Manics Newspaper and magazine appearances II - Page 5 - Forever Delayed

amay · #61 11-04-2015, 12:19

Article including Richey's sister - http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...tone?CMP=fb_gu

hummingbird · #62 11-04-2015, 19:39

some lovely things are said about our JDB by Andy Cairns

http://thequietus.com/articles/17592...irns-interview

bachelorette · #63 12-04-2015, 01:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by amay

Article including Richey's sister - http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...tone?CMP=fb_gu

Great article, thanks for that!

MSPKYE · #64 14-04-2015, 17:54

Under The Radar - http://fxmb.info/1CVP1HY

Manic Street Preachers – Nicky Wire on “The Holy Bible” and “Futurology”Testaments Old and New
Apr 14, 2015 By Hays Davis

As Britpop was taking off in 1994, the Welsh quartet Manic Street Preachers entered the marketplace with an acclaimed, dark classic of an album that exposed the raw nerves of the human experience.

Following the straight-ahead rock of their 1992 debut, Generation Terrorists, and '93's commercial-leaning Gold Against the Soul, The Holy Bible was an unexpected blast of political commentary, emotional upheaval, and unyielding observation. Largely featuring the lyrics of troubled guitarist Richey Edwards as well as contributions from bassist Nicky Wire, the tracks veered from stirring ("Faster," "Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit'sworldwould fallapart," "PCP") to tender ("This Is Yesterday") to unsettling ("The Intense Humming of Evil") and sometimes genuinely disturbing (the anorexia study of "4st 7lb"). With their U.S. label on board to seriously push the album, Edwards disappeared in early 1995 just before he and singer/guitarist James Dean Bradfield were to depart for America to promote the album. Bradfield, Wire, and drummer Sean Moore decided to carry on, and 1996's Everything Must Go propelled them into the ranks of the U.K.'s biggest bands, a status they've maintained ever since. Edwards was declared presumed deceased in 2008.

Last year, the trio observed the 20th anniversary of The Holy Bible by playing the album in its entirety during a string of U.K. shows that coincided with the release of new additions of the album. The Holy Bible 20, a boxed set including a vinyl copy of the album and four CDs, was recently released domestically, and this month the Manics will launch their first North American tour in years with shows that will once again present The Holy Bible from start to finish. Taking a break from tour rehearsals in their Wales studio, Nicky Wire looked back over The Holy Bible as well as last year's acclaimed album, Futurology.

Hays Davis (Under the Radar): Have you seen the movie Whiplash?

Nicky Wire: No, I haven't. Why would you say that? James saw it. He thought it was brilliant.

It had a main character with a willingness to go to physical and emotional extremes to achieve an artistic goal. Is that something you could identify with personally, or does that fall completely outside of your aesthetic or the band's?

As the four of us, we certainly were prepared at the start to push ourselves to the limits. I won't say that made us like original musicians or anything, but it was just something in our heads that, I think, coming from Wales, we had to try so much harder. We had to be larger than life. And I think we did the rhetoric, the look...not just the music. I think the whole package. We probably did push a lot further than any band around us at that point, for sure.

Now that you've played The Holy Bible a few times, are there elements of performing it that you felt edgy about at first but have relaxed with at this point?

It's so fucking hard to play as you get older! [Laughs] It's just one of those albums you just really have to concentrate so hard [to play]. I don't know what it is about the album. It's the angles...just physically the way you play it. It's not like any other record. Chords don't follow each other like they do on normal records. When you get onstage it is a force of will, of concentration and anger, and controlled anger, I guess.

To my knowledge, I don't think we've ever played Washington before. I think we were there once with Oasis [slated as openers] and they cancelled their tour and we were in their hotel there. And ticket sales have been really good, so...kind of really surprised. I never thought we'd make it to D.C. so I'm really looking forward to it.

Are there certain songs or sections from The Holy Bible that playing them now still seems sort of like moving a little too close to an open furnace, whether from any songs' lingering emotional connection or simply in how it feels to play it?

There is. I play our records a lot. James and Sean don't bother playing our records; they're just not interested, but I do. But The Holy Bible's the one I don't play so much because it does take you into a world very few records do. Maybe something like [Nirvana's] In Utero. It is quite uncomfortable, let's be honest, but there is a comfort there, in some respects. Having to play those songs every night...but the reaction of the crowd, really, is what made it easier. Just hearing them sing songs like "Mausoleum" back to you, three or four thousand people in London just singing those words. [Laughs] Never been a gig like it, really. That kind of communal thing, and of something so dark, made it all worthwhile.

As you guys moved from Gold Against the Soul into your work on The Holy Bible, Richey was dealing with personal issues that ultimately required treatment. How was he contributing to The Holy Bible during this time? Were you getting sporadic lyrics from him?

He was very controlled at this point, actually. The problems didn't really start until we'd finished the record. Obviously, there was always something; the four of us were pretty extreme, but Richey was more extreme than the rest. Nothing unraveled, really, until we finished the record. He was very organized like he always was. Like we all are, really. We were very disciplined, making the record. It was probably from the trip, really, to Thailand, where we're premiered "Faster." I think "Faster" came out quite a few months before the album. That's when, really, it started to unravel. But in terms of making the album, it was one of the most focused, disciplined periods the band had ever had. We were completely determined to kind of take total control of the presentation of the music, the words. And Richey's lyrics were just stunning. I could take a back seat; 75% of the album was Richey's words, whereas the other ones we pretty much shared everything out. I could tell he was in such of a rich vein of this stunning prose and poems. We knew it was going to be pretty special.

Were there lyrics that anyone within the band thought, "Is there even a way to make a song from this?"

I think James had that moment a few times. I still can't believe [James] turned "Yes" into such a melodic song, really, because when you see the lyrics written down there's just so many of them, and they're so awkward. They're brilliant, but they're almost journalistic rather than lyrical, and I think James just really rose to the challenge at this point. He felt a desire to create something really original: sounds of our youth, and the darkness and the melancholy of Wales, transferring that into all the places we'd visited on tour and the death camps of the Holocaust. I think he just loved the challenge of trying to make those words into tunes.

Reading that the creative process for songs that were often pretty bleak was actually a positive experience for the band sounds sort of paradoxical. Did it seem strange at all at the time that creating such dark material could be a positive direction from your work on Gold Against the Soul?

Yeah, I don't think we realized it. Pop was exploding in the U.K. and we were totally out on our own. We'd made this dark path of a record. We were all wearing military gear and going for the Apocalypse Now look. It made you feel really tight as a band, and we were getting on great. But once we released the record and realized the way it was interpreted and how we'd play those songs, then the façade unraveled a bit, really. We just realized it was really difficult. Difficult to play, difficult to listen to. There was no fierce intensity that we reveled in, but it became apparent that it felt like some sort of self-fulfilling prophesy was going. Everything seemed to be spiraling out of control a bit by the time we played the [London] Astoria at Christmas.

Considering the recorded clips used as intros or outros for some of the songs [including interviews with Hubert Selby, Jr. and J.G. Ballard, an extract from a report on the Nuremberg Trials, and dialogue from a 1993 documentary about the prostitution trade], was there source material you're aware of that might have been influential on the writing of the lyrics?
The lyrics definitely came first most of the time, at this point. We'd sort of done it really early on with "Motown Junk," for instance, and the original "You Love Us," where we'd had these strange intros and some nit bits: Penderecki and "Lust for Life" and Public Enemy. We wanted to get back to that. We wanted to have strange intros, spoken word. So we just let our imaginations run wild, really. Anything that was empathetic to the tone of the song we used. Mostly Richey, again, because most of the lyrics were his, so he had the main insight to those words, but I think it really enhances the album, whether it's the start of "Faster" or J.G. Ballard in the middle of "Mausoleum." It kind of illustrates the lyrics sometimes, almost better than some of the words because sometimes they're really impenetrable. You have these quotes that really illuminate the songs.

Looking back on feedback you may have gotten from fans on differences between Generation Terrorists and Gold Against the Soul, what do you remember hearing following the release of The Holy Bible?
With Gold Against the Soul we'd reached the apex of us trying to be sort of a gigantic rock band in the traditional sense. There are moments on Gold Against the Soul which we still love, but you can tell we just weren't a band that we wanted to be. We were almost trying too hard. When people got the first taste of "Faster" and "PCP' they just felt like, "Oh, we've got our band back. This is the band we fell in love with, almost even better than before." I can't remember any negative reaction, really.

What prompted the creation of the album's U.S. mix [included in The Holy Bible 20 as well as the album's 10th anniversary edition]?

I think it was just a suggestion from the American [label]. Ironically, it's the one album that we had a shot at doing well in America, because the record company was really into it. They wanted to remix the album to make it, shall we say, more "modern rock." [Laughs] And we loved it. [Tom] Lord-Alge did an amazing mix. At least six, seven of the tracks, I think, are better than the U.K. version, which is why we put it on the anniversary editions. I think it was the initial spark of someone from our record company, and we were quite happy to go along with it.

What was planned for James and Richey with their trip to the States to promote the album? Which song or songs were considered to help introduce it?

We were talking about that the other day, and we can't really remember. We were due to do a huge tour with Sponge. We were sold as kind of being the new Jane's Addiction, and we were going to do at least 18 dates, I think. So our record company was happy with that and they were building all the promo around it, and they loved the remix. I can't remember the trip James did, what the main thrust was, really, other than the press.

What does the album mean to you, in hindsight? Do you have a hard time weighing it against the band's other work without consciously or unconsciously considering it in its historical context?

I think it's true artistic expression, musically and lyrically. That doesn't necessarily mean it's my favorite record, but it's the truest expression of the people we were at that point. You can't ask for much more than that. It's just so brutally honest, especially at a time when the rest of Britain was reveling in a totally different genre of music. Kind of makes us feel pretty good, really.

[Onto your current album, Futurology,] naturally, any band wants a batch of new songs to sound fresh, but have there been times over the years where you guys approached work on a new album with what you felt was a genuine sense of reinvention?

Yeah. Definitely with [2007's] Send Away the Tigers. It felt almost like we were a new band. Not so much musically, but just like we'd rediscovered the reason why we loved being in the band in the first place. It just felt completely natural and made us feel 10 years younger. I think with Futurology, especially, as well, it just felt like, not only did we feel like a new band again, we actually sounded like a new band. Kind of the most radical departure for us, in many ways. You could tell, as songs would come in, and the lyrics. Just the whole mood of the album, I guess, the whole European mood, made us feel like we could convince people again of the worth of the band, really. Again, in an artistic sense rather than purely commercial.

As you settled into the writing and recording of Futurology, was there anything in particular that you knew you wanted to definitely do or definitely not do this time around?

We didn't want to worry about having a hit single, really. Apart from that, we just let our imagination follow the tone of the album, really. We didn't want to spoil the tone of the kind of European feel of the record just for the sake of trying to have a hit. We didn't want to destroy the vision of the record, which I think we achieved in the end. We sort of stopped ourselves and thought it stands up as it is, rather than trying to force something on it.

What's your opinion of why Futurology had such a strong chart impact in the U.K. compared to some other Manics albums over the past few years?

Well, we've just been really lucky, with Send Away the Tigers and Postcards [from a Young Man, 2010], and now this being number two. Just a really good run. I swear I think people have started falling in love with us again mainly because we fell in love with ourselves again. And to be on our 12th album and going to number two and still feel relevant when most of our contemporaries have split up and reformed and are off starting again. We don't dwell on it too much, to be honest. We're always thinking about the next thing.

There are times that the band sounds like you're having a great time. Did it seem at times like renewal, or was it simple exuberance here and there at how well a track was going?

Yeah, I think "exuberance" is a good word. It's just the power of ideas. That's what Futurology is about, the idea of how our minds have been opened up so much by traveling and reading and experiencing different cultures that we wanted to get our enthusiasm across on the record, and for once it just came really naturally. Just didn't have to force anything about it. I think that comes across.

This one followed fairly quickly after Rewind the Film. Was it a matter of following momentum, or of moving quickly with a new album as part of a fresh statement of purpose?

They did overlap at times. We did have quite a bit of Futurology done. Obviously we knew they were two completely different albums. Rewind the Film is probably the most startlingly different record we've done, just because it's so tender and melancholic. And we knew that we could never put those records together because they just didn't fit in any way at all. We kind of set out with the idea of doing two radically different sides of ourselves, and I think within six months we knew we could pull it off.

What do you think the Manics of the Holy Bible period would have made of Futurology?

I think we would have loved Futurology, actually. I'm not sure about Rewind the Film but I think we would have loved Futurology. [Laughs] I think we would have loved the idea. It might have even been the next record, you know. Maybe instead of Everything Must Go we would have gone down with something even more European. Who knows? But lots of critics have put it in our top three or four albums, and that's really gratifying, to be in your mid 40s and still do that.

MSPKYE · #65 15-04-2015, 07:28

Talking "Method" Recording and Youthful Delusions with the Manic Street Preachers - PopMatters

The Welsh group Manic Street Preachers are one of the greatest bands to have never been accepted by America. Their arguable masterpiece, 1994’s The Holy Bible, has largely been overlooked by American critics and anglophiles alike.

The album’s omission from the ‘90s rock pantheon is both shocking and somewhat logical. On one hand, its scorching, post-punk inflected hard rock was packed with enough deceptively catchy riffs to appeal to a large base of music fans. On the other, inviting songs about capital punishment, eating disorders, and the Holocaust into your ears probably isn’t something the average listener wants to do on a daily basis, if at all.

Those who have heard The Holy Bible are guaranteed to admit there’s never been anything else quite like it in rock music, even if the harrowing tales of former (presumed dead) Manics lyricist and guitarist Richey Edwards don’t quite make for pleasurable listening. This April brings a once in a lifetime opportunity for those of us in North America who get The Holy Bible, or have lived it, or just love it. After a hugely successful series of UK dates in honor of the album’s 20th anniversary reissue last year, the remaining Manics—singer / guitarist James Dean Bradfield, drummer Sean Moore, and bassist Nicky Wire—are bringing The Holy Bible to the states and playing it in full. Before setting foot on US soil, Bradfield generously chatted on the phone with me about the newness of touring North America and being led by lyrics.

* * *

How did the decision to bring the Holy Bible tour to North America arise?

James Dean Bradfield: The Holy Bible did quite well on import in America. We did an American tour about seven, six years ago I think? We really enjoyed the experience. There’s no doubt, in terms of commercial success, we don’t mean much in America. So, coming to America still feels like a new experience to us, because we haven’t really toured America that much in our lives.

But, despite all that, we have had a lot of requests from a lot of people that had bought the record in America to come and play it there. We thought, “Hell. What’s the downside?” None of us are young, there’s no pretending that, and anything that feels like a new experience to us is good! Bringing The Holy Bible to America will feel like a new experience to us. I think we’ve only ever played “Faster” off The Holy Bible in America.

I was actually there at the last tour, for a couple of the dates.

JDB: Which show?

I came to the show in Philadelphia… (at World Cafe Live)

JDB: Ooh, there weren’t many people at that show [Chuckles].

There were enough! It looked pretty full to me.

JDB: (laughs) I think it will be a bit better this time, to be honest.

I was there and I was at the Webster Hall show in New York.

JDB: The Webster Hall show I really enjoyed. I mean, I love Philly as a town. The center of Philly is a great place to walk around, and the fact that it was the first multi-year capital of America makes it a fascinating place, so I loved actually being there, but yeah… I remember there not being many people in the crowd. But Webster Hall was a great show.

It’s remarkable I can remember those two gigs, because if you’d ask me about a concert I’ve done in Britain, it’d be hard for me to remember ‘cos I’ve played in Britain and mainland Europe so much. But, I’ve played in America so little that every show is quite a distinct memory for me.

The tickets for the UK leg of the tour sold out in minutes and the announcement of the North American tour was met with a lot of excitement. Has The Holy Bible’s gradual rise in popularity ever surprised you?

JDB: Not really. I kind of knew when we were doing it that there was something about the record. I knew I was part of something—with Nick, Sean, and Richey—that was going to have some kind of resonance. I knew it would be intrinsic to quite a high minority of people, if you know what I’m saying? There would be a very large minority of people that the record would connect to, and that it would mean something to them, it would be tangible to them. The album was so locked in to dissecting certain politics, certain events, certain histories, certain psyches, that I knew the record would mean something to somebody out there. For want of a better phrase, I kind of felt as if I was part of something that could become a cult classic, definitely. And then all that kind of rational thinking went out the window when Richey went missing (in 1995).

So I stopped thinking about the record after Richey went missing, because it was indelibly connected to something which was quite a traumatic memory. So I think we kind of parked The Holy Bible in our psyches somewhere when we carried on with (1996’s) Everything Must Go, and we kind of tried to protect him, we tried not to touch it. But then ten years later, we realized that The Holy Bible had sold so many more records post-Richey’s disappearance than it did while he was around. It wasn’t much of a surprise to me, but it kind of crept up on us because we tried to protect ourselves from analyzing it because it seemed like such a pure thing that we didn’t want to sully it with anything.

How has perception of The Holy Bible changed over the years? How do you think future generations will regard it?

JDB: Well, I think there are two categories of records that kind of endure. I think there’s the one kind of record that people say transcends the time that it was recorded in, and it can be recalibrated and you can reimpose it upon any period, and then there’s the other kind of record that sums up the period it was released and created in. I think the second category is what The Holy Bible is in. I think it’s a snapshot of a certain psyche in the early ‘90s, it’s a political snapshot of the post-war era in Britain and Europe, and it’s kind of built in the steps of new Europe’s creation, to a certain degree. It’s not a timeless record, I think it’s a record that really sums up a distinctly different time period.

Do you think the internet has helped in building a larger US audience for The Manics?

JDB: To be honest, no. I am 46 years old and I’m not into delusion any more [Laughs]. I don’t think this (tour) is us re-engaging with the American market and hoping to break it, that couldn’t be farther from our hearts or heads. I think we’re just coming over for the experience of playing in front of an audience that has never really seen us play these songs. In Britain and Europe and Japan, we have played some of these songs in front of fans that we know want to hear them. In America, barely any of these songs have ever been played, and we’ve had so many letters over the years from people saying, “I’d love to hear ‘Archives of Pain’ played live,” or, “I’d love to hear ‘Die in the Summertime,’ I’d love to hear ‘ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforoneday…’.”

This is just a chance for us to actually have those people in front of us and hopefully make them happy! Which sounds like an anomaly from somebody that’s part of such a nihilistic, mad fucking record as The Holy Bible, but it actually will be quite touching for us to play these songs in front of an American audience that has never seen it before live. That’s kind of the deal for us, really. We have no delusions or illusions of having any kind of commercial success off the back of this experience.

I think it’s going to be a very cathartic experience for the people going to the shows. Just hearing “Faster” at those shows six or seven years ago was extremely cathartic for me.

JDB: Yeah, we don’t take any of this lightly. I think the one thing you gotta bear in mind when you actually take on something like this—which has become quite a popular thing in the modern era, people performing a “classic” album in front of a crowd—is you’ve really got to do the record justice. You’ve gotta play the record pretty much as close to how it sounded, you really gotta live up to how the record sounds in terms of emotion, in terms of physicality, in terms of intent, detail. You’ve really got to try and make sure that you don’t at all make any mistakes that kind of belittle the record, so to speak.

The thing you’ve gotta be aware of is that you’re being faithful to the spirit of the record, and the technicality of the record as well. Because The Holy Bible, in its own strange, fucked up, convoluted kind of way, is quite a muso album. It has quite complicated time signatures, there are lots of words interlocked into the drums and guitars, and it’s not something you can pick up and just play after one day’s rehearsing.

How hard was it to get Sony to release the album in 1994? Was putting it out through a major label a triumph in and of itself?

JDB: I’d love to give you the usual corny story, where the musician’s saying, “We fought tooth and nail with our hearts bleeding to get this record out on a major label,” but our experience was nothing like that. Our label, Sony, didn’t question the fact that it was obviously a record that was very dark and that didn’t have any natural singles on it—the lead-off single from The Holy Bible was “Faster”. The record company didn’t once question that, which is remarkable, really. We’re living in this day and age where record companies are even more conservative than they used to be. If a record doesn’t sell after one album, there’s a very good chance that you don’t get a second shot. This was our third record, and the record company never once questioned the artwork, the content within the lyrics, the way it was mixed, the way it was recorded—which was in quite a lo-fi way. And a lot of that has to do with our A&R man at the time, Rob Stringer, who is now the head of Sony in America. He gave us complete artistic freedom. So that’s a strange story really. When you’re hearing people talk about such stuff, talk about the battles they go through with the record company, about how there was just some kind of insipid censorship within the record company—but our experience was utterly the opposite. So, there’s no sob story there.

It could never happen today, I think.

JDB: No, it wouldn’t, and to be honest it didn’t happen as much back then either. We just had somebody that was extraordinary in charge of the record label, and that was Rob Stringer. He had a vision for the record too, not just us. Not all band stories are the same, I don’t think.

I read that the record label had offered you a luxurious studio setting to make what became The Holy Bible, but you turned it down and opted for recording it in Cardiff’s red light district.

JDB: We’re talking about 1993, 1994 here, and that was kind of standard practice back in those days. You go to a residential studio and you record a record. Residential studios back then were really lovely places to create and record. But we knew that it was just wrong for the music. Especially with the lyrics that had inspired the music. We knew that it would be a wrong decision to try and create this kind of music, which had threadbare emotions and hard political intent and acute observatory historical references in it. We knew that if we ended up trying to create this music somewhere in Surrey, England, which had four poster beds and every technical specification you could wish for, there would be something slightly off-message about that.

I suppose, in our youthful, delusional state, we thought there should be some kind of “method” recording, our version of method acting. We should immerse ourselves in a shitty environment to try and replicate the edge in the music. And that’s what we did. We hired a studio which we had used before in Cardiff, which was kind of in the red light area, and had no mod cons. It was a very, very monotone kind of experience. And we decided we wanted that kind of utilitarian vibe to try and rub off in the music, I suppose. It all sounds pretentious and I wouldn’t want to repeat it all now, but we were young.

The Holy Bible is actually what got me into post-punk music. I realize the musical approach came from being influenced by post-punk at the time and it serves the lyrics well. Was there ever a thought that, in choosing that style, you were going to be in complete opposition to what was trendy in the UK at the time, i.e. Britpop? Did you feel there was a need to go against it?

JDB: No, I think our music’s just always been led by the lyrics. That’s given credence and truth by the fact that I need lyrics in front of me to write music. Nicky and Richey would always give me lyrics, and 99% of the time I would always write music with the lyrics in front of me, and I would try and let the lyrics inspire the music. I was being given lyrics like “Yes”, “Of Walking Abortion”, and “Archives of Pain”. Looking at these lyrics, there were twists and turns in there. There’s some kind of indecipherable, fucked up iambic pentameter in there, and I knew that these weren’t normal kind of lyrics, they weren’t even normal for us, really. And I just knew that the music had to twist and turn and convulse with the lyrics, as the lyrics were themselves. So it’s really as simple as that. I love the lyrics, and I remember being given “Die in the Summertime”, and I remember being given “Yes” very early on, and thinking I must follow this muse that Richey created. Richey had written 70 to 75 percent of the lyrics on this record, and I was being given this stuff and I just knew I had to follow his direction. Otherwise I’d be betraying the lyrics themselves.

I don’t really think we were reacting against anything. I think we were just so secluded and so self-insulated against what was going on with the start of Britpop and stuff that we didn’t even pay attention to it. Again, it’s that delusional state of just thinking that you’re right, and I think that’s the place we were in. By the time we’d finished mixing “Faster”, we still thought it could be a top ten hit, that’s how fucked up and deluded we were! [Laughs] Everything was led by the lyrics and they still are.

But we came out of the back of The Holy Bible and of course we wrote “A Design for Life” and Everything Must Go, which kind of got co-opted into Britpop. We never intended it to be as such. But we didn’t care by then. I think we just wanted the music to breathe, and we just wanted to try and drop some of the subtext that had been written around the band. It’s a funny journey from The Holy Bible to Everything Must Go. If you listen to “Faster”, then listen to “A Design For Life”, I think you can see how much a band can change in the space of one album. “Faster” and “Design for Life” are the two lead singles off two separate albums, and it was merely two years between them. And it just goes to show how much a lyric can influence a musician. When Nicky gave me “A Design for Life”, I just felt a certain freedom in the lyrics, I felt a certain sureness in the words that were being written. They wouldn’t have to be understood, they were just stating fact and emotion. On The Holy Bible, despite the nihilism and despite the misanthropic bent, sometimes the lyrics are so pleading to be understood. Whereas on Everything Must Go, they’re just breathing and stating the facts.

In the liner notes of the tenth anniversary edition of The Holy Bible, the album is described by Keith Cameron as “a triumph of art over logic”. This description has always struck me, and I was wondering whether you, as the creators, feel it is an accurate statement?

JDB: It’s always nice when somebody else says it, because you can never say that about what you’ve done yourself, because it makes you an arrogant fool if you make such a statement about your own record or book or film or piece of furniture—whatever you’ve created. But I can see some kind of logic in that statement. I don’t really think a band like us, that comes from a very left wing area and place in history, ever expected to write a song like “Archives of Pain”, which talks about capital punishment and talks about it within a song—openly questions it and openly investigates and doesn’t condemn. I don’t think a band like us, from a working class area in South Wales, were ever meant to write a lyric like “Faster”, that has ambitions of overcoming everything with the power of your own will and your own self made intelligence. And I don’t think that would be married to that post-punk influenced music. So there is a natural ridiculousness of us coming from South Wales, from a very working class, proud area; actually doing a record like this was nothing anyone expected. We didn’t either. So I kind of accept Keith’s statement, and Keith is one of the best music journalists Britain ever produced, so I’ll stand by his statement. It’s always better when somebody else says it.

I guess that’s what critics are for!

JDB: Yeah, and other stuff too [Laughs].

almostfamous · #66 23-04-2015, 19:55

Nice little U.S. Q&A interview with Sean (yes, Sean)....

http://www.riffyou.com/qa-manic-stre...he-holy-bible/

I agree it's probably best to put The Bible down after this and move on to whatever's next.

Bathtub · #67 24-04-2015, 12:07

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifesty...y-live-9100288

Number 15.

roi · #68 25-04-2015, 09:51

From the Sean interview "We might play the occasional song from the album [in the future], but I don’t think we’ll be doing this again."

That's OK then, that's basically what they were doing before. The beginning of the article suggests they were completely drawing a line on THB.

jl45 · #69 26-04-2015, 09:37

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/wales/pos...ts_traci_lords

Traci Lords "would love to sing it (LBN) live with the boys one day"

Manicben · #70 27-04-2015, 12:26

Because we don't have the radio thread any more.

Heads up for the iPlayer for todays Rad Mac show on 6music. Currently playing Sarah Cracknell Ft. Nicky Wire.

When the iPlayer comes online it'll be just under 25 minutes in.