After a gig at London’s Hammersmith Palais in April 2005, The Manic Street Preachers boldly declared to their audience, “You won’t see us for two years”. This left diehard fans baffled: they felt the last Manics record, Lifeblood, was a return to the commercial peak that was the ubiquitous Everything Must Go. So where would the group go from here? The inevitable greatest hits had already been packaged and promoted via Forever Delayed in 2002 so music cynics predicted a split.

For Manics front man James Dean Bradfield, the speculation couldn’t have been any further away from the truth: “After Lifeblood, we decided that people deserved a rest from us, and we’re not exactly the best people to get distance from it ourselves,” he says. In fact, it was never Bradfield’s intention to make a solo record, but after becoming addicted to the sports channel ESPN and living like the archetypal student, he knew he had to fall back into the daily work routine. “It sounds horribly sincere and earnest but I really missed music in my life,” he explains.

After nearly a year of learning to cope on his own musically, Bradfield created his debut solo album The Great Western, so-called because of the cumbersome amount of train journeys he took between Cardiff and Paddington. The record handpicks the high water marks from the Manics’ envied back catalogue with pop flourishes reminiscent of Everything Must Go to the agitated punk of The Holy Bible.

The record was spilt between borders with recording taking place in The Square Studio in Hoxton and Sir Studios in Cardiff where Bradfield appreciated “the smaller studios and their murky and 70s-esque cloaked sound”.

The lyrics are painfully honest and took time to make the transition from train carriage to final mix. Bradfield’s first experience of penning a pop song was with the Manics’ understated single Ocean Spray: the deeply personal meditation on his mother’s death. Bradfield muses: “It wasn’t remotely Jungian or Freudian or in fact like therapy. That lyric came out of death and I couldn’t see myself writing another one for a long time after it.”

But the first song to make it to paper on the new album was also sparked by the sad demise of someone else who had a big impact upon his life and career. An English Gentleman, which is also the new single, is a fitting tribute to the late Phillip Hall, who had taken the young Manics under his watchful management during their early 90s escapades in London. The youthful lyric, “With sleeping bags under our arms” clearly sums up those adventure-filled early days. Bradfield was in awe of Hall’s incredible modesty. “Phillip wasn’t this big, fat-cat, cigar-in-mouth Londoner,” he smiles. “In saying that, there was still something quite swashbuckling about him.”

There is a distinct duality on the record - a double life that hovers between James Dean Bradfield the rock musician in London and James Dean Bradfield the salt of the earth boy from Blackwood. It forms the backbone of The Great Western.

Between all the beauty and introspection, there’s still a great deal of sloganeering, no more so apparent than on the album’s lead-off single That’s No Way To Tell A Lie. The harrowing riffs and lush synth hooks borrow heavily from the likes of Joy Division while the narrative takes a swipe at the way religion has maintained AIDS as an epidemic in Africa.

Read the full interview in the current issue of RedHanded.

ONE TRACK MIND

Join Manics frontman James Dean Bradfield for a trip aboard The Great Western.
Words by Keith Carey