The greatest political band of the last twenty years. [View All]

[Screaming Lord Byron]

Nostalgia is like rust, it catches up with everyone eventually. With that in mind I bought Forever Delayed - the Manic Street Preachers compilation. It's been out for about eighteen months, and I owned all but four of the songs on it, but yesterday, in a fit of longing for a long gone past, I picked it up.
The Manic Street Preachers were possibly the last band in the world who anyone would have expected to have a long term succesful career. The first I heard of them was in 1991, when I was fifteen and vulnerable to rock and roll. The band I saw on Top of the Pops looked like a third-rate glammed-up Clash, all tousled hair, bad eyeliner and polemic-strewn clothing. The song was 'You Love Us', which wasn't entirely appropriate, as it was in the lower reaches of the Top 40, and to be honest, catchy as it was, I dismissed it quickly, waiting for (the thankfully long-forgotten) Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine to come on.
But they stuck there in the back of my mind these valley boys who claimed that they would release one album, sell twenty million copies then explode, leaving, I should imagine, a good looking corpse.
Then, a few months later, another single was on TOTP, 'Motorcycle Emptiness', this one a Top 20 hit.
'Motorcycle...' was one of those songs that you can remember exactly what you were doing when you first heard it.

'Culture sucks down words
Itemise loathing and feed yourself smiles
Under neon loneliness motorcycle emptiness
Life lies a slow suicide
Orthodox dreams and symbolic myths
From feudal serf to spender
This wonderful world of purchase power'

The song shouldn't have worked I guess, musically being not too far removed from Guns and Roses, a long guitar solo, piano and orchestra, mediocre components that somehow made an extraordinary whole. This was beautiful, profound music that stuck out like a nail surrounded by euro-pop pap, whiny grunge and Kriss Kross. I was hooked.
The band went on for a couple of years, not selling twenty million records and not splitting up, but surviving, raiding the Top 40 with communiques from a parallel universe where Joe Strummer fronted Queen. Often an exquisite pearl slipped out, like La Tristesse Durera, an elegy for an elderly veteran.

'I sold my medal
It paid a bill
It sells at market stalls
Parades milan catwalks'

Then suddenly, shockingly the band collapsed. Chief propagandist and guitarist Richey Edwards drove his car to the Severn Bridge, not too far from his Cardiff home and was never seen again. It was all over.
Not quite, though. Just one year later 'A Design for Life' came out. The old Manics were dead, and a now three-piece had grafted the Phil Spector wall-of-sound onto an epic rock engine. The song, a hymn for the working class went to number 2 on the charts and was one of the biggest hits of the year, crushing the pop opposition with an extraordinarily profound rock record that encompassed the tragedy of the proletariat in a four-minute pop song.
Since then, the Manics have racked up ten more top ten hits, even managing to get two of them 'If you tolerate this, your children will be next' (about the Spanish Civil War) and 'The Masses against the Classes' a class-war manifesto to number one on the charts.
Why am I writing about this? I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes eloquence and thought can win out in the most unexpected places, sometimes supposedly non-mainstream ideas can explode like flowers through concrete. The Manic Street Preachers, a socialist rock group could make records based on abstract political concepts sell millions and confront people with ideas that challenge bland normality. Anyway, rant over. If you ever wanted to hear what The Clash would be like if they made a record with Phil Spector and Brian Wilson, do yourself a favour and check out the Manics, and remember that sometimes, against all odds, truth and beauty can win out. And truth and beauty are the only things that really matter in the end.


'The masses against the classes
I’m tired of giving a reason
When the future is what we believe in'