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Post by Fuggle on Oct 29, 2004 8:14:50 GMT -5
X-clusive: The Manics Attack The White StripesWith the release of the Manics new album ‘Lifeblood’ imminent, bass player Nicky Wire has been sounding off about the White Stripes as part of the new Orange Playlist show. However, the band have declared their love for Bowie's ‘Ashes To Ashes’ inspired their new album. Manic Street Preachers' Nicky Wire has attacked the White Stripes in a new interview with Xfm’s Lauren Laverne set to be screened on ITV1 tonight "There are loads of sh*t bands out there,” he explains. “White Stripes - I just don't get that at all. When they say 'We recorded the whole album in 2 days' it's like, 'Yeah it sounds like it. It sounds f*cking crap because you recorded it in a second'." Jet are another band to fall into the vocal bassist’s cross-hairs, with Wire stating that "Their music has the mental age of a foetus." Wire chose the Sex Pistols' ‘God Save The Queen’ as his dedication track on the show commenting, "It seemed perfectly fitting to dedicate this to the Queen. ‘God Save The Queen’ helped me form many of my early political ideals at a very young age." However, speaking to John Kennedy as part of the this week’s Xfm X-posure Album Playback of ‘Lifeblood’, Wire had only good things to say about David Bowie claiming he was the inspiration behind the Manics new LP. “I think David Bowie’s ‘Ashes To Ashes’ was a big influence on this album,” he explained. “Our idea was of an amazing pop single, but with a lyric about an astronaut on smack. You’ve got mums and dads singing along after it was on The Kenny Everitt Show and yet it’s a really dark and disturbing lyric. We aimed to match that by still reaching everybody, but being really subversive. “I think pop’s become a filthy word, not just a dirty word,” he continued. “When we grew up, bands like New Order were a very alternative act, but just crossed all genres and were capable of three-and-a-half minutes of pop brilliance. That seems to have disappeared now so we just wanted to write something completely weird, but that could still get to number one.” Hear the album ‘Lifeblood’ in full complete with the band's track by track by clicking here The band tour the UK in December with support from Razorlight (all dates except Brighton) and Hope Of The States (Brighton only). Tickets are on sale now from the Xfm Xchange on 0871 222 1049 or by clicking here. The dates are: Brighton Centre (December 4) Belfast Waterfront (6) Dublin Olympia (7) London Wembley Arena (9) Plymouth Pavilions (10) Nottingham Arena (11) Cardiff International Arena (13) Glasgow SECC (14) Birmingham NEC (16) Manchester MEN Arena (17)
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Post by Fuggle on Oct 29, 2004 8:17:09 GMT -5
I love The Manic's, I saw them live but I always think it's really sad when musicians who's careers are on the wain feel the need to start slagging other bands off.
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Post by Fuggle on Oct 29, 2004 8:24:52 GMT -5
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Post by Fuggle on Oct 29, 2004 11:57:02 GMT -5
Manic Street Preachers: Sublime and ridiculousTrouble follows the Manic Street Preachers around like a mangy dog. Trouble, grief and political strife. And now their hotel-room door won't open! Strewth. Fortunately, Simon Price is on hand to settle things down as Wales's finest finally crack the code and open up. They've a new album to discuss, a new way of looking at themselves - and the lost Richey Edwards is seldom out of their thoughts... 29 October 2004 'Formed in the Valleys, ner ner ner ... Inspired by Guns N'Roses and Public Enemy, ner ner ner ... Bloke went missing, ner ner ner ... Have I really got to read that shit again?" James Dean Bradfield draws on a Marlboro in Nicky Wire's Langham Hilton hotel room (against the non-smoking bassist's wishes). The singer is speaking about his feelings at being required to approve a new press biography to accompany Manic Street Preachers' latest flurry of activity, but he might as easily be anticipating the rash of articles which will ensue, including this one. Despite dreams of being "free from our history" (on Everything Must Go, as far back as 1996), no band is as self-consciously shackled to history - its own, and that of the wider world - than the Manics. Indeed, the last two Manics releases, Forever Delayed and Lipstick Traces, were a greatest hits and a B-sides collection respectively, their next-but-one is a remastered reissue of a classic album from a decade ago, and their imminent studio album, Lifeblood, is inhabited by spectres from the past. If the Manics' self-reflexive fascination with their own story seems a little morbid, unhealthy even, it's understandable. Stepping back and viewing their career from the outside, they must be able to see a human drama with sufficient tragedies and triumphs to sustain a whole book. Yes, James, you really have got to read it again. His reluctance to rake over the past is doomed, given their release schedule, but he's happy that the new album is receiving a relatively gentle push from Sony: "I don't want to make this album join the army if it doesn't want to," he says (ironically, for someone who has always looked as though he could have been a squaddie, if he'd made the minimum height requirement). If the three Manic Street Preachers have altered as people and as a band, it's telling that the change is slight, gradualist rather than revolutionary. Bradfield surprises me, when the tape isn't running, by speaking of his high hopes for Gordon Brown. James remains an engagingly enigmatic mixture of the gentleman and the brute, always courteous but retaining a no-nonsense toughness (of which his tattooed bicep is a visual reminder). These days, however, he's increasingly confident displaying his intellectual side, once hidden behind an exterior of laddish bravado. Sean Moore, the notoriously reticent drummer, has noticeably opened up and offers scattergun, off-the-record assassinations of several of the Manics' musical peers. He's even doing his part for the PR campaign (he's drawn the short straw today, doing phone interviews with Thailand and Canada), where once he'd have sat huddled over his Gameboy, or absconded completely. Nicky Wire, to the horror of many female fans, is sporting a few days' growth of light brown beard. The former Glamour Twin has oscillated between glitter-and-tiaras and casual blokewear since the disappearance of his other half Richey Edwards, and is very much in one of his casual phases. He's still something of a fusspot and a hypochondriac ("the only working organ in my body is my brain"), fretting that James and I will set off the fire alarms with our ciggies and drench his room. Famously a motormouth with a poison wit and a sharp tongue, Wire has unexpectedly become a diplomat, half-jokingly coaching his bandmates with the pre-interview instruction: "Remember, no politics, and be nice!" Beforehand, a little vignette speaks volumes about the different personalities in the band. We're outside Nicky Wire's hotel room, trying to get inside, but the computerised swipe card won't work, and the little light doesn't want to go green. "Let me try," says James, who proceeds to shoulder-charge the lock. After sheer violence has failed three or four times, Wire, who has been waiting patiently behind us, quietly says, "Shall I go down to Reception?" Manic Street Preachers sprang into existence nearly two decades ago in Blackwood, a small town in one of Britain's most culturally deprived and economically depressed regions, the former mining valleys of South Wales. Politicised by the Miners' Strike, inspired by 10th-anniversary documentaries on punk, and seized by a desire to mix revolutionary rhetoric (yes, Public Enemy) with commercial rock (yes, Guns N'Roses), four bored teenagers formed a band containing a clearly defined "political wing" of university-educated best friends Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire (né Jones) - their musical talent was limited but their skill with a soundbite and a visual image was not - and a "musical wing" of singer-guitarist James Dean Bradfield and his cousin, drummer Sean Moore. Their intention was to launch a kamikaze strike on a sleepy music scene. In a turn-of-the-Nineties musical landscape dominated by blissed-out bagginess from "Madchester" and soporific "shoegazing" from the Thames Valley, the Manics were a deliberate anomaly: as one writer put it, "a speed band in an E generation". Their initial tinny attempts to replicate the up-and-at-'em sound of The Clash were of limited musical merit, but the press couldn't get enough of them. While they were almost universally derided by critics, editors knew that the Manics "gave good quote". They were gleefully anti-consensual - their third single featured a chorus which crowed, "I laughed when Lennon got shot" - and endlessly provocative (they described long-forgotten indie band Slowdive as "worse than Hitler"). They also gave good photo. An explosion of Paris '68-style sloganeering and Motley Crue-style make-up methods, "a mess of eyeliner and spraypaint", they injected glamour into a drab, dressed-down age. Perhaps unsurprisingly, to begin with their public profile far exceeded their actual popularity and sales figures. In May 1991, the Manic Street Preachers provided their most infamous visual image of all. After a gig in Norwich, and frustrated by an interviewer's refusal to take them seriously, Richey Edwards took out a razor and hacked the inscription "4 REAL" into his forearm. He'd been a habitual self-harmer since schooldays. The resulting gory photograph from the NME's Ed Sirrs remains one of the most iconic in rock, and is retrospectively - rightly or wrongly - viewed as a foreshadowing of what would become of Edwards himself. Having outraged the indie world by "selling out" to corporate giants Sony, the group hilariously vowed to sell 20 million copies of their debut album, headline Wembley Stadium, then split up. It didn't quite work out that way. Generation Terrorists, 1992's ambitious yet flawed double album with a polished classic rock sheen, arrived at a time when, ironically, commercial rock was uncommercial. It sold respectably, but the accompanying tour began not at Wembley but at Northampton Roadmenders. Its successor, Gold Against the Soul, met the zeitgeist halfway - a blend of Bon Jovi and Nirvana - and the lyrics, particularly in songs written by Edwards, switched from the political to the personal, dwelling on themes such as insomnia, the impossibility of love, and the trauma of becoming an adult. Meanwhile, Edwards' gaunt appearance betrayed his growing dependency on alcohol and the beginnings of anorexia; and his self-cutting, often performed onstage, was becoming more frequent. By the time the band's third (and greatest) album The Holy Bible arrived in 1994, Edwards' mental state had deteriorated badly. The album addressed unimaginably grim themes, from genocide to self-harm. In July, following a two-day cutting and drinking binge, he was admitted to psychiatric hospital in Cardiff and, later, The Priory in London, forcing the band to play festival dates as a trio. Edwards rejoined the band for their autumn tour, culminating in three memorably intense pre-Christmas shows at London's Astoria, and his health seemed to be improving. However, in February 1995, on the eve of a promotional trip to America, Edwards vanished from a London hotel room, leaving only cryptic notes and parcels for his bandmates. His car was later found near the Severn Bridge, prompting many to assume that he had committed suicide. From that point on the trail went cold - although spurious sightings and conspiracy theories have continued to stimulate the Manics' constituency. When they re-emerged in 1996, almost topping the charts with A Design For Life, there was a sad irony to their sudden success. Here they were, at the height of Britrock, finding a mass audience at last, and Richey Edwards, who'd craved it more than anyone, was not around to enjoy it. But success grew. With Nicky Wire now their sole lyricist, the group achieved their first number one hit in 1998 with "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next" to go with the multi-platinum soft-rock-dominated album This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours. The first number one of the new century was theirs too. "Masses Against The Classes" followed up the largest indoor gig in British history, when they played to 70,000 at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium on the eve of the Millennium. Then 2001's Know Your Enemy built on the groups' newsy profile: the Manics went where no western band had been before. They played Havana's Karl Marx Theatre, met Fidel Castro.
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Post by Fuggle on Oct 29, 2004 11:58:25 GMT -5
At the time of writing, it's looking as though a hat-trick is on the cards. "The Love of Richard Nixon", a single with a typically provocative title, is number one as we go to press. It appears to be another case of sympathy for the devil. "The main thrust of the song," Wire explains, "is the idea of being tarnished with a certain part of your life forever. With us, people might think of Richey's disappearance, or 4 REAL.
"With Nixon, people will always associate him with Watergate and being a crook, not the fact that he was the first president to go to China to build up relations. Or the way he de-escalated the arms race with the Soviet Union - quite admirable things. Whereas Kennedy for instance, when you analyse it, he was the first president to put troops into Vietnam. He sanctioned the Bay of Pigs - besides his moral disaster zone of shagging everything in sight."
"If you take someone like JFK," agrees Bradfield, "Bay of Pigs was undeniably American imperialism, akin to what Reagan was doing with the Contras. There were the assassination attempts on Castro. He forced the Soviet Union's hand with the missiles in Cuba, and everyone knows Bush stole the election, but JFK stole 'his' election. Now, if you put Nixon next to JFK, I would probably be so liberally wet that I'd go with JFK."
Wire, who has watched Oliver Stone's Nixon twice or three times a year since it came out, continues: "There's always been a ridiculousness to Manic Street Preachers. Not humour, not funny-ha ha, but a question of 'Do they really mean it?' But there's probably more empathy [with Nixon] than I should admit. Nixon wasn't a good president, but he wasn't George W Bush. He was a brilliant man, and not all Republican presidents have been. I do think he's a fascinating character, particularly in today's climate. He probably ended the Vietnam war. Whatever you think his reasons were - and conspiracy theories abound - he signed off at the end of it ... If Radiohead are Kennedy," he smiles, switching to soundbite mode, "then Manic Street Preachers are Nixon: the ugly duckling who had to try 10 times harder than anyone else. Paranoid megalomaniacs."
"The Love of Richard Nixon" is atypical. Lifeblood, is an uncharacteristically insular, apolitical record, its inner sleeve adorned with a quote from Descartes: "Conquer yourself rather than the world."
"Fifteen years ago," Wire grins, that quote would have been 'Conquer the world, and fuck yourself.'" At a time like this, it seems strange that the Manics, of all people, are shying away from making great political statements. "I think there are great statements to be made," adds Bradfield, "but I don't think there are great statements to be made with music. One of my favourite bands is The Clash and one of my least favourite albums is Sandinista. When they became an internationalist politics band, I don't think it worked that well..."
"I just think the worst thing we could do at this moment," reckons Wire, "would be writing an anti-George W Bush song. When it gets to the level of Green Day doing them, there's no point. I couldn't bear to be associated with Bono, Chris Martin or Damon..." Bang on cue, on the hotel TV, Bono appears on the news gladhanding Mr Blair. "I think politics has been reduced to such a trivial level, and we're trying to grapple with complex issues.
"I couldn't dumb down my politics, which I think you have to do at the moment. It's all about single issues. You know - Make Trade Fair, blah de blah... I'm not saying they're bad things, but they're too bleeding obvious. I'm an intellectual snob, I guess, when it comes to politics. I do think a song like 'Freedom of Speech Won't Feed My Children' was a prophecy. It said everything that needed to be said about American foreign policy. And I'm really bitter about the fact that it needed a war for everyone else to become political. How pathetic is that?"
Lifeblood is a subdued, mellow, melancholy, quietly lovely affair, with few of what the singer calls "the slashing chords of James Dean Bradfield", and much use of synthesizers, pianos and, apparently, digital drums. Bradfield thinks it sounds like "Fleetwood Mac played by the Cardigans"; Wire thinks it's "a mature record ... elegiac pop." Bradfield speaks of "a passionate coldness, a compassionate coldness." Wire says, "This album is clean, not a dirty album. It's cold sex, not warm sex. It's dry sex." The initial sessions were recorded in New York with David Bowie's sometime producer Tony Visconti (Wire and Bradfield are both fans of Bowie's late Seventies output, from Low to Scary Monsters) and mixed by Goldfrapp's engineer Tom Elmhirst.
Visconti's trick, Bradfield says, was to "de-school" the band and encourage them to "take four steps back".
"Which sounds a bit stupid, like he's some kind of zen master in the corner, but he did a bit of a David Carradine number on us. With young engineers, they all wanna be Nigel Godrich. You ask for a drum sound, and they put the lead mic through a dustbin, and put the sound of the dustbin through a squeezy Fairy Liquid bottle, and say 'You've got a drum sound - that's genius man!' But there was none of that. Visconti put four mics on the kit, and 10 minutes later we had a drum sound. And whenever I'd be thinking, 'It's gonna take about 10 more takes to get it right,' he'd say 'That's great!' and I'd be like 'NO!!! You can't cut me off like that!' He made me realise that for the past four years or so, I'd been trying to get past the first and the second idea, to get to the third idea. And maybe we've got to an age where the first idea is good again."
Wire's lyrics, often given to prolixity, are deliberately pared down: "He's left a gap for the music to be more important," says Bradfield. It's the first time, he says, that the band have admitted to themselves that they actually enjoy playing together as musicians. So much so that they've been breaking self-imposed musical rules, and trying things which would once have been taboo, like slap bass (Wire tried to think "Ashes to Ashes", not Level 42) and harmonica (Bradfield tried to think "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out", not The Alarm).
The nearest thing Lifeblood has to a radio-friendly anthem - what Wire calls "the Football Focus factor" - is "Empty Souls", a piano-led track which Bradfield likens to The Associates. One line, however, jars, and may upset the programmers: "Exposed to a truth we don't know/ Collapsing like the twin towers..." Even from a band like the Manics, who have never been shy of using such words as "holocaust", "rape" and "apocalypse" metaphorically, is this one simile too far?
"It depends if you like us as a band, to be honest," says James. "As soon as I read the lyric, I realised it was about the incomprehensibility of death. I've never comprehended it when I've been faced with it." (James's mother died of cancer in 2000, the subject of a rare Bradfield lyric, "Ocean Spray".) "How do you ever find a path back to being positive again? And not being completely negative and nihilistic about everything that's left?"
Doesn't the casual use of the twin towers image cheapen 9/11? "It's meant to do the exact opposite," Wire maintains. "It's meant to show the enormity of death. The twin towers is the defining image of our generation, the ultimate symbol of death, and how incomprehensible not only that, but ONE death is. It's not a statement about terrorism or politics. But it's meant to be poetic, metaphoric, and in no way is it meant to be callous. We recorded an alternate version with the line 'collapsing like a dying flower', but it just didn't have the same impact ... The conclusion I've come to is, confronted with something like 9/11, as a society we find ourselves incapable of taking in the true nature of death."
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Post by Fuggle on Oct 29, 2004 11:58:39 GMT -5
Mortality and loss are recurring themes on this record. "This album is about death," Wire explains, "the 'trivialisation' of death. People talk about the sanctity of life, but I think the sanctity of death is as important. If someone wants to grieve for 10 years, and just sit in the corner and refuse to do anything, I think it's fair enough. I think we're victims of it ourselves, suffering delayed grief from 10 years without Richey. We've always been kind of, 'Come on, sod it, let's play Brixton Academy, he'll come back!'" The smile is bittersweet this time. Wire's eyes well up whenever he discusses Richey for more than two sentences.
Inevitably, Lifeblood, like every album since his departure, is haunted by Edwards, and at least one song ("Cardiff Afterlife") is directly addressed to him. One wonders whether Wire will ever exhaust or exorcise the topic, or whether the Richey songs will always come. "This one came in a big moment," he says. "There was a splurge of two or three pages of vitriol which I had to edit down. Our albums have always been infused with bitterness, and for the first time ever, there might be a bit more love than hate. So I had to edit a lot of the bitterness out." Bitterness towards people who try to claim Richey as their possession? "A little bit that, but also a little towards Richey himself. Which isn't fair, because a lot of it is driven by people outside. "It is about reclaiming something- 'I kept my silence, your memories are still mine...' The idea that he's a friend first, not the rock myth."
The specific pain of the Richey situation, like any unexplained disappearance, is the impossibility of closure. "It's the dangling man syndrome," Wire says. "You've got hope on the one side, and clarity or closure on the other. And sometimes you want closure, but to get closure you have to kill hope." And have you done that? "No. I don't know why. It's probably not healthy, because I have to have definites in my life - it's the kind of person I am. Doubt is not good for me. But until I find proof..." His voice trails off. He says something inaudible.
The last spate of Richey Edwards stories came in 2002, the seventh anniversary of his disappearance, when he could legally be declared dead if his parents wished it so. "The family chose not to," says James, "and I don't blame them. But that's not a decision taken by us or anything. And it's not a decision I'd like to take."
"There was cheap and nasty stuff in the papers," Wire recalls. "'The family can get his money now...' As if they would. It was the last thing on their minds." For the record, Edwards' songwriting royalties continue to be paid into a bank account which remains untouched.
As for "proof", there have been one or two close calls. "We were driving to a gig in Copenhagen once, and you get a phone message through saying they've found Richey's feet in the river." The decomposed feet in the Severn turned out to belong to some other unfortunate soul. In any case, they were wearing trainers Richey would never have deigned to wear. "Exactly. Diadora or some crap that Robert Smith would have worn. I know we always laugh and we're blasé, but it really does make you shudder, stuff like that."
The Holy Bible is due for reissue in December, with the usual DVD extras. The album most associated with Richey's troubles, is bound to stir up... "The question of whether he's still alive?" James interrupts. No, but... a certain amount of picking at the scab, as it were.
"Well, if anyone's picking at that scab, when they're past a certain age, they're necrophiliacs, for want of a better word. And I do want the album to be celebrated, because it's something which didn't reach its audience. It's just like I was saying to my dad - if all the people who told me they loved The Holy Bible had bought it, it would have sold more! And it's good to be proud of it, because it seems to have been inextricably linked with an era... You're made to feel you should forget it and move on.
"Around that album I really felt we were the perfect band. Even the photos backstage, we look really amazing, and without looking like we're trying. Richey wasn't sucking the breath out of his body and going like THAT." He sucks in his cheeks. "Just natural and cool."
For Wire, the motive for the reissue is purely artistic. "You know me, I enjoy the process of marketing, but I just wanted to show how brilliant Richey's lyrics are. Grace by Jeff Buckley and Definitely Maybe [Oasis] have had 10th anniversary editions, and I think it deserves to be in that company. It's fallen off the critical radar a bit."
A decade since his disappearance, I wonder whether the Manics still, consciously or otherwise, seek Edwards's theoretical approval for everything they do. Bradfield admits that, "Up until a year ago, the answer would be 'probably': I used to get the Essence of Richey to do a 'spellcheck' on everything." But times have changed. "I feel, to this day, incapable of going to the places that he went," adds Wire. "I was always scared of being irresponsible - he went to brave places. But I don't think he could do what I've done: be married for 11 years, have a baby daughter, clean the house..."
Wire is quietly firm about keeping his home life and pop life separate. "There's a poet called Elizabeth Jennings who says. 'True love is always quiet'. You see that all the time in showbiz, don't you? Proclaiming undying love for a month, then they're shagging someone else. Having a child just gives you even more moments of joy, I guess. Five minutes' joy a day is enough for me. I think we expect way too much out of life..."
Never much of a party animal to begin with, Wire's small talk is about cream teas in Abergavenny, not cocaine binges in London clubs. Another thing he feels incapable of nowadays is glamour. Eyeliner is out, the light brown beard is in. "We can't project sexiness any more. It's not possible for us to do." Because you feel too old? "When you've got a band like Franz Ferdinand doing it better... the word 'mutton' comes to mind! I still think you can make brilliant records, but you can't have the whole package." Yet the musical half of the package, it seems, still has legs. "We were in Germany the other week," says Wire, "and we reckoned we could do another album next year in Berlin. We felt really good about ourselves. When you're on a roll, it's the right time."
Formed in the Valleys, ner ner ner ... Guns N'Roses and Public Enemy, ner ner ner ... Bloke went missing, ner ner ner ... Made a load of brilliant records. End of story.
'Lifeblood' is released on Sony Records, 1 Nov. 'The Holy Bible' is reissued in December
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Post by Fuggle on Oct 29, 2004 12:01:06 GMT -5
Promising Return For Manic Street PreachersPosted by ben on October 21, 2004 Manic Street Preachers look set to pick up where they left off after the success of 2003’s ‘Lipstick Traces’, they released their first piece of new material for two years on Monday and it is thought to be proving a triumphant return. New single, ‘The Love of Richard Nixon’, is thought to be going down well with their fans. With lyrics such as: “People forget China and your war on cancer”, it is typically Manics - thought provoking from start to finish. Speaking of the new single Nicky Wire remarked – “To release that as a single obviously gives us a bit of glee”. He continues – “I’m attracted by egotistical, megalomaniac, paranoid people. There’s a sample on the record where Nixon says, ‘I have never been a quitter.’ I feel a bit of empathy with that. It’s the idea of the ugly duckling. Radiohead are Kennedy, Manic Street Preachers are Nixon.” He says grinning in his childlike manor. The new album, ‘Lifeblood’, will be released on November 1st. Followed by a UK Tour in the winter, full dates are – DEC 04: BRIGHTON CENTRE DEC 09: WEMBLEY ARENA, LONDON DEC 10: PLYMOUTH PAVILIONS DEC 11: NOTTINGHAM ARENA DEC 13: CARDIFF INTERNATIONAL ARENA DEC 14: GLASGOW SECC DEC 16: BIRMINGHAM NEC DEC 17: MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS ARENA Support will come from Razorlight on all dates except Brighton where Hope Of The States will open.
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Post by Fuggle on Oct 29, 2004 12:05:42 GMT -5
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Post by Fuggle on Oct 29, 2004 12:08:15 GMT -5
Manic Street Preachers Release Seventh AlbumPublished: 2004-10-04Britain’s Manic Street Preachers are preparing to release their seventh studio-album. The release date is set for November 1st, with ‘Lifeblood’ initially being available in Canada through import order only. The 12-track album has been anxiously awaited by MSP fans for quite some time, and they will soon be able to get their hands on the first sample of ‘Lifeblood’. On October 18th, the first single from ‘Lifeblood’ will be released to the world. The track is called ‘The Love of Richard Nixon’, and can be previewed at the band’s site at www.manics.co.uk. The Manics’ last album was 2001’s ‘Know Your Enemy’, which wasn’t too warmly received by fans or critics. However, the band is looking to regain their place at the top of the Brit-band heap with ‘Lifeblood’. The band’s biggest notoriety came when their primary songwriter famously disappeared – Manic Street Preachers were mentioned in the headlines of many a newspaper during 1994/95. With most of the tracks written by Richey James, the missing Manic, their album ‘The Holy Bible’ didn’t suffer at all from the media attention. The band’s next album, ‘Everything Must Go’ (released 1996) solidified Manic Street Preachers as international music stars. The track-listing of ‘Lifeblood’: ‘1985’ ‘The Love of Richard Nixon’ ‘Empty Souls’ ‘A Song for Departure’ ‘I Live To Fall Asleep’ ‘To Rebel Ghosts’ ‘Emily’ ‘Glasnost’ ‘Always/Never’ ‘Solitude Sometimes Is’ ‘Fragments’ ‘Cardiff Afterlife’<br> Writer: Jaclyn Arndt
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Post by Fuggle on Oct 29, 2004 12:12:53 GMT -5
NICKY'S IRE!Nicky Wire - Handbag not picturedMANIC STREET PREACHERS bassist NICKY WIRE has hit out at bands like the WHITE STRIPES and JET, branding them "fucking crap". Speaking in an interview on the Orange Playlist show due to be aired tonight (October 28), Wire slammed the Stripes' recording process. He said: "The White Stripes – I just don’t get that at all. When they say ‘ We recorded the whole album in two days’ its like, yeah it sounds like it – it sounds fucking crap because you recorded it in a second. "And Jet, Jet are so bad. Their music has the mental age of a foetus. "I think it’s too easy to make good music. There are so many idiots out there who’ve got rigs and computers in their bedroom who are making unbelievably average music that sounds quite good – it's not a healthy thing. "From David Bowie to U2 you have to know when its time to evolve – if you don’t, you die, like dodos you become extinct. "You have to know when to stop and get out. I think we’ll know when it's time to stop." Wire did have praise for one British star however. "I met Daniel Bedingfield at 'CD:UK'. He is an absolutely brilliant nutter actually. He’s truly warped and mad – in a good way."
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Post by Fuggle on Oct 29, 2004 12:14:41 GMT -5
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Post by Fuggle on Nov 1, 2004 12:36:53 GMT -5
Just another Manic dayIAN WATSONManic Street Preachers on stage. Picture: Terry McGourtyWHEN NICKY WIRE WAS AT school, as soon as someone he hated got into his favourite band, he went off them. When "the casuals and flat tops" discovered the Smiths, Wire dropped them. Same with Echo and the Bunnymen when they were championed by U2 fans. One minute he was obsessed, the next indifferent. And he still thinks that way now he’s a married 35-year-old father. Only these days it’s not bands he’s abandoning but politics. "Know Your Enemy was one of the most politicised albums ever," Wire says, referring to the Manic Street Preachers’ last album. "Unfortunately, it was four years before every f***er else got interested in politics. It took a war. Where have these people been the last four years? Forty years? American foreign policy’s never changed. There’s a track called Freedom of Speech Won’t Feed my Children on Know Your Enemy, about forcing freedom on societies that says everything we ever needed to say. So there’s hardly any politics on the new record. It didn’t feel comfortable joining a debate that includes Green Day, Chris Martin and Fran Healy." One thing Wire won’t be giving up any time soon is his love for a barbed quote, delivered with a broad, knowing grin. Green Day are "my idea of what punk never was. You take the artistry out of punk and you’re left with that". On REM, "they talk about their album being political, but it’s the most oblique, vague politics I’ve ever come across". As for the Travis frontman, "Fran’s a great songwriter, but how can he write songs like Flowers in the Window when the Afghanistan war’s going on?" Wire says his favourite TV programme is Newsnight, and you can just imagine him snug in his armchair every evening, shouting at the screen with glee. Rather than join the "bandwagon", the Manics have returned with The Love of Richard Nixon, a single seemingly defending the disgraced American president. "It’s a metaphor for the fact you’re always remembered in your life for one thing. Nixon’s always going to be remembered for Watergate and being a crook. But he was a brilliant politician. He wasn’t like George Bush. He wasn’t a f***ing idiot. He was the first American president to go to China, which was an amazing piece of foreign policy. Kennedy sent the first troops to Vietnam, Kennedy invaded Cuba in the Bay of Pigs. But everyone remembers him in a nice way. And most people associate us with Richey [Edwards] going missing. Even your family sometimes associate you with one or two things which you can never escape. So the idea of the song is just digging a bit deeper." Typically for a songwriter who’s spent his career asking questions, Wire says he’s interested in the pragmatism of politics. While he says Bush is "a f***ing disaster", he qualifies that with "But all American presidents are the same. The idea that Bill Clinton is a great guy, he hangs out with Bono, he did this, he did that. Well, what about Rwanda? 750,000 people dead in three months and he didn’t lift a finger. Neither did the UN, neither did France, neither did Germany. Perhaps Bush would have gone in and saved lives." Tony Blair also gets a cautious thumbs-up. "If you take Iraq out of the equation, this Labour government has been brilliant. You can’t have that much economic growth and slight redistribution of wealth and not give it a bit of credence. But Iraq’s going to blacken Blair’s term in office forever." Even though Wire claims he’s "bored s***less" with talking about politics, one song on the new album, Lifeblood, is directly political: Emily, about Emily Pankhurst. "It’s about the idea of Princess Diana taking over the role of the female icon. Someone as vacuous and empty as Princess Diana being a feminist icon is just beyond belief. The idea that the suffragettes threw themselves under horses to get the vote seems like such an utterly distant memory." Again, the song’s a metaphor, this time marking the passing of simpler, possibly more dramatic times. In the early days of the Manics, "you could mix your politics with a glamorous abandon. Life was just much easier. It’s just not like that now. We live in a serious world." When he was younger, Wire still had idealism. Emily is admitting that the serious world has stamped that out. "It’s about losing hope in politics," Wire nods. "I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that communism doesn’t work. There’s a line in 1985: "In 1985, I placed a bet and lied". That’s the idea of convincing yourself that political systems can actually change the world. And you can’t deny that capitalist western democracy has been dominant. That’s sad. Political theory is dead. Everything is about causes now. All worthy causes, but it’s all done within a capitalist framework." Know Your Enemy sold badly, Wire admits. It was, he says, "a deeply flawed, highly enjoyable folly". So, even though Wire jokes that the Manics’ type is the "political stiff album", they’ve reverted to the polished, stadium rock of This is my Truth, Tell me Yours. To the outsider, it feels as if the band are finally giving in. Wire doesn’t seem perturbed. "We’ve given ourselves the freedom to fail with a smile this time. I’m definitely less bitter. We were always bitter about everything. Cynical and bitter. That’s what made us. Our albums were always full of hate. For the first time, I think there’s a bit of love on this album." There’s also one very obvious ghost: the Manics’ theorist, Richey Edwards - a "wayward genius" believes Wire - who went missing in 1995. "The main themes are death and solitude and ghosts," explains Wire. "Being haunted by history and being haunted by your own past." Edwards is the heart of Cardiff Afterlife, the unspoken shadow behind Fall Asleep, a song about suicide and relief. "Sleep is beautiful for me. I hate dreaming because it ruins ten hours of bliss. I had a lot of bad dreams when Richey first disappeared. Not ugly dreams, but nagging things. Until we wrote Design For Life, it was six months of misery." Lifeblood doesn’t seek to exorcise Edwards’s ghost, though, just admits that "there are no answers". Wire finds happiness these days by isolating himself. "I think solitude is a really positive thing. I cherish solitude immensely. In today’s society, there’s so much pressure to communicate, eat out, be friends with people. Why can’t you read a book on your own? Why have you got to have a book club? I despise kissing as a greeting. Why can’t you just shake hands and f*** off? The four of us with Richey all cherished that moment when you’re watching telly, thinking, writing, whatever. It’s just a beautiful thing." Wire’s been doing a lot of writing recently, both songs and "bitter, cynical, un-PC tirades and rants" which he plans to publish as a book called The Unwritten Diaries. The latter are a safety valve, "all the stuff I try to filter out of my head not to get me in too much trouble when I do interviews. If you’re being honest, you do make a lot of mistakes." Does he look back at things he said and think he went too far? "Oh, I’ve been a complete f***ing idiot. Anyone who says they don’t regret anything, I don’t believe. I regret shitloads of things." Saying "I hope Michael Stipe goes the same way as Freddie Mercury", perhaps? "That was just bad. There’s no way around it, it was just idiocy. Even worse was that ‘travellers should be rounded up and put on an island’. That’s just idiotic. That makes me look thick." All of which begs the question, what is the point of the Manic Street Preachers in 2004? To newcomers, they’re probably an irrelevancy, something Wire happily admits. "I don’t know if we’re relevant to people who love Franz Ferdinand and the Libertines. I’m not sure. We might be relevant to Dido fans. I don’t really care." To those of us who’ve grown up with the Manics, however, watching them tackle their own history as they change with approaching middle-age is still a fascinating occupation. "I think our relevance lies in what people expect of us," Wire nods. If Lifeblood was the last Manics album, how would Wire feel? "I’d feel fine," he shrugs. "I could look at James [Dean Bradfield] and Sean [Moore], and Richey if he turned up, straight in the face and know we’ve done the right thing. And I probably couldn’t have done that with Know Your Enemy." What would he do? "I’d do f*** all," he beams. "I’ve got no problems about the band finishing. The joy of just thinking. I’ve got a whole day in front of me to watch telly, fiddle about in my shed and maybe do a bit of writing. "I have no problems with boredom. We’ve been swamped by bungee jumping culture. We must search for excitement. We must go white river rafting, climbing, exploring. Who gives a f***? What is the point in climbing a mountain? In fact, I think climbers are much more selfish and egotistical than any rock stars. Explorers are the vainest f***ers on Earth. "Yachtswomen! How f***ing vain are they?" And on and on he goes. Looks like it’ll be some time yet before we’ve heard the last from Nicky Wire. • "Lifeblood is released on 1 November.
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Post by Fuggle on Nov 1, 2004 12:44:00 GMT -5
Cutting Wire goes really manicOct 30 2004 Claire Hill, Western Mail ONE of the Manic Street Preachers has launched a stinging attack on other rock bands across the water as the group prepares to launch its seventh album. Bassist Nicky Wire has attacked bands such as The White Stripes and Jet branding them "******* crap." He also attacked bands that created music in their bedroom, but found some strange praise for pop singer Daniel Bedingfield. Appearing on the Orange Playlist show he said, "The White Stripes - I just don't get that at all. When they say 'We recorded the whole album in two days', it's like, yeah it sounds like it - it sounds ******* crap because you recorded it in a second. "And Jet, Jet are so bad. Their music has the mental age of a foetus. "I think it's too easy to make good music. There are so many idiots out there who've got rigs and computers in their bedroom who are making unbelievably average music that sounds quite good - it's not a healthy thing." As the band waits to release Lifeblood, Wire said it was important for bands to change. "From David Bowie to U2 you have to know when it's time to evolve - if you don't, you die, like dodos you become extinct. "You have to know when to stop and get out. "I think we'll know when it's time to stop." Obviously that is not at the moment, as the rest of the band have expressed pride in their new album, which came after a Greatest Hits album and a B-side album. But while other bands found themselves on the end of Wire's bile, one man has made an impact on the bassist. He said, "I met Daniel Bedingfield at CD:UK. "He is an absolutely brilliant nutter actually. He's truly warped and mad - in a good way."
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Post by Fuggle on Nov 1, 2004 13:30:11 GMT -5
Preaching to the convertedRock and Pop: Manic Street Preachers - Lifeblood (Sony) By Leon McDermott IN music – much as in politics, with the honourable exception of tea-drinking man of the people Anthony Wedgwood Benn – you almost always become what you started out hating. Scratch a hippie and you’ll find small-minded conservatism rather than free-thinking liberalism; let a punk talk for long enough and you’ll find a Tory in egalitarian clothing. (The outrage that greeted Paul Weller in 1979 when he said he’d vote for Thatcher was, you get the feeling, motivated not so much by disgust as the anger of thousands of Little England punks at having their cover blown.) And so it is with the Manic Street Preachers. Less revolutionary than they were reactionary (although, usually, it’s only time that separates the latter from the former), they appeared, in 1990, in a haze of dumb but effective political sloganeering, badly applied eyeliner and stencilled blouses. They said they’d set themselves on fire on Top Of The Pops. They said their debut album would sell 30 million copies and then they’d ins tantly split up. They made controversial statements in the music press, claiming that they hated long- forgotten shoegazers Slowdive more than they hated Hitler. Still, they always seemed to have something: for all the bluster and the deliberately controversial soundbites, they were intelligent: their lyrics full of literary allusions, their record sleeves weighed down by quotes from philosophers, activists, politicians and writers. If you’d told the average Manics fan a decade back that they’d one day write an apologia for Richard Nixon, you’d have been met with a horrified gasp – yet here it is, The Love Of Richard Nixon: a summery slice of pop melancholia that essentially makes the claim that well, you know, he was a misunderstood guy. Forget about Watergate, about his and Henry Kissinger’s murderous forays into South American politics, about the fact that he scuppered the treaty that could have ended the Vietnam war in 1968, purely for electoral gain. “People forget China, and your war on cancer,” James Dean Bradfield sings with such banality that it’s hard to take anything on this album seriously. Maybe it’s a joke, a laugh at the expense of anyone who ever thought the Manics believed in anything but surface (though it appears to be done in all seriousness). Maybe it’s contrarian old age, the real sentiments of a band whose political core vanished when guitarist and lyricist Richey Edwards abandoned his car near the Severn Bridge nine years ago, never to be seen again. Apart from the commercial and critical failure of their last album, the punkish Know Your Enemy (launched in Cuba, with Nixon’s old enemy Fidel Castro in attendance), the past decade of the Manics has been one of plenty: album sales, acclaim for dealing with the disappearance of a friend with dignity, and an increasingly lush palette of sound. Lifeblood, for all its keyboard washes and shimmering guitars, is an oddly dead album; polished and adult, yes, but (barring the excellent To Repel Ghosts) lacking anything approaching either anger or emotional bite. The problem here isn’t that the band should preserve their younger persona in aspic – who, except for Limp Bizkit fans, wants to hear grown men angsting around like disaffected teenagers?. The problem is that on songs like 1985, I Live To Fall Asleep and Solitude Some times Is, they sound like a band who long ago ceased caring about anything. Too old for post-modern irony, they’ve slipped into an apathetic musical coma. There is some respite. To Repel Ghosts contains something of the orchestral glory that characterised Everything Must Go, and the closing Cardiff Afterlife is a sweet, minor-key tribute to Richey Edwards. That, however, isn’t enough to save Lifeblood from itself. Where it should soar, it flops to the ground, and when it ought to be full of energy, it’s lethargic and anaemic. For a band whose best music was sustained by adrenalin, righteous anger and a belief in the power of thought, it’s a sorry state of affairs: not so much an admission of defeat as a declaration that the battle wasn’t even worth fighting.
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Post by Fuggle on Nov 2, 2004 6:27:18 GMT -5
Manic Street Preachers
Lifeblood, Epic, £13.99
Singing with a strangely laid-back quality, in a lower register than usual, James Dean Bradfield is almost unrecognisable on the Manics' new single The Love of Richard Nixon.
Indeed, with their seductive synth backing and gently rolling melody, it might be hard to identify the band at all were it not for its patently provocative, sloganeering lyrics, delighting in the political perversity of reclaiming a villain as a hero.
The Manic Street Preachers have come a long way from their punk-metal origins in Blackwood, South Wales. Lifeblood is the pop gem they have been threatening to make for years, its shimmering sonic spaces filled with sensuous keyboards, chiming guitars, driving rhythms and addictive melodies.
They can still do anthemic, but there is a soulful, almost yearning quality to these choruses. Nicky Wire's fragmentary, quasi-poetic lyrics are too opaque to yield obvious meaning, though themes of warped nostalgia and lingering depression are tangible, suggesting an almost elegiac surrender of youthful idealism.
On the stirring A Song for Departure, Bradfield declares convincingly: "This is a song to break your heart to."
Even his guitar solo burns with tender passion. Bradfield has always been the musical genius holding the Manics' fragile mix of bravado, contempt and pop obsession together, and this sounds like his masterpiece.
Neil McCormick
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