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Fear Of A Brain Dead Planet - Deadline, July 1991

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ARTICLES:1991



Title: Fear Of A Brain Dead Planet
Publication: Deadline
Date: July 1991
Writer: Steven Wells



DeadlineJuly1991.jpg DeadlineJuly1991 (1).jpg



There are three sorts of people in the world — those who are excited about the Manic Street Preachers, those who are ignorant of the Manic Street Preachers and those who despise the Manic Street Preachers — groin-dead, boring bastards.

"I've heard it all before when I were the cloakroom attendant at the 100 Club back in 1876 when the Pistols were just starting..."

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWN!

By sending beautiful letters to certain music hacks and by being well fuckable and having at least three good chewns and by slashing their wrists in front of a photographer, the Manic Street Preachers.

"I mean, I've heard that they don't even play their own instruments on the records....

BOOOOORRRRRRRRRIIIIINNNNNGGGGG!

They have got to the stage where they can fill the Marquee. One of them, a giant orange gonk-freak with his mum's sperm-crusty scarf wrapped around his feeble, unmanly chest drools in sticky welsh camp: "Tenessee Williams was the most beautiful homosexual who ever lived.."

And another Manic, a huge scar across his throat where doctors unsuccessfully tried to neuter the overactive thyroid gland that floods his shuddering, stammering. blinking, rigid frame with nature's amphetamines, he says "If there are any young men in the audience who'd like to fuck me then I'll see you all in the dressing room afterwards." He's never sucked a cock in his life, what he's doing is cupping the audience's balls in his hand — there are few women here just as there are few women reading this comic—and smiling and asking them just how rock'n'roll they really are.

Young men dressed in the crowd in the shit-in-your-parent's face riot rags of radical, revolutionary rock and roll folk- devils blanch and shake.

"AAAGGHH! UUUGH! FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF!" Dumb homophobic prematurely middle aged boring bastard Tory scum.

On the steps outside the toilets a bunch of rock'n'roll hairies — one wearing a leather jacket bearing the legend, "NOT JUST ANOTHER PUNK ROCK JACKET" — are verbally crucifying the prettier and younger and much, much, much, much more fuckable boys on stage —

"Just wait until the backlash starts..." "What are you talking about??" rages a bald fury on his way back from a piss wearing a fluorescent lime green DRUGS MAKE YOUR EYES BLEED t-SHIRT.

"This IS the backlash! Everybody hates this band! Everything about them is WRONG! The clothes they wear are WRONG! The songs they steal from are WRONG! And still they go from strength to strength whilst you sit and sneer instead of LEARNING..."

Every music hack I know that's set out to see this band has gone to hate them. Every single one has come back in love, all their fears and prejudices confirmed.

Four Oxfam shop fops from the arsehole of Wales who look like a downmarket Generation X on a diet of ugly pills. A band who when the rest of pop grooved to vibeful optimism ran in exactly the opposite direction. WE'VE HEARD IT ALL BEFORE!!!

To an awful lot of people —baggy E kids in particular — the very idea of totally sincere smash-the-system melodic attack pop is I00% new, but the punk bores, same as the hippy bores, drone on and on about when they were lads it were all fields around here. God, you boring bastards are the gravediggers of anything fresh. you've always been around...

The Sex Pistols? Load of hype man, anyway they're not doing anything that MCS and the New York Dolls haven't already done loads better and anyway they've nicked their entire look from Richard Hell and they can't play their instruments properly and the lyrics are just bald slogans.." BORING BORING BASTARDS DIE! DIE! DIE! This is not some Birdland (Snap their little legs) or Windy Jam sandwich and Transvision Wankbag corpsefucking outing. Birdland are on a nostalgia charabanc trip to some imaginary rock and roll old folks home cum theme park where they can grovel and lick the boots of their heroes. Wendy James — for all she talks of cheekbones and tight arses — is peddling a similar faked dream, FROTH. They're in love with and they respect the imagined 'honourable' rock and roll past. The Manic Street Preachers are about D.I.S.R.E.S.P.E.C.T., in their stuttering. vitriolic analysis there are no heroes, only failures to learn from and traitors to despise. You can and should suspect their analysis as leaky, adolescent twaddle — an adolescent who doesn't spurt leaky twaddle is an adolescent in serious need of a good wank —but you'd be wrong to impugn their sincerity. This is as real and as stupid and as exciting as it gets. This is the rock and roll orgasm.

Those who attack, despise or claim to be bored by the Manic Street preachers are dead to rock's essential absurdity. You're right to laugh, the Manic Street Preachers are a rock band and all rock bands are a fucking joke. But if you've ever fallen in love with rigid neck veins, thrashing, skinny-bicepped arms. a total hatred of the status quo, the belief that youth and speed and beauty and screaming righteous violence can achieve anything — and you still despise these grunting welsh monkeys then you've been killed by the cultural clampdown. They've got you. They've rammed the great rusty spike of conformity through the reptile part of your brain. As your dead eyes scan this page your central nervous system is being filed away in some dank, underground civil service bunker under the heading, BORING CYNICAL BASTARD!

The Manic Street Preachers in a Dublin hotel room talking about having just played Belfast. Automatic rifles waved in their faces by seventeen-year old killers in British Army uniforms..First stage burnout and fear of being seen to pose in front of guns and men and armoured cars a la the CL**SH. A song about the monarchy — A journalist working for one of those disgusting Baby Boomer glossies that drown their rock and roll in formaldehyde. attacks the preachers with gums of brittle cancer — A song about the Monarchy??? Surely nobody needs to go over that old territory. REPEAT AFTER ME..FUCK QUEEN AND COUNTRY! Until the brains of every Royal Parasite have been splashed on to the floor of Buckingham Palace then surely every young rock band has an obligation to attack the monarchy? Whilst most wage slaves on this rotting dogs head set in a sea of orange peel and used condoms. Raw sewage and crisp packets still think of England or Britain as their country then every pop single should seek to uncover the lie. That's the difference between the Manic Street Preachers and First Offence. F/Off target homosexuals—an oppressed group and in the context of the real, nasty, horrible world in which we exist. a dead easy target. If you rebel by shining on those weaker than you then you merely participate in the comedy of conformity. The Manic Street Preachers make targets of everything that's bigger, more powerful than themselves. The comedy of confrontation. They grew up in a mining town that they hated and they fed their tiny minds with rock dreams and sexy snappy, rebel politics and when the real world turned out to be just as dull as their home town they did not retreat into cynicism. they did not try to justify a descent into introspection (Hiya Moz!) or the cowardly confection of post modernism. They set out to make it so. They realised a basic truth — that we, all of us, are never just consumers. That the possibility always exists. if reality fails to match up to our dreams, to change that reality. They are stunningly articulate, naive, contradictory and convinced that they'll be the biggest band in the world. Possible first album title —culture, boredom, alienation and despair. A record contract with a big company and all the money and drugs and sex they'll ever want. Putting the record in a sandpaper cover so it gets scratched every time you play it Stupid ideas spewing out of the brains of young working class boys desperately trying to stay mean and bitter and disillusioned and excited.

In terms of the desire to articulate total anger. total disgust, the sheer will to rage against the lingering, painful death of the pop culture, the Manic Street Preachers have no white peers outside the anarcho-ghetto and those sad fuckers, hamstrung by moralism, are no competition. The Manic Street Preachers are an unstable stew of overeducated showbiz nihilism, an anti-crap jihad against the safe rebellion of those who don't honestly understand why Kylie shits all over the Wedding Present. They are inconsistent, contradictory, totally fucked up and 100% sincere. If that doesn't excite you then I don't know why you're still interested in pop music. Is t something you do as a reasonably exciting alternative to trainspotting. chartered accountancy or ballroom dancing? Are you one of those dweebs who consider adult comics about people sat around in pubs doing nothing deeper than Tank Girl because they're more boring? Who really want pop and the comic to ape the deformities of those inferior genres "serious music", and the "serious novel"? May I suggest that you give up wanking. give up sex, give up comics. give up drugs and give up breathing. We are in the death grip of the baby-boomers who are determined to take us to the grave with them. ADJUST YOUR EARS! This is no time for snobbery, Let's scream as they plunge us into a premature grave. Repeat after me, death sentence heritage...