Release date
November 25, 1996
Label
Parlophone
Recorded
Parr Street Studio, 1996
Length
4:31
“Wide Open Space” is a song by Mansun, released as a single on 25 November 1996. The song was the lead track of Four EP. The single’s success led to alternative versions appearing on four of the next five Mansun singles. These versions were one live, one acoustic, and two remixes, the first and most popular by Perfecto, and a NRG version by The Trouser Enthusiasts. A completely different version credited to longtime engineer Mike Hunter was included as a hidden bonus track on their compilation Kleptomania. The song also appears on The Sound of Gran Turismo, a soundtrack album based on Gran Turismo.
Singer Paul Draper said, “I struggled for 6 months to find the lyrics from this song, I eventually got them from absorbing someone talking on TV which gave me the title, then I painted the imagery around that.”
About Four EP – Wide Open Space
“Wide Open Space” was not the group’s most successful single in terms of sales or UK chart position – reaching number 15 in the UK Singles Chart – but propelled the group’s career and is their best-known song. It was also the only single that gained significant exposure in the US, reaching number 25 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart in 1997. Paul Draper later wrote that he was the sole writer and performer of the song. In the liner notes of Legacy: Best Of, Draper explained having recorded the entire song sans the vocals six months before he wrote the lyrics.
Two videos were filmed to promote the single. The first, directed by Paul Cunningham, features the band playing in a small dilapidated room while Martino Lazzeri (Joe Williams from BBC’s Grange Hill) walks around the London areas of Soho, St Paul’s Cathedral on Ludgate Hill, and Highgate Cemetery, alienated and paranoid, amid vampiresque overtones. A second, simpler video was recorded for the US market, directed by Nigel Dick.
“Wide Open Space” became a dance anthem after being remixed by DJ and producer Paul Oakenfold (under the production alias Perfecto). This remix was included on Oakenfold’s compilation Resident: Two Years of Oakenfold at Cream, sealing its status as one of the most played songs at major UK nightclub Cream, as well as in nightclubs around the world, over the 1997–1999 period.
“I thought ‘Wide Open Space’ was in the running for best single of last year,” remarked Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien in 1997. “They’ve got loads of ideas and they don’t sound like us at all. They’re supposed to be part of that ‘New Grave’ thing with us and the Manics, aren’t they? Everything that article said was true: we all did have long overcoats and dodgy haircuts in the ’80s.”