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Timing has never been the Manic Street Preachers’ strong suit. Whilst the world draped itself in the utilitarian workwear of baggy, they chose to be mascara—eyed glamour-pusses. When FM America finally tuned into grunge, they constructed a stadium-lite rock LP and, just as the world got Britpop-happy, with ironic high-jinks being the order of the day, they made one of the bleakest and most densely-constructed albums ever made. And now, they are back with the masterful Everything Must Go, surrounded by the dressed-up, self-satisfied glitteratti of ’96, looking and sounding as reflective as they’ve ever been.
And all we can really do is trust them. Because with the release of their quite splendid new album the Manics have reached some kind of virgin territory for a pop group. What the record represents, before you even get to the music, is a safe arrival following one- of the most harrowing journeys any pop group has ever encountered.
One which has sent them through a maze of contradictions and dark confusion all stemming from the day, almost 15 months ago, when Richey Edwards walked out of Room 516 of the Embassy Hotel in Bayswater, and out of their lives forever. In those agonising months since, the group have suffered everything the media has been cold-hearted enough to throw at them. Grim, pessimistic tracts bout the likelihood of Richey being dead; sombre reports about how his body would never be found if, as the evidence suggested, he'd jumped from the Severn Bridge on the morning of St. Valentine’s Day, 1995; even, unforgivably, rumours that Richey’s disappearance had been staged. All had to be dealt with as diplomatically as possible.
Meanwhile the group, bewildered by the entire episode, have been forced to reconsider their future in private and deal with the whole sorry affair as best they can. Nicky and Sean retired to a surreal serenity as home-loving DIY enthusiasts, whilst James embarked on a demon-exorcising career as semi-permanent London gadabout. The band, up until now, stayed firmly on ice. Yet to dwell too heavily on the events of the last 12 months is somehow to miss the point of the Manic Street Preachers.
For, ever since their electric-yell of a debut single, they’ve managed to exude a wildly maverick survival instinct. "Motown Junk” spat in the face of cloying fan-worship, "You Love Us” swore vengeance on the doubters and "Stay Beautiful", with its glammed-up insouciant howl of a chorus, Why don ’t you just fuck off!, practically redefined outsider chic. And that’s way before you get to the epic spitefulness which characterised parts of last album The Holy Bible which, for all its obsessions with the Holocaust, serial killers and self-abuse, still managed to include the splenetic dazzle of: I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer, I spat out Plath and Pinter amongst its lyrics. A sign that, as long as Richey's words were supercharged by James’s last-chance howl, the band would never veer off into the realms of introspective depression.
For the Manics have always been desperately keen to show their resistance to any sort of limitations. From their refusal to record in Wales, to their early contempt for most of their contemporaries; even through to the remarkable recent shows supporting The Stone Roses and Oasis. There may be an incredibly fraught history surrounding them already (the stuff of legend, unquestionably), but the Manics, as they stand, represent more than just a group freed from 12 months of self-induced torpor, They’ve peered over the abyss and come back, indeed, with "A Design For Life”. Perhaps this is best expressed by a lyric from “Australia”, a key song on the new album: l want to fly and run until it hurts. Three-quarters of the Manic Street Preachers, at least, have already proved themselves to be golden souls, untainted by the slings and arrows of pop stardom.
As for the fourth, it’s to be hoped he’s still out there somewhere, listening to it all and smiling in the wings.
Jon Savage Meets Nicky Wire
Jon Savage: What inspired you when you were growing up to want to do this?
NW: Certain things inspire you along the way, but I do think you are born to it. I still believe that everybody in the world is born with a talent. It’s just a lot of people never get the chance to use it. I started writing poetry a lot around the time of the Miners‘ Strike, because my village was heavily involved with all that, the pits and scabs and all the rest of it, and that mixed with a sort of leaning towards androgyny and a bit of Morrissey and then the Sex Pistols and then the Clash: I think they were kind of the motivating factors really, The Miners’ Strike was really important in terms of writing.
JS: So was it in the valley, or just in your village?
NW: There were 12 pits in our valley and, of course, there’s none now and it politicised you at a very young age. I wrote a song, it was a really terrible song, and I gave it to James when me and James were 15, and that's the first song me and James ever wrote together.
JS: What was it called?
NW: Ohh, (laughing) it’s something absolutely dreadful, I can’t even remember. I probably don’t want to remember; something to do with mines.
JS: Everyone’s sort of forgotten about the Miners’ Strike, haven’t they? I just remember that was the moment when you really realised what the Conservatives were doing, wasn’t it?
NW: It was the start of the demystification that working class people had any power, it’s ’No. Now you haven’t’. The start of the Conservative destruction, really. It had a big effect on me and James. It didn’t sort of hang around long, but as a catalyst it certainly got me and then I became sort of much more artistic, and Philip Larkin was one of the first things that inspired me poetry-wise. My brother was really into the Beat generation, he’d just come back from America so that followed on Kerouac and Burroughs. All I played at the time was classic Clash and Never Mind The Bollocks; it was a pilgrimage to try and understand those records.
JS: I’ve started listening to The Clash again recently. I underrated them for ages, but I’m just remembering that I saw them do two of the best rock shows I’ve ever seen in my life. It was the White Riot tour and the tour they did in the Autumn that year, in The Rainbow and the Manchester Apollo, full of kids going mental, completely out of control, tearing the place apart. It was so exciting.
NW: Yeah. (laughing) The thing for us it was all second-hand, I mean, when it was the tenth anniversary of punk, which was ’86, Tony Wilson did this re-run of all the Granada shows, and The Clash doing ‘Garageland’ on there from, I dunno, one of those dodgy gigs. That was completely...we loved it; there the four of us said that’s what we wanted to be like on stage, because we’d never seen a band that moved, that moved around on stage y’know. The Pistols were more arrogant anyway, more stare you in the face and psyche you out, but seeing The Clash in that video had a massive effect on us.
JS: There’s one great scene in that Granada footage where The Clash finish one song and, just at the end, Strummer trips over a monitor and goes flat on his face.
NW: (laughs) That’s the one exactly, and he just bangs his head right on it. He tried to smash a bottle as well, and when he goes ’Here we are on TV what does it mean to me? Fuck all!!’ I just love it. When we saw that it was just fantastic.
JS: So the four of you were all watching this kind of stuff; what were the first groups you ever went to see?
NW: Well, James, Richey and Sean were real Echo and the Bunnymen fans. I think that was their first gig for all of those three, and I really had a phase on The Smiths, but it did wear off very quickly for some reason. I loved Hatful of Hollow. Played it to death, but I went off it really quickly. I never went to gigs anyway, Jon, to be honest. The first band I saw was The Primitives and Tallulah Gosh.
JS: Well, The Primitives were good. I liked that record 'Crash'.
NW: Yeah! Well there used to be this club in Port Talbot, which is about fucking 80 miles away, which put on indie bands like, you know, The Shop Assistants... all those 1986 bands. We used to go there because it was about the nearest place really. If you were slightly weird, you liked The Smiths, you liked Echo and the Bunnymen, they were the starting point, you know.
JS: Do you think the problem, now that a lot of particularly indie rock that used to be about the outsider, is so much to do with being ‘lads’ and being Top 40 groups?
NW: That's why I think we exist outside those perimeters totally. At the end of the day ’A Design For Life' is still a very serious, intelligent lyric. Well, it tries to be, anyway. It’s not exactly a joyous song, it is kind of heroic. But it is worrying, just celebrating the actual being in a band. I don’t find it particularly exhilarating being in a band, but people do, they’re just happy to have their record deal and get a record out and get on Top of The Pops.
JS: One of the things I liked about the video for the single was that you still had slogans and ideas, and it seems to me that everybody’s not interested in ideas. Can you talk about a couple of the slogans?
NW: A lot of the slogans like ’A House is A Machine for Living In’ and 'Tomorrow Is Too Late’. They were all designers’ and architects’ quotes. ‘Useful is Beautiful’ that kind of stuff. It's the sort of council estate mentality, if you know what I mean. 'Destroy your own houses’, you know, when working class people should, if they are going to destroy anything - at least, go to somewhere rich and do it. (laughs)
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