Manic Street Preachers (2009)
Interview Background
Manic Street Preachers’ A Design For Life hit only made it into the Australian Top 40 singles chart for one week, but for me it was one of the most breath-taking singles of 1996. Arriving after the still-unsolved disappearance of chief lyricist Richey Edwards a year earlier, it gave the Welsh band a singalong power and edged these renegades into an unlikely commercial realm. Having interviewed softly spoken drummer Sean Moore for the album Send Away The Tigers in 2007, I chatted to frontman James Dean Bradfield for the follow-up album Journal For Plague Lovers in 2009. Despite the harrowing nature of the album (more details below), James was an incredibly affable interviewee. While the published interview focuses pretty exclusively on the current album, in retrospect the more interesting answers were perhaps left on the cutting room floor (they’re now reinstated at the bottom of the piece). In an interview a few years after this story he admitted to me the Plague Lovers period was incredibly emotionally gruelling, so I’m glad he got through it okay - and even managed to return to Australia and enjoy some rugby a few years later.
The following is an edited version of an interview first published in Rip It Up, May 2009.
Manic Street Preachers - The New Testament
by Scott McLennan
Although building an impressive back catalogue including hit singles A Design For Life, If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next and Your Love Is Not Enough in the past decade, the shadow of former Manic Street Preachers lyricist Richey Edwards has always loomed large for his Welsh bandmates.
The literate but troubled mastermind behind the intense and disturbing 1994 manifesto The Holy Bible went missing in February 1995, never officially seen again. Despite collating an impressive catalogue of five acclaimed studio albums since Richey’s disappearance, his three bandmates have been dogged by the mystery surrounding their friend’s ethereal escape.
Confronting this musical burden head-on, the UK trio have now released Journal For Plague Lovers, a brave collection of Richey’s unreleased lyrics put to new melodies. Frontman James Dean Bradfield offers Rip It Up an erudite account of the album’s genesis.
“Richey gave us these lyrics anywhere between three and five weeks before he went missing,” James begins. “There was an original copy he gave to Nick [Wire, bassist] in the form of a book/folder that had lots of collages, artwork, other people’s poetry in it and lots of things scrawled. Amongst all this were 28 finished lyrics, then he made copies of these two books for Sean [Moore, drummer] and myself. These are the only concrete things that he left us with.”
When asked about the possibility of using Richey’s unpublished lyrics for new Manics material after his disappearance, James told Q in 1998: “I would have enjoyed the challenge, but… the bottom line is that they would have been rubbish records”.
“I can’t deny that actually,” James admits. “When I first read these lyrics I couldn’t really connect with them. Nearly 15 years have passed since I first received these lyrics and I think I lacked the insight to connect with them at the time and put music to them. My feelings about them started changing around four years ago. Two years ago I got them out and I was getting the feeling I always get when Nick or Rich gave me lyrics – I was looking at the lyrics and actually having ideas as I read them. Richey left us these lyrics very shortly before he disappeared, so I don’t think we’re foolish enough to think that was an accident. He bequeathed us with these fully-formed lyrics – verse/bridge/chorus - and as time passed we had this responsibility as band members. He left them with us to do something with them.”
James suggests that it’s the conjecture surrounding Richey’s 1995 vanishing that has been the hardest aspect for the band to tolerate over the last 15 years.
“Since Richey’s disappearance we’ve kind of lived in the shadow of the event, but I’ve never actually felt we’ve lived in the shadow of Richey. The most difficult things are all the rumours and sightings. People turn the event into a B-movie when they theorise about it, so at least here with these lyrics we were dealing with something real about Richey, lyrics that he wrote and things that he felt and thought. It’s much easier than people would imagine, because we’ve never felt that memories of Richey are a burden for us at all. At least with these lyrics they are real, rather than hearsay and rumour.”
Known for his densely layered and learned lyrics, putting Richey’s abrasive stanzas to music has always fallen to James and Sean. After delivering a number of outwardly conventional singles in the last decade, Journal For Plague Lovers returns Manic Street Preachers to an uncompromising dynamic. James felt invigorated by Richey’s challenging compendium of lyrics.
“Undeniably a lot of Richey’s lyrics in the past, especially on The Holy Bible where they were full of intent and had no punctuation, were unorthodox. I think because we all grew up with each other and we’ve all known each other since we were born, we had this innate sensibility that went through all of us. When I’d see a Richey lyric like Yes or IfWhiteAmericaToldTheTruthForOneDayItsWorldWouldFallApart, both of which are from The Holy Bible, I would see it as a challenge. I would sometimes see the look, the little grin from Richey as if to say, ‘See if you can do that, then!’. I always enjoyed that and the one thing you can’t hide away from when you get words like that is there’s an intensity you can feed off. That makes life much easier for anyone who is trying to write music – if you have that sort of intensity coming off the lyric page that’s half the battle won. I think the best lyrics always inspire really good music and that’s always been the way for me – I need lyrics in front of me to inspire music. When I came to doing this record it was like what athletes call muscle memory – I remembered what it was like to write music to words like this and it came back to me very quickly. To be honest I realised that I’d missed it, the exercise of having to transfer that energy and intensity to music. I’d have never had it any other way – I’ve always found it a really unique challenge that I’ve enjoyed.”
Also highly enjoyable for James was touring Australia on the 1999 Big Day Out bill.
“I had a fucking amazing experience and got to see Australia versus Sri Lanka at the WACA. That was brilliant – I’d always wanted to watch some cricket in Australia and had a great day. I just fuckin’ loved the Big Day Out. You get a note under your door telling you where the party is going to be and I pretty much did irreparable damage to my liver on that tour.”
Journal For Plague Lovers (Sony)
Unpublished Interview Material
You’ve always been a pop fan, as your work with Kylie Minogue and Nina Persson, your cover of Wham! or your love of ELO indicates.
"I think we’re schizophrenic in nature. When something like Motorcycle Emptiness came out, people couldn’t fit the two together – a classic rock riff with very unorthodox lyrics over the top. The first line is ‘Culture sucks down words, itemise loathing and feed yourself smiles’, which is a very angular, oblique lyric coupled with a classic rock feeling. The Holy Bible doesn’t have any pop moments on it, it’s very much a post-punk album after its time. Then we went on to do stuff like A Design For Life, which I admit is very anthemic in scope, and worked with Kylie and Tom Jones. I suppose the very nature of us is sometimes quite contrary and confused. I think that has a lot to do with our background and the age we grew up in, but I don’t know if it bears any analysis, it’s just the way it is. If we ever tried to change those things about ourselves we’d just be fucked.”
'Libraries gave us power', but when was the last time you visited one?
“The last time I went to a library? I must admit it would be about a year and a half ago. I think are a very magical place when you’re young. Blackwood Library, which is very close to Pontllanfraith where I grew up, I lived in that library while I was young and would go in there and just read. From the age of 14 to 22 I was just in there all the time, because I didn’t have enough money to buy books. I think you graduate as you get older and have a bit of money and go to bookshops, since they’re consumerist libraries in a strange way I suppose. I constantly buy books, so I’ve transferred from the library to the bookshop. Libraries are really important when you’re young and you haven’t got quite enough money to buy books. It’s important to have somewhere to sit and learn something at your own speed rather than being told what to read.”
Nicky Wire appears to find it difficult to make it through the vocals on William’s Last Words, so what was the reason for him to take the spotlight on the closing track?
“Sometimes the truth is quite mundane, really. It was the one song on the album that was written in prose form, so it was two pages of prose and I attempted to edit it into a lyric and failed. I didn’t have any music for it and came up against a brick wall. Nick started editing his own version of the lyric and so he started writing music for it himself. He went into the studio one day and did an acoustic demo and as soon as he sung on it it just felt right. The very nature of him writing the tune and doing the demo, perhaps the slightly resigned and serene nature of his vocals just suited the lyric. If I had sung it it would have been crap – too bombastic and Welsh. It would have been wrong, because the context of the lyric didn’t need power or somebody hyperventilating over the top of it. It just needed someone telling it how it is and once you hear something and realise it’s right, you’ve just got to go with it. That goes back to what I was saying earlier - we just let the lyrics guide us and if it was right, we didn’t try to force a song to be something it wasn’t.”
You once described The Holy Bible as “not a record you’d play very often”. Is Journal For Plague Lovers in a similar category?
“I don’t know if I quite described The Holy Bible as a record you wouldn’t play very often, but it’s obviously not Party Hits Volume 12. The Holy Bible is invigorating, but it’s not something you put on your iPod when you’re going to the beach, perhaps. Journal For Plague Lovers is a bit different because the lyrics from The Holy Bible are full of rage, fear and disgust. These ones are a bit different, since they deal with the fallout of being so angry. They are doubtful about everything, so there’s more of a sense of calmness. That’s why I think it’s a natural conclusion to The Holy Bible, not a Part II. There are much more gentle moments on this record, but there are echoes. I play this record because I’ve just finished it, I’m still embroiled in it and I still feel it, but as to what other people do, it’s up to them.”
Does any of the gentleness come from turning 40?
"No, I don’t feel different in my head or heart, but my knees feel a tiny bit different. Just me and my wife drove up to north Wales and we were in the countryside by the sea and drinking beer for five days. I had an amazing time in God’s own country and having a lovely time.”
Sean told me when you were promoting Send Away The Tigers about the Big Day Out: “We went to one of the Big Day Out parties and we just looked at these people like they were from a different planet. They were living the rock‘n’roll myth. They’d seen a little book of rules of how to live like a rock star.”
“Sean is not that rock’n’roll. He’s my cousin, so I’m telling the truth there. I gave it a good go for about 10 years and from 1993 to 2003 I was a steady, professional drinker. I wouldn’t say I was the most responsible person in the band during that time, but it seemed to just switch off around 2002, 2003. I suppose my father’s genes took over. I think there are a lot of people out there who seem a lot more erudite and sober than us – Thom Yorke for one. He seems to live the dream of living in splendid isolation and I applaud him for that. I don’t think everyone out there adheres to the rock cliché, but our band was a strange mixture. Obviously Richey dabbled in a lot of rock’n’roll tokenism, Nick and Sean never did and I went down the more traditional beer and whiskey route. I think we’ve always given a slightly confused message. There are so many people in our crew that have been in there forever and you’re probably aware that the British bands call the Big Day Out the Big Day Off. I got to hang out with Huey from the Fun Lovin’ Criminals and Tim from Ash, but to be honest I’m not that good at hanging out with musicians. I once asked my dad why he didn’t have any carpenter friends and he said, ‘I’m with them all day – why the fuck would I want to go and drink with them?’. It’s kind of the same thing in the band – it all starts out nice but then you get a bit competitive and it can all go a bit wrong. I’ve got friends on the crew who are the best drinking team - and they know how to pay for a round as well.”
You always said you were Guns N’ Roses fans. You released around 10 albums (both Manics and solo) in the interim between Use Your Illusion and Chinese Democracy - what did you think of Chinese Democracy when it eventually arrived?
“I listened to it twice and I’ll always respect somebody’s right to perpetuate the group that they’ve loved and nourished, but I can’t listen to a Guns N’ Roses record without Slash, let alone Izzy, let alone Steve Adler, let alone Duff McKagan. It’s a solo project – it’s not a band. There’s so much more music that influenced the Manics, but there’s one thing about Guns N’ Roses that influenced us massively. There’s a performance from the New York Ritz club in 1987 that showcased the perfect rock’n’roll band. The symmetry is perfect, the chemistry is perfect – Izzy Stradlin is the perfect incarnation of a rhythm guitarist of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Steve Adler had so much anxiety in his drumming, Duff McKagan had a punk sensibility to his bass playing, Slash was just a genius and Axl was fucking insane. They were the perfect band. To reduce that to one member means that I can’t listen to it.”
Manic Street Preachers’ A Design For Life hit only made it into the Australian Top 40 singles chart for one week, but for me it was one of the most breath-taking singles of 1996. Arriving after the still-unsolved disappearance of chief lyricist Richey Edwards a year earlier, it gave the Welsh band a singalong power and edged these renegades into an unlikely commercial realm. Having interviewed softly spoken drummer Sean Moore for the album Send Away The Tigers in 2007, I chatted to frontman James Dean Bradfield for the follow-up album Journal For Plague Lovers in 2009. Despite the harrowing nature of the album (more details below), James was an incredibly affable interviewee. While the published interview focuses pretty exclusively on the current album, in retrospect the more interesting answers were perhaps left on the cutting room floor (they’re now reinstated at the bottom of the piece). In an interview a few years after this story he admitted to me the Plague Lovers period was incredibly emotionally gruelling, so I’m glad he got through it okay - and even managed to return to Australia and enjoy some rugby a few years later.
The following is an edited version of an interview first published in Rip It Up, May 2009.
Manic Street Preachers - The New Testament
by Scott McLennan
Although building an impressive back catalogue including hit singles A Design For Life, If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next and Your Love Is Not Enough in the past decade, the shadow of former Manic Street Preachers lyricist Richey Edwards has always loomed large for his Welsh bandmates.
The literate but troubled mastermind behind the intense and disturbing 1994 manifesto The Holy Bible went missing in February 1995, never officially seen again. Despite collating an impressive catalogue of five acclaimed studio albums since Richey’s disappearance, his three bandmates have been dogged by the mystery surrounding their friend’s ethereal escape.
Confronting this musical burden head-on, the UK trio have now released Journal For Plague Lovers, a brave collection of Richey’s unreleased lyrics put to new melodies. Frontman James Dean Bradfield offers Rip It Up an erudite account of the album’s genesis.
“Richey gave us these lyrics anywhere between three and five weeks before he went missing,” James begins. “There was an original copy he gave to Nick [Wire, bassist] in the form of a book/folder that had lots of collages, artwork, other people’s poetry in it and lots of things scrawled. Amongst all this were 28 finished lyrics, then he made copies of these two books for Sean [Moore, drummer] and myself. These are the only concrete things that he left us with.”
When asked about the possibility of using Richey’s unpublished lyrics for new Manics material after his disappearance, James told Q in 1998: “I would have enjoyed the challenge, but… the bottom line is that they would have been rubbish records”.
“I can’t deny that actually,” James admits. “When I first read these lyrics I couldn’t really connect with them. Nearly 15 years have passed since I first received these lyrics and I think I lacked the insight to connect with them at the time and put music to them. My feelings about them started changing around four years ago. Two years ago I got them out and I was getting the feeling I always get when Nick or Rich gave me lyrics – I was looking at the lyrics and actually having ideas as I read them. Richey left us these lyrics very shortly before he disappeared, so I don’t think we’re foolish enough to think that was an accident. He bequeathed us with these fully-formed lyrics – verse/bridge/chorus - and as time passed we had this responsibility as band members. He left them with us to do something with them.”
James suggests that it’s the conjecture surrounding Richey’s 1995 vanishing that has been the hardest aspect for the band to tolerate over the last 15 years.
“Since Richey’s disappearance we’ve kind of lived in the shadow of the event, but I’ve never actually felt we’ve lived in the shadow of Richey. The most difficult things are all the rumours and sightings. People turn the event into a B-movie when they theorise about it, so at least here with these lyrics we were dealing with something real about Richey, lyrics that he wrote and things that he felt and thought. It’s much easier than people would imagine, because we’ve never felt that memories of Richey are a burden for us at all. At least with these lyrics they are real, rather than hearsay and rumour.”
Known for his densely layered and learned lyrics, putting Richey’s abrasive stanzas to music has always fallen to James and Sean. After delivering a number of outwardly conventional singles in the last decade, Journal For Plague Lovers returns Manic Street Preachers to an uncompromising dynamic. James felt invigorated by Richey’s challenging compendium of lyrics.
“Undeniably a lot of Richey’s lyrics in the past, especially on The Holy Bible where they were full of intent and had no punctuation, were unorthodox. I think because we all grew up with each other and we’ve all known each other since we were born, we had this innate sensibility that went through all of us. When I’d see a Richey lyric like Yes or IfWhiteAmericaToldTheTruthForOneDayItsWorldWouldFallApart, both of which are from The Holy Bible, I would see it as a challenge. I would sometimes see the look, the little grin from Richey as if to say, ‘See if you can do that, then!’. I always enjoyed that and the one thing you can’t hide away from when you get words like that is there’s an intensity you can feed off. That makes life much easier for anyone who is trying to write music – if you have that sort of intensity coming off the lyric page that’s half the battle won. I think the best lyrics always inspire really good music and that’s always been the way for me – I need lyrics in front of me to inspire music. When I came to doing this record it was like what athletes call muscle memory – I remembered what it was like to write music to words like this and it came back to me very quickly. To be honest I realised that I’d missed it, the exercise of having to transfer that energy and intensity to music. I’d have never had it any other way – I’ve always found it a really unique challenge that I’ve enjoyed.”
Also highly enjoyable for James was touring Australia on the 1999 Big Day Out bill.
“I had a fucking amazing experience and got to see Australia versus Sri Lanka at the WACA. That was brilliant – I’d always wanted to watch some cricket in Australia and had a great day. I just fuckin’ loved the Big Day Out. You get a note under your door telling you where the party is going to be and I pretty much did irreparable damage to my liver on that tour.”
Journal For Plague Lovers (Sony)
Unpublished Interview Material
You’ve always been a pop fan, as your work with Kylie Minogue and Nina Persson, your cover of Wham! or your love of ELO indicates.
"I think we’re schizophrenic in nature. When something like Motorcycle Emptiness came out, people couldn’t fit the two together – a classic rock riff with very unorthodox lyrics over the top. The first line is ‘Culture sucks down words, itemise loathing and feed yourself smiles’, which is a very angular, oblique lyric coupled with a classic rock feeling. The Holy Bible doesn’t have any pop moments on it, it’s very much a post-punk album after its time. Then we went on to do stuff like A Design For Life, which I admit is very anthemic in scope, and worked with Kylie and Tom Jones. I suppose the very nature of us is sometimes quite contrary and confused. I think that has a lot to do with our background and the age we grew up in, but I don’t know if it bears any analysis, it’s just the way it is. If we ever tried to change those things about ourselves we’d just be fucked.”
'Libraries gave us power', but when was the last time you visited one?
“The last time I went to a library? I must admit it would be about a year and a half ago. I think are a very magical place when you’re young. Blackwood Library, which is very close to Pontllanfraith where I grew up, I lived in that library while I was young and would go in there and just read. From the age of 14 to 22 I was just in there all the time, because I didn’t have enough money to buy books. I think you graduate as you get older and have a bit of money and go to bookshops, since they’re consumerist libraries in a strange way I suppose. I constantly buy books, so I’ve transferred from the library to the bookshop. Libraries are really important when you’re young and you haven’t got quite enough money to buy books. It’s important to have somewhere to sit and learn something at your own speed rather than being told what to read.”
Nicky Wire appears to find it difficult to make it through the vocals on William’s Last Words, so what was the reason for him to take the spotlight on the closing track?
“Sometimes the truth is quite mundane, really. It was the one song on the album that was written in prose form, so it was two pages of prose and I attempted to edit it into a lyric and failed. I didn’t have any music for it and came up against a brick wall. Nick started editing his own version of the lyric and so he started writing music for it himself. He went into the studio one day and did an acoustic demo and as soon as he sung on it it just felt right. The very nature of him writing the tune and doing the demo, perhaps the slightly resigned and serene nature of his vocals just suited the lyric. If I had sung it it would have been crap – too bombastic and Welsh. It would have been wrong, because the context of the lyric didn’t need power or somebody hyperventilating over the top of it. It just needed someone telling it how it is and once you hear something and realise it’s right, you’ve just got to go with it. That goes back to what I was saying earlier - we just let the lyrics guide us and if it was right, we didn’t try to force a song to be something it wasn’t.”
You once described The Holy Bible as “not a record you’d play very often”. Is Journal For Plague Lovers in a similar category?
“I don’t know if I quite described The Holy Bible as a record you wouldn’t play very often, but it’s obviously not Party Hits Volume 12. The Holy Bible is invigorating, but it’s not something you put on your iPod when you’re going to the beach, perhaps. Journal For Plague Lovers is a bit different because the lyrics from The Holy Bible are full of rage, fear and disgust. These ones are a bit different, since they deal with the fallout of being so angry. They are doubtful about everything, so there’s more of a sense of calmness. That’s why I think it’s a natural conclusion to The Holy Bible, not a Part II. There are much more gentle moments on this record, but there are echoes. I play this record because I’ve just finished it, I’m still embroiled in it and I still feel it, but as to what other people do, it’s up to them.”
Does any of the gentleness come from turning 40?
"No, I don’t feel different in my head or heart, but my knees feel a tiny bit different. Just me and my wife drove up to north Wales and we were in the countryside by the sea and drinking beer for five days. I had an amazing time in God’s own country and having a lovely time.”
Sean told me when you were promoting Send Away The Tigers about the Big Day Out: “We went to one of the Big Day Out parties and we just looked at these people like they were from a different planet. They were living the rock‘n’roll myth. They’d seen a little book of rules of how to live like a rock star.”
“Sean is not that rock’n’roll. He’s my cousin, so I’m telling the truth there. I gave it a good go for about 10 years and from 1993 to 2003 I was a steady, professional drinker. I wouldn’t say I was the most responsible person in the band during that time, but it seemed to just switch off around 2002, 2003. I suppose my father’s genes took over. I think there are a lot of people out there who seem a lot more erudite and sober than us – Thom Yorke for one. He seems to live the dream of living in splendid isolation and I applaud him for that. I don’t think everyone out there adheres to the rock cliché, but our band was a strange mixture. Obviously Richey dabbled in a lot of rock’n’roll tokenism, Nick and Sean never did and I went down the more traditional beer and whiskey route. I think we’ve always given a slightly confused message. There are so many people in our crew that have been in there forever and you’re probably aware that the British bands call the Big Day Out the Big Day Off. I got to hang out with Huey from the Fun Lovin’ Criminals and Tim from Ash, but to be honest I’m not that good at hanging out with musicians. I once asked my dad why he didn’t have any carpenter friends and he said, ‘I’m with them all day – why the fuck would I want to go and drink with them?’. It’s kind of the same thing in the band – it all starts out nice but then you get a bit competitive and it can all go a bit wrong. I’ve got friends on the crew who are the best drinking team - and they know how to pay for a round as well.”
You always said you were Guns N’ Roses fans. You released around 10 albums (both Manics and solo) in the interim between Use Your Illusion and Chinese Democracy - what did you think of Chinese Democracy when it eventually arrived?
“I listened to it twice and I’ll always respect somebody’s right to perpetuate the group that they’ve loved and nourished, but I can’t listen to a Guns N’ Roses record without Slash, let alone Izzy, let alone Steve Adler, let alone Duff McKagan. It’s a solo project – it’s not a band. There’s so much more music that influenced the Manics, but there’s one thing about Guns N’ Roses that influenced us massively. There’s a performance from the New York Ritz club in 1987 that showcased the perfect rock’n’roll band. The symmetry is perfect, the chemistry is perfect – Izzy Stradlin is the perfect incarnation of a rhythm guitarist of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Steve Adler had so much anxiety in his drumming, Duff McKagan had a punk sensibility to his bass playing, Slash was just a genius and Axl was fucking insane. They were the perfect band. To reduce that to one member means that I can’t listen to it.”
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