I knew ME since 1993. My father and me - we loved the song. In 1997 I found an old cassette with the song and started to play it regulary at home. My father bought EMG und GATS then und I really got into the band.
When TIMTTMY was released, I was already really obsessed with Manics and the first four albums were part of our home. Truth was a shock. It reminded me of Queen in 80s compared to early 70s. But I fell in love with the new style and briefly I really had the feeling, it‘s their best album. I believe a part of it was the really great sound the album has.
Suddenly it was possible to talk with my schoolmates about it. Everyone liked it. I was happy for them to be that succesfull. They were in radio, girls wanted me to show them, how you can play the songs on guitar...
First I really loved almost everything. I never liked Tsunami, whistling solo and Black Dog (saved for the coda) Then I woke up a litte bit and started to prefer My Litte Empire, Nobody Loved You, SYMM and Born a Girl. Then I woke up completely and started to hate the album. For years. Before the horrible Postcards came I considered the album the worst. And only a few years ago I made piece with it. One of them once said in an interview for a czech magazine: „we had had a great success with EMG and we thought it would be great to make it again“ I think you can hear this approach on the album a lot and many bad choices were made just because of it. James‘s songwriting was definitely success-oriented and that clashes with my ears. But it was the last time they got a little bitte genius in it, that‘s why I consider it the best off bad albums they made :-)
Actually the fact I never really listened to this album regulary in this century saved the memories very well - I can really feel it immediatelly - our sound system in the bedroom, the white CD und pom pam pompom pam...theeee gap that.... It was definitely a big part of the most important years of a young man - I was 14 - it influenced me a lot and set me on the path of defining my style....

I only got into music towards the end of 1995 at the height of Britpop. ADFL came out which I liked but the EMG single was actually my first Manics purchase. Soon after that I went to my first concert (Oasis at Loch Lomond) which the Manics were support for. A couple of days later I bought EMG the album and over the next year or so bought up the other albums - as well as the taping the NYNEX gig off the radio which is probably my most listened to tape!

I ended up having a stronger connection to the earlier, rockier sound than the polished EMG sound. Rumours were abound that the next album would return to this (I think the NME described the album as being The Holy Bible part 2). I remember tuning into Jo Whiley's show (I think) to hear the premier of Tolerate, and feeling a little disappointed that it wasn't the rocker that I expected.

Two weeks before going to uni I headed to Dundee to see them at the Caird Hall in what I sitll class as one of my favourite gigs. The next day I bought TIMTTMY and had mixed feelings about... there's still songs on there that I really like (Nobody Loved You, Ready for Drowning, Blackdog on my Shoulder, The Everlasting, Born a Girl), but the mid section of the album is just a bit flat, and whilst I now enjoy the live version of YSTSFMH the guitar sound on the recorded version just doesn't work for me.

And here I am, twenty years later, twenty manics gigs more attended....

Got into the Manics through EMG - was 11/12 at the time I was buying all the singles from the album, got the album itself with Christmas money at the end of '96. Definitely got into them more than the other guitar bands I was listening to at the time (the obligatory Oasis and Blur). My only real source of music news at the time was on ceefax and teletext... I do remember thinking by '98 that maybe the Manics had broken up, it was so long since they'd released anything. My taste had expanded a lot and I was listening to loads of other stuff... still, when Tolerate came out I snapped up the single (borrowed some money off my mum to afford both CDs and the tape). It was totally different from what I was expecting - ambient guitar intro, huge long outro, five minutes long - but I immediately loved the melancholy of it. I remember going for a birdwatching trip with my dad a couple of days later (my 14th birthday - I was a seriously cool kid, obviously). Strangely I persuaded him to listen to the charts on the car radio on the way back, and was over the moon to find they'd hit number 1!

I bought the album on the week of release. My parents had bought a new hi-fi with a MiniDisc deck, and I had a personal MD player / recorder (I made my own music - the idea of being able to record digitally and create an album of skippable tracks like a CD was mindblowing) so I decided to get the MD version of the album. Thought it was absolutely brilliant on listening. I remember coming across a couple of reviews complaining it wasn't like their earlier stuff, not as heavy, James's voice less raw... I hadn't heard the earlier albums, but I just thought "surely this is a good thing... none of that loud screaming rubbish". Although I later bought the Richey-era albums and enjoyed them, I never had a teen angst phase and still prefer the refined, melodic, melancholic approach of much of the band's later stuff.

It was a nice time. I had no real contact with the fanbase, never saw them live, just enjoyed the album in the context of it being an album. The following year I started a new school and met a fan who was into the whole glitter / glam stuff who, along with discovering the internet, helped me learn the error of my ways and prefer the earlier stuff - I was very excited about KYE's rawer sound - and then I moved to university without a minidisc player. I didn't end up with a CD copy of Truth until about ten years ago, so went for quite a few years without listening to the album, at which point it sank to near the bottom of my list based on its reputation alone.

Then a few years ago I listened to it again and realised that, no, my initial impression was right: this is a beautifully crafted, gorgeously melodic, atmospheric album. It became my favourite Manics album again and remains so to this day. I'm a lot more confident in my own opinions these days and discovering how much I love TIMT played a big part of that.

I got into the band during the Truth era because the girl I had a crush on at school showed interest in them. I discovered my dad had bought some of the 7" singles from the GT era. One of my favourite Manics memories is turning Slash and Burn over and discovering Motown Junk for the first time. I liked the Truth era's Manics, but to my young teenage ears, that was something else. I ended up buying the back catalogue (I think my local Asda had most of the albums on sale for a fiver each) and became a much bigger fan. I think Masses and the Know Your Enemy album cemented the divide between my blossoming fandom, and her casual acquaintance with the band.

To this day, I still associate the Truth album with those times and that girl, much like I associate Postcards with the girl I was dating when that album came out.

Lemme copy-paste my story from the post about Motorcycle Emptiness being an overrated song.

I'm a bit young within the Manics fanbase context, being born in 1989, and in Croatia early 1990s historicaly kinda sucked. (Ahem)
My first real memories of the Manics start with Tolerate, which of I've seen the video back when the song was a hit and could be seen/heard everywhere on TV and radio stations. I liked the song (although, it could have been an influence from my elder siblings), but, as you might have noticed, I was too young to care (how old was I? 7? 8?)

When I hit puberty, and chose the punk way, I discovered Generation Terrorists amongst my brother's cassette collection. It was love at first hearing.
Additionally, I couldn't speak any English back then, but I knew the Manics' reputation already, so I genuinely trusted the lyrics must be good, clever etc. However, since I couldn't understand the words due to language barriers, naturally I focused more on James' singing and, man, was it dreamy! ~~~~ ♥
Eventually, the Manics' song lyrics and translated Japanese video games became my favorite English learning boosters.

And your English is perfect! Shakespeare optional but we thankfully don't speak that way.
But yeah, learning English inspired by Manics gives you a better perception of the world than coming to it from Beatles lyrics!

Awwweww! ♥ Thank you!
I actually have a degree in English Linguistics. *wink wink*
Yeah, I'm so glad I grew up with the Manics. And the feelings of affection towards their work and artistic personas. These guys always make me happy.

Wonderful, wonderful thread. I'm sorry I don't have time to contribute properly. Due to the inhuman neoliberal crunch-machine I'm in professionally. But short and dirty version: I didn't like them when Truth came out. In Eastern Europe we'd missed EMG. It just didn't reach there. Truth was the first Manics album to penetrate all of Europe. I didn't have anything against them, when they did -- Tolerate was a nice, slightly boring track playing on MTV.

I now consider it, like, in my top 5 songs ever written. And the best single ever released, so yeah... In my defense, I was like 12. A friend of mine was already into them. He told me they have tremendous album titles: Everything Must Go, This Is My Truth... The Holy Bible. I absolutely agreed. They sounded very cool.

As I became a full-blown teenage delinquent loser and semi-homeless person (in the early aughts), Tolerate found its way on to mine and my friends' hit list, playing in the background. Just, you know, like Billy Idol's Sweet 16 or something. A golden oldie that was on winamp playlists at parties. We all really got into it slowly and started discussing what an amazing song it is. What an incredible opening line and so on. A bit of wikipedia told us what it's about and the admiration grew.

In the meanwhile, they'd also released Know Your Enemy, another very cool title, I thought. I was in love for the first time and Found That Soul -- playing on the radio in Easter-Europe-Land -- went well with that emotion. They'd really pierced the radio playlist by them: Ocean Spray, So Why So Sad, even There By The Grace of God were all in circulation and formed a nice background radiation for that time period. But still only in that "Muse is playing, Muse is an okay band though a whole album of that, I don't know..." kind of way.

The premier of "THe Love Or Richard Nixon" on Nordic MTV was the point where I and a lot of my friends immediately became a fans. We just looked at that on MTV and said: "wow." What a tremendously atmospheric and elegiac joke. These people are fucking high-concept. I was blown away at the audacity, the historicity, all of it. Lifeblood made me into a huge fan. Of the albums before it, Truth was the biggest rediscovery. With fresh eyes all those songs that had seemed boring were suddenly gigantic. The opening 5 tracks, I still think, are the most overbearingly grandiose cycle of music I've ever heard. If not the best then definitley the BIGGEST. I also ended up moving to England. The manics hit really hard here, in situ. Especially stuff like Nobody Loved You...

Sorry for lousy editing on this post, as I said -- I don't have time to chisel the prose :).

Have a nice Sunday y'all.