Manic Street Preachers : Clasur Neu Methiant

The ultimate "all mouth,no trousers band". Yet when they open their mouths out comes a torrent of shit. "Nicky has the wisdom and grace of the true poets". HAHAHA!! "Napster is evil". You fucking goon. They dismiss America as evil (mainly cos they sell fuck all records there) yet their music is turgid, bombastic stadium rawk. JD Bradfield has a woeful, constipated voice too. Dud.

They may as well split up.

So definitely not classic but also not quite dud.

Prior to TIMT, fucking classic. Everything Must Go isn't as good as the first three albums, but about half of it is salvageable as decent to extremely good rock. As far as I'm concerned, The Holy Bible is the album of the 90s - I actually want to ask you, Dr. C, about the rent-a-slogan lyrics because if anything the first two albums are far worse with that sort of thing, so I was wondering what you considered rent-a-slogan lyrics. THB strikes me as the most mature, thought out compositions the Manics have put forth, before or after, and I honestly can't think of too many lyrics that'd strike me as rent-a- slogan - ifwhiteamerica... maybe? "Cool groovy morning fine / Tipper Gore is a friend of mine": I can see that as what you're talking about. Stuff like Yes though, I can't see that in any way symbolising the sort of "Madonna drinks Coke and / So should you" empty ranting that they often get derided for.* This is of course because the majority was written by Richey instead of Nicky, but I digress away from the point.

They've really put out some of the class act singles of the 90s, and Richey always looked good and gave good press, and isn't that what being classic is all about anyhow? So, first four albums (I'll give a by-pass to the half-good EMG): classic, more classic than Elvis. TIMT and possibly the next album (I mean, fucking hell, Baby Elian?): dud dud dud. But it's complicated, cos they really are just like two different bands.

And yes, as everyone is well aware, I could be considered a member of the Cult of Richey. What's it with you? ;P

* For the record, Madonna did Pepsi. Everyone but Nicky Wire knows this. Dumbass.

Classic, sure. THB = great. Opening of "The Intense Humming of Evil" = transcendent. Besides, they glammed it up lookswise, at least at one time. Automatically an improvement. ;-)

Though you're right, he would still be alive. Maybe I could work in some conjugal visits into my busy schedule.

This thread is quickly devolving into something unlike what it's meant to be about. Someone, quick, post something related to something besides Steve Lamacq's carved face or how gorgeous Richey was.

I quite liked the melancholic "I've failed in life / Could I live up to them?" feel of "If You Tolerate This ..." but all the other singles I heard from TIMTTMY were boring as hell and so I never felt motivated to listen to the album. They embarrass me now, and I'd feel much better about them if they just went away forever. Also, much of my respect for the Manics then came from my thinking their rhetoric was more original than it was - I wasn't aware that their hippy-bashing (Nicky's, especially), and the links they made between the crusty movement and public schools, were simply rehashed punk-era sloganeering (admittedly at a time when hippiedom was going through its biggest post-punk resurgence with Megadog, Castlemorton, The Orb, Pink Floyd becoming "OK to like" again, and Ultramarine in their way; looking back, it's as though MSP were trying to reassert punk orthodoxy at the time when, after 15 years, its grip was finally faltering).

I can still see where Nicky Wire is coming from with the anti- American, anti-imperialist stuff, but if the music is shit, what's the point? And the cosying up to Castro is, of course, archetypal kneejerk belief that, if corporate America is evil, anyone who suppresses it must be good, when in most cases both extremes are as bad as each other (it's like the idea that, if you hated Thatcher, you must look up to Scargill; it's no surprise that Wire so loves that rabid Northern ethnic authenticist posing as a "socialist"). So, yeah, classic in their time and context, but total dud outside it, and they've been in that dud status for long enough now.

Oh, and by the way, the entire band needs to stop eating for a month. I mean, for god's sake, that Q cover...

All mouth and no trousers indeed.

It's the "best" Wire quote ever because it's so out-there stupid. Isn't that a bit obvious? I don't believe it was brought up in the context of being funny or intelligent, unless I've completely misunderstood carsmilesteve (that's a mouthfull, can I call you Steve?).

The crap Nicky used to spew was funny in the day, in general, because it was such a contrast to the sort of mamby-pambyness that littered the scene. The problem is, he's gotten far too old to STILL be doing it; he's gone from being a twat to being just sad. Poor thing.

Anyone remember the Select photos where you could see the top of Nicky Wire's pubes? Yuck.

Anyhow, this whole discussion about Mr. Wire has all become moot because I am thinking a bit and I've recalled that I don't believe he originally said that Hitler comment. I BELIEVE that was the work of one R. Edwards in either Melody Maker or NME. If Ned's still reading this: you're an archivist, you have all those back issues, could you read thru every single one of them til you find the quote for me? Thanks chap ;)

I still think Nicky needs to be force-fed Coca Cola.

Anyhow, my dad likes the Manics too, actually. I reckon he wouldn't, however, if I told him Richey never played guitar, and just sort of stood there with it, posing, like a rock 'n' roll Milli Vanilli. I think that's a concept that would make his head explode. NOT...REAL...ROCK...ARRRGH...

Manics: due dud Due Dud Due DUD DUD DUD. Anyone who still loves the Manics and is over 19 needs a kicking for being so fucking cretinous that they still believe that shite.

Context is so important in pop: contextualising the Manics makes them look likes dumb adolescents (including Richey, the brightest but most stupid of them all for getting involved with a bunch of thick retro- rock no-hopers) venerative for a past already surpassed.

J

A few websites, including a rather serious timeline found here attribute it to Richey. The quote was "We will always hate Slowdive more than Adolf Hitler."

November 1991, it says.

I have never owned a Manics record but I like them. If they are thick then I don't know what that makes most pop stars. I guess they've kind of painted themselves into a corner, but still, I can't help but admire their awkardness.

Mind you, when I first saw them on Snub TV doing 'Motown Junk' I thought they were complete idiots. I think I lumped them in with Birdland.

Simon Price once remarked to Steven Wells and me, over a curry in Harlesden (see what I mean) as follows — pause for effect: "It is reMARKable [imagine a slight Welsh lilt here] that the three most important and influential bands in rock'n'roll history are British."

So who d'you mean, said Swellsy and I, agog — well, perhaps not agog, but certainly intrigued (bearing in mind that SimonP was at this time still in his High Peacock-Goth fashion phase, all gold and blue and bigt hair and time-consuming facepaint).

"The Beatles, the Sex Pistols aand — " and here SIMON paused for effect, " — Visage."

After this, I can forgive him anything, frankly. And who cares if he meant it or not?

The Visage revival starts here...

Am I alone in thinking the "Ashes to Ashes" video is great?

I am very bored. I have a lot of work to do but no will to do it so I am posting to dead threads. I'm hungover, sorry.

`Tis the best thing they ever did, if y'ask me.

I hate their hypocrisy. This great moral band, yet Richey said he didn't care if a thousand beagles died for his hairspray, lambasted animal rights, played a concert for a charity that is criticised for its experiments on animals. I hate them for that. Richey should have been put in a toxicology lab and then he'd have a reason to complain about his life the tosser.

I hate them for selling their shitty, lameass politics to kids. I hate them for the concert in Cuba which was so fucking dumb. I hate them for their apparent image as a woman friendly band and that stupid video for 'Little Baby Nothing' where the girl stomps on all the porn mags and yet Richey paid a hooker in Bangkok for a hand job and told any journalist who would listen about it. And Nicky and Richey spent most of their first tour shagging groupies.

I hate them for the durge of the recent albums and singles. At least when Richey was around you had some pretty decent tracks - 'Motorcycle Emptiness', 'MASH theme', 'La Tristesse', 'Life Becoming a Landslide', 'From Despair to Where', 'This is Yesterday', 'Yes' - compare to the shit on the albums after The Holy Bible.

I hate them cos even their first three albums have tons of shit on them as well.

I hate them because Nicky Wire with his 2.2 degree and who boasts about spening all his grant while at uni on gambling talks about the importance of education, as if he put his to good use. I REALLY hate Wire, mainly because he's dumb but I hate their trendy ultra left wing leanings, when they were once MET Bar hangers on and seen around town with Oasis.

I just hate them really. I wish they would go away.

I haven't ever seen them, I have a long sordid history of buying tickets to events they were appearing at and then having them cancel their appearances, probably just because Nicky Wire knows I want to ask him why he's such a big jerk and he's too scared to face the heat of such pointed questioning. I would love to see the pictures! GATS has the best liner, the Japanese version? Those pictures are tres rowr.

Alex, that album drives me insane for some reason. I have never been able to actively articulate it, but I've also never been able to actively articulate why The Holy Bible is my favorite. I end up sounding like I'm going thru some kind of rockist überfit trying to explain it. I really, really like "If You Tolerate This..." especially the middle bit going back into the chorus, that's really got a pretty sound ("And on the streets tonight/An old man prays..." that part), but I can't for the life of me remember anything else about the album besides it irritating the piss out of me.

Know Your Enemy isn't as good as I said it was when it came out.

There is not enough love for Generation Terrorists going on, though.

"everything must go" is the one, though. moves me more than the "holy bible". consistently great tunes from start to finish.

"the holy bible" is their only other 'very good' record. richey's skill with words is not great, to be honest, there's some pretty juvenile shit on there. but regardless of the crap words, the mood is really gripping, probably because of what happened to richey later.

the first two recs have some really good singles on them, but some fucking tuneless rubbish, too."motown junk" should have been included. "know your enemy" is easily their worst album, bradfield abandons any notion of, y'know, writing some great catchy tunes. i've seen them live a couple of times, and they were great.

Your Love Alone Is Not Enough = #1 single of 2007

Yep. I'm calling it now.

someone else has already noticed

16. MANIC STREET PREACHERS ft. NINA PERSSON - Your Love Alone Is Not Enough

Theory - if Kelly Clarkson did a record with the Manics, it would be brilliant. This springs to mind because of the part of this song where Nina Persson gives a shout-out to 'You Stole The Sun From My Heart', a song which I had always thought was rubbish, but whose inclusion here somehow elevates it to heroic status. With Kelly singing... it might work, you know. I can hear her ripping into the "YOU! stole the SUN FROM!" bits, and it sounds fantastic. "Drinking water to stay thin, or is it to pee with? I love you all the same." "I paint the things I wanna see, but it don't come easy." I can really see this coming off. I'm a fucking genius, I am. Obviously, the rhythm might need some perking up...

I keep missing the context lecture on the Manics - the first time I took any notice of them, it was 1996 and all the historic bits of their history had happened while primary school me was wondering why they were always screaming and topless and so on. All I got left with were various Radio 1 presenters saying "Obviously, 'Motorcycle Emptiness' is a great pop song", a statement that, being 13-year-old me, I completely agreed with, despite not having any conception of what 'Motorcycle Emptiness' or 'great pop song' might consist of (I was a 13-year-old private school kid, so I was already very familiar with 'obviously'); that, and the conviction that 'A Design For Life' was entitled 'I Desire Four Lights'. This was also obviously a great pop song for reasons that were obvious (who was I to question Teletext?) The Manics I got left with were not the ones people keep talking about, but the ones that sell out the Millennium Stadium every other Thursday, the ones with beer guts and stretchmarks, the ones that came up with hideous cack like 'There By The Grace Of God' and, indeed, 'You Stole The Sun From My Heart' - big, anthemic numbers that they would play on telly and always look and sound incredibly bored by. They just skulked about and looked a bit miserable. And their records all sounded the same. It was the sound of Virgin Radio, unwelcomingly loud, cloddy stadium-fillers. They never meant anything, cos by the time I noticed them they were pretty much treated as just being part of the furniture.

And that's why I'm so shocked, so overcome by this record. Sonically, it sounds nearly regressed to that late-nineties torpor, the kind of sound that gets people asking "Why aren't they big in America?" The drums are all thud and cymbal. There's violin sweeps (note: not the same as in the Biffy Clyro single, not by a long shot). There's Nina Persson, for pity's sakes (obviously, The Cardigans may as well not have existed after 'Erase/Rewind' - great pop song though). Everything's as anthemic as ever - difference is, there is a fucking ANTHEM! And Nina Persson's the key - not that she's especially great vocally, but just the insertion of another voice, aside from the one in James Dean Bradfield's head that keeps telling him he's too old for this shit. For the first time I can remember, it feels like he's singing to someone other than himself.

But maybe it is her, too. Their voices sound great in unison, doubling up to smack home lines harder - that would be dynamics, wouldn't it? And there's dynamics all over the place - the drums may slop about for much of the song, but that just serves to make the bits where they wake up all the more thrilling. They serve as launch pads for the guitars and orchestral swoops, they take off for that universe, that world:

NINA: But your love alone won't save the world
You knew the secrets of the universe
JAMES: Despite it all you made it worse
It left you lonely
NINA: It left you cursed

I've spent two days now trying to unpick that. It sounds impossible in scale: the world and the universe and the possibility of one's existence within them - I honestly, really cannot remember the last time I heard a pop song deal with them so... I don't even know how. I'm just left gasping. Sitting here getting washed over, again and again, looking for the handle. There's so much feeling between the two voices; if this is disintegration, it hasn't ever sounded less bitter or hateful - "through all the pain" (hear him fucking roar that bit) "your eyes stay blue, they stay blue, baby blue".

Not even mentioning this:

JAMES: I could have left us in exile...
NICKY: I could have written all your lines...
JAMES & NINA: I could have shown you...
NICKY: I could have shown you...
NINA: How to cry...

It's the way Nicky Wire forces himself into the narrative, off the rhythm, the lyricist sticking his head through the page - if it's meant to be an in-joke, it certainly doesn't sound like it. He sounds cragged, bitter, like the stories he's written are falling to pieces before his eyes, the happy ending suddenly impossible so let's slip off the mask. The show is over. The world just ended, didn't it?

It makes tears well up in the corners of my eyes for reasons I will never be able to explain, possibly cos they don't exist - it feels like the natural reaction, like how Dimitar Berbatov makes me cry sometimes with his perfection (that really is the best analogy I can come up with, I'm sorry). It's too much to take in, even if it feels like it shouldn't be. I'm exhausted, overcome and delighted all at once.

I'm a sentimental bastard, as I said before. The thing is, I don't think that has anything to do with it.

(I've just been watching the video for 'Everything Must Go'. James Dean Bradfield falling to his knees in a hail of pink petals, screaming "HAPPY, HAPPY" - it's pretty awesome)

I just checked these guys out for the first time on youtube (never heard any Richey stuff, just some boring thing from "This Is My Truth" and Know Your Enemy back in college) and judging from the opening riffs and opening culture quotes they'd come off like the best band ever, the whole Clash'n'Slash thing, and then lose me by the second chorus. I'm fascinated enough to dig deeper and try it again, but on first listen EVERY song had the same effect.

At the very least, I love the idea of this band to death.

OK: piece of namedropping follows which makes contributing a JPEG to AICON look like getting yrself entered in the phone directory, in terms of self-destructive vainty and cool/anti-cool ambivalent gesture: here goes
Simon Price once remarked to Steven Wells and me, over a curry in Harlesden (see what I mean) as follows — pause for effect: "It is reMARKable [imagine a slight Welsh lilt here] that the three most important and influential bands in rock'n'roll history are British."

So who d'you mean, said Swellsy and I, agog — well, perhaps not agog, but certainly intrigued (bearing in mind that SimonP was at this time still in his High Peacock-Goth fashion phase, all gold and blue and bigt hair and time-consuming facepaint).

"The Beatles, the Sex Pistols aand — " and here SIMON paused for effect, " — Visage."

After this, I can forgive him anything, frankly. And who cares if he meant it or not?

-- mark s, Thursday, April 5, 2001 1:00 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark Link

actually remember reading this about six years ago, still makes me chuckle.

thing of it: at the time i would have been lol visage, but -- challenging opinion ahoy -- visage > sex pistols.

Reviving the general Manics thread to share a bit of history...

http://thequietus.com/articles/17436-manic-street-preachers-holy-bible-james-dean-bradfield-interview

This is cool. Thanks for sharing.

You're welcome! (A little surprised at the quiet reaction here, I admit!)

I can't imagine even attempting that interview after only having had time for a half-listen. Must have been quite a day.

Fascinating little piece of history. So if I read the introduction right, James was supposed to be heading to the US with Richey, but he didn't show up (and would never show up again), so James travelled by himself, talked to you and some others, then came home to... everything that happened after? Did he say anything about Richey not coming along? The album had been out since the previous summer in the UK - how come you hadn't heard it before then? I realise things were different in the 1990s, but I also know you were listening to a lot of UK stuff in that period. Anyway, it's great you still had the tape.

Pretty much what you see in the interview about Richey is what he said -- no direct mention of him not coming along, and I didn't have any sense of why he would or wouldn't be there. I would just have been "Oh, okay, James is doing a promo tour and I have a chance to chat, cool." That's it, really. James I gather headed home precisely because Richey in fact had not only gone away but had simply disappeared, and had been contacted about it.

And yup, it had been out buuuuut you are talking about a poor grad student at the time who was doing music writing and college DJ work as I could. Some things simply weren't easily affordable; I'm sure the baseline price around then for the import would have been something like $22 or the like. And that's a chunk of change! So yeah, didn't have it yet.

awesome read, thanks for posting that, ned -- i recall you mentioning the interview a long time ago but couldn't remember ever reading it. iirc richey had actually gone missing for a couple days a few weeks previously before turning up again, so that might explain why james went ahead with the interviews, assuming richey was just having a bad day or something.

Wow @ the timing of that interview. James is such a smart, honest interviewee.

Might as well revive this thread too, having done that for the Suede one -- US coheadline tour in November.

https://americansongwriter.com/the-london-suede-manic-street-preachers-tour-north-america-in-2022

So I posted that Quietus piece with my JDB interview from 1995 ten years back upthread a little bit...and now, if you subscribe to Rock's Backpages, you can hear it too.

https://rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/manic-street-preachers-james-dean-bradfield-1995