Test3

ARTICLES:2021

Nicky Wire - The MOJO Interview Publication: MOJO Date: September 2021 Writer: Keith Cameron Photos: Tom Oldham With four strings and a feather boa, the Manic Street Preachers’ iconic Minister Of Aggravation carries on the Kulturkampf, while reflecting on loss and longevity. “You are allowed to build bands on hatred and delusion,” insists Nicky Wire. ‘‘I’LL GIVE YOU A LIFT BACK TO THE STATION.” The last place MOJO expects to be after interviewing Nicky Wire is in a car driven by Nicky Wire. A previous visit to the Manic Street Preachers’ bassist, lyricist and spielmacher at home in Newport saw him recruiting brother Patrick Jones and bandmate Sean Moore as chauffeurs; his failure to pass even the theory test rankling for someone whose academic success at school came easily. Yet here he is now, humming along to Lloyd Cole & The Commotions’ Rattlesnakes, navigating the hills near the Manics’ Door To The River studio, then easing onto the motorway with only the slightest clench of the steering wheel. “I’m a very instinctive person, really poor on technical stuff – that’s why I’m such a shit driver,” he laughs. “I said to Sean, ‘There’s no instinct in passing your test.’ He’s like, ‘Well no, you’ll kill someone!’” Moore is not around today, but Wire’s other bandmate James Dean Bradfield greets us in the upstairs lounge before leaving Nicky to talk. Situated above the River Usk, with horses in adjoining fields, the Manics recorded 14th album The Ultra Vivid Lament here and at storied Rockfield, 25 miles away, in between lockdowns. Wire didn’t remove his mask once. Fond of solitude – promotional items for 1996’s two-million selling Everything Must Go bore Sartre’s maxim “Hell Is Other People” – and famously keen on cleaning, he quips that he perfected social distancing long before it became a thing. The new album is lush and deftly focused: “London Calling-era Clash playing Abba” was the shorthand blueprint, explicitly so in the nuanced political anthem Orwellian, amid an overwhelming mood of bittersweet sorrow. Wire’s father died in July 2019, only a year after his mother. “Certainly, losing both my parents hangs over virtually everything I do and think, in good ways and bad,” he says. “I feel extremely lucky to have had them but extremely sad not to have them any more.” History and loss are intrinsic to the Manics psyche. Mementoes of a 30-year journey from punk iconoclasts to pop symphonists are all around as we settle on the studio sofa, Wire with a Coke and MOJO enjoying coffee from a mug inscribed with the words of Aneurin Bevan, a fellow Welsh working-class hero. On the wall, amid a collage of approved icons – Lana Del Rey and Michael Kiwanuka joining some perennial touchstones (Axl; Iggy; Kurt; Marilyn; Cozy Powell) – there’s an image of the young Manics at original strength with Richey Edwards, smiling at Karl Marx’s tomb in Highgate. The jacket Edwards wore in the You Love Us video is framed, albeit still waiting to be hung, in the hallway. “I am cut from a cloth of just ploughing on,” Wire chuckles. “For me, the key line on Everything Must Go, unfortunately, is not ‘Libraries us gave us power’, it’s ‘All I want to do is live/No matter how miserable it is.’ Thinking even the moments of terrible isolation will pass. Because they do." As with every Manics record, the new album contemplates The State Of Things, but predominantly in the personal realm. It’s the inner migration, as I think JG Ballard called it. There’s a certain amount of politics and the usual Manics traits, but lyrically, yes, it is a deeply personal record. And I don’t know how that resonates in terms of our back catalogue. You could say The Holy Bible is personal because of Richey’s lyrics. But it’s not our raison d’être. Opening song Still Snowing In Sapporo flashes back to 1993, touring Gold Against The Soul in Japan – is the band’s history energising, or a weight you carry around? It’s always been an energising force, up until now, where it does feel pretty impractical, and subduing, at times. It’s just fucking hard work being in a band this long! Not that we don’t get on, but so many other things come in – ageing parents, kids, you name it. When I turned 50, I realised my short term memory was really degraded. I can’t even remember if I had a shower this morning – but I can recall everything from 1993, I can literally smell the hairspray that me and Richey were using, or James’s insane see-through blouse. So I tried to write that song in a really romantic way. At that point, we were completely on our own – there was no kinship with any other band in the universe. Your son is at school and your daughter is at university. Was Nicholas Allen Jones a good student? I was genuinely strange, because I found this way literally to do nothing but [still] get A’s. Six A’s at O level and two A’s at A level – Politics and Sociology. I’m really bitter to this day that I got aB in English Literature. Chaucer fucked me up. It shouldn’t be on the curriculum, it’s literally just because it’s old. We could have been doing Dylan Thomas or R.S. Thomas or Philip Larkin, anything. And at university I was awful. My predicted grades were so bad I went to Portsmouth Polytechnic... (laughs). Purely because they would have you? Exactly. I never said anything in class, I was unbelievably shy and reticent. I went slightly off the rails and I called my mum up. I had two A’s and aB in my pocket, so she got me into Swansea because my brother had been there. At the end of the first year in Swansea, I got a letter saying, “Are you still in the university?”, because I hadn’t been on campus once. But I still managed to get a degree. Even though the night before one of my finals, we were supporting The Levellers at Salisbury Art Centre. We came on stage, and I said, “You can all fuck off and walk your greyhounds now.” There was such a seething hatred towards us – quite rightly. Then I did the public administration exam the next morning. So I was terrible in university. I regret it a bit. This was 1990 – did you have any alternative career prospects? Well, I was also addicted to fruit machines, big time. I was £3,000 in debt. I redirected my mail to James’s house, because I didn’t want my mum and dad to see it. But I convinced the bank to give me a loan by saying I’d got a job in the Foreign Office. It sounds really bad now...So the dream in my head was to be a diplomat (laughs). I thought my politics degree would lead to a job as an ambassador. Legend has it you’d already seen a bright sporting career thwarted by injury. That has been over-amplified somewhat. I was playing football for the district. And I went for a get together with the Welsh schoolboys. The second time, I sent my mum to the bus stop to say, “He’s not coming.” Because I just felt really intimidated. The story that you were offered trials by professional clubs – true? Yeah, but I just never went. I know it’s hard for people to understand from my ‘stage persona’, but I was chronically shy. That’s why, to this day, I can still so happily recoil into myself. And I had discovered music by then. My brother ended up being a better sportsman than me, I think he played at Anfield for Swansea University. I’ve always been naturally unfit. What did your parents do? My dad started off as a miner, joined the army, ended up building – real physically strong. A brilliant man. Obsessed with history and with books. My mum was an evacuee in the war, came down here literally with nothing. She was taken in by a family in Bargoed – Uncle Will, our uncle by default. She got into grammar school, then did secretarial work, the dentist’s, doctor’s, that kind of stuff. Every day I wake up and think if there’s a true privilege I had in life it was having them as parents. Your brother Patrick is four years older – did he fulfil a musical mentor role? He did. Rush was the thing. Which for a 10-year-old boy was a bit weird! We are massively into Rush, and Sabbath and Zeppelin, and I don’t know if he was trying to get cool and trendy but he brought London Calling home, then took it back the next day because we both just couldn’t fucking comprehend that. An odd moment. The Clash became such a formative thing for me but I rejected it for Whitesnake, initially! Either of the first two Clash albums might have made more sense. I think Give ’Em Enough Rope in particular. The first single we ever bought was Neon Knights by Black Sabbath. Amazing song. Dio’s phase in Black Sabbath is really underrated. My brother was the mad one in the family. I was much more the mummy’s boy, didn’t have a girlfriend until I was 16, 17 – no chance of it at all. Whereas he always had girlfriends. He went to America for a year, got married without telling anyone, to keep a green card. I was very much the straight, sensible one. How did you first meet James, Richey and Sean? Me and James were five and in Mrs Jones’s class, and then in the same class right up through school. He looked like Radar from M*A*S*H. James was very idiosyncratic. I really liked that. Then we went to the same comprehensive and then Crosskeys College. When I went to uni, that was the first time we’d (mock sobs) been apart. Richey was in the same school but a year older, as was Sean. I knew Richey more because we used to play football together. He lived in what we considered the slightly rougher part of Woodfieldside and we’d play ‘us against them’. Then you presumably connected with Richey when you went to Swansea University? The first year I didn’t see anyone at all. I slept for 16 hours a day and watched Going For Gold. I was perfectly happy. Second year, me and Richey got really close. He was living in private rented accommodation, he was grown up more and totally in the flow of university life. He’d cook me food. Rice and Fray Bentos pies, some amazing meals actually. I hadn’t eaten for a year! We’d sit there listening to the Wolfhounds and McCarthy. It was peak C86, there was a nightclub in Port Talbot called Raffles which put on the original My Bloody Valentine when they had David [Conway] the singer – when I liked them. Darling Buds, Wedding Present... We sort of started hatching plans. He wasn’t in the band then – we had done [first single] Suicide Alley, by this point – but it felt like it was only a matter of time. They were great days. Waiting for Happy Mondays to come on at a disco and having that moment amongst aeons of dross. With [1991 single] Motown Junk you looked and sounded out of step with the times. You later said you knew you would be laughed at – where did that resilience come from? I think I get it from my dad. I always felt he could solve any problem through sheer force of will. In school, I looked like a girl, I had really long blond hair. I was called Shirley, and things a lot worse. But even that didn’t bother me. You are allowed to build bands on hatred and delusion. Not any more, obviously, but it is a valid way to have protective armour. We were so tight at that point, the four of us, buying into an aesthetic: be larger than life, be bulletproof. The Clash and Guns N’ Roses were undoubtedly the two things we honed down to. We did love The Stone Roses as well, such a cool arrogance, and a real muso playability which James loved. But there’s three brilliant musicians in the Roses – we had one and a half. Sean would become one, but me and Richey were really fucking not. You seemed like a religious cult, with the millennial edict to sell 16 million copies of your debut album then split. Were there dissenters in the choir? There was dissent. James and Sean were broadening their musical horizons so much, and me and Richey were building everything into a cul-de-sac of no escape. There were times on-stage where I would just not be playing the right thing, then Richey would throw the guitar down, and it would just be like The White Stripes! I could see James and Sean wincing at some of the stuff me and Richey were saying, and quite rightly so. But there was always a benchmark song – Motown Junk, Motorcycle Emptiness, Little Baby Nothing – which showed James and Sean progressing really quickly. There’s a certain something about Motown Junk, which you can only do by being young. I still don’t know how we made that record. Were you surprised how quickly things moved for you? Yeah, because we hadn’t been formed jamming...! We literally formed through talking in a bedroom. We planned everything, and then when it actually fell into place and we’re on the cover of NME and we get Top Of The Pops, we’re like, “Fucking hell, this is easy!” A lot of that is down to James and Sean shouldering the musical weight. When we recorded Motorcycle Emptiness we did think, “How can we not dominate the world?” Then we switched on Top Of The Pops and Smells Like Teen Spirit was on. And we just felt 100 per cent wrong. All of a sudden everyone was dressed like tramps, and we were glamming it up over the globe. You and Richey were a provocateur tag-team in interviews, whereas on-stage that role seemed yours alone – the most notorious instance being “Here’s hoping Michael Stipe goes the same way as Freddie Mercury”. Was that a persona you had to summon up or did it come naturally to you? It is strange... because I’m not lying when I talk about my shyness when I was young. I’m always dubious about people who say they have no regrets. I have millions. I deeply regret some mad things, just awful things I said. Spiteful things. And I haven’t got any excuse. Sometimes I was absolutely hammered on Babycham and vodka. You do forget how much drink can alter you. I haven’t had a drink for 11 years. Not a big crisis or anything, just, “I’ve got kids and I can’t get up in the morning any more.” My daughter really loves to pick these things up. At the dinner table she’ll say, “You can’t talk, Dad. Look what you said in 1992, look what you said in ’94...” So your daughter has read your old press? Only to say bad things about me. I’m irrelevant in my own house. Having said that, she does nick a lot of my old clothes! The circumstances and impact of Richey’s disappearance, in February 1995, have been well explored. But what about the long-term effect on you? I’m a big, big believer in bottling things up! Philip dying first was equally traumatic [manager Philip Hall died of cancer in December 1993]. This newlywed guy took these four kids from Wales into his house. Such generosity. Such an instinctively clever man. Then Richey coming soon after that, it gave me a real coping mechanism with some deep-rooted sense of loss. Those two instances, much like my mum and dad now, they hang over you all the time. It’s not always destructive either, because there’s some blazingly beautiful moments. Do you think the band would have endured as long as it has had Richey stuck around? God, that is tough. It depends which Richey you’re talking about, I guess. Maybe not, from his point of view. We would have got back to writing lyrics together more, definitely. I think there’s two big misconceptions. One, that I never wrote any lyrics before The Holy Bible, which does get a bit galling at times. Y’know, “Oh, Motorcycle Emptiness, did something on that, did you?” And also, musical direction. The Holy Bible is James. Sean is amazing on that album too, but it is James saying, “I’m John McGeoch here.” Obviously Richey’s lyrics helped inform that, but it’s still James. And James was gonna make Everything Must Go whatever lyrics there were. I mean, Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky – we’re doing massive gigs, we’d sold two million albums and there’d be couples in the crowd singing “Harvest your ovaries, dead mother’s crawl”. So there was still a case that we could have used Richey’s lyrics. You’ve evoked him in songs, like Cardiff Afterlife and Your Love Alone Is Not Enough, and on the new album Diapause feels like a Richey state of mind. Do you find yourself wondering “What would he think of this?” He’s like a mental tick in my brain, when I’m writing something which I know is a bit half-arsed, to think, “No, he wouldn’t have...”! And I really appreciate that. Diapause in particular, yeah –I can hear him, just pushing me on. I genuinely think that in the post- Everything Must Go Manics era these are the best set of lyrics I’ve written. I certainly put the most effort in. In the Everything Must Go making-of documentary, Jon Savage said that album was where you “readjusted” your “relationship with Wales”. Why did that happen? I don’t know why. I was the only one in Wales. Sean was in Bristol. James was in London, having the time of his life, and I was dragging him down into industrial history and R.S. Thomas’s self-examination of Welsh culture. I was living in an old miner’s cottage in Wattsville, up against the mountain, married. Something which was always in me, in a sporting sense, just clicked culturally and aesthetically. I was obviously having a reaction against The Holy Bible. I knew I couldn’t match anything that Richey was doing on that. So I pared things back. It’s even more exaggerated on This Is My Truth..., which is the big R.S. Thomas album. I’m not sure what Richey would have thought about that, to be honest. This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours went to Number 1 in the UK and took you into the arena-sphere – was success tiring? Only for me. I was such a pain in the arse at this point. We were touring so much, we were a genuinely big band, things couldn’t have been better, and I just wanted to be home. I love the record, it’s got a real bleakness to it. But why I became so miserable, I have no idea. I was giving it the old, “Oh we’re just turning into U2...” I think back now, “What’s wrong with that?! Making money, people loving you...” But I just felt like I had become a musician. Which was just not what I set out to be. I was going through the motions. Which is what you have to do when you’re doing 200 gigs a year. Not every gig is an event. But I could tell James was getting really weary of me. While this was going on, I was thinking, “To counteract this, we’ll launch an album in Cuba, lose loads of money, credibility and make a ragged, half-arsed record...” Just bad vibes. That record, [2001’s] Know Your Enemy, is the quintessential great-single-album hiding-in-a-double. I concur. But musically I was particularly lazy and destructive. Constantly saying “It’s too tight – can’t we use the demo?” Too many lyrics just weren’t finished. The original idea was to have two albums: one called Solidarity, after the Polish trade union movement, and one called Door To The River, which was the softer side. James just looked at me: “Why are you trying to do this weird shit all the time?” In a nice way. I loved Intravenous Agnostic, we played that once live – in Llandudno – and I was so bad on it we never played it again. Singing Wattsville Blues live... (laughs). Martin [Hall, manager, brother of Philip] was in the crowd and some bloke just shouted, “Get that cunt off the microphone!” It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry. You once said you’d never had any doubt in the band until 2004’s Lifeblood. Really? True. Because even with Know Your Enemy, it felt like we were still really...big. And important. That press conference in Cuba was the most intimidated I’ve ever been: 100 journalists just waiting to get us. James and Sean stopped speaking straight away, like: “This is your fault!” I sort of danced my way through it. Lifeblood is very much a withdrawal album, I was digging deeper holes, to just piss people off – without even trying. There’s certain bits of it we do love. But as a man who grew up with the Guinness Book of Hit Records, the fact that album went in at Number 13 just crushed me. “Not even in the Top 10?! How has this happened?” Because it was delayed payback for the previous album. Exactly. To this day, you see Know Your Enemy at service stations for £2.99, because they bought so many thinking it was by one of those commercial bands! In retrospect, it sold half a million copies. Imagine what we’d give for that now. In 2006 you and James made solo albums – a post-Lifeblood crisis of confidence? No, I actually think it was: people are sick of the band, we’ve just got to do something with no pressure. I wanted to do that broken, frazzled indie music, which is always my refuge in dark times. It helped me get into the rhythm of writing lyrics again, definitely. You do write in a different way when you’re writing the music yourself. It’s much easier to sing, for a start. When we came to Send Away The Tigers [2007], not so much depth on that album, but I knew that those words would be easier for James to sing. Which is not true of Lifeblood at all. How have you managed to sustain that relationship over 30 years? It is bewildering. I do think we’re at the point where it is more through telepathy than anything else. Luckily, we were coerced into having families at the same time. OK, James a little bit later than me and Sean...but the fact that we all can relate to this sheer exhaustion of keeping things going, normal life, band life. It does take massive effort. I mean, if you’re not even relevant in your own house, it’s hard to project to a whole country that you are. For a successful group, your values seem to have remained consistent throughout: working-class, collectivist, unpretentious. Is that a valid perspective, or do people see what they want to see from a rock’n’roll band? I’d agree with much of that, but over the last 10 years, I just don’t know. I’m so riddled with doubt and contradiction now, even though I still kept to those principles. My kids have been through comprehensive education, I still believe in high taxation and all those kinds of things, I stay close to my roots...I haven’t abandoned any of those things at all. But I don’t know if they’re relevant to modern life. You see supposedly left-leaning actors and pop stars queuing up to get MBEs and OBEs – and I’d rather fucking stab my eyes out with a pencil than do that. What was it, Weller and David Bowie turned down knighthoods? That’s good enough for me. Not a bad club to be in. Going Underground was a lyrical inspiration on this album. It had a big impact on Orwellian, I played it five times, 10 times a day in the car. Because it’s political without being political. It’s 1979 and he’s overwhelmed by culture and politics and “How can I get through this?” It’s almost like you can’t articulate – you literally have to withdraw. Speaking of The Jam, the album’s other non-political political song, Don’t Let The Night Divide Us, mentions Eton. That one really is The Clash playing Abba, a bit of Waterloo mixed with the Cost Of Living EP. There’s a wryness to the lyric “Don’t let those boys from Eton, suggest that we are beaten...” Like, we’ve got your number. I’d been reading a lot of John le Carré and his quote about Eton being a curse, the sense of entitlement and brutality that it breeds. We pictured ourselves in Brighton Dome with platform heels and star-shaped guitars, almost winking. There is a much undervalued side to Manic Street Preachers: the fabulous disaster of life. Which one song would you hang your legacy on? I think it would have to be Motorcycle Emptiness. It’s probably the four of us at our peaks, four people coming together to create that landscape of existential despair. Because the production is almost cosmetic, it’s actually pretty timeless, it doesn’t sound like the ’90s. There’s just something about it. For such a complicated lyric, wherever you go people sing along. That’s a pretty amazing trick.