In December 2014, Manic Street Preachers played a short run of 20th-anniversary concerts performing their third album, 1994’s blackened masterpiece , in full. “I liked the idea of the physical challenge,” frontman and guitarist James Dean Bradfield says. “I actually loved the gladiatorial nature of pitting my older self against my younger self, trying to toughen up.” The band’s bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire, Bradfield says, “was a bit more wary of it, of the narrative of the words weighing heavy. And they do. Some of the words do weigh upon you on the stage.”
Wire’s caution was understandable. The shows were less a celebration and more a confrontation of the scarred shadows of the past. stands testament to its chief lyricist Richey Edwards, the band’s intellectual North Star – “a poet who can’t play guitar,” as per Wire’s lyrics to 1998 B-side “Prologue to History” – who disappeared on 1 February, 1995, five months after the album’s release. It is presumed Edwards took his own life aged 27 – he was legally declared dead in 2008.
Bradfield and his cousin, the band’s drummer Sean Moore, made the music austere, heavy and unforgiving, but Edwards drove ’s harrowing, (self-)questioning narratives. It trod entirely new ground for a rock album. Edwards used his own mental health struggles – he suffered with addiction, anorexia, self-harm and depression – as a non-pitying jumping point to interrogate the motivations and consequences of humanity’s basest instincts.
So among self-important self-justification (“I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer/I spat out Plath and Pinter” goes the incendiary “Faster”) and facing his own demons (“4st 7lb”, “Die in the Summertime”), Edwards dissected liberal censorship, historical atrocities and political violence. He argued for the death penalty on the Michel Foucault-inspired “Archives of Pain” and, taking from Valerie Solanas’s , posited men as deficient, unthinking, fascistic vessels on “Of Walking Abortion”. Edwards took ownership of his bleak analysis on “Faster”: “I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing.”
“There is definitely a lot to unpack there,” Bradfield says, with no little understatement. “But there’s a lot of empathetic lyrics on . It’s not just all horror.” Edwards extends sympathy and understanding to the anorexic teenager on “4st 7lb” and, inspired by a band trip to Dachau, the slaughtered masses of war on “Mausoleum” and the admittedly more conflicted, unsettling “The Intense Humming of Evil”. Still, not even the listener gets off lightly. “Who’s responsible?” asks “Of Walking Abortion” on the question of complicity, before the kicker: “You f**king are.”
The band somehow thrived after Edwards disappeared, becoming more commercial and successful. Resuscitated by 1996’s off-the-canvas anthem “A Design for Life”, and 1998’s This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours sold five million copies, winning Brit Awards. But many Manics fans see as the band’s unflinching, macabre peak. “It’s what people think represents Richey in his purest sense”, Bradfield says.
A new album, , recorded on the first of three nights at London’s Roundhouse in 2014, captures the band rising to the challenge of meeting their former selves, veering from brutal defiance to claustrophobic angst and a strange sense of triumph, where corrupted anti-anthems were embraced as huge singalongs. “That was a strange experience,” Bradfield says, “but a brilliant, absurd experience.”
Bradfield is on video call from his Cardiff home, happy to chat everything from Welsh football to Cate Blanchett (he just saw at the National Theatre) to the new songs the band are working on, which could be the follow-up to last year’s 15th album . “Lots of melody, late 80s influences, feels like the place that we came from musically.” But he fears the album format is now a niche concern, and had a certain resignation over the Manics’ future. “You’ve got to make peace with the fact that the future may never come close to competing with the past. It’s hard to admit that the past matters so much sometimes,” he says, “but it does, doesn’t it?”
Manics’ past counts as one of British rock’s great iconoclastic careers. They emerged from working-class Blackwood, South Wales, in 1986, a subversive, sloganeering “mess of eyeliner and spray-paint” as they proclaimed on 1991 single “Stay Beautiful”, sustained on culture both high and low (Manics-land is a place where Nietzsche and Guns ‘n’ Roses co-exist on equal footing). Add in a provocative streak – Wire and Edwards, who split lyric writing equally until , were kings of the attention-grabbing quote – and they stood alone as the outliers of 90s rock.
But in 1994, their us-vs-the-world attitude seemed even more pronounced. The patchy and overblown American rockisms of 1993’s had stalled their career, sending them inwards. “We’d circled the wagons,” Bradfield says. They retreated to a cramped studio in the Cardiff backstreets – “really grimy; glue, really shit, cheap drugs and prostitution was rife” – and got to work on , Bradfield ditching “the delusion” of being a big rock band and reconnecting with his love of the post-punk of his youth (Magazine, Gang of Four, Skids).
Performing musical acrobatics to fit Edwards’ words into listenable music – “I was getting schooled; I had to ask him about the reference points,” he says contrary to the album’s reputation – the long hours he and engineer Alex Silva spent working on songs were enjoyable. “I had a brilliant time. A double cheeseburger from Burger King and four pints of Brains Skull Attack every night. It was real poverty rock. I was sleeping in the studio. We were in this last chance saloon, but everything conspired. That paucity of options focused us again. If we’re gonna get dropped, let’s go down swinging.”
Whenever they came up for air, they found themselves completely at odds with Britpop’s growing cigarettes and alcohol-fuelled girls-who-like-boys culture, and lashed out like a bear out of hibernation. At 1994’s ferocious Glastonbury appearance, Wire declared that “someone should build a bypass through this shithole” (it would have taken a brave person to predict the Manics would be headlining five years later). Just weeks prior they’d performed “Faster” on Top of the Pops, Bradfield causing a moral panic by wearing a balaclava at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland – the BBC received a record 25,000 complaints. “I remember being egged on to do it.” The point, he says, was “the abuse of state power and legal power and what the paramilitary reaction to that is around the world. But of course, people just see a balaclava. They’re not going to see any of that crap.”
But the background was Edwards’ physical and mental decline. A very public display of self-harm on a traumatic tour of Thailand (Edwards cut himself across the chest on stage) was followed by a presumed suicide attempt at his Cardiff flat. Edwards had spells first in a psychiatric ward in Cardiff, then The Priory. Teetering on the brink, the band played some festival shows as a three-piece, including Reading, to pay for Edwards’ medical care.
It left the Manics having to navigate a crisis as young men in their mid-twenties in the unforgiving and macho mid-90s, long before mental health considerations became mainstream. “Looking back, we just weren’t equipped to deal with it, even though we did lots of the right things,” Bradfield says. “But perhaps we shouldn’t have listened to what he wanted so much. Because he demanded to come on tour. Perhaps we should have said, ‘No, we’re stopping.’”
The band ended a UK tour in December 1994 with a three-night run at London Astoria, smashing £25,000 worth of equipment on the final night. “I thought that was a good time to take stock, to gently find him a new belief system.” But on the eve of an American tour – “I never really expected that to happen” – Edwards left the Embassy Hotel in London and was never seen again, his abandoned car later found at the Severn Bridge. The band resurrected and reinvented, ending the decade genuinely massive, but bereft.
Bradfield says time doesn’t necessarily heal. “That American notion of closure and all that stuff is just bollocks,” he says. “I never got closure of my mum dying. You’ll always have that pain. And unloading yourself into your writing doesn’t always solve things. Talking to people doesn’t always solve things. I find it hard when people say they’ve got closure on something like that. I’m just like, really? How does that happen?”
The anniversary shows were understandably a fraught undertaking. “And years later, it’s much harder.” The band revived the military regalia look of 1994, playing in front of camouflaged netting, and pointedly played as a three-piece – since Edwards’ disappearance, Manics tour with two extra session musicians. “Because we wanted to feel as if it was the four of us. That’s the closest you’ll have to being in a four-piece again. And the album is like a Jenga puzzle. Only we have the code for it.”
Yet as much as “you’ve got to learn to try and switch that off”, the words could sit heavy. Bradfield says he found singing some lines jarring, such as “like maggots, small, blind, and worthless”, from “Of Walking Abortion”. “You’re not quite sure which perspective that is coming from. And some of the vitriol – ‘dumb c**ts, same dumb questions’,” he says of “Yes”, “again, it’s very jarring.”
Other times, “these memories flash through your head”. He says performing the becalmed coda to “4st 7lb” “reminded me of Richey’s discomfort in writing the song and the reaction to it”. Edwards received a deluge of letters from fans on the subject of anorexia. “I’m not saying that he regretted writing it, but the song did weigh a bit heavy on him. And he was like, ‘I can’t reply to this, and I don’t know really if I want to.’”
But ultimately, Bradfield says he is proud of the gigs and live album, that the band successfully reckoned with themselves. “If you’re not showing emotion, then you’ve got to question yourself. And now and again, I’ve had to question myself because we’ve been around for so long. But those nights, I felt as if we all connected. I do feel we did it justice physically, kinetically. We know the absence of Richey hangs over everything. But then you still try to connect with what he did on that record, and we still could,” he says. “As simple as that – we could still do it.”
‘The Holy Bible Live’ is out now. Manic Street Preachers tour with Suede from 28 October
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