A self-made vacuum
But still stranded here
With all the scum
So clean, So lost
So beautiful
But I found that soul
Yeah I found that home.⁵‘Found That Soul’ (Know Your Enemy, 2001).

These few lines of enjoyable provocation feel like simple punk rock, a reading supported sonically by the lo-fi production and grinding arrangement that frame them. But the opening track from Manic Street Preachers’ 2001 album Know Your Enemy could equally be reaching for a complex idea: we are all better than this; we are the architects of our own mediocrity; we cannot find a way to change the situation; and crucially, we find it comforting. Read this way, what begins as a statement of bleakness becomes a celebration – a dichotomy expressed and explored throughout this band’s catalogue, in which home is repeatedly lost and found. Comfort in anger; comfort in defeat; comfort in failure.

This may be the core of Manic Street Preachers’ politics. No matter how disparate, how specific or how targeted, they start and end at home, reflect most keenly on the self, and offer strange but real comfort. The Manics are just as likely to use personal stories to explore the Political as they are to use a barrage of references to real-world events in order to achieve the trenchantly introspective. Understood in this way their body of work collects itself into a powerful and cogent whole: politically engaged, reliant on specificity and meta-specificity, focused on not giving in, openly fragile, exhausted from the fight. It becomes impossible to separate the band’s real-world and existential politics because both lead us to the same places, whence we look critically at ourselves. Time and again, they will weaponise confusion, complexity and abstraction to create a confrontational experience, calculated to disorientate the listener and blur the line between politics and Politics.⁶This is an important distinction. Hilary Janks, writing in English Teaching: Practice and Critique 11 (2012): 11, 150-63, gives definitions which serve well here: Politics deals with ‘government, world trade agreements, and global capitalism’; politics with ‘identity and place’ and the idea that ‘the personal is the political’. She specifies that this ‘is not to suggest that politics has nothing to do with Politics. On the contrary, the socio-historical and economic contexts in which we live produce different conditions of possibility and constraint that we all have to negotiate as meaningfully as we can.’

As listeners we are beaten into submission and invited to find our own solace in the process. So lost, so beautiful.

I was 14 in 1994, when Manic Street Preachers released the album that would eventually unlock the rest of their catalogue for me. It would also reveal the unique capacity lyrics have for creating a connection between art and politics: a revelation which ultimately transformed my idea of what music could be. The significance of The Holy Bible took a long time to reveal itself, but I loved it immediately for its heaviness,⁷Heavy, as an adjective in music, is a slippery idea. I maintain that the relentless bleakness, blunt truth and lack of redemption that make up The Holy Bible constitute an experience I would describe as heavier than any extreme genre record I can think of. its grubby and glaucous anti-production values, its audibly provocative stance and palpable, non-specific anger. This sounded like music I knew without sounding like anything I had heard before. 

Naturally, the context in which the record presented itself was inextricable from my experience. I was growing up in Bristol, a relatively short distance from the Manics’ home town of Blackwood, and closer still to the Severn Bridge, so associated with the disappearance of principal lyricist, guitarist and figurehead Richey Edwards in 1995. The Manics were close to being a local band. The dominance of Edwards’ disappearance – exhaustively covered elsewhere – was overwhelming in the music press at the time, and talk of the band was almost exclusively reduced to this subject. The perfect rock n roll mystery was playing out on our provincial doorstep, and our young hearts were broken by its inevitability.

I mention this because the development of my relationship with The Holy Bible, and thus with Manic Street Preachers, could be said to have been interrupted by such a seismic event. The album – the band, even – became about Edwards’ disappearance. The little that is known about the episode, considered alongside his contribution to the Manics’ catalogue that was to follow, does seem to suggest that we should discount the idea of The Holy Bible – the lyrics for which are largely by Edwards – as a suicide note. The neatness of that idea is, however, somewhat intoxicating, and it perhaps isn’t surprising that the record was generally parsed with this context in mind. 

What may, with some distance, turn out to be more relevant here is that this sharp focus on Edwards turned our attention towards the complex, abstract and Politically charged lyrics he contributed to the album. It seems likely that the obsessive dissection of such a rich text would have shaped our understanding of what is arguably the first truly mature record from a difficult band, and that the nature of that text would have been enough to charge us politically in turn, cementing the role of music in the expression of those politics. 

In the dieback of that maelstrom, what I have come to love about that record remains heavily weighted towards its density, attitude and context, much of which has required the intervening decades to reveal itself. Edwards’ lyrics in particular are unwieldy and abstract; they neither scan nor rhyme but, as noted by Manics biographer Simon Price, ‘are so rich that you can squeeze them and an oil of meaning comes out.’⁸Adam Scott Glasspool, Steve Murphy, Lucas Way, What Is Music? Podcast, Season 1, Ep. 31, Journal for Plague Lovers On The Holy Bible the words are made indecipherable by the band’s desperation to spit them out, crammed as they are into each song’s tightly controlled structure. The Manics – and this would turn out to be a motif – were actively making it hard for me to connect to their music and message.

The key to The Holy Bible’s depth, of course, lies in the fact that behind that density and obfuscation hides a wealth of detail which rewards the committed listener. The album acknowledges the unresolvable contradictions and hypocrisies of political engagement, and does so with self-awareness, infectious anger and an almost obscene delight. The relatability of Manic Street Preachers’ songs often relies on a collage-like writing style which deliberately states but does not dictate, or even explain, a position. The songs ask more questions than they answer, and confuse more than they clarify. Significantly, the Manics’ songs hold enough space to contain what we bring to them. What sounds like polemic turns out to be sleight of hand, and usually returns us to that central message: everything is both personal and universal. And everything is falling apart.

Arguably, the capacity to mobilise latent anger is one of the great contributions to culture made by political or protest art of any kind. Art can catch, inform and direct anger, clarifying and turning it to constructive ends. The Manics have a unique talent for documenting and translating such unfocused anger; and like any intelligent band they can reflect existential dissatisfaction or anxiety and offer it catharsis, context and meaning. They have managed this at times by remaining stubbornly open-ended, and this is how The Holy Bible spoke to my ever-present sense of injustice. I knew this music mattered before I knew why. My task became connecting those dots.

Edwards’ writing in particular applies this collage-like style, which returns on 2009’s Journal for Plague Lovers, an album created entirely around lyrics left with his bandmates before his disappearance. In these songs, many of the images are undoubtedly Political, but the specific Politics become cyphers so quickly that they seem to evade a straightforward reading. We have no way of knowing to what extent even the band are aware of what is happening as the elements are brought together. John Niven’s striking essay on the album digs deep into the four words which open the chorus of ‘Peeled Apples’:

Riderless horses, Chomsky’s Camelot.³⁴‘Peeled Apples’ (Journal for Plague Lovers, 2009).

Military funerals, animal sacrifice, Genghis Khan, fallen warriors, John F. Kennedy, Vietnam … It is impossible to do justice to Niven’s analysis here. Suffice it to say he is able to find a wealth of meaning in those four words, and from it pose a question which zeroes in on a key aspect of the Manics’ political position:

Did Richey Edwards think all that through and condense it into one couplet so that, as with all good poetry, the fit, hungry listener might extrapolate meaning back up from the bottom? Or did he just think it sounded fucking cool? As Bradfield and Moore bring the drums and the Les Pauls in on the chorus … you are powerfully reminded that it is one of the great joys of rock and roll that it doesn’t much matter either way.³⁵ John Niven, An Essay on Journal for Plague Lovers, 2009.

There are no answers in these songs, but it would appear that if you aren’t coming away with new questions, you may not have been listening. In any case, answers do not seem to interest the band too much, as the quote from Susan Sontag they included on the sleeve of Know Your Enemy suggests:

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.

The Manics force me to return again and again to the overwhelming complexity of the world when experienced with the senses open and the intellect engaged. It is a trying place, even dangerous. We see too much, we can never know enough; we cannot hope to identify which things matter and which do not, and there is no way to navigate this (unless it is through disengagement) without cornering oneself. The paralysis can be heard on The Holy Bible’s ‘Faster’, identified by lyricist and bassist Nicky Wire as “the last time [he and Edwards] swapped lines of lyrics together”:³⁶Mastertapes (Manic Street Preachers), BBC Radio 4, 2014

I’ve been too honest with myself
I should have lied like everybody else.³⁷‘Faster’ (The Holy Bible, 1994).

No wonder we seek comfort in ignorance. The more we see, the less we scream, and the Manics hold up a mirror to remind us who’s responsible. It makes their music an often uncomfortable experience, and perversely there is reassurance to be found in that discomfort.

There is perhaps no more direct expression of the band’s own self-awareness – and no better example of their density of Political reference – than the second chorus from The Holy Bible’s ‘Archives of Pain’, still mis-transcribed as a carbon copy of the first in many places:³⁸I owe this observation to the creators of the What Is Music? podcast series on Manic Street Preachers, to whom this piece also owes a more general debt. Their insight and analysis has informed many of my reflections here.

Kill Yeltsin, who's saying Zhirinovsky, Le Pen
Hindley and Brady, Ireland, Allit, Sutcliffe
Dahmer, Nielson, Yoshinori, Ueda
Blanche and Pickles, Amin, Manic Street Preachers
Give them the respect they deserve.³⁹‘Archives of Pain’ (The Holy Bible, 1994).

Removing Slobodan Milošević’s name from the first chorus’ rundown of despots, serial killers and figures from the extreme right and replacing it with the band’s own serves to win any race with critics to bring the Manics’ edifice down on their own unworthy heads. We know this is too simple, they seem to be saying, but doesn’t it feel cathartic anyway? Of course we can only fail, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Listing these names feels Political. The song seems to be about these people, or on closer inspection about the problems inherent in glorifying them. Perhaps though, its Politics trade effect for depth compared to the more nuanced politics of a track like ‘Found That Soul’. The ambiguity of the Manics’ writing allows for much to be smuggled into their songs. We would do well to remember that although the most successful single of their career to date presents as a singalong stadium anthem, its subject draws on the idealism of volunteers joining Communist International Brigades to fight Franco during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, placing it in stark contrast to a perceived contemporary apathy. Its title – ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’ – is a direct quote from a Republican propaganda poster from the time showing ‘the dead body of a young girl, with numbered labels for identification, against the background of a clouded sky across which aeroplanes fly in formation’.⁴⁰Imperial War Museum Collection – Art.IWM PST 8661.

Nothing of this is hidden in the song. It is very much on the surface, but can so often go unnoticed, sitting as it does amid a rousing chorus and euphoric arrangement. The wrong-footing of ‘If You Tolerate This …’ is not unique in the Manics’ catalogue, either. Several of their most popular songs possess a similar undercurrent, yet have connected with an audience for whom the complexity of the band’s politics might come as something of a surprise. This is the peculiar section of the band’s audience who have been with them on and off since 1996’s Everything Must Go. The album’s lead single ‘A Design for Life’ was the first to put the Manics in front of a broader audience when it landed squarely in the last years of the Britpop era. Despite a typically nuanced message its anthemic chorus proved deceptively simple:

We don’t talk about love
We only want to get drunk.

The Manics seem here to be adroitly giving voice to a disempowered working class, expressing anger at the way they are perceived, at what they have been reduced to. Typically though, the song at no point confirms or denies this: rather it leaves open the possibility of a simple battle cry, deliberately leveraging the ambiguity. A more straightforward reading would certainly have felt less ‘starkly at odds with the prevailing louche mentality of Britpop.’⁴¹Andy Gill, Manic Street Preachers: A design for life as outsiders, Independent (2 Nov 2012). For anyone not versed in the band’s precedent lyrical style, it might have been easy not to notice the song’s more sober opening lines:

Libraries gave us power
Then work came and made us free
What price now for a shallow piece of dignity?⁴²‘A Design for Life’ (Everything Must Go, 1996).

Doubtless the band enjoy these ironies. There does seem to be a satisfying meta-level at which anthem-Manics are able to operate. ‘A Design for Life’ may be the prime example the Manics have produced of the point at which the response of a band’s audience can come to embody their message. The song, being as it is a complex critique of working-class identity and solidarity, parsed through Le Corbusier and the philosophy of Total Design (a ‘fantasy about architecture as control’)⁴³Mark Wigley, Whatever Happened to Total Design?, Harvard Design Magazine 5, Design Arts and Architecture (Summer 1998). via Joy Division’s An Ideal for Living, sets up a context for those chorus lines which can go unnoticed despite the explicit frame, as described in Dan Barrow’s analysis:

In this sequence, the gains of autonomous working-class culture, emerging from the crucible of industrialisation, exploitation and political repression in 19th-century Britain, is rendered nugatory by the very thing that produced it; the second line, with its bitter echo of the slogan over the gates at Auschwitz-Birkenau, ‘Arbeit macht frei’, depicts a world of working-class experience that dissolves itself in its historical unfolding.⁴⁴Dan Barrow, Objects of History: A Design for Life and the Production of A New World, New Socialist (8 Feb 2019).

Balancing (c)overt political commentary with self-sabotage and acknowledgement of the hypocrisy inherent in their bid for integrity has remained a part of the Manics’ M.O. throughout their career. Their habit of undermining – even destroying – what they create adds a poignant sense of defeat to a band philosophy that Wire has described as ‘a mixture of defiance and melancholia – still raging against the dying of the light.’⁴⁵BBC Breakfast, 16 April, 2018 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlZYE-cnPfo. Their 2001 show in Cuba at which they met and performed for President Fidel Castro was described by them at the time as ‘“the greatest honour” of their lives’⁴⁶Oliver Burkeman, Manic’s anti-US preaching at Havana show brings Cuba to its feet, Guardian (19 Feb 2001). and played out as a celebratory statement of defiance. Castro stood for an ovation to ‘Baby Elián’, a song uncompromising in its political reference and alliance, and which explicitly (and typically) takes a side in the debate on US-Cuban relations. By the time of 2014’s Futurology the band had reduced the whole affair to a laughable, empty gesture by means of a single couplet:

So you played in Cuba did you like it brother?
I bet you felt proud you silly little fucker.⁴⁷‘The Next Jet to Leave Moscow’ (Futurology, 2014).

Beaten down, reinvented, beaten down again. We do this to ourselves, with a hollow laugh. These defeats – the dissolving hopes of the left, the working class, the post-war socialist dream of unification (which would presumably have been very present for a tight-knit group of fiercely intelligent young men from a Welsh mining town under Thatcher) – have a presence in the themes of this band’s work which cannot be overstated, even by Wire. From an early stage the band have been aware of the mixed blessing of their roots:

The journalists want to create their own little working class playthings to build up and destroy. They don’t understand that working class people can have sensitivity.⁴⁸Nicky Wire Interview, Guardian (1992).

The parallel between journalists and politicians here is hard to miss. The Manics have  always been the product of their era, of their community and nationality, and have striven to know their enemies. Their dignity in destruction is caught by Edwards in a lyric that surfaced on 2009’s Journal for Plague Lovers:

He stood like a statue
As he was beaten across the face
With a horse whip
Where the wounds already exist
…
He did not defend himself
He didn't even raise his hand
I will not beg because
This is how I am.⁴⁹‘Marlon J.D.’ (Journal for Plague Lovers, 2009).

Where the wounds already exist. The line matters. We have been here before and will be again: politics is coping, and we talk about it, because this is the way we remember how we are. It remains a genuinely affecting aspect of the band’s appeal that their success appears not to have eroded this. They seem to become more specifically Welsh – and more provocatively prosaic – as they evolve. Wire has made a connection between an inherent quality of Welshness and the idea of self-sabotage in the past:

The Irish all went off to North America and became folk heroes. The Welsh went to Patagonia⁵⁰Welsh settlements, or Y Wladfa, still exist in Patagonia, following an initial colonisation in 1865 led by Welsh nationalist non-conformist preacher Michael D Jones. ‘Ready for Drowning’ contains a line from Wire in the voice of a resident of Capel Celyn: ‘I’d go to Patagonia, but it’s harder there’. We are literally between a rock and a hard place., this bleak, barren place – and half of them died in the first year.⁵¹Nicky Wire Interview, Q (October 2008).

From one desolate, difficult landscape to another. The game doesn’t change, only the rules. This blend of defeat, anger and nostalgia has been a motif in the Manics’ politics throughout their career: a deep sadness that can still reduce me to tears if I think about it in the right way. Theirs is a lens through which we have processed decades of loss, grief and anger. Whether it be the loss of identity, opportunity and purpose, or grief for close friend and manager Philip Hall in 1994; for Edwards in 1995; for entire communities destroyed in the name of progress, the recurrent themes of their most enduring work remain fixed around these axes. It seems no coincidence that 1998’s ‘Ready for Drowning’, a song recalling the flooding of the Welsh town of Capel Celyn to create a reservoir for the city of Liverpool, uses as its central metaphor a real-life conversation between Wire and a taxi driver about Edwards’ disappearance:

Must have had him at my mercy
Drown that poor thing, put it out of its misery
Condemn it to its future, deny its history.⁵²‘Ready for Drowning’ (This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, 1998).

Future, present and past seem to feature in a lot of the Manics’ work. It isn’t difficult to see how the nature of time has become a focal point for the band, or how it relates to their signature combination of nostalgia and rage. Here, in the first two lines of ‘If You Tolerate This …’, they waste no time in looking backwards:

The future teaches you to be alone
The present to be afraid and cold.⁵³‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’ (This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, 1998).

Perhaps, then, the past contains the idea of a cleaner fight. Younger men, simpler times, clearer targets. Also lost could be a time in which it felt more possible to have a political stance at all. As the band ages the songs seem to gather nostalgia for a time of more direct action, as in the opening verse of 2001’s ‘Let Robeson Sing’:

Can anyone make a difference any more?
Can anyone write a protest song?⁵⁴‘Let Robeson Sing’ (Know Your Enemy, 2001).

Singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield has said as much, while remembering the band’s teenage years, from 1984–7:

It was a glorious, romantic time to be angry. You knew what your targets were … So it felt terrible to be there at the time but now I look back on it and I think, God, we were lucky! Because it was just – you wake up in the morning and you go ‘Right. I know what’s happening today: everything’s fucked.’⁵⁵Elizabeth Marcus, No Manifesto: A film about Manic Street Preachers (2015).

There is a helplessness, an inevitability even, to all of this. A sense that the ‘good fight’ must be fought but can’t be won. In itself this can be a comforting thought, and one which will not be unfamiliar to members or students of the post-war left. Romanticism can be found in narratives surrounding the dissolution of an almost-achieved socialist utopia, in which people were bound together by decency and altruism in the face of oppression and poverty, had ‘proper jobs’ and made ‘real things’. These narratives have in common the wistful backwards gaze, a sense that things used to be better even though ‘it felt terrible to be there at the time’. As though the Politics of the past are somehow more suited to the politics of the present.

The Manics’ shift from anger to resignation seems to announce itself at the very start of 1998’s This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (their first album to which Edwards contributes no lyrics). From the first verse of opening track ‘The Everlasting’ the message is clear – we cover age, conviction, futility – and as the chorus crashes downwards with a sigh of comforting strings, it is as if they are claiming a defeat into which they actively intend to settle:

Oh, you're old, I hear you say
It doesn't mean that I don't care
I don't believe in it anymore
Pathetic acts for a worthless cause
In the beginning
When we were winning
When our smiles were genuine.⁵⁶‘The Everlasting’ (This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, 1998).

Sometimes it is more reassuring to feel beaten than to hold on to hope.

And yet that hope is never entirely lost. 2014's Futurology, from its brutalist, sun-bleached cover art to its Hansa Studio-produced industrial soundscapes, is in large part a joyous love song to the post-war ideal of a unified Europe. An album that pushes aside our condemned futures and denied histories, offering up the triumphantly militant invitation: ‘Let’s salute Eternalism’⁵⁷‘Europa Geht Durch Mich’ (Futurology, 2014). in what may be one of the bravest, most original and glorious songs of the latter half of their career, ‘Europa Geht Durch Mich’.

Despite its creation at a time of mounting division and separatism in the UK, Futurology is saturated with honest hope and raw enjoyment. But this is a Manic Street Preachers album, so of course, it’s complicated: their triumphant pageantry is undermined throughout by references to historic oppression and memento mori from the history of art, and ultimately feels like an attempt to save – or at least document – a vision of the world as it disappears in front of them more than it does a celebration of a realistic possibility. The now-familiar resignation is never far away, and by the time we reach 2018’s aptly-titled Resistance Is Futile, in a typical act of undoing, ‘the future of the future’ is described by the band as ‘when memory fades and gets boarded up.’⁵⁸‘Hold Me Like A Heaven’ (Resistance Is Futile, 2018).

The ideas being chased here are complex, fragile and difficult to pin down. The Manics have made a career of attempting to protect and capture this complexity, and in the course of doing so have referenced and co-opted historical movements, figures, events and works of art to provide context for their commentary. They have done this without providing explanations or liner notes, and without holding our hands along the way. They have preferred to signpost – or misdirect – by incorporating samples from documentaries and films into their songs and plastering slogans and quotes on clothing, on-stage projections, and album sleeves.⁶³The Manics have included a quote on every album to date, sometimes pushing standard information such as track listings from covers so as to fit them on the outer sleeves. Attributions have included Octave Mirbeau, Mao Tse-Tung, Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus and Andy Warhol. One could go so far as to conclude that music is in itself insufficient to their end – perhaps a band like this exists not beyond, but despite, music?

This is reflected in the type of engagement the Manics tend to inspire. It is hard to connect with them if one is not prepared to put in the work, do the research, understand the context. For that reason it is not uncommon for a Manics fan to be more excited about the books they have been reading than the bands they have been listening to. Wire has noted himself that ‘more fans of ours have gone into education than they have gone into bands.’⁶⁴Elizabeth Marcus, No Manifesto: A film about Manic Street Preachers (2015).

In any case, the Manics have enslaved themselves to context. Without the extra layer one discovers by picking up the threads and following the trails they leave throughout their songs, it is often hard to find a way in at all. My own efforts over the years to find a way past this armour of context and intellect have been rendered all the more rewarding precisely because of the effort involved. It is hard to imagine a band I have tried harder to meet on their own terms than Manic Street Preachers.

Of course, the disorientation, obfuscation and provocation serve not only as a way of packing songs with meaning, but also as a protective layer. A shell which protects the idea of imperfection in its fragile beauty as well as the space the band are continuously holding for it. If the Manics stand for anything, it could be precisely this: that our personal right to be a mess is worth fighting for. It’s a sensitive and humane position, more political than Political, refracted through spectrums of lyrics ranging from the inaccessible to the universal, often within the same song.

But behind the bluster seems to lie a heartfelt kindness in acceptance. From some of their earliest releases they have been making declamations along the lines of ‘love your masks and adore your failure,’⁶⁵‘Stay Beautiful’ (Generation Terrorists, 1992). and on this count they have certainly practiced what they preach. The possibility of failure is something the Manics haven’t allowed to prevent them from reinventing themselves and challenging their audience, in the process leaving themselves more open to criticism and poorer commercial performance than most of their contemporaries. As a result it is possible to see – even to make allowances for – their output as messy or unfocused (they have certainly sabotaged several opportunities to hit some established markers of ‘success’) but this would be to miss their achievement at a higher level. When it comes to integrity and continual avoidance of the comfortable rut, the Manics are hard to measure against, and where they can be said to have failed it has been for noble faults – idealism, experimentation, questioning. Ultimately it has proved more rewarding to explore these pathways than to stay in safer waters, as they acknowledge in 2014’s gloriously silly ‘Sex, Power, Love and Money’:

We could have been heroes but failure’s more fun.⁶⁶‘Sex, Power, Love and Money’ (Futurology, 2014).

It is difficult to avoid concluding that for all their real world references, the Manics’ Political statements can be reduced to weaponised gestures pointing to a celebration of failure. But this would be to diminish their status as a genuinely political band. That is, a band with genuine politics, who seek to educate and infuriate in equal measure; who are committed to holding everyone (themselves included) responsible; who continue to surprise even their most loyal audience; and who have never backed down from making – and then breaking – a bold statement. It is after all in the anarchic nature of punk to embrace the messiness of humanity, and as such that very celebration is in itself an act of provocation and defiance.