Yule Love Alone Is Not Enough (et cetera)

And so to the Day In Question, the main event, the big kahuna. Christmas. 

Let Chaos Reign!

Christmas is a special time for me. A close to the year, a time for food and family, the stuff of memory building - and, indeed, memory revisiting. Nostalgia feeds our annual year-end feast, whether it's an imagined Victoria experience of snowdrifts, sleigh-bells, and red-breasted robins roasting over a crackling Yule log, or something more intimate and local. For me it's the memory of past family gatherings, the larger Simian whanau coming from Dunedin and Christchurch to share Christmas with us, the rolling maul of big dinners, eked out into leftover cold servings and, yes, barbeques. The last Christmases together, before one or more of us left our home, or left the embrace of our family. I lost a cousin two weeks ago; as one ages, Christmas mingles happy memories and sad, the most bittersweet of anniversaries.

But to a kid in the Seventies Christmas was huge. Toys, holidays, long summers, trifles and jelly, cousins and play mates. My family's Christmases are an unashamed attempt to recapture some of that for our kids and ourselves. A riot of colour, activity, smells, tastes and noises. You're pooped by the end of it all - eyes glazed with TV specials, belly groaning from rich multiple servings, ears ringing from the long hours and laughter. Enough nostalgia, though. Or... not...?

Christmas day, stuck in the seventies

Play all day with your Scalectrics

Oh my god, I got a tomahawk

How sweet life can be

Manic Street Preachers' Send Away the Tigers was an improbable hit. A chart-topper that delivered a righteous hit in Nina Persson duet, but delivered thin servings thereafter. Far from the experimental Lifeblood before it, or the divisive and cut-down double Know Your Enemy before it, Tigers is a wry re-run of past victories and crowd-pleasers, lacking only a needle to push. However, it did delivery some good B-Sides, including this particular burst of UK Christmas nostalgia - an unashamed mash of memberberries. It is, in the words of What Is Music podcast a right banger. 

Best of all for 2022 is Manics re-releasing Know Your Enemy in as close to its original intended form as possible. A real surprise and a Christmas treat to be sure. 

Merry Christmas, Everybody!    

Christmas Eve in the Valleys

 'Christmas Eve' by R.S. Turner, music by Manic Street Preachers (2021)

 

 It's Christmas Eve in the Monkey House, usually a time of slightly frazzled repose before the perpetual motion machine that is Christmas Morning to Christmas Lunch to Christmas Afternoon (brief pause for the King's Message) and then the likely-to-be-barbequed Christmas Dinner. It's a hectic time, the most ex-haust-ing time of the year, in fact. Christmas Day is the main event; the night before barely gets a word in, much less in songs (unless you happen to be in a New York drunk tank, of course)

 So spare a thought for this liminal pause, then. The moment of quiet betwixt the end of the Shouting Boxing Day Sale reminders of TV and the internets, and the blinking awakening of The Day in Question. To my mind, the commercialism has dominated Christmas Eve - one last, frantic exhortation of the nation's retailers to us to fill the tills emptied months before in anticipation, and reward the faith months of loss-leading have born witness to.

Bah, humbug.

And so to noted poetic Grinch, R.S Thomas, whose The Furies was once quoted in the liner notes to fellow countrymen Manic Street Preachers'; melancholic, none-more-Welsh peak This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours. In the same work Thomas dedicates four short poems to the winter holiday, and it's this one, Christmas Eve, a contemplation of the commercialism of the season with the coming of 'the child' triumphant and soundless, 'like radiation' - brief and full of mystery.

The music works, provided as usual by twin composers James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore, who likely provides the trumpet for this piece. This is not a release proper, but is just a year old, a contribution to Michael Sheen's Christmas Day show for Radio Wales. I like it a lot, and I hope you do, too.

More Manic, more Christmas - tomorrow.

'What is the Future of the Future?'

Manic Street Preachers: Resistance is Futile (2018)

With a vintage group announcing a new album, the long-term fan may feel an approaching leap of faith. Will this be the best? The least-loved? The peak? The last? Every release is a spin of the chamber.

I'm tempted to regard a dichotomy to Manic Street Preachers album releases - like Guillermo Del Toro's on-off Hollywood and arthouse projects, or the alternating quality of Star Trek movies. With Manics the commercially-oriented alternates with the artistic - not perfectly, and with not as much regulatory as would fit the comparison, but compare Resistance to Postcards and Send Away the Tigers... and you may sense a pattern. 

This is an accomplished album, but not characterised by the confident musical probing of Futurology or the greater lyrical reach of This is My Truth; instead, Resistance presents an album meticulously arranged, familiar in trappings, and reliable in themes: memory, loss, disenfranchisement. Not an angry album, but one resigned to being... resigned. There are clear highlights after the table-setter People Give In , International Blue comes across as pure pop Manic - James Dean Bradfield once again offering a tenor belying his years, and Nicky Wire and Sean Moore bringing up a thundering rear. 

Consciously, the album is reflective not only in its mood, but also in its sound - Sequels of Forgotten Wars (a personal favourite) the closest to the faster, early Manics, Dylan and Caitlin a return to earlier albums' wining duets (Your Love Alone and Little Baby Nothing more than Sullen Welsh Heart). Topically there's a looking back - at past idols like Bowie (In Eternity), while Liverpool Revisited finds itself haunting the same Hillsborough as Truth's SYMM, from the other side of the later coronial inquest and twenty years on from the disaster. 

 (Wire even provides a guitar solo for Liverpool) 

That said, there's a lot to like. International Blue is a belter, Broken Algorithms could have been a great closer (I do wonder if the album could be a couple of tracks shorter), and penultimate single Hold Me Like a Heaven provides the singalong stadium who-oahs and memorable hooks to surely make it a live favourite. As said, the album is engineered well - reflective of the extra time put into it while the band's new studio was being built. As any ageing rocker will argue - why rush quality? 

As ever, you might find yourself wondering where the next Manics album will lead.

Cover story: A colourised portrait by Baron Franz von Stillfried-Ratenicz: 'Samurai Warrior 1881' - a once-heralded soldier captured on the eve of a new century, and a future that will be characterised by automatic weapons and machines of war. The band (as has been noted) cast as a relic, composed and dignified, displaced and resigned.

Here's my gift to you: a soundtrack to the void.

Sortumn

I have a guilty secret. I think my favourite season might be Autumn. This, I suspect, would not go down well chez Simian, as my wife is an avowed lover of the summer and dislikes winter with a pathological enthusiasm. Similarly Jet Jr will happily bask in the sun on our back deck when the weathers good.

Winter's fine by me - I have a July birthday and for me the season is all about hearty meals, open fires, grey outdoors and indoor comfort; a modern sentiment based on primal needs. But Autumn - ahh, now that's different because it's al about the anticipation of winter, and like spring it's a miraculous season being a transitional one. Our alleged control over daylight hours slips and the mornings and evenings draw in, shadows grow long and lean as the sun sits low on the horizon, and sunlight acquires a watery aspect, as though filtered through smoky glass. Sure, the washing takes longer to dry on the clothes line, but this year has enjoyed a prolonged Indian summer - a period of clement, even quite hot weather that is long-staying but not quite endless, broken by hints of cooler days to come. I've given this time of the year 'Sortumn' - sort of summer, sort of Autumn.

The other great thing about this time of the year is the discovery that like Halloween we've actually got the good deal with regards to Easter in the Southern Hemisphere. If you ignore the near-certainty of crap weather over the long weekend and of course the northern Spring associations of new chicks and rabbit eggs and what have you, there's really no better time of the year to enjoy a good buttery spicy  hot crossed bun than Autumn.

Autumn gets a bad rap. It's a season of promise for the prepared, the self-sufficient, a tap on the shoulder for DIY and outdoor house maintenance. In the weeks to come the lead mountain within the Monkeyhouse will be eyed up for winter modelling and painting, and a new indoor ascent will be planned up its precipitous slopes. Outside the town belt is turning a golden amber, and branches are fingering their way into the fading light. Sure, there's a bit of work to tame the garden and patch up some weatherboards before winter arrives - but who wants to think that far ahead? Autumn's here to be enjoyed!
 

'European skies, European desires'

Manic Street Preachers - 'Futurology' (2014)


"I am the sturm und drang / I am the schadenfreude"

In unprecedented haste for a band of its age, the twelfth studio album from Manic Street Preachers was released around six months after its companion, Rewind the Film. Both albums complement one another, and yet are intended to be opposites, Rewind the introspective middle-aged Holy Bible, while Futurology, while not exactly future-looking, is an optimistic, outward-looking work. Its predecessor is no slouch, but fed on Krautrock, and presenting electronic soundscapes and a peculiarly Welsh view of modern European history, the Manics' latest album is one of their strongest and most complete.

"Working class skeletons / lie scattered in museums" 

Like Rewind the Film, Futurology was recorded at Hansa by the Wall, in Berlin. The British artist or group retreating to Berlin for reinvigouration and reinvention has past form, of course: Bowie (Low and "Heroes") and U2 (Achtung Baby) both did it, and while Manics eschewed Eno and parted with Visconti five albums previously, there is a sense of hat-doffing to the former. But this isn't pastiche as Achtung Baby pretended towards (and Zooropa achieved) but a logical transition. Doubled with Rewind the Film, its studio companion, the two albums converse and share ideas, sounds and influences.

Futurology is a confident album - still equipped with the doubts of Rewind, but seated in a continental context, and an historical one. Its Europe is a Europe of ghosts both living and dead: - 'The Next Jet to leave Moscow's' "old jaded Commie walking in Red Square", while bonus track 'The Last Time I Saw Paris' has its protagonist wander the French capital looking for 'the boxer' (Sartre) and 'the goalkeeper' (Camus), Grieg's 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' is sampled in 'Let's Go To War', Munch's painting in 'Between the Clock and the Bed', and more personally, the shimmering 'Divine Youth' sparks from Wire's catching an image of himself and Richey Edwards in their younger heyday on a bootleg t-shirt.

"To understand your country you must first understand yourself"

So while U2's European experience is largely as travellers and impressioned observers, Manics draw on European political history, Welsh history as European history ('Dreaming a City (Hugheskova)' and 'The View from Stowe Hill'), and their own politics to create part-essay, part travelogue. Far from the cut-up soundbite approach of the Richey era, there are easier entry points in thee songs, and what seems to be an attempt to demystify the lyrics, maybe Wire's past-affirmed "attempt at mass communication." And so alongside the possible survivor-guilt of 'Walk Me to the Bridge' and eflection of 'Between the Clock', there are songs about Wire's dwindling Socialist values ('Moscow') and a self-referencing of the band's more notorious history: "so you played in Cuba did you like it brother? / I bet you felt proud, you silly little f*cker."

My overriding impression of this album however is one of generosity. There are songs loosely about the band and its primary lyricist, but these seem small ingredients alongside the wealth of ideas, the inclusion of fellow Welsh vocalists Georgia Ruth and Green Gartside (duets being another element shared with Futurology), and the impressive soundscape from Bradfield and Moore - hinted at in the previous album's closer, but fully formed here. It echoes not only the Krautrock of Can, Neu and Kraftwerk ('Black Square', to my ears, and also 'Misguided Missile'), but more domestic influences - PiL, Simple Minds, a dash of The Skids. I don't think manics have ever not worn their influences on their sleeves, but here the influences seem broader and more accommodating. And I'm very happy to have it in my collection.

Cover story: It's allegedly a good sign because the band logo and lettering has the reversed letters back! fans would therefore expect a call-back to similarly-typed albums The Holy Bible, Send Away the Tigers and Journal for Plague Lovers, and, perhaps third album excepted, it's not a bad comparison. The photo: a blonde fraulein standing on a block of ice in brittle, beautiful midwinter sunlight. Gorgeous. And futurist Berlin architecture forms the backdrop to the band portraits inside. Job done.

'This side of the truth where no sun shines'

Manic Street Preachers - 'Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of Manic Street Preachers' (2002)

What to make of an album of B-sides? What to make of an album of cover versions? Can you tell much about an artist or a band from either? Of course you can; whole careers have been jeopardised on cover albums alone (*cough!DuranDurancough!*), but B-Sides are quite a different kettle of fish.
There exist some bands for whom the B-Side is a serious attraction. If an act is large or popular enough, fans will follow them to the ends of all second-tier 45 fillers, but for the most part, it seems to me the best-regarded B-Sides come from bands who simply haven't treated their non-A-Side works as lesser cast-offs. The Smiths, for example, command a discography in which many Bs and album tracks at east are not so much indistinguishable, but equals, and Oasis, apparently, did the business with their own collection Stop the Clocks (of which I must admit I’ve only heard one B-Side, the highly commendable 'Acquiesce'. On the other hand, from my own collections Blur and Iron Maiden are largely the less on the flip-side, while The Darkness vary depending on how silly they felt on the day of recording. It’s a broad church.

Lipstick Traces, a Secret History of Manic Street Preachers attempts to have a go at both tacks, presenting two discs of B-sides, one entirely original compositions and one entirely cover versions. It’s a lot of songs – long enough to rival National Treasures, and at $6.00 (I think) from our local JB Hi-Fi I definitely felt I was getting more than my money’s worth.

The original songs are pretty well chosen, though omit some fan favourites such as Are Mothers Saints. Nevertheless the spread of singles and years presented here offers as much a potted history of the band as this set’s contemporary best of. Here’s 'Desolation Alley' from the Manics’ very early days, through to the titular 'Forever Delayed' (oddly left off the Best Of that bears its name – I find it more interesting and engaging than 'Door to the River') and This Is My Truth drop-out 'Prologue to History', perhaps the best B-Side of the band in its second generation. Certainly, the first half of this disc is well worth your time, with some great variety of style and composition thrown in.

Highlights are many – the aforementioned tracks of course, plus would-be Judge Dredd track 'Judge Yrself', the Radiohead-esque 'Donkeys' and rabble rouser 'Socialist Serenade'. For the expected Richey tribute track there’s 'Sepia', another sound piece. What comes out of this collection is not so much a secret history as an alternative history of Manic Street Preachers; indicative of the band in its various guises, but arranged in such a way as to keep you guessing what might be around the corner next. Fans would (and did) complain that there’s a lot left off this anthology, and perhaps the missing tracks and remixes will be visited in time by the band or label, but in the mean-time this is tidy, still luxurious in length, and varied enough to not get samey.

And so to the covers. This blog has already nodded in the direction of Manics covers a couple of times (here and here and also here), so we’re traversing familiar territory. But something should be said of the choice of covers here – from the obvious early influences (The Clash’s 'Train in Vain', GnR’s 'It’s So Easy') to the more obscure, like Campervan Beethoven and, yes, Mike Batt/Art Garfunkel. That the likes of Strummer and Slash speak across both discs though cover and pastiche is one thing, but adding the likes of Bacharach and Linden ('Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head') to that list – informing to my ears original B-Sides like the lovely instrumental 'Horses Under Starlight', says to me that these are genuine influences, and not throwaway dress-ups. There’s a bawling enthusiasm in 'Rock and Roll Music', and even 'Can’t Take My Eyes Off You' that would surely beckon audience participation, and may well speak for their origins here as set-fillers . More recently Manics have covered contemporary songs with a straight face, giving their own interpretation to the likes of Rihanna’s 'Umbrella', while on here there’s a similar gravity to an old Robeson standard:


So on reflection it’s an interesting set of cover versions, and in places a strong one. Worthwhile, even.

As mentioned above, there’s easily space for a Lipstick Traces vol 2, though I suspect this will be more in the hands of fans than the group itself, and fair enough. For the most part, such histories are an intimate thing, a matter between artist and enthusiast, and something removed from the initiation of a singles collection. This is a set I visit infrequently, and only once entirely in one sitting, but on pretty much every hearing there’s been a new discovery, and that’s no bad thing at all.

'Success is an Ugly Word'

Manic Street Preachers 'Forever Delayed' (2002) / 'National Treasures' (2011)

By fluke of blogging FreakyTrigger recently covered Manics' The Masses Against The Classes on their Popular feed - mileage varies, but the fan support in the feedback is strong and not at all scary (they breed them polite and articulate over there.) So that's now fifteen years almost to the month since Manic Street Preachers' last number one single. The top selling singles are an interesting thing -  If You Tolerate This is Manics at their most stadium-friendly and gracefully earnest - probably the closest to Nicky Wire's later-voiced "attempt at mass communication";  Masses strikes me as an attempt to mollify departed fans - and they're just the number ones. The breakthrough could be Manics' NME benefit album cover of Suicide is Painless (Theme from M*A*S*H) - I'll come to cover versions in the next post, but it's an intriguing entry alongside Design for Life (being caught up in a New Lad misunderstanding earned it a Number Two position) and Everything Must Go the survivor anthem. From the unloved Lifeblood are two Number Two singles, while 'comeback' Send Away the Tigers yields a further couple, and the last top ten single the band has achieved since.

But Masses informs the title of this post and features on both of Manic Street Preachers' singles collections, both separated by roughly ten years and covering respectively ten and twenty years of the band's existence in the popular eye. A good band compilation can be met in different ways, the two most popular routes being the Best Of selection, and the more complete Singles Collection route. Alternatively, you might find yourself buying a collection edited and presented out of sequence for maximum playability (Queen’s Greatest Hits being an easy example), or something straight-down-the line, the chronological story. Manic Street Preachers, being somewhat a warts-and-all act, have had a bite of both, and the result is more or less a comprehensive history of the band in its early life and midlife.

Forever Delayed is their first Best Of – out of sequence ordering, fresh off the boat post-Know Your Enemy and the earlier Masses single. It’s a singles set with some exclusions, while the stand-alone tracks There By the Grace of God (a fitting taste of what was to come with the next album Lifeblood) and the dour Door to the River fill out the roster. Being the mid-era release it’s strong on the recent singles and an effective early history, but it only tells half the story. For some that may be enough.





 There are thirty-eight singles on National Treasures, twenty-four of which are UK top twenty hits. The collection is more generous to the early years than Forever Delayed (Slash and Burn is reinstated for one), and it seems to take an age to get through the first two albums alone. Of course Treasures continues where the previous collection left off, including tracks from Lifeblood through to Postcards From a Young Man. Also, unlike Forever Delayed, it's in chronological order, which adds to the storytelling aspect - I can see why some singles collections go out of release order, but prefer this approach. Also, as my friend David pints out, if you’re not a fan of a band’s earlier or later work, the track ordering enables easier entry and exit points!  Door to the River is dropped, but the stand-alone track, a cover of The The's This is the Day, is the feature, and I must admit to preferring it over the original for its urgency and build! A noteable omission is anything from Journal For Plague Lovers; the band never released a single from this, though there could have easily been two or three contenders, and I miss those songs for it.

In conclusion, both collections are worthwhile, and both did the business in sales, but it's hard to go past National Treasures simply because the story of the band continues and is still interesting. I've argued before that my following of Manics is a post-Richey Edwards thing, and that they are a band who I have aged with, so my appreciation is always going to be contextual. If you could argue that collections mark transition points in band histories, then I would agree that from the two albums which follow this latest Best Of a new direction has indeed been forged, and Manic Street Preachers are into another phase again - once again, to be covered in an upcoming and final post. With less of an eye toward the charts, and more of an eye towards creating an on-going narrative of self-reflection and maturity, I think this latest phase is their most rewarding yet.

"21 Years of Living..."

Over the past wekend marked two decades since the disappearance of Richey Edwards, an event that redefined the Manic Street Preachers, reshaping their lyrics, their sound, and their output through to the present.

Last December saw the Manics tour a live performance of their seminal album The Holy Bible, and album which to some epitomises the band, though its influence fades across the years. To some, The Holy Bible is their peak, and all else since can only disappoint; NZ's own online music reviewer and Chuck Klosterman-wannabe Simon Sweetman certainly seems to think so, and bases his review of Manics' latest album Futurology on whether it lives up to an album twenty years in its past.

I came late to Manics, well late to The Holy Bible, and you could say that it was reading about Richey Edwards' disappearance in a Pavement magazine in Dunedin's Metro cafe that got me interested in the band, and their story, in the first place. I am therefore a post-Richey Manics fan, and that era of the group - while impressive in places, is only a part of the overall story. And it goes on. Sorry, Simon.

The weekend's passing reminds me that I have roughly three more posts to go before I'm spent on Manics and their output - the Best Ofs, the B-Sides, and Futurology. I daresay Mr Sweetman's Off The Tracks review (the actual content to which his bait-and-switch Blog On theTracks often links to) will come up.

The countdown begins this week, then. With some non-music, non-movie posts in for good measure.

Comic Strip Reachers?

It is perhaps not a truth universally acknowledged, but the meeting point between popular music and the comic strip form is at times a strong one: both in their current form arrived around the same time, both developed greatly as a tool of American youth culture, before being exported and adapted in most parts of the world. Both forms attract the young and creative - as a outlet for expression they occupy mass culture and multimedia, and in their own way are dominated by big names nd legions of fans; they are equally aspirational, they feed off each other and converse along mainstream media,  although arguably one does less heavy lifting in the stakes of amorous endeavour...

The aspirational aspect remains, however, and to see an example of this in recent history you need look no further than the story of Manic Street Preachers. The two main writers and creative nucleus Nicky Wire and Richey Edwards were both huge fans of 2000AD, each apparently vying to appear in the magazine's pages in some form. For the record, Richey won, his efforts being realised through some reader's art in the days when a three pound prize was realy something to brag about:

The rest is far from silence, however, as the slow rise of the band matched with the gradual entry of artists andw riters into the magazine's fold who were of the same age as the Manics bore witness. Now, pop music references were not a new phenomenon in the pages of 2000AD, and almost go back to the very first issues, but the entry of Blackwood's finest sons was almost prescient, with Grant Morrison nodding to the then rising name in his British superhero magnum opus Zenith:

The fellow above is the superhuman Domino, whom arist Steve Yeowell based visually on Nicky Wire, and made his (almost) wordless debut in Zenith Phase III some time before Generation Terrorists introduced the band fully to a UK audience. So, match-point Wire, and, one assumes, something of a coup for the band as a whole getting their name in the magazine in the same wildly popular strip, not long afterwards...

Portentous words, as Nicky's comic strip counterpart was, alas, not to survive the story the year, although the band's infamy had well and truly spread, with Richey achieving a sort of infamy in being parodied as 'Clarence' the (frankly more Brian Molko-like) frontman of Mega City One's Crazy Sked Moaners replaying his real-life 4REAL self-mutilation in Garth Ennis and Dermot Power's outrageous Dredd story Muzak Killer:

So much for the Manics in 2000AD, however. They never scaled those heights again, and indeed the Richey incident provedto be the defining moment for the band in comic stirp form s much as the music press of the day, as our final example proves, from Coln B morton and Chuck Death's giddy NME strip Great Pop Things. I recall I first read of Richey's razor blade antic in Melody Maker (RIP), but the point stands now, as it did then. This, in itself, was Making It...

Monkey on my back

As I seem to be in danger of blogging nothing but local music videos every Friday (and none of us wants that, I suspect), I thought I should provide an update on other stuff that I would normall blog on.

In the first instance, illustration is demanding a lot of time, so that has priority. I have a tight deadline. So here's a picture of a gorilla:

Drawn really quickly, and coloured digitally, it took less time than it does to do my roughly-rendered international Judges, which is I guess a sign that using those guys as target practice (which they are, to be honest), seems to be working in part. But oh, the hours...

A Lapse of Judgement
Which means I'm a couple of Judges behind - Egypt was supposed to be done last month, and it's on the way. Argentina (well done on the football, by the way) is next. Dare I leave it 'til next week? I might - not that I'm suggesting anything World Cup related, heavens no.

Forever Delayed
Also this month: a new Manics album! Released this week was Futurology, and while I've not seen it in shops here yet, I'm assured it's on its way and hey, I have a birthday coming up so perhaps I shouldn't rush out to buy it just yet. Besides, I have a couple of posts still to do on Manic Street Preachers, so maybe that'll come up soon.

and finally...

Elf Denial
Oh, my Mirky Dozen. The Mirkwood Elves conversion project has gone on the backburner, but as far as things were going it was ticking along nicely. But there's a lot to do yet.

That will possibly kick off in October - I want to have the figures done before The Battle of the Five Armies. In the mean-time, the Gorilla gets the biscuit, sorry!

"I'm No Longer the Centre of the Universe"

Manic Street Preachers: 'Rewind the Film' (2013)

“How I hate middle age - In between acceptance and rage”
-Builder of Routines


Over ten years ago while we were in our precocious early thirties, a friend David and I used to grimly joke about what we were supposed to be writing about 'at our age', penning songs of frustrated gardening, perhaps, or, like John Upstart, Smith and Jones' Slightly Irritated Young Man playwright, the broken demister on the Volvo. Joking apart, once the threshold has been passed, what is there left to say? 

Having dallied with its approach in recent albums, this is the Manics grasping the midlife nettle fully, exposing the disappointment and frustration of maturity, when simple championing and sloganeering will no longer do – much less the star jumps Nicky Wire once could afford to attempt on stage. Twenty years after the ravaged original, this is Wire, Bradfield and Moore’s own Holy Bible, muted and sullen, but more resigned to the reality of age, given the aural space of This is My Truth. There's very little electric guitar on the album, using more acoustic than any album before it, and harking back to traditional song structures - the opening This Sullen Welsh Heart and As Holy as the Soil (that Covers Your Skin) could be spirituals.

This is an important album for the Manic, and may be their best and most cohesive since This Is My Truth. The years colour and condemn, and a group "laminated" against its rigours look back on youth and simplicity. You could argue that previous albums have also visited this ground, particularly Postcard from a Young Man, but Rewind the Film willfully resists its predecessor's attempt at "mass communication" and is pointedly introverted, referencing the moribund likes of Morrisey (for whom 3 Ways to See Despair was written), Vidal, Lowry, Lennon and Lenin, as much as the band's own history, both happy (I Miss the Tokyo Skyline) and regretful. Wire's As Holy as the Soil calls his departed friend to "please come home, it's been so long but I can't let go."

Wire sings more here, and the band employing duets (which worked well for them in the past) but I wonder whether there's another tactic in distancing themselves from harder songs - the title track is shared by Pulp's Richard Hawley with Bradfield coming in on the choruses; Cate Le Bon provides all the vocals for 4 Lonely Roads, and Lucy Rose backs Sullen Welsh Heart. It, like Rewind the Film, covering the heavy confessions. I'm reminded of Nicky Wire opting to sing the closing song (bar one hidden track) of Journal to spare his bandmate the raw emotion of singing what has been taken by many to be a suicide note rehearsal.

Journal for Plague Lovers returns in sound with Running Out of Fantasy, a world-weary look in the mirror with some elegant phrasing and some of Wire's most economic writing:

The dying fall of my sentences / the magic of lost consequences
The seduction of a fading power / in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere

I love this album, I think, and I'm glad I discovered it a little late, away from press reviews and magazine articles (which have been largely highly complimentary.) in two months the companion album, the threatened 'Krautrock' influences Futurism will be released, its likely sound hinted at in this album's angry closer 30-Year War, Rewind's most overtly political song, driven by an intriguing array of keyboard washes, reverberating William Orbit-like percussive stabs and Wire playing the closest to a Peter Hook bass riff as he possibly can. It sounds an intriguing mix, and indicates a lot of life left in this band yet.

Cover Story: Railings on the Severn Bridge, that potent image of the band’s true crisis point, taken from a moving vehicle. This is a moving on from a past point of identity - not yet erased nor rendered ineffective, but able to be passed. A place of memory and temporary reflection.

Videos: The past returns in a Seventies-bleached slice of life in a Welsh community hall (the director apparently didn't need to put too much effort into dressing the location to period). Show me the Wonder is atypical of the album in general, being an up piece, but the past can be a happy, even wonderful place, too.

This is no threat, just an invitation
A sense of belonging, a sense of inspiration

Rewind the Blog

Happy New Year, everyone

Back after a ten-day holiday at home/s on the Mainland, and back to the routine of work tomorrow.

Around the tail end of '13 I had more time to read (but only read, alas) some social media and in that time was surprised to read how rough last year had been on some of my friends - the number of times I saw iterations of the phrase "good riddance to a crap year" was... arresting.

For myself 2013 was just another year - altogether survivable, and mostly harmless. If anything it was an unproductive year, and that's not a good thing for most of us. I think as a species we have an innate urge to create in some form; even those who profess to not have an artistic bone in their body still follow some existential will to do something, maybe out of fear of doing nothing.

"The act of creation saves us from despair" goes a line in the song below, from an album I'm more than a little embarrassed to admit I didn't know had even been released until the end of year music overviews (it's not alone - the Chills released a single, 'Molten Gold' to coincide with Martin Phillipps' 50th birthday this year - whoosh over my head it went, but check it out - it's lovely). I'll return to Manic Street Preachers' Rewind the Film very soon, but for now here's the opening track This Sullen Welsh Heart, equal parts hope and despair, and a gorgeous and moving version it is. Taken from an intimate live performance on Later With Jools Holland it retains the studio version's guest talent of Lucy Rose and in its stripped-back sound is very indicative of the album in all. I picked the album (and Postcards From a Young Man, along with Wilco's Hotel Yankee Foxtrot) up on sale at the Warehouse in Timaru (a store whose sales have never let me down!) and am really looking forward to getting to know it better.


After this, some rewinding of my own with holiday-inspired entries, and some much-overdue painting updates. And to all of my splendid readers and friends out there, here's to a much more creative, enjoyable and prosperous year ahead...

Dancing About Architecture

Manic Street Preaches have been and gone from New Zealand, they played the Vector Centre in Auckland, and apparently put on a very good gig, actually "trolling through the back catalogue" as Nicky Wire promised after their performance on X-Factor. Man - they did Revol. I'd have loved to have seen that.

But about that X Factor performance:
 

Something of a specialist already, Stuff.co.nz's travel/entertainment/lifestyle writer Owen Vaughan wrote this Tuesday "Rock's Dead, Manics, You Killed It", an article with a tiresome and ridiculous headline, but writers don't always get to choose the clothes their opinions get dressed in, I suppose. Obviously I take issue with the sentiment behind it and the article itself, that MSP have sold out by playing a populist show like X factor.

It's a facile argument, and classic bait-and-switch news 'blogging', designed to elicit a response. I'm not going to give Stuff the on-site response they might want, however, because I simply can't be bothered to sign in to their Stuff Nation 'community' to do so.I'm sticking to my blog, thanks. So about my issue with Vaughan's complaint - I can think of five reasons why this article isn't worth linking to:

1. Live entertainment shows on TV in New Zealand are not common, particularly when you try to think of a suitable format. Seven Sharp is still trying to firm up its identity as a sort-of 'infotainment' vehicle, and while Good Morning will host touring live spots, Manics probably weren't a good fit there, either. X Factor is almost the only prime time game in town. At least it wasn't Dancing With the Stars. Speaking of which...

2. This argument has been made before, or at least a more balanced version, which I strongly suspect Vaughan may have already read, and perhaps figured that it needed more 'bite'. Ben Myers wrote in The Guardian of Manic Street Preachers playing in an elimination episode of Strictly Come Dancing in the UK in 2010, and the comments on that page are in some part worth reading, because they themselves in places take a more balanced view, including the following:

3. Manics have some form playing populist shows. Even in their alleged heyday they played Saturday morning TV shows, chat shows, and almost anyone who'd have them. They were a band seeking attention, and if their heyday is some years behind them now, well I don't think we should be surprised to see them seeking what few avenues there are in New Zealand to promote their first live show there. X Factor, a high-rating series that Stuff features a running blog commentary on, is a pretty appropriate option. Is that really so different from, say, The Beatles playing on the Ed Sullivan Show?

4. Vaughan's argument (and some of Myers' commentators) seems in part based on a personal grievance that Manic Street Preachers have (gasp) changed from the young upstarts that they were, settling for a more populist approach and softening their early, rebellious image. There's nowhere for a band as old (or older) than Manics to go with this argument; bands age and their members do too, they change and often mellow. It's a natural progression, and in the cases where this hasn't obviously happened (AC/DC?), the alternative is being seen as something of a one trick pony, descending into self-parody. I think Manics (who made no secret of courting the mainstream from day one) made their decision some years ago, and maybe Vaughan just hasn't been listening? Finally, and in a related way:

5. Rock and Roll is already dead. It died decades ago. We have pretty much officially been in a post-Rock and Roll environment now for at least a generation, with most standard instrumental innovation now exhausted and the genre so schismatic and subjected to genre after sub-genre it's a diluted quantity. In that sense Rock and Roll was dead well before Manic Street Preachers came along and opted to posit themselves between a few already-existing sub-genres anyway. That said, I wonder whether the history of modern music may be something that Owen Vaughan, author of such articles as "Shetland ponies wearing jumpers. Everyone say Awww" and "Nine ways to turn Gareth Morgan into a cat lover" put in the too-hard basket for this article.

Look, I know it's only rock and roll. It's stupid, too-heavily weighted on ephemeral ideals (youth, rebellion, individualism without compromise), and it's entertainment and spectacle at best. There's a complaint in Vaughan's article that to me just epitomises the neediness of the immature music fan, who can't see past age and change and reality and just wants things to stay the same as it ever was. There are bands for those people of course, - Bon Jovi come to mind. My friend David and I often discuss the notion that in this rather absurd 'industry' there is no real retirement plan. Well, there is, but to expose the reality of living off the royalties of one's most fruitful years goes against the ethos of what rock and roll is apparently about. Instead, there's money to be made in reissues, reunion tours and associated merchandising, as bands from the Grateful Dead and The Rolling Stones to Bon Jovi will acknowledge, but there's not always an obvious stepping-off point. Stuff music blogger Simon Sweetman went into this in his own way this week as well, and it's worth a read.

Owen Vaughan's opinion though? Stick to the ponies, mate.

1985: Ich bin ein Britischer

I am 15 and my world is expanding.

This isn't going to be a Video Affects post, nor a Manic Street Preachers one, although the video below is useful for more than just illustration. In my mid-teens my musical tastes went Northward, to the United Kingdom. Obviously, thanks to the Summer of Pop and the early Eighties British Pop Invasion the presence of a wide range of popular music from the Mother Country on New Zealand radios would have led to a lot of young teens such as myself building a music collection which had a particular geographical bias. Thanks to that, and after a brief dalliance with West Coast US rock, through an even briefer interest in NWOBHM, I settled on following British music almost exclusively - Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Duran Duran, The Police and Sting, U2, and eventually The Skids, The Clash, and The Smiths. For a while I could see no point to the sunshine and sweetness of American pop, and resisted the likes of Madonna and Prince to follow acts which I thought, in my tender years, spoke to me more about how the world really was. Goodbye California Girls, hello Eton Rifles.

Quite silly, of course, and by the time I'd left home a good few months of university life fixed such notions and I was adding The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth to a palette that even at high school couldn't quite manage resisting College-radio era REM. But enough listmaking, it's making me feel all weird and old.

The thing about following British culture, as I did in my teens, was that half a world away it seemed to require an additional investment in background cultural accumulation. Reading comics (Eagle, 2000AD) that over ten years would move from nodding at contemporary novelty newspaper headlines and TV ads through to actually quoting Morrissey lyrics; following TV series (The Young Ones, Spitting Image, Black Adder, any number of Comic Strip specials, New Statesman, Red Dwarf) that were the product of a new wave of politicised young comedians - all of this demanded some sort of context to it, and working out the relevance of terms like Special Patrol Group, or names like Scargill, Tebbit, Lawson... Thatcher.

At least the last name needed little introduction. Margaret Thatcher's political career spanned many more years than my teens, but her eleven years as British PM overlapped them neatly enough, and culturally she was everywhere, perhaps more than any other Prime Minister since Churchill. Looking back it seemed the political landscape of Cold War Eighties was dominated by these huge and polarising world leaders - Thatcher, Reagan, a succession of doomed Soviet Presidents culminating in Gorbachev, the formidable Bob Hawke, and here the outwardly sharp-witted David Lange, an orator king who'd thrust our defining foreign policy riposte into international waters - out Anti-Nuclear stance. This seemed like a brilliant burst of desperate hope compared to the grim picture painted by the songs, programmes and stories I'd read and watch and listen to. Polarising leaders inspire entire cultural movements in revolt, and so my music collection also acquired tones of political protest - The Specials, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello and The Proclaimers. Only  my following all of this seems now more than a little disingenuous - a combination of good tunes and unfocused adolescent fervour. A far cry from those early Eagle magazines and their Falklands-themed pull-out posters of Harrier jump jets and MIG Foxbats. Culturally as well as politically the Thatcher years as I experienced them as a teenager still resonate in the movements and phases that followed - angry small press-inspired comic titles like Deadline and Revolver, Britpop's courtship and rejection of Tony Blair's New Labour, the stories of Ian Banks and Irvine Welsh, and even the shape of modern Doctor Who. Thatcher's death this week is a strange thing for me to mark then, her past career seemingly forming the bedrock of an artistic reaction that I could only really experience vicariously. It all seems so distant, geographically and chronologically; and as I type this with Tramp the Dirt Down playing in the background I feel I'm no closer now to the heart of it than I was at fifteen, seventeen or twenty.

Video Affects - Art Garfunkel: Bright Eyes (1979)

I am nine, and my family have just been to see Watership Down, an animated movie about rabbits which, going by the elegant and haunting music video accompanying its related single Bright Eyes, will be just the sort of wholesome, non-threatening entertainment the three youngest of us (fourteen, twelve and nine) should enjoy. The actual result, if you are unfamiliar with the story of Watership Down, is quite a different thing. I stay through to the end, and bedsheets go unbothered for nights afterward, but even now it’s clear to me that this was probably the first great instance of cinematic trauma I endured in my childhood. Added to the list of shorter snippets from the later Sea Gypsies (a shock shot of a skeleton in an abandoned cabin), the earlier The Mouse and his Child (a living doll decapitated under a cartwheel), Watership Down’s tooth-and-claw lapine warfare, scenes of mauling animals and warren gassing by farmers, plus the nightmarish and ever-present spectre of the Black Rabbit of death are the top of the list, an experience so vivid that even as an adult I recently recall genuinely hovering with hesitation over bargain bins with the DVD among the cheap offers. Google “Watership Down trauma” and you’ll see page after page of the same story. Previous generations may have had Bambi’s mother being shot, and later generations the Hamlet-on-the-veldt of The Lion King, but neither can compare to the relentless wholesale and, above all, matter of fact natural slaughter of the lapine characters of Watership Down.

   

Revisiting it recently, the music video itself comprises clips from the film, and of them there’s little that’s going to offend – Bigwig’s being caught in a snare, the red-eyed pale gassed rabbit, the warping jagged lines of a rural pylon. What delivers the blow now as much as then is the juxtaposition of expected reactions – as a nine year old, cartoon characters were for the most part wholesome, sympathetic or comic. They didn’t tend to actually die, but stepped away from their cartoon fates blackened with soot, flattened by anvils or crumbling into charcoal only to be reconstituted offscreen. They were immortal, and they didn’t bleed. But Watership’s wide-eyed rabbits like Hazel, Bigwig and Fiver do, as matter of factly as they do in Richard Adams’ novel. And accompanying this, the sleepy, near-pastoral strings and woodwinds of Mike Batt’s musical composition, lulling the unwary viewer like a will-o-wisp. The video as it stands is mostly safe for very young viewers. It is not, however, for grown men.

 I’ve long been puzzled as to why the movie and the song were soon after chosen as ripe for lampoon, and can only conclude that in part satire was a natural reaction for a large adult population stunned or offended by the movie’s shock factor and the incongruous longevity of its otherwise unassuming single. Even today there are plenty around who would dismiss Bright Eyes as ‘that song about cartoon rabbits’. The truth is of course that the song is a mediation on dying, one’s “following the river of death downstream’; a curious subject for a number one single, and the video bears this out too, with its odd combination of family-friendly bunny rabbits and dreamlike bounding shadow of the rabbit spirit. Art Garfunkel’s vocals are distant, offering questions that can never be answered: “is it a kind of a dream?” “a shadow?” And as in life there are no answers: “Nobody seems to know where you go”, a line reworked later, as I hear it, by Coldplay in God Put a Smile on Your Face. There’s spirituality in Richard Adams’ rabbit world, but an animal one – no salvation, no resurrection, just oblivion. The dying rabbit of the video's close leaves his lifeless corpse to join the Black Rabbit of Inle in a flight over the land, one with the 'fog along the horizon', the 'high wind in the trees', and no longer one among the living.

 Batt’s lyrics reflected the death of his father from cancer, supposedly the starting point for the song. The composition would be covered by others later to varying degrees – one of the more affecting I’ve come across is a self-conscious solo with guitar by James Dean Bradfield on the nights of Richey James’ last ever appearances with Manic Street Preachers. At the time the song was dedicated to the band’s late manager Phillip Hall, but naturally grew in fans’ minds to take in a broader picture. But for a nine year old me in a darkened cinema, the world of Hazel, Fiver and Bigwig was a very small thing indeed, subject to the cruelty and injustice of the wilds, occasionally visited by the brutal hands of men. You age and mature, and life’s lessons and lack of fairness become less surprising, some you can even prepare for. But life’s final phase, unseen, little-expected, unfamiliar and unyielding is still a mystery.

"As distant as your former sins"

Manic Street Preachers: 'Postcards From a Young Man' (2011)

I don't believe in absolutes anymore
I'm quite prepared to admit I was wrong
This life it sucks your principles away
You have to fight against it every single day
These are the postcards from a young man
They may never be written or posted again

It's a good job this album was left 'til last. It took me a long while before I could warm to the Manic Street Preachers' most recent album, Postcards From a Young Man, especially after the impressive feat that was Journal For Plague Lovers. By comparison Postcards can't seem anything more than a step back into the sound of Send Away the Tigers, and indeed, just as Tigers proved to be a commercial turnaround for the Manics, so Postcards has been lauded in some circles as being a tremendous return to form. The question is then, what is that form? First and foremost, it's the culmination of a common arc in the life of a maturing musical ensemble - from popular voice resolving ultimately to the personal. It's a matter of the Manics as they are today, the central idea of Postcards being the present and not the past, confronting reality and not idealism with the accrued experience and wisdom of middle age. In an industry and age that demands younger acts and more immediate roads to fame and success, perhaps surviving long enough to write an album based around middle age is itself a revolutionary act.

Postcards is also an album also about distance, particularly that of distancing one's self from the past, from memory and the disappointment of age. The postcards of the album's title track - representations of old media, are left behind, not out of disillusionment or failure, but because an understanding has been reached. As has the comfort and the compromise of middle age, and a less-than-reactionary Nicky Wire claims "I am a happy consumer" in Hazleton Avenue, a love song to a youth of record collecting. Looks to the past on this album are wistful, but not filled with regret; they are those of a life lived well, and a settling reached with maturity. The musical references are themselves ageing - while early Manics would routinely nod towards The Clash, Guns 'N' Roses and Hanoi Rocks, Postcards has hooks that range from classic rock (Cheap Trick, Queen, Elton John), Dad rock (Green Day) and even Waters-Era Pink Floyd (pre-chorus Auto Intoxication) - there's even some late-sound Beatles in here, I swear. It makes for a rather homogenised set of songs, and somewhere in their composition and delivery the old voice of the Manics rarely breaks out, save for an extraordinary couplet in Auto-Intoxication where James Dean Bradfield strains at his leash, bawling: "...disaster isn't coming, it's already arrived / I am so lucky, I think that I survived."

In all of this, Postcards strikes me as a pretty 'up' album. Political songs are rare, and lack the edge of their predecessors. All We Make is Entertainment laments the passing of British Industry and the rise of cheap reality television (whose overnight 'stars' are targeted in album closer Don't Be Evil), and the easy acceptance of this in a post-industrial world. But with an opener to All We Make like this:

  I'm no longer preaching to the converted / That congregation has long since deserted.

...Wire could just as easily be writing about his band in 2012. Postcards works best for me when it isn't attempting to hit big, global issues or even, as is the case above and Internet-wary A Billion Balconies Facing the Sun (which doesn't so much rail against its demons as describe them) such low-hanging fruit. If that sounds odd given the band's age and its not shying from weighty themes in the past, then perhaps that's the distance I also sense in the whole album; what does work here is the personal, the reflective, the greater part of Postcards. Golden Platitudes, the album's closest thing to a slow 'ballad' is another mediation on 'what we were' and 'how we used to be compared to now', and does reference a larger social concern - the lack of 'fight' and passion in Western society - our overall acquiescence, but it comes across better as an intimate song, rather than another raging against a sleeping world.

If the Manics have lost their voice of outrage (and I really don't know if they have - Journal For Plague Lovers suggests they can still match great incendiary music to Richey's lyrics), then they could do worse than drop that stance and go for something more direct and personal. Would it still be Manic Street Preachers? I don't think that's an important question when the distance of this album tells enough of the story well. As I argued in my review of Simon Price's biography, Manic Street Preachers of the second decade of the Twenty-first century are a different band - they have to be, and probably have become this despite themselves. The good thing about this is for them it works just as well. The older, younger Manics have faded into history, but there's life in the band yet. Whether Postcards From a Young Man, the last album before Wire's proclaimed 'hiatus' for the band, proves to be their swansong, then there's enough on this album to satisfy that transition.

Cover story: Why, hello Mister Tim Roth and Polaroid camera, both taken in better days, and in a shot which recalls the covers of The Smiths' albums. Inside it's your actual series of photos sort of related to the topics of the songs, but otherwise it's a reasonably understated presentation.


Videos: Such a long way from the early days that we can now afford to literally sit on the sidelines while Anna Friel and Michael Sheen make chess look sexy:
 

This Christmas

Last Christmas I gave you Iron Maiden. And the year before you got The Darkness. That was generous, wasn't it?

So this year, to save you from tears, I'm giving you something special...
Winter 1996, when they had the entire country in the palm of their hands. Merry Christmas everybody!

This Was His Truth...

Music biographies are two a penny – literally, in some dreadful cases. I’ve read a handful of them over the years, and have some still on my list to go through. More often than not they suffer from slack research, limited access to the artists, or a lack of critical distance – I still shudder at the gushing and poorly-disguised hagiography I encountered in a Kate Bush biography read in the nineties. Urgh.

Simon Price’s Everything (a book about Manic Street Preachers) is an exception, however. Price, a Welshman, music journalist of considerable voice and confessed fan seems the ideal author for an act that poised itself in the media at every opportunity from early on; yet suffused as they were with their own manifold, often intellectual and sometimes conflicting messages (Nicky Wire, Price reminds us often, gleefully claimed the band’s right to contradict themselves at will), the fledgling Manics at least needed an understanding music press to deliver their voice. Inflammatory outbursts and shocking photo ops were what the band were known for, but Price sensibly deconstructs Richey’s ‘4 REAL’ self-mutilation and Wire’s frequent crowd-baiting jibes to align both with what he sees as a sophisticated and methodical attempt at broad communication in, it could be added, a media world that still relied on paper, radio and television as its delivery vehicles. Not to mention live performance – the number of concerts Price reports , often seemingly from first hand, is astonishing, and tell a story in themselves; from small-audience early outings in provincial wales, through to a dogged attempt at conquering London and the greater cities, Europe and Asia, and reliably, doomed assaults on a US market. It’s a well-researched and diverting read.

Through this we deal with Price’s initial fervour, his dogged pursuit of the band and all-in fan adulation, his one-on-one interviews with Wire and Edwards, and ultimately his growing disillusionment with the group post-disappearance, post-Everything Must Go. Price’s status as something of a fan confidante as well as a fan himself gives the book a genuine and intimate air, particularly so in the closing chapters of the unfortunate Richey, to whom (along with Nicky Wire) Price gravitates. Throughout the book are essays by price concerning aspects of the band (its lack f US success, their Welshness, their ‘rock’ approach) and its individual members. Wire and Edwards are the clear winners here, each given the lion’s share while James Dean Bradfield is probed from a distance, offering little to counteract his reputation for distance and prickliness itself, and as for Sean Moore, you’ll read of his boyishness, his love of DIY and spending and the occasional nod to his reticence overall, but there’s no mystery plumbed here.

What mystery is plumbed is the nature and disappearance of Richey Edwards – a significant portion of the book which I read over a two-hour car trip and once through, sighed with relief. It’s heavy-going, and Price deserves credit for his balanced approach to the details behind the case, even though the author later reportedly urged fans not to buy the book due to its publishers withholding some of his criticism of the police’s investigation.

But perhaps it’s more a case that the story lies with Richey in chief – his disappearance occurs around the three-quarters mark, and Price’s impression of the band, which becomes more evident and singular as the book progresses. Small asides at the Manics’ seemingly-undeserving contemporaries – the dreary Radiohead, the pretentious Blur, the boorish Oasis and appalling Levellers; Stone Roses are described ironically as “a Led Zeppelin tribute band from Manchester”, and U2 a “conceptual rock band” (a fair point given their mid-Nineties creative slump.) Price’s bias towards early Manic Street Preachers is voiced quietly, tacitly, but it’s there towards the book’s end, the gentle condemnation of a band who the author sees as having abandoned their youthful anger and righteousness for a rock and roll millionaire lifestyle which wouldn’t trouble Guns N Roses with its scandal. Price seems to westle with the task of reminding the reader (and himself) that the successes of EMG and especially This Is My Truth are earned and deserved – clearly there is regret that Richey was not around to share in them, and it’s not a point which Price sticks on for long; but it’s clear to me that the division felt by a good many fans between ‘old’ Manics and ‘new’ Manics is felt by the author too – especially in the proprietorial closing chapters where the newer ‘casual’ fans are castigated for their blundering into an established act’s history on the strength of a best-selling single; Price asking “where were you in 92?” The answer isn’t needed - the question is redundant.

But at the end of the day, this is a splendid book, and by the last pages it’s plain to see there won’t be a follow-up. Rice effectively dusts his hands of the post-Richey Manics in the politest way, challenging them to make good on their early promise of mass appeal, mass influence. Personally, the ten years since this book and This is My Truth (given pretty short shrift compared to its predecessors) reveal the ground the band have and haven’t covered in the interim - in short, they grow, they mature, and they change, to the distress of some fans, while accruing new ones. You’ll not find a better record of the early days than this, at least not until the band themselves take pen in hand.

"I Really Don't Mind Being Lied To"

Manic Street Preachers: 'Journal for Plague Lovers' (2009)

On the 23rd of November 2008 Richey James Edwards was officially declared presumed deceased. After fifteen years having disappeared without trace his story was never fully resolved, with Edwards' family declining to allow him to be declared dead until this time, and in the case of his surviving bandmates and friends, a percentage of profits from each album being set aside for Richey. 2008's official announcement would prove to bring some closure at last to the tale, or the nest best thing at least, though greatly far from the most perfect closure, of course.

Fifteen years on, the Manic Street Preachers were a markedly different band from their Holy Bible selves: successful, middle-aged, on the perimeters of the establishment of course, but so established in themselves that they have been regarded Britpop survivors, elder statesmen of that era. They had two comebacks, and on the strength of the success of Send Away the Tigers, could have easily stayed the course and plumbed their works for more mainstream adulation. And yet... Journal for Plague Lovers is the result of this catharsis, created as it was from Richey's legacy to his best friend Nicky Wire, a scrapbook of his writings, photos, poetry and lyrics, not recreated, but given life by the surviving band. Some have seen the album also as a tribute to the band's fans, particularly those fans of the late Richey, and in all the project seems painstakingly co-ordinated, mannered to fit the model of the band as they were, rather than as they are. No singles were released from the album, although a video for Jackie Collin Existential Question Time was made (see below) which hits the right notes for me. And that note is 'energy.'

There's something touching also about the relationship between lyrics and performers here. Richey's words   are entirely of their time, and yet written by a twenty-eight year old to have them sung by his forty-something friends is remarkable - it's really as though the years haven't passed. One suspects some cosmetic enhancement went on between lyrics and song, however - there's less of the Gatling gun approach in the lyrics, and overall it appears Bradfield and Wire have had more control over the songs than they may have had with Richey about. The references contained in the words aren't as marooned in the mid-Nineties as they could be - either Richey was more prescient in his writing than you'd grant, or his poems and fragments were simply not that specific to a time and place, or perhaps some judicious editing was undertaken? It's a minor thing. For what it's worth the lyrics are a passing thing for me - maybe it's the state by now of Nicky Wire's writing, but I found that by this album I'd tuned my ears out to the lyrical content and more into how the group were playing together; maybe that's laziness, but it's not to say I don't still sing along.

What does matter is the work in full; Manic Street Preachers re-energised, revitalised. A celebration instead of a commemoration, and I can’t think of a better example of both turning back the clock in the most perfect way possible, nor creating as fitting and devoted a tribute to the work and creativity of a departed friend. As close to a perfect Manics album as you could find. Where did Bradfield find the compositions? Eking out whole songs from scraps of verses, haiku, sometimes repeated verse, and yet the music seems as though it had been kept on ice since 1994. This is the follow-up promised by The Holy Bible, diverted into Everything Must Go, and yet devoid of the treatment (“Pantera meets Nine Inch Nails meets Screamadelica”) that Edwards would have intended at the time – and yet for all that it’s not a jarring anachronism; it’s a beautiful, elegant, sad and loving miracle.

And as it turn out, this marvelous album is also something of a detour. The follow-up will be, promised Wire, something lighter; more poppy, more accessible - so, Send Away the Tigers revisited, rather than another Journal. But for its time and place, its sentiment and its truth, if Plague Lovers had been anything more than a one-off then I might have been suspicious. There are two ways to assuage your audience, sounding like you once did, or sounding like something entirely new. if this is nostalgia (and it's much more than that), then this brief, magical trip into the past was worth taking. It's reminded me of how much potential the early Manics, now outnumbered and outgunned by the mature three piece, was once. And it's a cracker.

Cover Story: To continue the link with The Holy Bible's era, the cover art is another Jenny Saville piece, and was deemed offensive enough to have the album not displayed in Tescoes, Asda, Sainsbury's and Morison's (Bradfield pointed out the hypocrisy of still having lads mags on display in the same shop, but to no avail.) It's a beautiful and arresting piece, striking the tone of the album - diverting, possibly shocking, provocative, but not gratuitous. Inside, if you're lucky enough to have the deluxe edition, reproductions of Richey's scrapbook pages and lyrics. In the standard edition, lyrics and a simple gatefold shot of the man himself.

"I Was Born to Underachieve"

Manic Street Preachers: 'Send Away the Tigers' (2007)

 “I realised that The Manics had lost that element of fabulous disaster... And on this album, we've gone back to source” - Nicky wire on Send Away The Tigers 

And now for the triumphant return, the second second coming? Lifeblood’s fortunes had been mixed indeed – eschewed critically and by the fans for its different sound and introspective mood. By 2007 Manic Street Preachers were an old band, shedding ill-fated solo projects and looking with steely eyes to a twentieth anniversary in a handful of years. Surely after the lacklustre response to their last group effort, the next album would open quietly and fade away slowly? Well, not in this instance. It’s a strange element in the music and life of the Manic street Preachers that confounded expectation runs through their career. Generation Terrorists was not the incendiary monolithic debut the band had hoped to arrive and shorty retire on; The Holy Bible did not achieve its Important Album status by chart success, and the fortune of Everything Must Go is a matter of historical record by now. By 2007 though, you’d be forgiven for thinking the well was running dry after two albums whose reception had been, to put it kindly, ‘mixed.’

Send Away the Tigers was instead a great success, and widely regarded as that elusive thing for an ageing band, the ‘return to form’. Pipped to the number one album spot by fewer than 700 units, its first chart-eligible track, the grand and sparring Your Love Alone Is Not Enough with The Cardigans’ Nina Persson (the band’s first duet since Pretty Baby Nothing) took them back to the number two spot in the UK, and re-launched the group as a credible radio-friendly band once more. Certainly, speaking for myself the results were there. I bought Tigers aware that friends and family who had ‘til then had no opinion (or even awareness) of the band were expressing genuine interest in the single, and this far from Wales that had to mean something (Your Love eventually reached number 20 in the NZ charts), so all was well there. What of the rest of the album though?

Comeback albums are funny things; not as common an industry cliché as “the difficult second album”, but common enough that there’s a commercial imperative built in for any aspiring manager of a downwardly-motivated act to dream of. Send Away the Tigers as a whole for me recalls Green Day's American Idiot (2004), an altogether huger work with longer-lasting impact, but as an example of a return effort with little change to sound other than a renewed vigour, the albums are close. Tigers ups the ante a little, offering more politically-motivated tracks (Rendition, the Clash-like Imperial Bodybags) peppered among the ‘mature’ audience-friendly ones, and overall the efforts speak of Wire’s aforementioned intent to ‘return to the source’. There’s a lot that’s familiar and comforting to the established fan: Lifeblood’s keyboards open the album but are pointedly drowned out by another Adamson-styled guitar intro, and the band’s past works are referenced too – from You Stole the Sun From My Heart finding its way into the lyrics of Your Love Alone to the swinging 6/8-timed Indian Summer, which so resembles A Design for Life that Bradfield and Wire were at loggerheads over its inclusion, and soon after its release a YouTube wag demonstrated just how close the similarity was. Critically and emotionally as well as commercially Send Away the Tigers is a great success, probably well worth the return of the reversed-R cover lettering, I’d say. But for me it’s not a long player, being maybe too familiar, too rehearsed. It’s the sound of a band who knew they always had it in them, but because their past two albums had fared poorly, this return to form strikes me also as something of a shrug of acknowledgement. The hidden track, an unnecessary cover of Working Class Hero (also covered by Green Day for an Amnesty International album) tend towards lip-service. The Tiger burns bright, and where and when it needed to, but the follow up album for me is the big one; another resurrection of the past, but crucially less well-rehearsed, and the better for it.

Cover Story: Finally, a cover with legs. An astute choice, using a professional photographer’s work. This was borne out with the video for Autumnsong which came in two varieties – a label-sanctioned version, and a second pass instigated by the band themselves using the same models miming to the song and directed by the photographer. It’s an attractive sleeve. There, I said it.