Shiver to Comformity

You have to love a bit of career suicide, and the music business is full of bands who over-reached themselves on tricky second albums or in attempts to move towards artistic credibility. After all, not everyone can be like the Beatles and go from Love Me Do to Tomorrow Never Knows in the space of a few years.

Sometimes there's heroic 'failures', though. In 1998, Mansun were a pretty hip band after their debut album Attack of The Grey Lantern had topped the UK album charts on the back of fine singles such as Wide Open Space and Taxloss. Singer/songwriter Paul Draper also give the album a vaguely prog-rock feel by ensuring the whole album had no pauses between songs and putting in characters in several songs.

For the follow-up, Six, he took his progressive ideas to another level. Lead single Legacy made the top 10 despite being over six minutes long and featuring lyrics like "all relationships and emptying and temporary" and "nobody cares when you're gone". But even this seemed like a conventional pop song compared to the rest of the album.

From the cover alone, accusations of Mansun turning totally prog were always going to be on the cards. Featuring plenty of pictorial references to the songs - especially to the TV show The Prisoner - it wouldn't have looked totally out of place on a Marillion album, especially with the tracklisting putting the album into "Part One" and "Part Two" with an interlude inbetween.

The opening title track would have just added to it: despite a great chorus, it turns from being a fairly atypical (albeit excellent) indie-pop song into something very different with the direction shifting a good couple of times (at least) and leading to the refrain "life is a compromise anyway". Listeners less prepared may be eased a bit by the following Negative, which follows a slightly more easy-to-grasp structure whilst rocking like a bastard.

From here, however, it all gets a bit weird. Shotgun namechecks Winnie the Pooh, Anti-Everything architect Richard Rogers and Cancer commentates on Christianity, with the slightly bizarre line "I've been emotionally raped by Jesus".

The 'interlude', Witness to a Muder (Part Two) is guitarist Dominic Chad's song about the last minutes of the life of Brian Jones, of whom he was long obsessed with. Narrated by Tom Baker (in the days before he became hip again), it works surprisingly well as a break amongst the noise of the other songs.

Part Two features only four songs, but they're great ones. Television is loud and Special/Blown It (Delete As Appropriate) may well be Draper's confession of what the album would do to his career, singing that "I've blown everything I've ever done, I've fucked it up, shot my load". The theme continues with Legacy, with "I wouldn't care if I was washed up tomorrow" being slightly apt given the reception Six would get from many critics.

It ends with Being a Girl, which sees Draper muse that "Being a boy's like sucking on a lemon... I feel like being a girl/Being a girl, and my life never tasted sweeter". It's a barking track on which to end the album, which is probably appropriate enough.

Though Six made the top 10 and went Gold in the UK, it perhaps alienated enough people that when the more straight-forward Little Kix followed in 2000, a lot of people had lost interest. It was later revealed that the band had been forced to compromise by the record company on several songs and they subsequently broke up after aborted sessions for a further album.

The strangest part of listening to Six is that I bought Legacy when it came out and I had loved Attack of the Grey Lantern at the time, but I never got round to buying this album until very recently. In a way, I reckon I wouldn't have been able to appreciate the subtleties of Six when I was 17 or so. It's a sprawling album that is occasionally a mess but also bears repeated listens to reveals the brilliance within. I reckon it could well be a work of genius that outstrips OK Computer as the best British rock album of the late 1990s.