Welcome to the world of the Manic Street Preachers. There is no room here for warmth or ambiguity. Every song is a meticulously crafted manifesto written with icy moral certainty, just in case you hadn’t realised that all right wing politicians, Nazis and serial killers are BAD PEOPLE, m’kay? To sweeten the pill, the music is generally banging rock but interspersed with on the nose sound bites about concentration camps and prostitution just in case you start enjoying it too much.
It’s impossible to listen to this without a profound sense of sadness. When this was recorded, guitarist Richie Edwards was severely depressed and suffering from alcoholism, anorexia and self harm. It seems that the band were happy to put up with him starting drinking first thing in the morning as long as he wrote another song about pain and suffering.
The music press also colluded with this. A notorious incident saw Edwards cutting himself with a razor blade to prove that the band were ‘4 real’ and the response was just to write articles about how edgy the band were instead of getting the poor guy some professional help.
It was not really a surprise that Edwards disappeared after the recording, never to be seen again. Draw your own conclusions.
https://album.link/gb/i/942562485
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