Paul Draper

Former Mansun man vents his spleen against former bandmates.

In this magazine’s 2014 list of The 100 Greatest Prog Albums Of All Time, there, beside the inevitable classics by Yes, Genesis, ELP and King Crimson, was Six, the madcap multi-section masterpiece by Mansun, one place ahead of Radiohead’s

OK Computer. Radiohead’s third album might have earned the plaudits, but it’s Mansun’s follow-up to their chart-topping 1997 debut Attack Of The Grey

Lantern that has become the cult favourite among prog musicians. Steven Wilson

(who has recorded two tracks with Draper) extolled its virtues in Prog, while Public Service Broadcasting proclaimed it their favourite album of all time. Even Radiohead believed Mansun were the better, more adventurous outfit.

“When Ed O’Brien [guitar] picked up an award for OK Computer, he said, ‘I feel really bad about this because Attack Of The Grey Lantern was the real musical achievement this year,’” notes Paul Draper, who was so blitzed by the fallout from Six that he’s still recovering. “Then Colin [Greenwood, bass] said he went to the mastering suite in secret to hear Six and said, ‘There’s no way we can beat that.’”

Draper himself struggled to match Six

– or rather, he was stymied by the rest of the band, management and label, EMI. There was one more album, 2000’s more conventional Little Kix, and a fourth was attempted (the aborted sessions became the posthumous 2004 release Kleptomania). But a clash of musical approaches (Draper wanted to pursue his vision while the others, he claims, intended to become a glorified jam band) and intra-band tensions caused by drugs and financial malpractice brought proceedings to a violent close.

“It all turned to shit,” Draper told this writer in 2006. He was still so incensed that he refused to name his bandmates. “We sacked the bass player, who’d been taking hundreds of thousands from our account. When we confronted him, he broke down on the MANSUN’S ACCLAIMED floor, crying, ‘I’m ATTACK OF THE GREY evil, I need help.’ LANTERN (1997) AND

“I tried to keep SIX (1998) ALBUMS. it together and, in 2003, we booked the house [St Catherine’s Court, near Bath] where Radiohead recorded OK Computer,” he recalls, back in the present, of Mansun’s dark, final days. Things got so twisted they even found themselves having a séance “with a load of witches from Somerset”, during which they were gifted psychic drawings and Draper “nearly shat himself” when a massive log fell off the fire, causing a black cat to launch itself into mid-air.

The atmosphere was, by all accounts, murderous. One night it “all kicked off” after several of the band broke into the wine cellar, picked out the best bottle of champagne and “got twatted”. There was, as a result, “a lot of shouting and aggro”, culminating in guitarist Dominic Chad punching his hand into a brick wall and winding up in hospital on a morphine drip. As for Draper, he stormed out of the studio after he was “headbutted in the face” by one of the band.

In the immediate aftermath, the stress of it all made him ill – not just emotionally (“People were saying I was a delusional paranoid schizophrenic”) but physically: he got a malignant tumour and had to have five courses of radiation therapy before having it cut out. The repercussions linger to this day.

“There were knives involved, the police were involved – a lot of stuff,” he says. “That [series of violent altercations] was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. It goes a lot deeper than that.”

Does he care to elucidate?

“I can’t,” he says, “for legal reasons.” Draper was so traumatised by the events of 1996-2003 – most of Mansun’s duration – that he withdrew into writing and production for other artists. It wasn’t until he teamed up with Catherine Anne Davies, aka Catherine AD, that he made his tentative first steps back into the limelight. The pair worked on The Anchoress project, winner of Prog’s Best Newcomer at the

2016 awards, recording Davies’ Confessions Of A Romance Novelist album and a couple of EPs for Draper (2016’s One and Two).

And now he’s issuing his debut solo album, Spooky Action, comprising material he’s been amassing since the death of Mansun. If Confessions… saw Davies sing and write the lion’s share with some input from Draper, this flips the script: it’s his mordant vocals (with some backing vocals from Davies) and his songs, seven of them co-written with Davies. It’s a superb partnership – think Fleetwood Mac’s Buckingham-Nicks, only “without the fucking and cocaine” (see panel) – with a fractious dynamic that works.

It has certainly teased a riveting album out of Draper: an exorcism of sorts, as he rids himself of the negativity that has been consuming him for this past decade or so. The titles – Jealousy Is A Powerful Emotion, Friends Make The Worst Enemies, You Don’t Really Know Someone, Til You

Fall Out With Them – offer hints as to the contents. The lyrics, peppered with references to ‘imploding’ and ‘destruction’, provide further clues: it’s the lexicon of loathe writ large.

The music, meanwhile, is all angry guitars and vicious, viscous synths, sounding like someone slashing and burning their way through the Mansun catalogue. That’s hardly surprising considering the instruments employed – Minimoogs, Prophet 5s, Les Pauls – were borrowed from a collector whose hobby is tracing the gear Mansun used on their records and buying it back.

“It’s the weirdest cycle of connection,” Draper says cheerily at the offices of his new label, Kscope, home of The Anchoress, Anathema, Ian Anderson and others.

“I didn’t go looking to be a solo artist – I didn’t think I had it in me. I thought, ‘I’m out of the game here.’”