iconic TV show, the Prisoner. On top of all of that, the record featured a spoken word section from the legendary fourth Doctor Who – Tom Baker. The end result is a 70 minute, twelve-track brain warp, a record that would set Mansun apart from their peers forever.
SIX has been fully remastered from the original master tapes by Jon Astley (Van Morrison, The Who, George Harrison, Norah Jones, Rolling Stones). The standard CD comes with a bonus track of outtakes from the Tom Baker recording sessions. The deluxe version of SIX comes with a treasure trove of bonus material including one disc of outtakes, demos and rarities and a disc featuring The Dead Flowers Reject – a fan-generated bootleg album featuring favourite B sides from the SIX era.
Mansun were Paul Draper (vocals, guitars, studio), Dominic Chad (guitars, piano, harpsichord), Stove King (bass) and Andie Rathbone (drums). One of the most iconic and innovative British bands of the late 90s, they signed to the legendary record label Parlophone (home to The Beatles, Radiohead and Sigur Ros) in 1996. They released three albums – Attack of the Grey Lantern (1997), SIX (1998) and Little Kix (2000) and one posthumous compilation, Klepto
SIX formats and tracklisting:
CD – 21st-anniversary CD edition with a 12-page booklet with extra track: Tom Baker isolated vocal session
Vinyl – limited 2×12” 180g heavyweight coloured vinyl edition in a gatefold sleeve.
Deluxe 4-Disc book – three CDs featuring the remastered album in full, a disc of demos, rarities & outtakes, and the b-side album The Dead Flowers Reject. Also contains a DVD featuring SIX mixed in 5.1 surround sound mix (DTS 96/24 5.1 and Dolby Digital AC3 5.1) by long-time collaborator P-Dub; a hi-resolution stereo audio (24bit/48kHz Linear PCM) and all of the album’s original promotional videos. It also comes with a 48-page hardback book featuring sleeve notes by journalist and long-time fan Paul Lester alongside notes on the album from the band’s Paul Draper (including foreword, analysis of the cover art, track-by-track descriptions for the CD extras and an album overview of The Dead Flowers Reject).
