24 MusicWeek 20.09.13 THE BIG INTERVIEW NICKY WIRE
brave artist, and it’s great that when he had a platform, he used it, he really tried to say something. I like that record [Ill Manors] because it’s confused, it’s angry, it’s an explosion. When you’re ‘replaced’ by people who otherwise
would have gone into accountancy, then it’s not going to mean as much to them, not as much as it meant to us anyway. And the music will inevitably be a bit bland. I don’t hate bands on a class divide, I just want
something… I want to hear fingertips scraping, I want desperation, I want a band that means it so much.
And I want a band that doesn’t give a fuck about their audience. Everyone’s so obsessed these days with saying how great their fans are, and that’s not a healthy situation. All my favourite bands had contempt for pretty much everything. I’m not saying we’re like that now, because we
can’t be. You’ve got to feel it for real, which you do when you’re young, and which we did, like when we went on stage at Glastonbury and alienated an entire generation.
And on Stay Beautiful, when you sang ‘Don’t fall in love, cos we hate you still’... And that’s when we didn’t even have any fans yet, it was a pre-emptive warning! That was the genius of Richey: we’re the only band to have written our own myth and then lived it. It was slightly harrowing at times, but it was amazing.
“Now I’m a busted flush/I am waiting for the night to come” FROM REWIND THE FILM
Is that really how you feel? Like you’ve got nothing left to give? I don’t know, I think I still feel the same things, but I’m not sure I’m capable of following through. It’d be a fucking help if Richey was still around to be honest, he always had a lot of fight in him and we always fed off each other.
Without Richey, and with the onset of middle age, how hard is it to care as much, and to be certain about things? It’s the certainty thing that’s difficult, because whatever issue comes up, you realise there are no fucking answers. The world was more black and white, or seemed so to us, when we were young. We meant everything we said. We were sure of it and sure of ourselves.
“So sick and tired of being 4 Real” FROM BUILDER OF ROUTINES
The line refers to one of the most famous moments in the Manics’ iconography, when Richey, determined to convince the NNE’s Steve Lamacq of their credibility, used a razor blade to carve 4 Real into his own arm.
Do you feel pinned down by certain events and images like that? Yeah, definitely. Deep down I think this is probably the best collection of lyrics I’ve ever written, in terms of truth and poetry, but I know I’ll always to some extent be known as the guy who wears a dress, uses Dysons, smashes his guitar up, can’t play, whatever. And I don’t mind, because I’m a rock historian myself and I know that cliché is really important in rock n roll. But we’ve come back with a single James is barely on, that’s six-and-a-half minutes long, from an album that hardly features an electric guitar…
I love you so won’t you please come home / It’s been so long but I can’t let go FROM AS HOLY AS THE SOIL (THAT BURIES YOUR SKIN)
The track is half love-letter/half personal plea to Richey, 18 years after the guitarist, lyricist and Wire’s soul mate disappeared. And personal is very much the word. As Holy as the Soil is from the heart and almost unbearably moving.
That must have been a very hard lyric to write… It’s about as personal as I’m ever going to get, certainly. I was dancing round the houses a bit, and then I got that phrase, ‘I love you so won’t you please come home’, and that seemed to say it all, so rather than try and be oblique I just went with it.
I guess most of the time, just through the demands of life, you keep things hidden, but this is a glimpse of how much it still hurts. It is, yeah. And it’s about him as a son and a brother as well as our friend. His sister, Rachel, has done so much brilliant work, his Dad passed away a year or so ago and I was at that funeral. I don’t know, sometimes I look at a picture of him and think what an amazing rock star to have around. There’s a massive gap there. He’d be like an intellectual and political version of Lady GaGa – but prettier.
Do you miss the dynamic of working with him – miss getting his approval or even his criticism? Two parts, really. The first is simply writing together. We wrote Motorcycle sitting at a desk in Swansea Uni. I’ve still got that draft. I know guitarists swap riffs, but we were swapping lines. A lot of the first album was like that. And I also miss sharing what we liked, what
ABOVE Past Preachers: Rewind The Film adds to a Manic Street Preachers discography stretching back 11 years. [Top L- R] Generation Terrorists (1992), Gold Against The Soul (1993), The Holy Bible (1994), Everything Must Go (1996), This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (1998), Know Your Enemy (2001), Lifeblood (2004), Send Away The Tigers (2007), Journal For Plague Lovers (2009), Postcards From A Young Man (2010)
we were listening to, what we were watching, what we were reading – and absorbing it all into our writing.
“I’m as tired as John Lennon sang” FROM 3 WAYS TO SEE DESPAIR
Not the floweriest phrase on the album, but significant because it is the second name check for Lennon in the Manics’ songbook. The first, of course, being ‘I laughed when Lennon got shot’, from the breathless early salvo that was Motown Junk.
How do you feel looking back on that first Lennon line and the young men who wrote it? [Laughs] Well, I’m not putting the blame elsewhere, but that was one of Richey’s. I wore it like a badge of honour though, like fucking yeah, bring it on.
Did you say it because you absolutely couldn’t and shouldn’t say that? Exactly, yes. In 1977 [the song not the year (although, yes, the year as well)] Joe Strummer sang ‘No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones’ and we were searching for our version of that line, and that was how it manifested itself – albeit in a slightly nastier way. This new line is… well, it isn’t me redressing the balance as such, but that song, I’m So Tired, is a great record and it does sum up that crippling, jet- lagged feeling, so we were happy to drop his name one more time, a bit more respectfully this time.
“The old boy network won the war again” FROM 30-YEAR WAR
The album ends with a flash of fire in the eyes and vim in the veins. 30-Year War is a tirade against the brutality of Thatcherism and the inequity of today. It’s also a taster for a new Manics album due next year, tentatively titled Futurology. The original plan was to record a wider selection of
songs, but in the process the band realised they were two very distinct sets. The acoustic, contemplative introspection was captured on Rewind The Film. and if 30-Year War is a clue, then the next record will be spikier, louder, feistier and, quite possibly, a glorious contradiction after RTF’s partial white flag.
So, how did this one sneak on the record? I actually didn’t want to give it to James, because the idea of this album is that the lyrics are quite self critical and reflective - draped in this beautiful music. But James looked at it and said it had to be on
there, he thought it was one of the best things he’d read, in political terms, since Tolerate. It was inspired not by Thatcher, but by
Thatcherism. I wrote it before she died and she was gone to me decades ago anyway. I lived through the shit she did to my community. It’s about how no one has the energy to even face these issues. The fucking leader of the Labour party doesn’t even want to face these issues, so who’s going to do anything? He’s the most insipid opposition leader, of either side, that I can remember. It was problematic because we couldn’t get it to
work in the context of this album but then we realised we didn’t have to, it could just be a bridge to the next one…
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