“I think the only time we ever seriously considered
splitting up was after Richey disappeared,” says Nicky Wire of the Manic
Street Preachers. “After Lifeblood we knew we had lost the essence of
the Manics, that we had become far removed from all that we stood for. Although
I still really loved the album, I knew it didn’t really connect with
us or the fans.”
Reconnecting involved getting back that essence of the earlier albums – edgier,
more aggressive songs with a greater readiness to take a stance – more
like The Clash in their heyday (an oft – quoted influence). Part of that
process of rediscovery involved going off and doing their own things too. Wire
and James Dean Bradfield both spent time alone in the studio. “The solo
projects were a decluttering exercise that allowed us to get back on track
with the big stuff, The Manics,” says Wire. “I’d wanted to
make a record like Lou Reed with loads of miserable lyrics about suicide. It
was a vanity project but it cleared my system. We tried to take elements of
both into the new recording. The joyful naive idealism of Generation Terrorist
and the song writing euphoria of Everything Must Go. We thought back to our
favourite albums and what makes us tick as a band and we went from there." It
definitely worked. The result is 38 minutes of a band declared to be back on
form by everyone from the NME to Uncut.
Nicky Wire may be renowned for being quite outspoken, but a decade on, do the
Manics really still have anything left to say? It seems so and politics remain
on their agenda. The album title, Send Away The Tigers, was taken from a phrase
coined by comedian Tony Hancock whenever he started drinking. According to
his MySpace essay about the new album, Wire saw, “a parallel between
that line and the animals being released from the zoo in Baghdad when the Allies
invaded. A misguided idea of liberation.” I ask about this. Wire explains: “I
did a degree in politics; it would be pretty embarrassing if I didn’t
write songs that reflect the modern world. There's not much point in me writing
about girlfriends and nightclubs and bouncers and all the rest of it.” What
he does write about is the inescapable sense of doom he feels we live amidst
in Britain. “The album looks at misconceptions. It deals with those bad
decisions you make that others judge you for throughout the rest of your life,
no matter how much more good you may do. You will always be remembered for
the bad stuff.”
Talking of good stuff, the first single, Your Love Alone Is Not Enough, reached
Number Two in the charts. The track saw Dean Bradfield duet with Nina Persson
of The Cardigans. “It was always written as a duet and Nina was always
our first choice. We're huge fans of The Cardigans. I really like Nina’s
lyrics; she’s underrated in that respect, especially as Swedish is her
first language. After doing all the TV promo for an album you tend to get sick
of the first tracks very quickly, but I’m desperately in love with this
song and it still gives me goosebumps which is very, very rare. There was a
real serendipity that came together for it. When a song is effortless, when
it just happens like it did with A Design For Life, it is destined to become
one of our best tracks. It has always been that way in the past.”
Wire explains that the track, which has become a big sing-a-long hit live,
started as a conversation in his head with Richey Edwards, his friend and co-writer
who famously went missing from the band in 1995. “I was trying to figure
out what it takes for a person or a country to have a semblance of happiness.
Is it religion? Is it democracy? Is it love? Is it hate? Is love ever enough?
I wanted to look at what it is that makes people or countries reach a level
of contentment.” He didn't find the answer, “I don’t know
what the solution is for happiness but I’m all for balance. I’m
guessing it has a lot to do with everything, with a need for compromise.” Their
next single, Indian Summer was released on October 1. Wire is hopeful that
it is indicative of the stage in their career that the Manics have reached.
It is an unlikely track for the band, focusing on friendship, yet as Wire explains,
this is the gel that holds the Manics together.
The 23-date tour over the summer has taken in performances at Glastonbury and
the V Festival but the Manics hardly seem the types to get into the camping
spirit. “We really struggled at the start – there were no mirrors
to do our make up in. As time has moved on, I’ve come to like festivals
a lot, lot more than I used to and I know to make sure that there is a mirror
in my dressing room now.” The frocks, leopard print and pink feather
boas that got the Manics their attention before are more likely to appear on
members of the audience than the band themselves these days. Wire is never
without eyeliner but has the infamous bass player put his cross-dressing days
behind him? When looking for new outfits for the tour he told me that he’d
visited emo-punk clothing store Blue Banana looking at girls’ dresses. “It’s
brilliant. If I was 16 I would never be out of that place.” Surprisingly
then, there have been few sightings of Wire frocked up on stage on the latest
tour. At Glastonbury he cited all the mud as his reason, all his pretty gowns
discarded in favour of Holy Bible era military jackets. No such excuse will
be possible for the CIA date so anything could happen.
Life on tour with the Manics is far different from those tabloid-shock-horror
early days with Richey slashing his chest open with knives in Thailand. Instead
it has become more of a pipe-and-slippers affair. All the same, Wire seems
at home: "The tour bus is like a man’s garden shed. It is one of
the real sanctuaries of life in the band; especially as we’re not the
most excessive of people. We just sit around and watch films, eat sandwiches,
read books. The fact that our last tour sold out in just a few days really
surprised us. You’re always insecure in a band. You never know if people
really still want you. That, as much as anything, has really kick started us
to get down to work, to raise our game.”
So what does the future hold for the Manics now? “I’d be lying
to say that we haven’t changed. I think we went through a process of
almost destroying all of what we had achieved. We're 38 now, so we haven't
got as much energy as we used to but overall I think we’ve gone back
to the things we loved about being in the band, about our fans and our music.
We did try to work out who, apart from Radiohead, is still going strong from
the time we started out but we struggled to come up with anyone else on their
eighth album.”
“
There comes a time that, if you sell less and less records you will eventually
fizzle out. These days I think that whole idea holds less drama for us. We’re
not the kind of band that will play The Point for the rest of their career.” Instead,
thanks to Send Away The Tigers, they can go out on a legal and oh-so-mature
high.
The Manic Street Preachers play the CIA on December 6. For ticket info call
the box office on 029 2022 4488 or see www.livenation.co.uk. Indian Summer
is out now.
Roaring back
What do The Manics do after their Lifeblood album proves pretty lifeless? Call it a day? No way, bassist Nicky Wire tells Susie Wild