Mansun's Slipping Away

Eternal outsiders Mansun are to release their last ever single next month amidst news that the band are writing together again.

‘Slipping Away’ will be released on September 20, preceding the release of the band’s ‘lost’ fourth album ‘Kleptomania’, out on September 27. 

As previously reported, ‘Kleptomania’ didn’t receive a release after the band slip in 2002. However, fan base pressure has led to its release. The album will now be released a 3-CD collection of 37 tracks, all complied and annotated by frontman Paul Draper.

‘Kleptomania’ features non album singles, EP only tracks, B-sides, rarities and previously unreleased material from 1995-2003. The album also comes with a 32 page booklet featuring rare and unseen photos, discography and sleeve notes on all tracks by Draper.

“We went into the studio to start a new album and it just took forever,” said Draper of the forthcoming album. “I don't think, any of us, our hearts were really in it. Everything was taking ages to do and we didn’t have any perspective on whether it was any good or not. We didn¹t want to get in the situation we
had with the last album, where we put out an album we didn¹t believe in. It just disintegrated over a weekend at the last session where we all sat down and went “this just isn’t happening, why is it taking a week to record a song whereas in the past we’d do it in four hours?”. It became very soul-destroying in the end. We thought it was the music but it wasn’t, it was us as people. The band was dead.”

“I was shocked when Parlophone called me up and said “we’re still gonna put this record out”,” he continued. “I said “well there’s no band, how can you put a record out with no band?” That’s usually reserved for dead rock icons and albums found in a vault. People thought the album was finished, I think, so we had to explain that the sessions hadn’t gone that great and it wasn't finished, but in retrorospect I did think the stuff was really good and an improvement on the record we’d previously made and well worth putting out. It’s coming out in a form that I guess the 3000 people who signed the petition for its release would want to hear.”

“There’s something new in the future,” Paul lets slip. “We've been writing together. We don’t know what it is yet because it still hurts, the splitting up of Mansun. It seems mad us getting together and doing another project because essentially Mansun was me and Chad sitting down in a room and me writing songs and him coming up with parts and arrangements. That was the core of it, so it seems mad that we’re still doing stuff but not under the name. We may work with another singer, we may not.”