There once was a time, a darker time, let’s call it the late 1990s, when I was a big, big fan of the band Manic Street Preachers. I’ve mentioned that before, no big whoop. I didn’t do the whole eyeliner-and-tiara thing that many MSP fans used to go for – and, I presume, still do – but there do exist photos of me in a feather boa. On the scale of obsessive Manics fans, I was pretty tame, although I did go to a fan convention in Cardiff once, which was a lot of fun. For me, being a fan of the band was more of a social thing: it provided a group of friends who loved the same songs and went to the same gigs.
One time, my friend Tom and I bought a bootleg tape from Camden Market of the Manics’ headline slot at V99. At this gig, the band debuted their forthcoming single ‘The Masses Against the Classes’, and so Tom and I sat for a couple of hours, trying to transcribe lyrics from the terrible quality recording that we’d just dropped a fiver on. We thought one of the lines was “Attack me wearing Tommy Girl”, which it obviously wasn’t. The reason we were trying to figure out all the words was simple: we were members of the alt.music.manics newsgroup, and nobody had yet posted them. There was a real sense of pride when we posted our take on the lyrics, plus an mp3 file, encoded at a dial-up friendly 32Kbs, of the song. Man, we felt pretty cool when the praise and admiration started pouring in from people we didn’t know.
The reason I bring up this episode is because I just finished reading an advance copy of the new Nick Hornby novel Juliet, Naked, and there’s a very similar situation in there. One of the main characters is an obsessive fan of an obscure American singer and longs to be envied in the eyes of fellow fans, people who he’ll never meet, who share his passion for a musician that most people have never heard of. There are three main players in Juliet, Naked, and they all have very distinct personalities and motivations, but I found Duncan, the music fan, to be the most interesting. He’s pretty much dedicated his life to being an “authority” – whatever that means – on the life and work of singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe. He’s dismissive of anyone else’s opinions, be they about Tucker or anything else.
The book begins in a toilet. In Minneapolis. Duncan has dragged his long-suffering girlfriend Annie on a pilgrimage across the States, going to various places of interest to Tucker Crowe fans, all six of them. And this toilet is supposedly where the singer made the decision to disappear from the public eye. That ought to explain to you the levels of Duncan’s devotion, and also why Annie might be a little sick of it.
Tucker Crowe, meanwhile, is portrayed as a quiet parent of five, from four different mothers, who is trying to settle down with his young son, having made a lifetime of mistakes. He takes his kid to little league games and doesn’t think about his earlier glories and transgressions. The book charts the relationships between the three, and I found it very good. I don’t know when Hornby became really uncool – was it the Songbook? – but this is a solid piece of work. There are some parts that call for serious soul-searching from Tucker, where he has to reconcile with his many estranged ex-wives and even more estranged children, which I found rather unsatisfying and hollow, but those aside, it was fun to read. Hornby makes good use of Wikipedia postings and message board posts to convey the joys of being an internet fan of a musician. There's even a troll who loves Morrissey!
Best part of the book? There’s a couple of guys who are really into Northern Soul! Shout outs to Major Lance and Dobie Grey! I'm a big Northern Soul fan.
I’m a dork.
One of the plot points in the book involves the rival reviews of an album from Duncan and Annie, so why not read a review of Juliet, Naked by Lauren over at HalfDesertedStreets?
You think it's King Lear
Riderless horses, Noam Chomsky's Camelot
The first taster from the new Manic Street Preachers album hit the radio and subsequently, faster than you can say "Does anyone still care?", the internet, yesterday. The album, 'Journal for Plague Lovers', is out in May, and is noteworthy since all the lyrics on the album are missing guitarist Richey Edwards'. Adding to the "old MSP" feel, the album's cover art is a Jenny Saville painting, just as was the case on 'The Holy Bible'. And a quick scan of the tracklisting reveals such gems as 'Jackie Collins Existential Question Time' and 'She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach". Legendary. So maybe this one will be the oft-promised return to their roots.
Too many numbers, numbers, numbers
Last week, Manic Street Preachers performed a six-song-set at the Festival Hall in London, supporting Doves, to celebrate the birthday of their first record label, Heavenly Records. The band put out two singles on that label in 1990 and 91 before moving on to bigger and (eventually) better things. Listening to the bootleg of the show, it's fun to hear the older, wiser band tearing through songs written when they were so much younger and angrier. Hard to imagine the Brit award winning, happily married Manics of 2008 writing a song called 'Ceremonial Rape Machine', isn't it? And it was a jolt to hear 'Starlover' played live. My favourite song from the set, though, is one of my all-time faves by the band, 'Sorrow 16'. Rarely played live, it sounded mature and polished at the Festival Hall. In other words, it wasn't interesting at all. So here's the original version. Again, it's ok for a young band to sing about class struggle and "paint your ego in blood", but it'd be ridiculous if they did it now. Seventeen or so years ago, though, it was pretty cool, and the song remains a whole lot of fun, particularly Nicky Wire's gleeful shout of "...in HATE".
[download Manic Street Preachers - Sorrow 16]
4play: Heads of State
Rumours that I didn't think this feature through and that I'm already running out of ideas may or may not be entirely accurate. Anyway, here's the second installment. Songs about leaders of government.
Didn't quite make it: SFA's 'Presidential Suite', about "Monica and Naughty Billy", because it's too slow-but-pretty; iLiKETRAiN's recent 'Spencer Perceval' (wrote about that here), or anything about the Garfield assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, my new favourite historical figure.
But enough about those losers, here's today's four:
Revol: Could've gone with 'The Love of Richard Nixon', but that song is rubbish, and Revol namechecks at least ten figures. Raus Raus!
The Day That Thatcher Dies: Any possible feeling of moral uncertainty about this song's sentiment is washed over by the fact that it has a kid's choir.
Teddy Roosevelt's Guns: I'm new on the Godspeed/Mt Zion bandwagon, but I'm head-over-heels with all that stuff now.
El President: The subject of this song, Gen. Pinochet, was kept at the Priory in North London for a while, about five minutes from where I lived. I remember protesters and hearing our town in the news.
[download Manic Street Preachers - Revol]
[download Hefner - That Day That Thatcher Dies]
[download A Silver Mt. Zion - Teddy Roosevelt's Guns]
[download Drugstore - El President ft. Thom Yorke]
Live Vault: Manic Street Preachers at Reading 97
Promised this the other day - here's Manic Street Preachers' headlining set from the Reading Festival in 1997. It's always fun to look back at old festival line-ups and see how far up/down the bill certain bands are, since the later a band plays in the day, the bigger they are. For instance - is that Bennett and Subcircus relegating Mogwai to the early afternoon? (The mighty) Audioweb above Embrace? Tiger following Travis? Republica getting a bigger crowd than Stereophonics? Feeder playing before Dog Eat Dog? Oh, hindsight. See the poster for the event here.
As for the Manics... It's one of the best bootlegs I have of theirs. Great setlist - a healthy mix between the old and new, as it was at the time - first outing for 'Ready for Drowning'; big singalong as the intro tape plays the Stealth Sonic remix of 'A Design for Life'; nice antagonism between JDB and Wire ("Just because he wears a dress..."); and a massive Heavenly ending to 'You Love Us'. The sound quality is good, if not incredible.
I wasn't there in '97, though I saw them headline Reading again in 2001. It wasn't all that great, to be honest, although they were introduced by Karl Marx, which was cool.
EDIT: Aug 12: So apparently lots of you are coming to this page. Here's the whole set in two zip files. Maybe check out the rest of the site, yeah?
Part 1
Part 200 - Intro Tape
01 - Australia
02 - From Despair to Where
03 - Kevin Carter
04 - Faster
05 - Ready for Drowning
06 - La Tristesse Durera
07 - Yes
08 - Roses in the Hospital
09 - Enola/Alone
10 - Motown Junk
11 - Motorcycle Emptiness
12 - No Surface All Feeling
13 - Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky
14 - This Is Yesterday
15 - Elvis Impersonator
16 - Everything Must Go
17 - A Design For Life
18 - Introducing The Band
19 - You Love Us
Cheap whiskey and godawful truths
Well, the new Manic Street Preachers record has gone and leaked, and it was with pretty low expectations that I gave Send Away the Tigers a listen. The bad news is that there isn't a song on there that really grabs me and makes me say "Yes! That is fanfuckingtastic!", but on the plus side, it's their first album in almost ten years that I imagine I'll listen to multiple times.
'Rendition' and 'Underdogs' are the requisite rockers, but there's a strong sense of the big-strings-plus-huge-choruses sound of 'Everything Must Go' that's a welcome return. I mean, I say return, but to be honest, I couldn't even name more than two songs on their last record, much less hum any of them. 'Indian Summer' and 'Autumnsong' are pretty, ideal for bigger venues and singalongs. 'Winterlovers' is an anticlimactic closer - veers close to being a huge, fully formed power-rocker (complete with na-na-naaas) but clocking in under four minutes. 'Imperial Bodybags' is about the war but isn't trite, the image of "children wrapped in homemade flags" is macabre enough to recall vintage MSP.
Your sample track has the word patsy in its title, that should be explanation enough. Reminds me of first album Stereophonics, which is no bad thing. What's going on with that album cover, though, guys?
[download Manic Street Preachers - I Am Just A Patsy]
Trade all your heroes in for ghosts
As you can see below, it looks like the Manic Street Preachers have brought back the inverted "R" for their new record 'Send Away The Tigers'. They last used it for their masterpiece 'Holy Bible' album in 1994, and so there must be some sort of statement being made by bringing that typeface back.
Trouble is, apart from the letter R, there's really nothing else in common with the band they were thirteen years ago. First single 'Your Love Alone Is Not Enough', with Nina Persson of the Cardigans, isn't necessarily bad, it's just overwhelmingly pleasant, which has been the case for the last few albums. Again, this album has been heralded as a "return to the roots" but it really misses that mark. Watch the video here or, if you're up for it, a live version of it here, with Nina Persson replaced by Charlotte Church, surely providing conclusive proof that the band has lost the edge it used to have. Ten years ago, they headlined the Reading Festival (I'm gonna put that show up for download soon, keep an eye out), this year they're second on the bill (to the Kooks!) on the second stage at the less rockin' V Festival.
There's positive signs, though. Go to the official site for a free download of 'Underdogs', a song described as "All out punk metal" by Nicky Wire. It's not too shabby. Lyrically clunky - no song should ever begin by declaring itself "for the freaks" - but at least it rocks. When I was 15-16, this band meant the world to me, so I always want to love what they do, but they're making it harder and harder. Here's one of their greatest songs.
[download Manic Street Preachers - Yes]
