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Spotlight Special: Manic Street Preachers Everything Must Go

From despair to where...?
CLASHMUSIC
27 05 2016

After the nihilistic fury of 1994s 'The Holy Bible', the follow-up album byManic Street
Preachers might have proved to be the ultimate endgame. The title, 'Everything Must Go',
suggested as much. Evoking the window-length posters that announce a product clearance before
a shop closure, there is a sense of an ending, of the commercial failure that was perhaps to be
expected from the previous album, which included frantic diatribes on capital punishment, the
Holocaust and political correctness alongside first-person explorations of prostitution and
anorexia.

Emerging British groups at the time were singing increasingly of hedonistic leisure pursuits and
decadent lifestyles in catchy singalongs. Manic Street Preachers garnered a record number of
complaints for their paramilitary appearance on Top of the Pops as they promoted their single
Faster, on which they sung So damn easy to cave in, man kills everything. Few could have
anticipated that the same band would become one of the most popular rock acts in the UK within
a couple of years, and in a markedly different guise that would gain them the mass audience they
had envisioned for their music ever since their bedroom days in Blackwood, South Wales in the
late 1980s.
---

A radiant testament to the bands commitment...

--Whats more, 'Everything Must Go' was recorded following the disappearance of band member
Richey Edwards, whose provocative media appearances had been central to Manic Street
Preachers entry onto the music scene in the early 1990s and whose increasingly allusive,
journalistic, and surreal lyric writing had been key to re-energising the group after a tepid second
album. Once it became clear that Edwards would not soon return, it seemed likely that Manic
Street Preachers would call an end to their ambitions altogether. 'Everything Must Go', however,
turned out to be a radiant testament to the bands commitment, which saw them forging another
vital sound, both rousing and plangent.
But if the music takes a somewhat different tone to its predecessors, everywhere on 'Everything
Must Go' there are remainders of the bands past; characteristics which continue to define their
poetic, visual and musical style. The title 'Everything Must Go' is in another respect a sign that
business would continue as usual. The groups use of an exploitative or ailing economy as a
metaphor provides a throughline to their work history. Recall the entrance of 'The Holy Bible: an
audio sample in which a pimp coolly explains: Everythings for sale.
The cover of 'The Holy Bible' confronted the listener with a triptych of an obese woman; the new
albums front also showed three framed portraits, this time of the band themselves, but without
any of the makeup of their glam beginnings, and none of the Holy Bible-era warpaint. The same
acceptance of reality, only this time more introspective than voyeuristic.
-----

With the orchestral splendour of the lead single A Design For Life the band quickly reached a
new fanbase. The song reached number two in the UK charts following its release in 1996 and it
is this anthem of working class determination that, among the bands numerous chart singles, has
continued to resonate most strongly with listeners. Although the bands songs had been
unashamedly political from the start, the sentiment and spirit of the lead single seemed more
attuned to a wider grassroots feeling than their earlier anti-monarchical, anarchistic complaints.
Not long before, they had sung I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing. Now the band
regained a stoicism and re-engagement with moral principles, following the misanthropic dead
end of The Holy Bible. There was an unquestionable change in the band, however: they would
more and more foreground their interest in the community and history of their native country in
contrast to their youthful boredom and disparagement towards the mining village in which they
grew up. This was signalled on 'Everything Must Go' in the small dedication to the Tower
Colliery in South Wales in the liner notes, and then in bassist Nicky Wires appearance onstage at
the 1996 Brit Awards where, along with his bandmates James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore,
he collected the Best Album trophy draped in a Welsh flag.
But despite the stirring string arrangments, their highest singles chart success to date and the
reconsideration of their home as a source of inspiration, the groups outlook did not sound to have
lifted all that much once the album could be heard in full. On the opener Elvis Impersonator:
Blackpool Pier Bradfield sings The futures dead, fundamentally. Its so fucking funny its
absurd, a reminder of the Sex Pistolss There is no future, with a similar sardonic wit this
was not altogether a new Manics.
---

The band regained a stoicism and re-engagement with moral

principles...
--Acoustic guitar and harp begin the album, the two instruments heard against the sound of gentle
lapping waves. But the drums, bass and electric guitar soon crash in on a humorous satire on the
Americanisation of England. There is more space and a richer texture to the sound than before; a
more captivating, less aggressive rock style. Across the record, Bradfield strums molten,
melodious chords but also strips back to let acoustic passages reveal other colours; his voice no
longer excoriating but rising and falling against the changing shades of the songs. Sean Moores
tight unshowy drumming as ever belies complexities, with elements of Brazilian rhythm on

Kevin Carter while the frantic middle eight of Australia perfectly captures the restless urge to
escape, propelling the listener forward to new Antipodean horizons.
Though Wire and Edwardss words were, for the first time, given a widescreen, technicolour
musical presentation on many of the tracks, the little-heard Removables is closer to MTV
Unplugged Nirvana, whose Pennyroyal Tea the band played live during the last months with
Edwards. And in one of Edwardss final, haunting contributions, Small Black Flowers That
Grow In The Sky, plucked and sweeping harp melodies are used to counterpoint sung
descriptions of caged animals on show, torn from their natural surroundings. All I want to do is
live, no matter how miserable it is, cries Bradfield on Enola/Alone.
----Any triumphalism conveyed by A Design For Life was everywhere underwritten with the same
deep melancholy that the band had expressed on one of their earliest singles, Adrift in cheap
dreams dont stop the rain, numbed out in piss towns, just wanna dig their graves. Lyrically the
Manics still stood out for the idiosyncrasy of their inspirations, their pessimism and the almost
paradoxical longing for escape and solitude that runs through such crowpulling tunes. Edwardss
contributions provide stark, imagistic contrasts to those of Wire, but both foreground this idea of
escape. Escape from the present, escape from here, Escape from our history.
Before the band struck their first number one in 1998 with a song about the Spanish Civil War,
they entered the Top Ten with a song about a Pulitzer Prize-winning, South African war
photographer who committed suicide in 1993. Kevin Carter is based around an impressionistic
portrait of Carters troubled life, as captured in Edwardss concise and unconventional lines. It is
driven by Bradfields clean, chopping guitar and features a sublime trumpet solo by drummer
Moore. Bradfields main riff seems to mimic both the repeated click-clicks of a camera shutter
and the hacking of a machete both referenced in the song its repeated punch creating a tight
bossa nova rhythm along with Moores percussion.
Interiors (Song for Willem de Kooning) was inspired by a television arts documentary on the
abstract expressionist painter and remains the unheralded gem on the album. The song is a
companion of sorts to Kevin Carter in sound and subject matter. Bradfields voice reaches its
characteristic soaring heights, and his bright electric guitar lines blaze, carry Wires resigned
lyrics.
---

Escape from our history...

--For many of these songs, art and other media serve as an inspiration for the writing, as it has so
often done for the band. Though the record is lighter on audio excerpts and author quotes than
previous releases, there remain links to the writing of poet Sylvia Plath on The Girl Who Wanted
to Be God and painter Jackson Pollock quoted within the sleeve all in keeping with the bands
interests from the very start. Little has changed today, with the bands recent krautrock-influenced
twelfth album 'Futurology' carrying references to Mayakovsky, Malevich and a disillusionment
with social media.
Still, it is hard to think that Manic Street Preachers prior to Everything Must Go would have
composed a song quite so simple in its lyrical intent as a wish to escape to Australia, as on the
albums fourth hit single, of the same name. Though the band from the beginning isolated
themselves from their peers, their lyrics had typically been used as opportunities to express a
litany of grievances and politically informed observations on the modern world and popular
culture in common with Situationist and other left-wing movements. Wire, taking over as sole
lyric writer was beginning to find inspiration in new metrical forms and images as a result of his
domestic married life and the departure of his friend Edwards, drawing the writing style away
from the cut-ups and stream-of-consciousness surrealism of Burroughs and the other Beats.
As close to Larkin as Lydon at times, Wire would increasingly refer to home and landscapes,
inner and outer. This was already signalled, however, in one of Wires main contributions to The
Holy Bible, the nostalgic This is Yesterday. It finds its epitome in Enola/Alone in which Wire
writes: I walk in the grass and I feel some peace at last/I walk on the beach and for once I feel
some ease. Edwards had written a similar line, I wanna walk in the snow and not leave a
footprint, on the song 4st 7lb but the mental state he evoked in so doing was altogether more
troubled.
The orchestral splendour and the melancholia of Everything Must Go has a character all its own.
Without the fierce light of Richey Edwards, the Manics would now carry on in a new aspect, a
beautiful triangle of distortion, reflective of the past, embodying Samuel Becketts stoicism:
I cant go on, I must go on and despite everything, managed to find the popular audience that
they had always truly intended to.
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'Everything Must Go: 20th Anniversary Edition' is out now.

Words: Yusef Sayed