Every now and then I have the urge to get some new music, but today was different. I wasn’t content to buy yet another indie band’s catalogue of pop songs or rock folk ballads and after getting through the whole ‘Just for you’ selection I was still unsatisfied. I wanted something special, something that I could rave about and just because I knew I hadn’t done this for a while I typed in ‘Manic Street Preachers’.
I could have apologised then to my neighbours for the jumping up and down, but maybe I’ll save that for tomorrow when I’ve listened to Send Away the Tigers about ten times. I’m on my second play through now! And well, it sounds ... exactly like the Manic Street Preachers!
They are a band who have always been on my radar from the days that Richey James appeared on the front cover of the NME with the words ‘4 Real’ carved into his arm, but it was with the release of Everything must Go that I really began to pay attention. It was the first album without James and confirmed Nicky Wire as the real strength of this group. Design for life got to number 2 and the CD was rarely off my player.
A couple of years later I found myself in Madrid where the live music scene was dire (OK it was dire if you wanted anything other than Latino music) and then all of a sudden in the space of two weeks Massive Attack and the Manics were playing. I get this feeling that Massive played first. It was a great venue near RetiroPark where pretty much everywhere you stood you could see; always good for a bit of a short arse like me. I was well into Massive at the time. We had a shitty cassette of Mezzanine that we listened to in the car and then one day we finally splashed out and bought the CD and from then on you could regularly hear me waking up the neighbourhood on a Saturday morning blasting out the beginning of Angel. I had this whole image in my head of doing an installation that would have ‘Angel’ as a soundtrack with this massive mechanical Angel that would be gradually lowered and then all you would see were constellations and then as the lights went up the thing would unfold its wings and be blindingly bright. So what I’m getting at is that although I really liked the Manics I wasn’t as excited by This is my Truth Tell me Yours, I had no expectations for this gig other than I would enjoy it because live music is my drug of choice; that was until the lights went up and they started playing. Compared to the earlier albums, Everything must Go and This is my Truth were slick and well produced. But when they began playing all that was stripped away and what you were left with was an energetic guitar rock band. The crowd erupted and that tingle went up my spine to the tips of my toes that kept my head bopping and my shoulders grooving and my feet shuffling for the whole hour and a half. The crowd went nuts when they played Motorcycle Emptiness and La Tristessa Durera, but real ecstasy was achieved when the first chords of Motown Junk filled the club.
When Know Your Enemy was released in 2001, I was now in Paris. What the Manics achieved in that club in Madrid they achieved on this album. It was back to pure guitar rock and Wire’s ability to blend good tunes with politicized lyrics was extraordinary. I was sure they would play Paris, I looked all the time, I looked, I waited, they didn’t.
In 2002 Forever Delayed was released with that classic cover of Suicide is Painless, but it was a Greatest Hits album after all and there were no gigs.
So today I’ve already checked the ticket site and the official website. They are almost at the end of their UK tour and I don’t see a European one. And if they do come I think they should play the Bataclan, because it’s gritty and fairly small and they will bring the house down. And most definitely not La Cigale, because I don’t know what it is with that club, it’s jinxed, bands always cancel there. Well, actually they can play anywhere, just... please... come.
