One of the most audacious albums of the ’90s has been remastered for its 21st anniversary
Including the hit singles “Six”, “Being A Girl”, “Legacy” and “Negative”
Released little over a year after their No. 1 debut album, strong>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 Kleptomania. Kscope acquired the band’s catalogue in 2017 and are running a thorough reissue series that delves into a treasure trove of previously unreleased audio and visual material.