Manic Street Preachers

The Welsh rockers tap into the spirit of gone but not forgotten lyricist Richey James Edwards for their ninth album as Real Groove gets up close and personal with Nick Wire and James-Dean Bradfield.

Their songs have long been a call to arms for alienated, disaffected youth and assorted castoff freaks. Faced with the sudden, shock disappearance of guitarist and chief songwriter Richey Edwards in 1995 on the cusp of real success, they decided to continue as a three piece and have since gone on to become even bigger and more successful than they ever hoped. Their latest album Journal For Plague Loverssees a return of Edwards to the group by way of lyrics long ago left to the other members shortly before he fell off the face of the earth.

“It's hard to recollect the exact time frame but it was between five and three weeks before he disappeared,” explains a gloriously lanky Nicky Wire behind black glasses. “He gave this big binder to me and at the time I didn't think it was weird. because he was just completely and absolutely digesting culture; through his ears, through his mouth, through his nose. Just watching films, reading books. Just constantly doing something. We just thought he was at a creative peak, at an apex of not being able to stop writing. I remember vaguely thinking at the time that it may have been some kind of double album concept record in his mind.”

That next record according to Richey should have sounded like a mixture of Pantera, Nine Inch Nails and Linton Kwesi Johnson. What they recorded instead was the Mercury Prize nominated Everything Must Go.

Now after fourteen years the band have decided to bring out those lyrics passed on to them so long ago and put them to good use. So why haven't they done so before?

“I guess it hadn't seemed right before, we had been wanting to prove ourselves as a three piece. We had them there but we didn't really look at them. We had some of his collages and paintings which we'd look at but then gradually it seemed very natural that we would use his words, I mean he left them for us and after everything that's been said and done it seems that his disappearance was not a spontaneous thing shall we say. So the fact that he gave us these lyrics shortly before he left made us think that he wanted us to do something with them.”

In the time since Edwards' disappearance much has changed about the music industry and I wonder if the brash egos that helped embody the Manic Street Preachers have now had to change with the times?

“I miss that because I loved to embody that ego-driven side of rock, that was our heritage,” laughs Wire.

“And without that Angus Young couldn't go around in his fucking shorts,” adds Bradfield. “The ego you need to carry that off for so many years is unbelievable.”

“I can't even explain to you the cataclysmic change that has occurred since we started out on this label in 1992,” confides Nicky. “I'm just glad we were around in a time when record companies happily pissed money away and didn't care about it. But they also gave you creative space to grow. I mean Everything Must Go sold over a million albums but it was our fourth album and bands just wouldn't get that chance today. We were allowed to hit a creative peak, which was a commercial disaster (Holy Bible). A lot of people say that was our creative peak but if it was done in this day and age we wouldn't have been able to record it. That huge solar-plexus hit that you get the first time you heard Bowie or Liam or even Richey, I don't know if that is there any more.”