Manic Street Preachers

Manic Street Preachers are just such an odd band and their mix in terms of visuals, influences, attitudes, myths and a fanatical fanbase is often more interesting than their music.

Like Primal Scream, they know their music history and Pop culture inside out and have really thought about the kind of band they want to be, and what they need to do to make it work.

They’re also living proof that great music can come from small towns; where music and schemes are hatched in teenage bedrooms as a reaction to the small town mentality around them.

The Manics story is bound to small town Wales just as tightly as their music influences were to the iconic cities and Pop moments like The Clash’s London 77, Public Enemy’s New York and Guns ‘n’ Roses LA.

They formed in 86 while James Dean Bradfield, his cousin Sean Moore and Nicky Wire were still at school in Blackwood. Richey Edwards designed the cover of their first single Suicide Alley and would provide lyrics, do the driving and when he eventually joined the band he would mime his guitar parts.

New Art Riot (it even sounds like a Malcolm McClaren/Situationalist quote) was released on Damaged Goods in 1990 and in 1991 Motown Junk was released on Heavenly. Seven inches of sacred cow kicking, from it’s title to the line “I laughed when Lennon was shot”.

The Manics early interviews were shotgun blasts against the world. The band were fiercely and proudly literate. Books, films, history and philosophy were mixed in with Clash style posturing and trousers.

Gigs were 20 minute affairs of confrontation and audience baiting. All other contemporary British bands were fair game for a Manics slagging. The only bands that mattered were Guns ‘n’ Roses and Public Enemy and the Manics line was they were going to make an album as good as Appetite For Destruction, sell out Wembley and then implode.

Even the album sleeve was originally going to be made of sandpaper....to both destroy the record inside it and those around it.

They had great ideas, (or at least an exciting rehash of other people’s) great quotes and great song titles like You Love Us, NatwestBarclaysMidlandLloyds. They looked the part too, with their white jeans and spray painted slogans.

Stocky shouter and guitar hammerer Bradfield, Nicky Wire tall and gangly, bass slung low and dangly. Drummer Sean Moore always looked like he would rather be wearing an anorak and anorexic Richey Edwards dressed up as Marilyn Munroe for a video and carved “4 Real” on his arm during an interview forcing the cancellation of a gig at the Barrel Organ. Seventeen stitches worth of sincerity. It’s not a good look.

This was a band careering ahead, in all senses of the word. They weren’t cosying up to the established Indie Press values but they were generating headlines and controversy.

They were shouting about how many records they wanted to sell, but even as they wrote for Kylie and got Porn star Traci Lords to sing on Little Baby Nothing they were still dream material for the music press (after all here’s a band who can actually string a sentence together) and also for any teenage sensitive types who felt different, alienated or indeed as if they might have read a book.

The band from the Welsh bedroom with an eye on the stadium had got all bases covered, bedroom Metal heads and bedroom poets.

The first album was released in 1992. Generation Terrorists was sprawling, chaotic Punky Metal with some surprisingly MOR touches. That’s the thing with the band, despite their Stormtrooper interviews there have always been those blander moments.

On Motorcycle Emptiness for example there’s the full Gun ‘n’ Roses guitar wig out but underneath it there is the stuttering drum pattern that all the Indie Dance Acts of the time were using and a piano cascade that sounds like the Baywatch theme tune.

1993’s Gold Against The Soul has got From Despair To Where. Released as a single it hits the G ‘n’R target straight on. It’s got ambition, a great title, soaring riff, terrific vocal (helped by the fact that it’s not Axl Rose) and a massive orchestra. The other single La Tristesse Durera is based on a Van Gogh quote and has a really tight focused sound under a powerful vocal.

The Holy Bible came out in 94 as Richey’s health and personal problems developed into full blown Unhappy Bunny Syndrome and he was admitted to The Priory for treatment for anorexia and alcoholism. (When he took a razorblade to his arm was he actually trying to write “4 Real Ale”?)

He supplied the majority of the albums lyrics and titles such as 4st 7lbs, She is Suffering, The Intense Humming Of Evil, Of Walking Abortion, Mausoleum and Archives Of Pain have been cropping up as radio requests for swoony lovers ever since.

The band appeared on Top Of The Pops to promote Faster. The unlikeliness of the opening line as Bradfield barks “I am an architect” made more surreal given the fact that he was wearing a paramilitary style balaclava.

Richey Edwards disappeared on February 1st 1995 leaving his car near the Severn Bridge and has not been seen since. On a Pop History level, the whole Richey saga, his personality, disappearance and resonance with the more damaged elements of their fanbase, just adds to the uniqueness of The Manic Street Preachers as a Pop proposition

The band came back in 1996 with the Everything Must Go album, containing 4 of Edwards’s lyrics and the anthemic A Design For Life. You’ve got to love a song with the opening line “Libraries gave us power.”

For many people the subsequent albums This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (1998), Know Your Enemy (2001) and Lifeblood (2004) have been less impressive.

However the Spanish Civil War single If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next reached number 1 in the Pop Charts in 1998. Just say that sentence again...that’s why the Manics are a good thing...they’ve got lyrical ambition and are not being constrained by a Pop formula or subject matter. In 2000 the limited edition instantly deleted single Masses Against The Classes also reached number one. Both Bradfield and Wire released solo albums last year.

Manics fans are exceptional in their obsessiveness, loyalty and Manics related trivia hoovering, but they do get out of chatrooms to go to the gigs and buy the records. Doubtless they’ll do the same for the forthcoming tour and album Send Away The Tigers. Super salesman Slick Nick Wire has guaranteed “Springsteenesque long sets, working class rage, make up and dumb Punk fun.” I believe him too.