monotonous west country life— comprehensive school, job at tesco, have kids, die in the same town you were born in. anyone trying to do different is beaten down in attempts at submission. always subvert expectations: without this life is nothing. fuck your wannabe effy stonem lifestyle— fake being working class all you want when the dirt washes off everyone will see. normal people used to pretend to be rich: now it’s the other way round. what next? pretending to be stupider, uglier, nastier? anything to fuel the middle-class ego. go home to mummy and daddy with their wine cellar and three-storey house. glamorise smack until you’re staring at it. what happened to integrity. strip down aesthetics and find meaning. if there’s no meaning then destroy it. it is worthless. call yourself a libertine but until you act it’s just a facade to hide a lack of personality. go somewhere. do something. be something.

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idolise the 90s and live under a blanket of nostalgia and delusion. all analogue and cheap booze none of the realities of the 21st century: terrorism on a mass scale the western descent into far-right nonsense. just plug in your walkman and tune out. it’s easier to pretend than confront the atrocities around us.

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celluloid past/plasticine futures

don’t just bite the hand that feeds;

devour the wretched thing in its entirety

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the “good old days”? ha there’s no such thing. thatcherite destruction made well sure of that. the past is just as bleak and derelict is as the 21st century. and long gone are the times of queen bodecia/roman savagery welcome to the era of nuclear terror (again) and forever war. what’s ahead is just as bad as what has come before.

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most bands need to be understood within their socioeconomic upbringings/backgrounds to fully 'get' their music. while this is the case for even rock giants like oasis and ozzy osbourne, it is 100% crucial for the manic street preachers. that specific brand of anger, hatred and absorption of literature cannot be developed by middle-class kids in london: it has to come from a working-class upbringing in a small town with little-no industry. the manics also cannot be understood without acknowledging the impact of the 1984-5 miners' strike on the band's environment. without the perfect cocktail of these things, manic street preachers would not have came to be.

the fact that they were regional (from the welsh valleys) is an integral part of the band's foundation. it forced them, in their effort to be different, to become an incredibly tight-knit unit— even more so than before. isolating yorself within an already isolated area of the uk is simply impossible in the large urban hubs of london, manchesterand birmingham. they were not exposed to half as much as their urban counterparts experienced in their day-to-day life.

growing up during, and in the aftermath of, the miners' strike surely had an impact on each member of the band, whether form mining families or not. blackwood was a small mining town in the valleys of south wales, a region of the country destroyed by the strike's impact. watching large swathes of your fellow townspeople becoming reliant on the miners' support groups for essentials as thatcher's governmentr purposefully starved the strike to an end would have caused a lot of anger and frustration. and, watching oakdale calliert close in the mid-1980s, leaving most men unemployed and struggling to find employment out of the pits, somethimes after decades down the mines, is not exactly a situation that would inspire hope for the future. we can see the influence this had on the manics' politics and ethos ('culture, alienation, boredom, despair', the anger flung at the government and institutions at the top, the 'nothing to lose' attitude of their early days)— it touches every aspect of what makes them who they are.

and it is these factors that also cannot be fully understood and digested without first-hand experience. the only way to truly 'get' the miners' strike and the environment it caused, was to live through it in a mining town. likewise, the experience of growing up and identifying yourself as different in a small town cannot be understood without actually going through it. and for those who have those lived experiences, the manics can eb understood at a bone-deep level. for the first time, you can see pieces of yourself in a (semi-)successful band. however, there is also still appeal for those without this shared context. because of the band's environment, they became very eloquent and insightful in their lyrics, as well as including countless cultural references. and their standalone image, not quite like anyone else, allowed their appeal to a nationwide audience. but it will always remain that these two groups that make up the manic street preachers' audience have two, sometimes fundamentally, different outlooks and understandings of the band.

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like an old dog

that can't learn any new tricks

i sit

read books

watch tv

don't can't venture for something new

repeat the same old tired teenaged routines

and wait

hoping

somehow

that things might change

(they never will. the cycle repeats)

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you watch

as she climbs over to the other side of the barricade

you watch

as she looks down from the bridge

at the water below

you watch

as she closes her eyes

and takes a step forward

you watch

as she plunges into the river

you watch

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he sat on the sidelines

and watched their— no, his band

roar through their set at lightning pace.

only knowing one song, he couldn't join them on stage yet.

just another few minutes.

fiddling with the guitar strap, a ball of nervous energy,

waiting for his cue.

any time now>

finally he saw the singer give him a nod:

come on then!

one final look back before be went,

stepping into the unkown.

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walking with a best mate

arm in arm

down cardiff queen street

just us

against the world

nether knowing

what the future holds

hopefully nothing too bad

but it can't get worse than it's been

a mess of eyeliner and spray paint

bombing about the city

searching

hoping

to find whatever comes next

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late mornings in bed reading + sipping coffee. grace/wastelands plays quietly in the background. almost at peace— yet still yearning to be somewhere else.

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what happened to havinfg an opinion + voicing it. musicians + actors have been pr trained to the point of having zero remaining personality but that doesn't mean the general public should join in too. becoming placid + docile for the benefit of who because it's definitely not yourself. self surveillance/censorship that serves no purpose turning everyone into the same cold carbon copies the perfect puppet to be moulded into a mindless consumer. to fall in line without being asked no spine no brain no tongue.

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i live to fall asleep it's the only thing that keeps me going. daily life is too much— i spend all day waiting for the moment to go back to bed + hide from the world. a safe refuge from the outside, or an excuse for intense laziness. nothing excites me more than getting under the covers. not having to pretend to be human any longer free to be a husk. shaking off all expectations + shutting off. a temporary death. what could be better?

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analysing this is my truth tell me yours as an allegory for the grief cycle lends itself to some of the best analyses of this particular set of songs. while it makes songs like if you tolerate this your children will be next more tolerable + symm us finally given a good meaning, born a girl benefits the most form this extra layer of textual meaning. while it can (+ should) be read as nicky wire imagininghow certain aspects of his life could have been easier had he been born a girl instead, the song also has its place within the grief cycle. through this lens, born a girl could be seen as nicky struggling with his identity without richey. in the public eye, the two were intristically tied to each other— 'glamour twins' wasn't just an aesthetic label, but one that described the relationship between the two. they were the band's lyric-writing duo, did interviews together (often without james + sean): for the first three album cycles, it was impossible to imagine one without the other. after richey's disappearance, nicky was left to navigate his public persona on his own for the first time without his counterpart. it was the identity equivalent of having your leg amputated + having to relearn how to walk. this, ocmbined with some preexisting issues around gender, led to a sort of collapse of his sense of self/sense of identity in the comedown of the everything must go cycle + success. the years 1996-7 were so hectic that the impact of nicky's loss of identity were temporarily delayed. the fallout of the loss of richey brought other identity issues, particularly around gender, to the forefront. it is worth noting this album cycle was the first time nicky embraced wearing dresses regularly in public, most notably at the 1999 brit awards. the grief caused a complete shattering of nucky's public image that then had to be rebuilt + renavigated in a world without richey. so, while the difficulties surrounding gender for nicky clearly predate february 1995; they were visibly exacerbated in the following years, particularly 1998-2002. it is almost as if richey's disappearance forced nicky to confront his femininity in a way that might not have happened when it did, in the way it did, in any other circumstances. it is also noteworthy that there was no obvious sexual intentions behind nicky's femininity. in an interview with the face, james admits to once wearing a dress in the bedroom, and this doesn't mirror nicky's experience at all. his first dress was the floral number seen worn at phoenix festival 1993— just looking at that dress should be enough to believe there was nothing sexual underneath nicky's gender nonconformity: it is done purely because that is what he likes to wear. in the first year following richey's disappearance, this is kept under wraps but reading 1997 sees the return of the dresses. it is almost as if the forced conformity as a consequence of richey not being at his side anymore caused an outburst in the opposite direction that could not, and did not want to, be hidden.