Trivia / Mansun

• Bad Export for You: The US version of Six has an altered tracklisting, dropping the tracks "Witness To A Murder, Part 2" and "Inverse Midas", as well as replacing the full eight minute version of the title track with the much shorter (and inferior) three minute Arthur Baker rerecording that was used for the single release of the track, as well as replacing the Design Student's Orgasm original artwork to something much more minimal.
  • A much more minor example of this applied to Attack Of The Grey Lantern, which had its tracklisting rearranged for the US release, and had the song "Stripper Vicar" replaced with "Take It Easy, Chicken".
  • Another minor case: the US video for "Wide Open Space" was a basic performance video with cheesy effects. The UK original, meanwhile, was a more appropriately moody video about a vampire roaming about a city in the dead of night, ultimately committing Suicide by Sunlight at the end.
• Creator Killer: When Andie Rathbone was asked in 2005 why Mansun split up, he simply replied "Little Kix".
• Executive Meddling: Some pretty extreme examples of this during the recording of Little Kix, such as Paul Draper, who had produced the band's two previous albums being forcefully replaced with Hugh Padgham as producer, the label forcing Paul to tone down the Black Comedy of his lyrics and forcing the band as a whole to make much more "independent local radio friendly" music. This ultimately led to the demise of the band.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Attack of The Grey Lantern has had this twice; first in 2010 and most recently in 2018.
  • As of 2019, Six now has one.
• Troubled Production: Little Kix for the aforementioned reasons.
  • Kleptomania arguably counts too, considering the band split up while recording it.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Around the time of the release of Attack Of The Grey Lantern, Paul Draper mentioned working on a sequel album entitled Return Of The Grey Lantern.
  • Attack Of The Grey Lantern itself was intended to have been a much more fully developed and story-driven Concept Album instead of the loose story and character-songs the final album ended up as.
  • While Kleptomania was mostly completed by the time the band broke up and it was released, there were still some tracks left unfinished, which remain unreleased.
  • Little Kix initially had much more of the experimental sound and Black Comedy lyrics typical of the band, before the aforementioned Executive Meddling forced Paul Draper to tone down the lyrics and the band to make the album more commercial.
  • Fearing that the record label might reject Six for being too uncommercial, the band recorded an "insurance policy" album featuring more accessible material entitled The Dead Flowers Reject. Thankfully, the record label accepted Six, so most of the TDFR tracks ended up as Six B Sides, although Paul Draper had always planned to release them as a full album, initially as part of Kleptomania, but the band disintegrated before he could. The Dead Flowers Reject finally got a proper release for record store day 2020, with Draper stating "it probably would have been my favourite Mansun album" due to it being very close to how the band played live.
• Word of God: Draper has said that Attack Of The Grey Lantern isn't a full concept album with a coherent story, but was intended to be before he "lost his nerve".

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