Wired and Wonderful: The gospel according to a Manic Street Preacher

Nicky Wire shoots the breeze with consummate whimsy as he imagines himself curating Meltdown where the 'newly reformed' Rage Against The Machine and McCarthy (the cult 80s band whose track We Are All Bourgeois Now was covered by the Manics) would show today's upstarts a thing or two. "I think in Britain there are loads of good bands, loads of good music, but it's a very decadent musical environment, the lyrics are unbelievably self-satisfying." Warming to the chat, he adroitly pictures the ultimate political rally: "Martin Luther King, Tony Benn, Mo Mowlam - met her a couple of times, she was great - oh, and Chairman Mao." Chairman Mao? "Yeah [and then, voice dropping to deadpan baritone], just for a laugh."


And laugh he does, but in effect, Wire has demonstrated the essence of the Manic Street Preachers in a microcosm - music unrelentingly intertwined with politics fronted by tongue-in-cheek bravura. The Skinny, having wheeled out the soapbox, finds this songwriter-in-chief isn't for turning. Setting his sights on the incumbent Prime Minister, he is scathing, venomous even. "The song Send Away the Tigers (title track of their latest studio album) is really about how one foreign policy decision has wrecked his (Tony Blair's) legacy. From a historical perspective he may have been seen as a good PM; that's not my view but there might have been some reverence towards him. Alas, he's made some fucking disastrous decisions and said disastrous things. It just seems the Iraq war has left a giant cloud over the country, so even when there's some positive news it's hard to feel good because of that situation. It leaves a very bad taste."

When he does finally talk about music, it is with a decidedly philosophical bent. Wire has recently suggested that all great bands go through a phase of destroying themselves, and unashamedly includes the Manics in this particular Pantheon. "I think all the best acts reach a peak of commercial acceptance and then ask if they've been true to themselves and their roots. I think it's all the colour, all the shades; the triumph and the tragedy [co-lyricist and guitarist Richey James has been missing, presumed dead, since 1995] which puts us in that category. We made a record like The Holy Bible [1994] which many people view as our best record but it didn't sell at all. We were a real cult band at the time. But from selling 50,000 of The Holy Bible to two million of Everything Must Go [1996] was obviously a big jump. It had been a long process, but when we got there, it was a question of 'where next'? We just seemed to chase our tail for a bit. But a lot of my favourite bands have done that. Like the Stones with Their Satanic Majesties Request [1967]; it's a mental album, confusing the band and their audience, but it stiffed. Then they came back with Jumping Jack Flash straight after. It must get boring being in a band that's constantly successful (wry laugh) - you try and invent stuff to make it more interesting."

One such 'invention' was a highly publicised expedition to Cuba in 2001, where they became the first popular western rock band to play there in what was interpreted as an anti-American protest. "Surreal is one of the more overused words in the English language but it truly was like being in Forrest Gump or a Lewis Carroll book. All of a sudden you're doing a gig in the Karl Marx theatre and there are no security guards except for some giant potted plants to stop the crowd rushing. Then you go backstage and there's Fidel Castro. He's an unbelievably bright guy, not that I agree with all his policies or anything like that and I still don't know to this day if I have drawn any conclusions about the whole thing. I think it's one of those things that when the band is over that I'll be able to understand a bit more, for good or bad."


The title of the new album (their eighth studio offering) is an explicit allusion to the exorcising of demons. "Actually, the emphasis for the record was that we reconnect with ourselves and the fans who've stayed with us; the reasons they fell in love with us in the first place are probably different reasons to what we've become. At the start there was always the idea of the 'fabulous disaster', the Technicolor moment. I think you reach a peak of nihilism and cynicism when you get older. We had to make (well, me in particular) a conscious decision to try and be a bit more naïve again, a bit more idealistic and instinctive, and perhaps not to worry or care what people say so much. My solo album helped with that [last year's I Killed the Zeitgeist]. I always wanted to make an out of tune, Lou Reed feedback-drenched vanity project without any expectations to sell lots of copies. When you're in the Manics you can't do that. I think if you become too vain and too indulgent you find you're not quite as good as you should be. Maybe we've been guilty of trying to ram our ideas down people's throats - well, perhaps not 'guilty', but I just think it's the way we are. With this album there's much more a sense of joie de vivre about it."