Manic Street Preachers

Manic Street Preachers – National Treasures.

1991. Somewhere in the frozen North. Manic Street Preachers, awoken and agitated, are on a stage, making an ungodly noise that sounds equal parts Brigitte Bardot, The Seeds and a young Ornette Coleman tuning up. ‘Motown Junk’ howls out of nowhere, a gradual anarchy, loaded with cyanide crystals, spluttering out of the cannabilistic past and gnawing its way to a fraughted future. Four messy glam-beat angels on the brink of something monstrously ambitious or else simply monstrous. Overcome with the fumes, I take the bus home and make love on a damp mattress whilst dreaming of Mr Nicky Wire wearing stilettos and a bra. Every moment is pregnant with revolt. Nothing will be certain ever again. Somehow the world keeps turning on its axis.

I've always been a singles fanatic and this, this is my idea of a single.

A riff rolling the Pistols and the Who into one, the ghost of Stuart Adamson on lead guitar and a sense of surging adrenaline so palpable I get a metallic taste in my mouth just thinking about it. All that added to the Public Enemy referencing, the "I laughed when Lennon got shot" line, the glorious drum fill before the chorus which, in true punk fashion, seems to speed up in anticipation of the chorus itself and  the unique vocal where a strangely beautiful melody is hyperventilated rather than sung.

I was living in a flat in East Belfast in 1990 when SNUB TV in the UK broadcast footage of the Manics performing this tune. A group of us usually got together and watched the show. I couldn't remember any band getting such a polarised response as they did that night. Some of the people hated it, their apoplectic, spittle-flecked rage giving them the absurd aura of the Daily Mail reader but the others adored it and couldn't stop talking about it. I'd video taped the show and played the Manics segment repeatedly over the following months (in fact, playing Manics singles repeatedly became a bit of a thing for me. Before Therapy?'s performance at the 1994 Castle Donnington festival I played my promo copy of ‘PCP’ relentlessly before we went on stage).

I'd grown up on classic Ulster punk singles but in the monochrome 80's my high energy fix was sated by American hardcore bands, after 'Motown Junk' the world seemed a more colourful, vivid place.

20 years on and ‘Motown Junk’ still sounds outrageous as it did back then. National treasures indeed.

 

 

Amy Raphael (journalist and author)

This was the first Manics song I fell in love with, and to. “Deny your culture of consumption/This is a culture of destruction”: the Situationist perspective beautifully carved into a perfect pop couplet. I own the 12inch poster single and the fabulous B side, ‘RP McMurphy’, has also taken a hammering over the years.

“Between the billboard masturbation, across highways of metallic isolation there lies the deafening screaming of the millions wiping out the diseased pages of apathy that bleed our innocence,” begins the album version of ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’, a spoken-word extract from ‘The Eloquence In The Screaming’ poem by Nicky Wire’s brother Patrick Jones.

Released as a single on October 28 1991 - exactly 20 years to the week before this thing you’re looking at here – it’s a song, much like the band who made it, that has become more vital and resonant than ever in recent times. That they achieved this feat while sounding like Queen, looking like Hanoi Rocks and quoting Albert Camus, only serves to make it all the more remarkable.

The best thing that happens in music – hearing something new that sounds so exciting, so thrilling that its impact on you is indelible. Such was the case for me with the Manics and ‘You Love Us’. I remember I was hosting a singles reviews session on a long-gone hard rock fortnightly magazine. Can't remember which band or artist it was with, but safe to say they’re long forgotten too. ‘You Love Us’ arrived like a bolt of lightning. I imagined the band behind it would be young, improbably glamorous and entirely unconventional. They were. I loved them then and have done ever since.

"We are not your sinners" set up the archetypal Manics paradox. No, you are. "We won't be mourned". No, you will. ‘You Love Us’ has always been the live anthem - wall-to-wall chorus, no fucking about. In the 90’s I was that teenager, with a borrowed feather boa and the lyrics to every ‘Holy Bible’ era b-side scrawled on the inside of my brain. "Regard all critics as useless and dangerous" read the quote on the ‘You Love Us’ sleeve. Cool, I thought - maybe I'll give that a go.

If ever there was an extreme example of the Manics’ early manifesto - the forcible jamming together of uncomfortable, unsexy political messages with ultra-commercial hard rock - then surely ‘Slash N’ Burn’ was it, the fingertip-tangling run into that choppy Keef Richards-esque riff kicking the door open for a lyric about the “created needs” of global capitalism, pointing an accusatory finger at Madonna, McDonalds, Coke and Exxon, and sometimes struggling to scan (“Third World to the furry-urst…”). A semi-successful exercise in entryism, it was half Guns N’ Roses, half Noam Chomsky.

Google Map where they started out from and where they filmed this video and it says:  We could not calculate directions between Blackwood, UK and Tokyo, Japan.’

If Google can’t calculate how the Manics got there, imagine how they felt. This was a band fuelled by an ambitious desire to make a mark on the world. To be more than anyone had ever given them credit for. With ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ everywhere on MTV in gyms, airports, bars and clubs, the video was a flag of victory. The song: a statement of occupation. A ballad with a meaningless but understandable title and a wailing lead guitar, the opposite of what people expected of them.

The singer James looks handsome in sunglasses and jacket. Richey looks stunning face on to camera and enigmatic talking to a tortoise. Black-eyed Nicky walks amongst the Japanese public like a giant punk rock panda and Sean shows the banal reality of rock and roll life flicking the TV channels from a hotel bed. The Newport Dolls had become a fixture on the favourite medium of writer Bret Easton Ellis. It’s the last great rock and roll video anyone bothered to watch. It’s a tribute to detachment.

They could do what they want now. The band had made it.      

This song captures everything that made Manic Street Preachers startling when they arrived. Myself, I loved their hunger and ambition and refusal to play safe; their almost comic readiness to over-reach themselves, confident that if they fell apart they’d at least be able to do so beautifully. Somehow, all of these qualities seemed to find focus in ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ - in the spiraling guitar and sweep of a chorus you almost want to climb into, the candescent yearn of the lyric. It’s like starlight reflecting on the head of a pin and, coming so early in the band’s career, still seems a kind of miracle to me.

I was lucky enough to meet Republican party reptile PJ O’Rourke in September 1992. I had a still-warm CD copy of the Manics’ ‘Theme From M*A*S*H’ in my bag, and asked him to sign it. Across the image of a crumpled stars and stripes, he wrote, “Don’t burn this!” I covered his cautionary words with sticky-back cellophane for protection and still have this unique cultural mash-up. Their first top ten hit, recorded for a Spastics Society charity album of number ones the NME had compiled to mark its 40th year, the band unearthed the crunching epic in Johnny Mandel and Mike Altman’s Byrdsian lament. (Altman, son of M*A*S*H director Robert, was 14 when he wrote the sappily nihilistic lyric.) It was twinned with an unrecognisable and unplaylisted ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ by Irish art-hooligans Fatima Mansions’ – their only hit, on a technicality (“the only way to win is cheat”). An extra curio: the extra track on the UK CD, ‘Sleeping With The NME’, though credited to the Manics, was in fact an extract from a fly-on-the-wall Radio 5 documentary, in which the ‘4 REAL’ aftermath at the NME lightbox was frozen in hysterical aspic. The ‘Theme From M*A*S*H’ is thus a little piece of history from a prelapsarian age when it was still called the Spastics Society.

A notable curio in the Manic canon: the landmark of their first Top 10 single came via a cover version, recorded for a (mostly dire) NME charity album. It's a respectful, elegiac performance of a contentious song, beautifully evoking the melancholy not just of the original's source but an earlier, more innocent age: when a minor-key comedy about the shitty reality of war could be a hit on British TV. Would any other band have thought to do this?

The remarkable sixth single from their glory or bust debut album, ‘Little Baby Nothing’ epitomised the ruddy, damaged glamour of the band in 1992; kohl and carefully smeared lip-gloss, white jeans tattered and dirty at the knees. Lyrically, it looked at the subjugation of women, Traci Lords’ tragic past and rebirth from abused girl to porn star to pop singer fitted right in, even if James’ vocals did run rings around hers. Fittingly, only he appeared in the video along with Shampoo; who did their best to look put upon. Kylie was their first choice to sing with the band, but not even she could escape the then sturdy chains of the PWL organisation.

“Youth is not enough. And love is not enough. And success is not enough. And, if we could achieve it, enough would not be enough”  Mignon McLaughlin

God they were young. We were all young. Nick in his Guy Debord shades. Sean’s 90s indie bangs. James in his De Niro as Jesus phase. And Richey, his essential sweetness hidden beneath leather and contempt, Brando via Bolan.

‘From Despair To Where’ is the Manics proving, with insouciance and rage, that Motorcycle Emptiness was no fluke, no lucky shot. The flagship epic of their second phase by a band unaware of the epic and the tragic to come. In a swirling halo of guitars and strings, they cagily eye the future that rolls towards them like thunderheads on the horizon.

The melancholy meditation on the WWII soldiers’ belittled sacrifice which detonates, suddenly, into a primal howl of cataclysmic drumbeats and furious indignation: “I see liberals...I am just a fashion accessory!” It meant more to me, perhaps, than others - with a Prisoner of War dad, one of those tortured, skeletal shadow-men who built the Bridge Over The River Kwai and whose war experience, forever, remained literally unspeakable. “The sadness will never go,” the curious title translated, the dying, tormented words of Vincent Van Gogh and just one more cultural pointer from rock’s most eloquent, essential professors. “It’s the Lipstick Traces thing,” Nicky Wire once said. “All you can do is leave clues throughout history towards something better. Towards progress.”  

‘La Tristesse Durera’ soundtracked the end of many, many Dust Brothers sets. We played it when it first came out and it still never fails to rouse the people. It was at the heart of our sets at the Heavenly Sunday Social. Maybe it's a surprising record for a club, but it truly stomps; it’s full of builds and drops, and a great bass part. What it really has is like all great dance records is that integral sense of transcendent melancholy. "Oh, the sadness will never go, will never go away, baby it's here to stay" indeed.

‘Roses In The Hospital’ rarely makes it onto anyone’s list of favourite Manics songs. It didn’t even feature on the previous Best Of, ‘Forever Delayed’, which took its name from one of the song’s lines. But it feels like one of the most vital to me, a big smouldering, spite-fuelled juggernaut of a rock song that you can dance to. And as ever with the Manics, certainly from that period, the pay-off line of “We don’t want your fucking love” feels as loaded with meaning and ideas as the densest of their lyrics. It takes something special going on to do that. I once hassled Nicky in an interview to put it back in their set. When eventually they did, I took credit for that, however undeserved.

I remember being quite dismayed by this song. Though it starts with a gentle cradle-rock of acoustic and James’ gentle, cracked croon of “Childbirth/Tears upon her muscle”, it’s one of the Manics more unsettling numbers. It's the infectious despair that bleeds through it, tainting everything from childhood to sex to gender to love to art to nature to simple human fellow feeling; it seemed so utterly hopeless, so tired, that it floored me. The worst thing that it wasn’t a railing, a rage, it was just... resigned. I couldn’t get my head round it. “There is no true love/Just a finely tuned jealousy”. Isn’t that a dreadful line? As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to understand those kinds of feelings more, to admire the candour with which the lyric avoids offering any false hope, although I still don’t like it. But I’ve also picked up on the subtleties of the song, the way the music needles against the deadness of the lyrics. The slow, sweet collapse of that sweeping chorus is suddenly cut away by a flailing tantrum of raw, vital, grungey riffs, as James switches to a raw-throated howl: “I don’t wanna be a man… desire on its knees”. Just because you’re honest about the moments when you’re losing, doesn’t mean you’re not still scrapping. There’s fight in there, for sure.

God we were kids; kids – and the Manics were the most fun you could have with your eyeliner on. Wolverhampton, Bournemouth, London, Glasgow – everyone in town who properly dressed up would be there: girls in gloves, in a wedding dress, in hysterics. Boys in lipstick, in the mosh-pit - trying to sing “You love us like a holocaust” with the same heroically ridiculous, serious/not serious/deadly seriousnessness as the band. From above, on the balcony, a Manics gig looked earnest puppies in Barry M glitter nail-varnish. It was a Scrappy-Doo valiance in the face of the 20th century. In the face of their fake-fur, library-learned arseiness, your fist aimed unstoppably upwards, in an air-punch.

And then: Richey in rehab. Richey out of rehab. ‘Faster’ on Top of The Pops. Sickly green lights, fires burning on top of the speaker stacks. James in a balaclava with the ragged mouth-hole - looking like he’d bitten through a hand knitted gimp-mask as he walked on stage. And Richey: too too thin, in a sailor’s uniform, looking – in every respect you can think of – inappropriate for tea-time television. 

‘Faster’ was faster – too fast.  Much too fast. It was like watching the car in front of you on the motorway suddenly flip up into the air and spiral off, over the hard-shoulder, into the fields, as you listened out for the crash. “Too damn easy to cave in/Man kills everything.” No air-punching now. Terminal velocity. The point of impact. A fist aimed low, down, hard; at your throat.

Afterwards, the BBC reported a record number of complaints from viewers. I was amazed they could pick up the phone and speak. I couldn’t. Too fast.

‘REVOL’. It means lover backwards. It means the tangled history of stunted revolutions and flawed icons refracted through the conceit of sexual identity. Possibly. I’ve heard so many barstool counter theories claiming otherwise I’ve lost count. But for me it will always simply mean: the first time.

“Leave me alone or I won’t let you borrow my new Manics CD.” I was twelve years old and Phil, my best friend’s older brother, was using his record collection as a bartering tool to get us out of his bedroom.  “Your what?” “My Manic Street Preachers CD. Their new single. Here just take it. Now GO AWAY”. And so began my EVOL affair.

 

Easy though it was to make ‘tampon ad’ jokes about “She Is Suffering”, the ‘She’, Richey explained in his pass-notes, is Desire. The desire, we surmise, is for beauty - whether in a lover or commodity - and the ‘Suffering’ is noun, not verb. Throughout 1994, this used to be my piss-break/bar-visit song, a lull amid the magnesium-white intensity of ‘The Holy Bible’ material. How spoilt I was. An insanely, almost heroically uncommercial choice for a single, it was the closest ‘The Holy Bible’ got to Nirvana’s ‘In Utero’ (an acknowledged influence). Richey, like Rilke, was telling us that - contrary to the make-up brand - there is no Beauty Without Cruelty.

From it’s opening line, originally a declaration now a dire warning, it stirs the heart and the mind equally.  Coruscating, elegiac, apocalyptic and tender.  Music that comes from the spine.  Music to move mountains with.

You couldn't make Manic Street Preachers up. They have followed their own path, sang about what they believe, and really have taken poetry to the masses. ‘A Design For Life’ still gives us goosebumps, it's a song from a certain time and a place, yet resonates with people around the world. It was a gear changer for the band in terms of popularity, yet lyrically is still on of their rawest and most honest, beautiful songs.

It is one of many cultural regrets in my life that I missed out on the Manic Street Preachers in the early days. In the late eighties I was working for a record label called Go! Discs and recall an overly excited A&R; man running into the office and blurting "I've just seen the new Clash!" 

The thing that makes Manic Street Preachers special is that they actually mean what they say and do. Nothing is a career move. There are dozens of bands who get a producer in to make them sound 'epic' while the Manics simply can't help but be epic. They remain angry poets in a field of chancers.

‘A Design For Life’ - I have a very clear memory of standing in the teeming rain in front of the Pyramid at Glastonbury. At the end of a blistering set, James looks out at the crowd halfway through ‘A Design For Life’ and marches himself and his micstand out into the deluge and carries on singing. One of my favourite ever gig moments. That and their brilliantly grumpy 'no encores' policy.

“Escape from our history,” go the lyrics, but ghosts are everywhere:

The Ronettes’ Be My Baby, the Situationist Anthology Leaving the 20th Century, and all the accumulated debris of the group’s collective life so far. So, this song is a perhaps a plea, not least to their own disciples: for the burdens of mythology and self-destruction to be set aside, and for more human imperatives to rise to the surface: “just need to be happy,” James sings, which is not the kind of sentiment one hears from rock’n’rollers. Musicians singing about themselves is sometimes a better idea than some people think (witness, say, Mott The Hoople and The Clash), but only this group could make doing so sound so important. In other words, this may be about them, but it actually cuts straight to one elemental aspect of the human condition: the quest to somehow feel weightless, and its complete impossibility.

Kevin Carter was a Pulitzer prize winning photographer who committed suicide at the age of 33 in 1994. Feted for his work in war zones and famine areas of Africa, Carter couldn’t deal with the dichotomy of photographing the stricken – often children - rather than helping them. Part of his suicide note read, “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners.”

I heard this song before I’d heard of the man. I then spent the following month reading obsessively about his troubled life.   Once again with The Manics, their thirst for knowledge helped to inform, educate and entertain me, along with thousands of others.

To quote Picasso: “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

This is the MSP’s manifesto for life and for that I thank them.

‘Kevin Carter’ (1960-1994) deserved a Richey Edwards lyric. A much-admired photographer of wars and famines who spent too long contemplating the worst of human nature. His suicide note read: “The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist.” Carter memorialised his subjects in pictures and the Manics memorialised him in song — stabbing spy-movie punk-funk which melts into an exquisite trumpet threnody. A song about facing the unbearable.

Dorian Lynskey (journalist and author)  

I always loved ‘Australia’ from when I heard the first version to when I finally got to mix Mike Hedges brilliant production. It’s so perfectly Manics to meld such a desperately sad lyric to such a euphoric rock song - what other band could pull it off?   Lyrically this is Nicky's ‘Life On Mars’ & I can hear echoes of the kinship they felt with New Order following the tragedy that had gone before in the chime of the guitars, but the way James manages to make the desire to be alone & silent in grief on the other side of the world sound somehow uplifting is all his own.   Before the mix James told me he wanted to evoke some of the feel of the BBC Grandstand theme & that he wanted it to soundtrack the goals on TV, something I never thought I'd see happen to the angry, make up smeared punks I'd met as a tea boy six years before!   Soon however it became almost ubiquitous on all the sport on TV & I truly realised they'd finally made the jump from the indie ghetto to the mainstream.

In an ugly, imperfect world, this beautiful, perfect song was Number One. This song that stops you, that challenges you, that humbles and haunts you, was Number One. And in an ugly, imperfect world, that fact and its truth make me feel much less alone, less afraid, less cold and less gutless. Thank you.

‘If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next’ - There's a real beauty in their wilfulness. They were the only band in the charts saying this kind of thing. Much as the song itself is about The Spanish Civil war, the title carries a broader and more direct message.

These days people talk nostalgically about the Richey-era Manics - the make-up, the art terrorism, the sheer youthful exuberance of the Manics' mark 1 and their determination to make rock n roll count again in the late 80s and 90s. I saw those Manics when ‘The Holy Bible’ came out and didn't really get them as a band, not least because both Richey and NIcky almost felt like add-ons onstage while James and Sean did the work. To me, it's the Manics' response to the tragedy of Richey's disappearance that made them a great band. It focussed James, NIcky and Sean and it made them look deep into themselves. The anthemic rock of  ‘A Design for Life’ and ‘Everything Must Go’ made them national heroes at the tail end of Britpop but 1998's ‘This is My Truth Tell Me Yours’ made them national treasures and it opened with ‘The Everlasting’, my favourite Manics' song because it's big and bold and anthemic and terribly sad. LIke many Manics' songs post-Richey, it sounds like a meditation on his alienation and the rest of the band's admiration for him and their sense of loss. Of course it's about so much more than this but I've always seen it as a lament for the loss of youthful idealism and I've always been smitten by its opening lines,by James' melody and his anguished, yearning vocal. I have read that Nicky wanted to write a lyric and a song that matched Blur's ‘The Universal’ and Joy Division's ‘The Eternal’. That's great company and I think they pulled it off.  ‘The Everlasting’ belongs on a huge stage and in the late 90s so did the Manics and we loved them for it. They were a band with a lot to say, their hearts were full and it was their time.

It was the 31st of December 1999.  I'd been given many privileges that night. I performed with a group reciting one of  Patrick Jones's  poems in front of a half filled millennium stadium in Cardiff as part of the opening acts for that historic night. I was then given a police escort over to City Hall to light the millennium beacon and later, became a member of the crowd back at the Stadium to watch the Manics bring in the new Century.

My heart was broken from a painful break up earlier that year but little did I know that I was already working with my future wife. The Manics opened with ‘You Stole The Sun From My Heart’.  A bitter sweet moment. One girl had stolen it and I wanted it back but in a few months I would gladly share it with another.  I blew my voice after the first chorus singing along with the other 60,000 fans.....  Thank the lord James held on to his!

This, briefly, was the soundtrack to my broken heart as a new decade began in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. Standing in the VIP section among members of the Welsh rugby team (it was so mawkish that if they made a film of it, Tom Hanks would play me in a wig), as I was unceremoniously dumped by my date that I’d brought along. Which wasn’t to say that I didn’t have it coming;  broken relationships, like bones, rarely heal themselves, or if they do then they’re never quite the same again. The video had animated birds flitting around the screen like Disney once did, I remember, not that I could watch it or listen to this song again until the spring came.

We played the ‘Tsunami’ single for the first time on The Session in Wales with myself and Bethan Elfyn on BBC Radio 1. It's a beautiful song, and all the more poignant when you realise it's about the true sad story of twin sisters. I think of it as a cleansing song, the euphoric chorus is just gigantic in the image it portrays. It's a great, underrated Manics song.

Insinuating philosophical discourse amid feral rock'n'roll was a Manic ideal from the very outset, and with ‘The Masses Against The Classes’ came possibly its supreme attainment. The intro's Chomsky, the crushing closer from Camus, but the song itself is all about "us": ambivalent, alone, winter-lovers, "the only thing left to believe in". It went straight to Number 1 and they considered splitting up right there, because ‘Masses’ really does say it all.

“My smile as real as a hyena's/Burns an expressway to my skull…” 

I first heard this song performed on the 17th of February, 2001, in the Karl Marx Theatre, Havana. Fidel Castro arrived later during the set, so he missed one of my favourite Manics singles. ‘So Why So Sad’ – a mini-‘Use Your Illusion’-esque double release with ‘Know Your Enemy’ as its sister single – is, as its title suggests, a classically melancholy Manic Street Preachers song. Louder than war and sadder than crying, it charges on with a Beach Boys harmonies and a punked-up Phil Spector production and features what, as far as I can tell, is the only Stylophone solo on any Manics record. Fidel missed out, frankly.

Apart from the fact that it’s a defiant and bruising song, it’s also probably my favourite opening to a Manics record. 

It’s almost like a prologue to a book: revealing the author’s state of mind and hinting at the psyche of what’s to follow. And it has a terrific sense of being refocused and back in business, while at the same time being a little ambiguous (found which soul exactly?). 

The way it simply barges in, over that strict bassline and crunchy guitar – with that one note piano ringing through it – I thought was irresistible.

‘Ocean Spray’ is James’s touching paean to his dying mother- the intimate made into stadium rock that captures the real genius of the band which is a long way away from their initial anger and is far closer to their sensitivity couched inside the high decibel of a hi octane rock n roll band. With a rare excursion into lyric writing from James, this is as heartfelt as any band gets and the melody is a perfect slice of beautiful melancholia. It’s a beautiful song about James own mother dying from cancer and is powerful and emotive in a way that the band's own heroes like Guns n Roses would never dare to write.

An underrated song from an overlooked album, consider the personal weight it carries and the self-restraint of ‘Ocean Spray’ is remarkable. Be it James's vocal, his gnomic guitar flashes or, most poignantly of all, Sean's trumpet solo, these performances belie grief's numbing properties and offer up hope from a place of sadness.

For me ‘Let Robeson Sing’ will forever mean Cuba in 2001, for the Louder Than War show at the Karl Marx theatre. The crackle of awe that went through the room that night when Castro himself entered and took his seat a few rows behind us, only eclipsed by the moment during Robeson when James threw his head back and sang “Went to Cuba to see Castro – never got past sleepy Moscow”.  All of us singing that beautiful line for the rest of the trip, four perfect days in the dusty squares and tiled bars of Havana, drinking mojitos long into the night, until the Caribbean sun would come up and chase us all to bed.

In 2002 we had several recording sessions at Monnow Valley studios looking for an increasingly elusive extra track for the ‘Forever Delayed’ greatest hits album. After a long day's recording we were about to turn in, when James had one of his famous late-night ideas. He asked me to get a drum loop running and then, amazingly, in a few short hours we'd tracked the initial elements for ‘There by the Grace of God’. It was one of those moments where you knew you'd hit on something. The darkness of the song, the vocal melody that follows the Peter Hook-style bass line and Nicks lyrics were all special. For me, being entrusted by the band to work on what would become my first hit single as a producer is what made this recording an important part of my musical career.

“The Love of Richard Nixon was just weird,” according to Nicky Wire. “Imagine trying to eulogise America’s most hated president in the style of the Pet Shop Boys.” He seems baffled. I was in the TOTP studio when they performed it in front of projections of Vietnam and Watergate, and the audience seemed baffled too. I love it because it’s quixotic even by the Manics’ standards. Only Nicky would consider extending sympathy to a dead pariah president. Only James would grace the lyric with such a sleek, sad melody. Only Manics fans would salute this bizarre enterprise by sending it into the top three. “The sample where he says ‘I have never been a quitter’, I feel a bit of empathy with that,” Nicky told me at the time. “We may lose a few elections but we always come back.”

U2 famously "touched down at JFK", so how apt that the Manics pay tribute to the Prince of Camelot's old foe in a song of android grace that could have held its own on ‘Achtung Baby’, Edgey guitar solo and all. Even amid a period of self-doubt the band visited places no one else would even imagine. 

It's funny to think of ‘Empty Souls’ as one of the great lost Manics singles when it was only kept off Number 1 by Elvis Presley but, if you asked the milkman - or even the more casual fans up in the back of a Manics gig - to hum it, you'd more than likely meet blank stares. Truly the perfect encapsulation of Lifeblood's "elegiac pop" ethos, this was nothing less than The Associates' Alan Rankine playing over a Funk Brothers backing track then topped with a Keith Levene-ish guitar squall. As brittle and exhilarating as diving through ice, this remains an utterly, utterly glorious record.

During the demo sessions for ‘Lifeblood’ at Stir studios in Cardiff, James needed an idea to work on during the evening, so with Sean's car already running outside, ready to avoid rush hour, the band quickly tracked a live demo for ‘Empty Souls’. This version ended up becoming the single, complete with guide vocals and guitar over the drum tracks. We spent the evening over-dubbing vocals, guitars and keyboards with James and Nick 'The Lord' Nasmyth and everything came together magically. It was of the most creative nights I've ever had in a studio and was certainly one of my most memorable experiences with the band.

‘Your Love Alone Is Not Enough’ is when I realised just how good the Manics were. Everyone fell in love with MSP when they first arrived, but to still be releasing tracks of that quality 20 years later was a hell of an achievement. Duets are hard to pull off, especially for a band, but from the first time I heard it I loved it. JDB and Nina Pearson complement each other perfectly and with the added bonus of vocals from Nicky, it's just a perfect track. As always with the Manics it’s just a bloody great tune, which is what makes them so good.

‘Autumnsong’ is the sound of a band re-embracing everything they love. The neurotic teen outsider. Guns ‘n’ Roses. The great FM rock anthem. The melodrama of love made from hate and hate made from love. The grandstanding guitar solo and the big chorus and the pleasure of being a band whose job it always was to lead the cheers for the sensitive, anguished kohl-eyed kid who doesn’t fit in, and knows that they shouldn’t, but can’t help hurting anyway. The perennial insult that is, “Baby, what you done to your hair?” becomes a paternal congratulation as ‘Autumnsong’ melds the defiant trash-flash of ‘Generation Terrorists’ to the grieving coming-of-age that was ‘Everything Must Go’, and hoists the Manics freak flag high again.

‘Indian Summer’ perfectly captures the yearning for a lost beauty, that transient sparkled sun slanting polaroid of a fractured memory that almost never happened.   No other band can blend metaphor and melody so seamlessly.  That evokes sadness, memory and hope.  Beautiful.

I still have that image of James Dean Bradfield scorched on my memory, walking into Kingston Poly back in 1990 and seeing him there, dressed in a flying helmet and huge sunglasses, tearing through ‘You Love Us’ like it was the last night on earth.  I fell in love that day and resolved to have his band in my life ever more.  Seventeen years later I found myself sitting down with Sean, Nicky and James listening to the most vital music that they had recorded in a decade.  I had the incredible fortune to be running Columbia Records and was blessed to be united with The Manic Street Preachers as they prepared to release a record that would solidify their legacy for the future.  ‘Indian Summer’ was the third single from  ‘Send Away the Tigers’ but it was always my favourite as I could feel immortal again as the music filled my heart.   This is music to drive you onwards feeling righteous and ready for whatever the world throws at you.

“Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other” Miguel De Cervantes

The CD came through the post, I squirted it to the Ipod, clamped on the phones and took it out with me through the streets of a vibrant, sunlit city. This is the track I heard first, and I felt as joyously, emotionally engaged and possessed by a record as I have been in my life. Simply to survive the vicissitudes of fortune and fashion of the previous two decades would have been an achievement. But something as workaday and quotidian as ‘survival’ has never been the Manics way. They have never sounded more incendiary, more glorious, more relevant. They are not going gently into that good night.

I came to my obsessions with the Manics and Echo And The Bunnymen quite separately and I remember glowing with happiness when I first discovered that MSP were Bunnymen fans too – indeed the first gig James attended was the ‘Ocean Rain’ tour with Sean and Richey. And then last year, the news that Ian McCulloch would guest on ‘Postcards From A Young Man’: giddy! The song didn't disappoint. Afternoon-sunshine warm and honey-sweet, it rolls gently in sheets of strings, ambling along down painful old paths. It’s the most elegant of elegies, a summing up, you have to think, of everything Nicky had been trying to say to Richey from ‘Everything Must Go’ on; that echo of 'Enola/Alone'’s “I take a picture of you/To remember how good you looked” picked up in “Still and lonely like an old school photograph” and the many emotions bundled up in the simple line “It’s what you wanted, it’s what you got/Your final search for truth has stopped”. It’s beautifully restrained as it breaks your heart. And then, that magisterial build-up, released by Mac’s urgent howl of “never stop, neveeeer”. The most beautiful of full circles, but rather than a neat conclusion, in the end, they shoot for the moon, like they always do.

  

We don’t expect plumbers and postmen to believe the same things they believed at 20. Neither do we make those demands of ourselves – so I’m not quite sure why we hold musicians to account over youthful declarations made into the red light of a Dictaphone. In the high noon of their lives, the Manics’ tenth album ‘Postcards From A Young Man’ told us that Manic Street Preachers know better than to try and remake ‘Repeat’ and ‘You Love Us’. Eloquent vindication of that outlook comes with the record’s eponymous song. Somewhere between sky-scraping strings and the tough, tender delivery of James’ vocal is a perfect evocation of the bittersweet sensation that comes from sifting through the ephemera of your youth. If we encountered our older selves at the age of 20, we’d be able to tell ourselves a thing or two. By the same token, we have an awful lot to learn from our fearless younger selves. What a wise thing to say in a pop song. And more to the point, what a pop song.

An inspired choice to launch the ‘National Treasure's’ collection. James's vocals add another dimension and vitality to what has been one of my all time favourite songs. Reading the track list of the album really reinforces the talent and consistency of the Manic Street Preachers.