Manic Street Preachers : Clasur Neu Methiant

I hate their hypocrisy. This great moral band, yet Richey said he didn't care if a thousand beagles died for his hairspray, lambasted animal rights, played a concert for a charity that is criticised for its experiments on animals. I hate them for that. Richey should have been put in a toxicology lab and then he'd have a reason to complain about his life the tosser.

I hate them for selling their shitty, lameass politics to kids. I hate them for the concert in Cuba which was so fucking dumb. I hate them for their apparent image as a woman friendly band and that stupid video for 'Little Baby Nothing' where the girl stomps on all the porn mags and yet Richey paid a hooker in Bangkok for a hand job and told any journalist who would listen about it. And Nicky and Richey spent most of their first tour shagging groupies.

I hate them for the durge of the recent albums and singles. At least when Richey was around you had some pretty decent tracks - 'Motorcycle Emptiness', 'MASH theme', 'La Tristesse', 'Life Becoming a Landslide', 'From Despair to Where', 'This is Yesterday', 'Yes' - compare to the shit on the albums after The Holy Bible.

I hate them cos even their first three albums have tons of shit on them as well.

I hate them because Nicky Wire with his 2.2 degree and who boasts about spening all his grant while at uni on gambling talks about the importance of education, as if he put his to good use. I REALLY hate Wire, mainly because he's dumb but I hate their trendy ultra left wing leanings, when they were once MET Bar hangers on and seen around town with Oasis.

I just hate them really. I wish they would go away.

I haven't ever seen them, I have a long sordid history of buying tickets to events they were appearing at and then having them cancel their appearances, probably just because Nicky Wire knows I want to ask him why he's such a big jerk and he's too scared to face the heat of such pointed questioning. I would love to see the pictures! GATS has the best liner, the Japanese version? Those pictures are tres rowr.

Alex, that album drives me insane for some reason. I have never been able to actively articulate it, but I've also never been able to actively articulate why The Holy Bible is my favorite. I end up sounding like I'm going thru some kind of rockist überfit trying to explain it. I really, really like "If You Tolerate This..." especially the middle bit going back into the chorus, that's really got a pretty sound ("And on the streets tonight/An old man prays..." that part), but I can't for the life of me remember anything else about the album besides it irritating the piss out of me.

Know Your Enemy isn't as good as I said it was when it came out.

There is not enough love for Generation Terrorists going on, though.

"everything must go" is the one, though. moves me more than the "holy bible". consistently great tunes from start to finish.

"the holy bible" is their only other 'very good' record. richey's skill with words is not great, to be honest, there's some pretty juvenile shit on there. but regardless of the crap words, the mood is really gripping, probably because of what happened to richey later.

the first two recs have some really good singles on them, but some fucking tuneless rubbish, too."motown junk" should have been included. "know your enemy" is easily their worst album, bradfield abandons any notion of, y'know, writing some great catchy tunes. i've seen them live a couple of times, and they were great.

Nicky Wire's like a cartoon character these days. The last interview I read with him he actually said something like "No Logo? That book is for retards! I read Engels, not that studenty shit!"

Richey, at the end of the day, said a lot of offensive crap and did a lot of offensive things (re: the Bangkok incident) and I'm not as happy as others to feel sorrow and say: "Oh poor guy was going mad, no wonder he was happy to rubbish animal rights and support vivisection". I mean, what if he had said something racist? Or attacked someone? Would we say the same thing then?

The guy was a dick, who killed himself - he wasn't the new Ian Curtis or Kurt Cobain, he was a spoilt middle class arsehole much like his friend Wire. I have no time for any members of the Manics. The only positive thing I'll say about them is that I find them easy to ignore as they've become more and more of a joke (even in the mainstream press) which means they don't annoy me half as much as Coldplay.

...which makes him exactly like Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain, doesn't it?

esoj OTM, what are you talking about, Calum? I find it entertaining that you of all people are latching onto a glib soundbite about dogs dying for hairspray and using it to base your entire opinion of a person.

I meant that he wasn't the new Kurt Cobain or Ian Curtis because, quite simply, he didn't have the talent that these guys had for making us emphasise with them. These two guys were real talents in my book, and a great loss. Losing Richey was maybe the same as saying goodbye to Michael Hutchence from INXS - not such a huge loss then.

anyway, a few trax aside "Know Your Enemy" is great and their fuck-you prole-punk-springsteenism is a great mess of fun contradiction.

the best thing about the cuba concert was the interviews afterwards where meanwhile oasis was playing for blair and they had great fun pissing on new-labour.

also i haven't bought holy bible ever but this thread makes me want to.

(PS I'm being serious)

Calum, you're an asshole.

(or not even burn it -- i haf just purchased an 80GB hard drive for my nefarious musical acquisitions!)

No, I'm not insensitive, I just don't suffer fucking cocks that support vivisection (which the Manics still do I should add). Seems to me you're the insensitive one, but then ignorance is fine for you isn't it Ally? Poor old middle class Richie who sympathised with 'Facism', exploited hookers in Bangkok (have you read into Thailand's prostitute trade? Poor girls from villages sucking dicks in bars and being infected with fuck knows what for tourist money and a chance to get out of the city) and supported 500 dead animals every fucking day.

Yes, Ally, I'm insensitive. Grow up you and wake up to the world around you you silly fucking arsehead.

There are about 8 million fair negative comments one could make about Richey Edwards. He was a self-centered fuckwad--if he wasn't, he wouldn't have offed himself, leaving his family to suffer the way they have, eh? My "asshole" comment towards Calum was directed towards the "no big loss" comment. How can you cry about animals in one sentence and pretty callously dismiss the entire lives of people in another?

I actually think they should've gone in a folky direction, a la the "Design For Life" b-sides.

For the record, Nicky Wire refused to comment on the destruction of the World Trade Centre, saying he thought it was inappropriate for someone who just in a rock band to comment on genuinely serious world events. Is this just a big cop out, given that he usually can't keep his mouth shut about similar topics?

that seems pretty out of character, alright. bafflingly so.

And after all those ridiculously priapic threads started by Calum, is he really in a position to be so righteous?

I still think my point stands that being righteous about animal rights and then in the next line being blase about the deaths of humans is a bit out of line.

For the record, Nicky Wire refused to comment on the destruction of the World Trade Centre, saying he thought it was inappropriate for someone who just in a rock band to comment on genuinely serious world events.

Yeah, I remember being completely confused by this when I read it. I totally agree with him--but it is so completely out of style for him that it becomes baffling and semi-offensive because of lack of comment. He's got bloody piles to say about every other thing that happens ever in the world, from Cuba to what someone's doing down at the market that really irritated him because, christ, all he wanted to do was go buy some drinks and all they had was Coca-Cola and fuck it, what's the point? So what's the deal here?

Quite honestly, I don't care because, really, I have no interest in finding out what he has to say about anything. I wish Sean and James would speak more often, they seem vaguely more reasonable and normal than Nicky (and certain far much more normal and reasonable than Richey was).

Everyone who hasn't heard "Yes" should download it immediately, I'll email an MP3 to people if they want. That's the best Manics song.

They'll be redeemed when Nicky Wire starts a campaign against animal experimentation, but until that day comes he's lower than shit in my book.

And the Castro thing is still the most stupid thing by any rock band ever.

I've pointed out why liking the Manics equates you to being someone who obviously does not take into account any moral view when opening your pockets to an artist, but no doubt you brush your teeth with Colgate and fly Air France (providing you've visited other countries in your time... surely someone posing to be as clever as you has taken in other cultures?). My point is made - Manics = evil for sympathising with the vivisection trade.

A life?

If you're going to insist on using such tortuously contrived sentence constructions, it might also be a good idea to master some of the finer point os punctuation before presuming to challenge anyone else to a discussion of "linguistics".

Welsh actually < /pedantry>

Definitely classic. They were the first band I really truly loved. I travelled all over Britain to see them, pre- and post-Richey. The one thing that spoiled them for me was their fans(by and large), you know what I mean, the I-feel-Richey's-pain brigade. Like you couldn't like them unless you could really "understand" them. Unless you were 4-real enough. That was a bit shit, but I can't hold their fans against them.

I like that they've grown up at the same sort of rate that I have.

The Manics were interesting to me as a window into British/Welsh culture during the mid/late 90s. Living in the middle of America as I was then, I stepped into the middle of the fray over Richey's disappearance only after EMG was released, so that's the band's starting point for me (in fact, I didn't even know about the 4REAL incident until about three years ago). So when the odd issue of Melody Maker or NME or Vox or Q would make its way to Kansas (which was a little more often that I'm sure my coastal friends are thinking right now), I'd pick it up, wonder "who's this band?" and eventually pick up EMG, and later TIMT.

And I think they're interesting albums in their own right, but I'm also grateful, I suppose, for the research they've made me do. I vaguely remember hearing about Kevin Carter before "Kevin Carter," but the song spurred me to check it out. I never understood the "libraries gave us power" line in "A Design for Life" fully until I heard about the miner's library in Wales. And while I remember the Hillsborough deaths, I didn't understand the class issues behind it until (gasp!) "SYMM," which I think is a great song for acknowledging its own limitations.

So, absent of the hype machine of Britian (I found out that "Know Your Enemy" was out when I found it in a used bin), I'd have to say classic. Or, as Mos Def would say, quasi-classic.

Oh, and total classic for that screensaver that scrolled all the revolutionary sayings. I loved coming back from a sales meeting to find Mao on my screen.

Second - since when does one not take into account the opinions or actions of mucisians when buying their products? Would many ILMers now purchase Gary Glitter CDs? Considering how interlinked the Manics opinions are with their songs I find it strange that anyone could possibly listen to their crap with anything approaching a straight face. They have made a mockery of eveything they ever pretended to stand for. They're "socialists" but signed to Sony, Sean admits to being materialistic and has two huge houses, James goes to the Met Bar, the whole "crappergate" thing which enraged (rightly) Billy Bragg, the arena tours... hardly "socialist" is it? A career built on quoting radical philosophers and authors (without pause to think about what they might actually be saying, of course, but if it's cool the Manics wear it) and then Nicky Wire writing a song called "Freedom of Speech won't Feed my Children" and going out to Cuba to associate himself with Castro (a dictator by any other name). The whole pro-feminism thing (c.f. "Little Baby Nothing" which uses Traci Lords without pausing to think about the fact she was the exploiter and not the exploited) and yet Nicky and Richey were fucking groupies, Richey paying a hooker in Bangkok for a hand job etc... and the vivisection thing is very important. Seeing as vivisection is a capitalist industry built on people preferring to give themselves fat pay cheques instead of funding the available alternatives to animal models (capitalism by any other name) their support of it is ignorance at an all time high. And they wrote "Small Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky" without, obviously, thinking about their own views. But, hey, it sells to people needing an outlet for some middle class, bullshit depression - the Manics all over.

Dud as dud can be, I hope Nicky Wire chokes on his own spit one day.

awesome read, thanks for posting that, ned -- i recall you mentioning the interview a long time ago but couldn't remember ever reading it. iirc richey had actually gone missing for a couple days a few weeks previously before turning up again, so that might explain why james went ahead with the interviews, assuming richey was just having a bad day or something.

Wow @ the timing of that interview. James is such a smart, honest interviewee.

Might as well revive this thread too, having done that for the Suede one -- US coheadline tour in November.

https://americansongwriter.com/the-london-suede-manic-street-preachers-tour-north-america-in-2022

So I posted that Quietus piece with my JDB interview from 1995 ten years back upthread a little bit...and now, if you subscribe to Rock's Backpages, you can hear it too.

https://rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/manic-street-preachers-james-dean-bradfield-1995