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Manic Street Preachers enjoyed a career rebirth with 2007 LP Send Away The Tigers. Here, frontman James Dean Bradfield revisits its rip-roaring lead single, the No.2 hit Your Love Alone Is Not Enough, which saw him duet with The Cardigans’ Nina Persson...
I moved back to Wales lock, stock and barrel in late 2009, but at this point I was still living in London, in Chiswick. Nick [Wire, bandmate] was up to see Martin [Hall, manager] and said, ‘Swing by the office, I’ve got a couple of lyrics for you.’ He handed me this tape and two lyrics in an envelope and said, ‘I’ve written half the tune for one song already, have a go at trying to finish it off for me.’
I went back home and opened the envelope, which is always quite exciting because Nick puts lots of collages on it and some abstract visual clues as to the spirit, the nature and the shape of the song. I saw the lyric of Your Love Alone Is Not Enough and put the tape on. He had the verse, ‘Your love alone is not enough, not enough, not enough. You said, the sky would fall on you, fall on you…’ Then the tape just stopped and I thought, ‘This is going to be a hard song to finish’ because it’s one of those where the verse is as strong as any chorus you can write.
I needed to write a bridge and a chorus, but it came really quickly. There’s a little riff that joins the verse with the chorus that, in my head, sounded like a John Squire 12-string descending line. So that was good because, if you have an idea in your head, it gives a shape of how things are going to connect – even if it subsequently ends up sounding a bit different. The gaps in the song remind me of [The Who’s] The Kids Are Alright, where the drums just stab and then it picks up again.
I’d done a tape of it, and I realised Nick was still in the office so I thought I’d rush back because I was quite excited. I wanted him to listen to it and think, ‘Fuck me, we’ve done it!’ He listened to a bit of it on the train and called me up when he got home saying, ‘Yeah, that sounds like it could be pay dirt – it could be our first single on this record we’re planning.’
Sean [Moore, drummer] was away, but I was excited enough to go and do a little demo with my own drums, which Sean said sounded like a roadie falling down the stairs [Laughs]. But we knew, even from those two quite rudimentary demos, that we had something.
Cut to us being in the middle of Ireland at Grouse Lodge studios, where we laid down the backing track. We had three quarters of the song and it felt perfect. That’s when I got scared; I was like, ‘Right, now it’s ours to fuck up!’
All the while, Nick had persisted that it was a duet. We had a shortlist of people to sing the other part, but Nina Persson was always the top choice. We were both massive fans of [The Cardigans’ 2003 album] Long Gone Before Daylight – For What It’s Worth is one of our favourite singles of all time.
Nina agreed to sing on it, which was a massive coup for us because we’d definitely had a bit of a blip. Lifeblood [2004 LP] had been a bit of a failure, chart-wise and critically, and our festival slots had got worse. It wasn’t a certainty that somebody like Nina was going to say yes, but she heard the backing track and my guide vocal and agreed to it.
We packed up in the studio and Nick and Sean went home, but I flew straight to New York from Ireland to collect the vocal from Nina. Hearing her sing was exciting: a woman’s voice just transforms a track and I’d experienced that before with Traci Lords [Little Baby Nothing] and Sophie Ellis-Bextor [Black Holes For The Young]. I was like, ‘Wow, if we could just manage to get Nina to join the Manics for the rest of eternity, we could sound like this!’
I just knew that I was coming back on the plane with an amazing CD in my pocket of what was going to be our next big hit – and it missed No.1 by a whisker.
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