{"id":621,"date":"2018-04-13T15:03:08","date_gmt":"2018-04-13T13:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/britishdailynews.co.uk\/?p=621"},"modified":"2018-04-13T15:03:08","modified_gmt":"2018-04-13T13:03:08","slug":"manic-street-preachers-jobs-give-us-meaning-jeremy-corbyn-doesnt-understand-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/britishdailynews.co.uk\/?p=621","title":{"rendered":"Manic Street Preachers: \u2018Jobs give us meaning \u2013 Jeremy Corbyn doesn\u2019t understand that\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

N<\/span><\/span>icky Wire and James Dean Bradfield are seated in the latter\u2019s hotel room in Marylebone, central London, ostensibly promoting the Manic Street Preachers\u2019 forthcoming 14th album, Resistance Is Futile, but instead talking about the possibility of\u00a0Manic Street Preachers<\/a>\u00a0splitting up. Wire says he finds the prospect \u201cterrifying\u201d, which is understandable: they have been in the band for 31 years \u2013 they formed at secondary school in Blackwood in south Wales \u2013 and neither of them seems to know what else they might do. \u201cI can\u2019t go and teach at the\u00a0Cardiff Institute of Music<\/a>, you know,\u201d smiles Bradfield. \u201cMy first lecture on how to make it in the music business: \u2018Piss everybody off, dress like your mum and learn how to play on the job.\u2019 \u2018Er \u2026 can we have a new lecturer, please?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, they say, splitting up is a thought that has occurred to both of them in the four years since they\u00a0last released an album<\/a>, a trying period during which Wire\u2019s elderly parents fell ill, his mother gravely so, and their\u00a0Cardiff studio, Faster, was closed<\/a>\u00a0after the building that housed it was earmarked for redevelopment and demolished \u2013 its closure made the local news in Wales. The process of building a new one, Bradfield protests, turned him into \u201ca low-rent version of what\u2019s-his-fucking-name from Grand Designs\u201d. \u201cHe would ring me up and go: \u2018I\u2019ve got a bit of bad news \u2013 steel prices have gone up,\u201d sighs Wire, with the unmistakable air of a man who didn\u2019t join a band in order to discuss supporting joists.<\/p>\n

To most observers, the Manics seem to have spent the past decade in the kind of creative Indian summer that has eluded most of their peers. They enjoyed their commercial zenith in the late 90s, when, as Wire disbelievingly points out, they were so big that a single such as\u00a0The Masses Against the Classes<\/a>, which opens with\u00a0a sample of Noam Chomsky<\/a>\u00a0and ends with\u00a0a quotation from Albert Camus\u2019 book The Rebel<\/a>, could knock Westlife\u2019s Seasons in the Sun off No 1. If they have never recaptured that high point, the past 10 years have still come replete with gold albums, arena tours and critical acclaim. That last record, Futurology, in particular was widely hailed as one of the best records the band has made. But Bradfield says he has found himself wondering if the Manics still had an audience \u2013 an odd thing to worry about given the size of the venues they still play, but as he says, the band were always \u201cfucking obsessed with a desire to be huge\u201d.<\/p>\n

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Wire says he has been beset by doubts, not just about their relevance, but the relevance of rock music in general. From the start, at least part of the point of Manic Street Preachers was, as\u00a0Wire once beautifully put it<\/a>, \u201cto give clues to a more rewarding life\u201d, to use rock music as a means by which you could transmit ideas about books and films and politics. The journalist Stuart Maconie recalled faxing them, early on in their career, a standard set of questions for a weekly NME Q&A called Material World, and\u00a0receiving in response<\/a>\u00a0a set of \u201capposite, brilliantly chosen quotations from a whole range of cultural figures \u2013 Mao, Philip Larkin, Marilyn Monroe, George Best, Flaubert, Andy Warhol, Heidegger\u201d. But in a world of social media, rock music is clearly no longer the main conduit of youth culture.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s dictated by role models, icons, whatever you want to call them,\u201d Wire says. \u201cMusic used to be the leader in terms of that, everything about the way we looked growing up was about searching out how to look like those kind of people. Now they\u2019re getting it from avenues that I can\u2019t comprehend why they\u2019d want to.\u201d He sighs. \u201cThe emptiness of it. Actually, I feel a certain sense of pity, because I think our youth was so definite and tangible and exciting and full of space to dream and magic and all those kind of ephemeral things. Whereas now, it\u2019s just ratcheted at you at such a fucking speed. And we all know, because we\u2019ve all got kids, and you try to kind of \u2026 not influence them, but pass on things that made your life magical, and they just seem completely fucking irrelevant. It\u2019s not nostalgia, that\u2019s a key thing; it\u2019s actually things just disappearing. It\u2019s like the\u00a0NME closing<\/a>, that was the worst thing about it: it\u2019s just another nail, telling you music is less relevant.\u201d Nevertheless, he says, \u201cthe one thing I know for certain, in this world of absolute doubt and uncertainty, is that when the three of us get in the studio, there is still a magic there\u201d.<\/p>\n