Paul Draper has insisted there was “never” a plan to reunite Mansun with his new project.
The Wide Open Space hitmaker has revisited his group’s back catalogue for his latest record, Mansun Retold – which features acoustic reworkings of the band’s songs – and he always viewed the album as a solo offering rather than exploring the chance to get back in the studio with Stove King, Andie Rathbone and Dominic Chad.
Asked if he’d considered a Mansun reunion, he exclusively told ContactMusic.com: “No. No, I think Mansun, we were together for eight years and two years before we got signed, so that was a decade of my life.
“When we split up, we went our own separate ways, that was done and dusted, there was never ever any thought of us getting back together.
“This is a completely separate project from that. This is me, as a solo artist, picking some of my favourite songs and reimagining them with a full acoustic band, this was always the idea of the project, never to get Mansun back together.”
Paul is unsure what his former bandmates make of his take on the songs.
He said: “I’ve no idea how they would react to it really, literally no idea. I might contact Andie the drummer and see what he thinks of it, but I’ve no idea.”
Paul was keen to revisit some of Mansun’s songs because he wasn’t happy with the original finished versions.
He explained: “The main reason is cos I wasn’t too happy with some of the original recordings. We started doing one or two tracks and thought we could put them out as B-sides on my solo stuff.
“The very first track we did was Until the Next Life, the original recording on that we used synth strings and a drum machine and I wanted to get that with a proper drummer and string quartet, it worked out really well.
“We didn’t want to just recreate the songs so we came up with the idea of doing it with a full acoustic band, so acoustic, guitar, acoustic bass, string quartet, and it came from there really. We wanted to improve on the original recordings.”
However, the singer admitted there were some songs they were unable to re-record.
He said: “here’s a couple of songs on Six, Being a Girl Part 2 but the guitar part didn’t translate to an acoustic lead guitar.
“The other one was Legacy, I still play that live as a solo artist now. But when it came to do that in the studio, we had to change the key of it, it was simply too high for my voice to sing these days and it just didn’t work in a lower key.”
Mansun Retold is out now, and Paul is currently on a UK tour playing all of Mansun’s top 40 singles. For more information, visit https://pauldraperofficial.com/