Make Us Your Glasnost: Manic Street Preacher’s ‘Lifeblood 20’ Review

When the Politburo unanimously elected Mikhail Gorbachev as the eighth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR wasn’t in a great place. The cowboy bravado of Ronald Reagan had lead to military spending to ride to 27% of its GDP; production of civilian goods was frozen at 1980 levels; US financing of Mujahideen warlords to overthrow socialist leaders in Democratic Republic of Afghanistan ensured the war in that country was an absolute disaster (and would later be referred to as “The Soviet Union’s Vietnam“); and general faith in the leading party was at a historic low. It was clear that some changes would be needed. And ol’ Mikky G believed he had just the plan.

Firstly, Gorbachev wound down the USSR’s power around the world. He retreated from Afghanistan, likely assuming the $20 billion that the CIA had donated to train and arm the jihad resistance groups was unlikely to ever have any longterm effects. He went all smiles and waves to the hawkiest of hawks (and now 43 year champion of the “Reason For Everything Wrong In the World” award) Ronald “Rawdog” Reagan, making the landmark agreements that they would scale back the arms race with the small concession that America still carry on doing the exact same shit. His “Sinatra Doctrine” threw the USSR’s hands up in regard to the Soviet Union’s satellite states, allowing them to do it their way and conceding power to the nationalists and the fascists. Secondly, there would be the concept of ‘perestroika’ (перестройка/restructuring), which were economic reforms that essentially dismantled the planned economy without any suggested alternative mechanism. It also introduced market factors, being the softlaunch of capitalism and conceding power to the new bourgeois. It also meant McDonalds and future Pizza Hut adverts. Yay.

And then there was glasnost (гласность/transparency), the ultimate liberalisation of the Soviet Union. Gorby essentially opened up the USSR’s ‘Marketplace of Ideas’. The previous Marxist perspective on ‘free speech’ was probably best explained in Mao’s ‘Oppose Book Worship’ (反对本本主义): “no investigation, no right to speak”. Not everyone is assumed to know enough to speak on anything. Now, the USSR would work from Western, liberal rules. Anything goes. All bullshit is as valid as the next. And “free speech” meant what “free speech” means to this day: reactionary right wing potato heads using racism and sexism to further their own desires for profit and accumulation.

When the Manic Street Preachers first started to record their seventh album in Stir Studios, Cardiff in August 2003, they weren’t in a great place. They considered their “deeply flawed, highly enjoyable folly” of a previous album – 2001’s at once ambitious, confused, frenzied and impenetrable ‘Know Your Enemy‘ – a failure by that point. They were starting to look upon the 16 track, 75 minute elongated panic attack of an album in the same way you or I would look back on a three day ketamine binge. What were we thinking?? That was some crazy shit. I… think… it was a lot of fun…? But look at all this mess!

“‘Know Your Enemy’ was ragged and unintelligible. It’s got a line on it that references the Cuban Adjustment Act: it’s just so fucking awkward”.

Nicky Wire

The band didn’t know at that point that the record had already pretty much torpedoed their commercial viability for good – or at least ensured that they would never be the multimillion sellers that they were in the late 90s – but it was at least obvious that a massive course reset was needed after the previous album saw them, according to JDB, “trying to destroy everything we’d built”. Since then, they’d also released both the (none more casual appealing) ‘Forever Delayed‘ best off and the (none more Legacy Fan appealing) ‘Lipstick Traces‘ b-sides and rarities collection, so there was a definite air of a massive band era now being closed. Time to pander to the fanbase again?

How ’bout no? The band would instead focus on reconstruction/перестройка and on transparency/гласность.

перестройка

As appose to their previous album, which was almost intentionally created under confusion and constant second guesses in order to create a work they were as uncomfortable with as possible, ‘Lifeblood’ had a clear mission statement and artistic vision early on: it would be restrained, it would be detached, and it would utilise more sparse and yet more lush electronic elements. While ‘KYE’ was a veritable orgy of “no wrong answers!”, recording the first thing that came to mind and distrusting any suggested improvements as bourgeois decadence, the album with the working title of ‘Litany‘ was about questioning the band’s assumptions and trying new ways of structuring the songs that might not have occurred to them before. JDB: “Don’t trust your first idea. That was the only rule: Once you’ve written something, don’t try and perform it in the style you usually would – lay back, and let something else fill that space”. Nicky Wire would repeat the word “elegiac” again and again when describing the album’s musical intentions at the time, and while however Wire talks up a new Manics album should always be taken with more than a few grains of salt (Before every album: “It’s like if Frank Zappa and Leonard Cohen had non consensual bum sex and then Chaka Khan emerged from the resulting anus tear”. The resulting record: Another fucking Manics album) his choice of syllable was bang on here. ‘Lifeblood’ is stately, it’s intentional, it’s haunting and melancholy. It’s very elegiac. This new solemn and composed attitude extended to the most visually arresting album artwork of the band’s career, exceptional in how it mirrors the contents and also how artistically stunning the white backgrounds and splashes of red paint (blood? Blood of life?) look. Also, It was maybe 15 years after first buying the album that I realised that the red paint (blood? Blood of life?) was actually over a body in the nip, how long did it take you? While the songs on ‘Lifeblood’ might be sparse and subtle, they also represent some of the warmest and most amiable songwriting of the bands career. Before we get into more detailed critique of the contents, it has to be said straight off that this is a beautiful album in many ways. Which is why the choice of The Love of Richard Nixon as the lead single is so endearingly stupid. Awwww, Manics! You’ve shot yourself in the foot commercially again! You’re so sweet! Come here!

*pinches the bands’ cheeks and wobbles them*.

Seriously though: what are you doing, lads??

I’ve always been fascinated by him anyway because of his indiscriminate hatred of people. He was paranoid about everyone. It’s purely a love song. Bill Clinton presided over genocide in Rwanda far worse than anything Nixon did, and yet he can have dinner with U2 and everyone thinks he’s great. Some of the things Nixon did, like breaking down barriers with China… He’s going to be tainted forever with Watergate but he did some decent things. I suppose I just feel an empathy with paranoid megalomaniacs

Nicky Wire, Repeat Fanzine 2004

To be clear: The Love of Richard Nixon is one of the band’s greatest ever songs. Their 20th greatest ever song, to be scientifically accurate. An absolute beast of a cold synth skin crawler, a near industrial piece of sociopathic non-emotion that seems to lack any of the tropes that the band were widely loved for. Is the band even here?? It sounds malevolently synthetic as if it were written, performed, conceived, born and educated by a Hyperdyne Systems 120-A/2 android. Even the guitar isn’t audible before one of JDB’s greatest ever solos that sounds more like the Large Hadron Collider going into anaphylactic shock. I. Fucking. Love. It. Absolutely unfeasibly, only the pandering to the perverts of Eric Prydz’s Call On Me* stopped it from being one of the weirdest UK #1 singles of all time.

(*for those of you too young to remember, the early 00’s were a big time for dance songs using hideously sexualised videos in order to engage the spending power of the horny teenage boy, your Zombie Nations, your Satisfactions…)

But considering the lead single is supposed to promote the album? Yeah, what the fuck were you thinking, lads? Nixon… is an anti-promotional single, leading people to assume that the forthcoming album would be a collection of emotionless electro bangers. And despite the album featuring some of Wire’s most wishy-washy, liberally solipsist lyrics to date (the transparency/гласность that we’ll get to soon), they lead with a nuanced take on America’s most maligned president (at that time) that will just convince people it’s more of that awful political stuff that they don’t want to hear about on Radio 2 in the afternoon?? The complete balls up of the ‘Lifeblood’ campaign starts here, as the band allowed themselves to be talked into releasing Nixon… as the leading promotional single, despite it sounding little like anything else on the record. Or like anything else they’d ever done before. Or like anything else ever created by a human.

What did the band want as lead single? Only the greatest song they’d produce in the 21st century.

I ranked 1985 as the band’s 10th greatest ever song and – honestly? – I may have underrated it. Opening ‘Lifeblood’ in the greatest possible way, 1985 makes you an immediate believer in the band’s new direction, even if it sets a bar that the following album fails to meet. 1985 is like if the band listened to the crazed, barked cultural referencing of well loved B-side Prologue to History and thought “Aight, cool. But what if we kinda did that but made it so beautiful that it forces people to look into the eyes of God?”. Musically inspired by Kissing the Pink’s minor hit Last Film (unfortunately for symmetry lovers, originally released in 1983) and its contradicting themes of futuristic awe and dystopian dread. Here though, it’s through the lens of more “Gosh, wasn’t being young ace?” Nicky Wire lyrics (and we’ll get to you soon, Wire!), and instead posits that 1985 was the tipping point that lead to the futuristic dystopia that we currently live in.

I seem to moan every new Manics album about how they really need to ween themselves off using Dave Eringa as a producer. He has produced or co-produced 10 of the band’s 14 albums, and although his work is always very good, some of the band’s greatest artistic achievements (‘The Holy Bible’, ‘Futurology’… this album…?) have happened when they’ve experimented with other producers, while some of the band’s vilest crimes against music/humanity (‘Postcards From a Young Man’, ‘Resistance is Futile’) happened when Eringa’s presence allowed them to get too comfortable and fall back into lazy tropes and habits. I mean, I liked ‘Ultra-Vivid Lament’, but couldn’t love it as much as many did is because, eugh, it’s just so Eringy! Oh, and that Nicky Wire’s lyrics are terrible (and we’ll get to you soon, Wire!). 1985 is one of the greatest example of the revitalising effect employing different producers can have on the band’s sound. The lush and vivid arrangements on the opening track and throughout add to ‘Lifeblood’ quite possibly being the greatest sounding record that the band have ever released. The band first spent three weeks in Philip Glass’s Looking Glass Studios, New York recording with famed David Bowie producer Tony Visconti, but the band still didn’t think it quite matched the sound in their head and so most (9 of the 12 tracks) of the work was done in Ireland with far less feted producer Greg Haver. A guy whose own Wikipedia page describes as “best known for his work with the Manic Street Preachers and Melanie C”, and of the 19 ‘notable’ records he’s worked on six are by the Manics or members of the Manics. And one is 1998’s ‘The Yellow Album‘ by The Simpsons. But the guy’s obviously a genius.

The Manics + Dave Eringa = Taylor Swift + Jack Antonoff.

The real ones will get that.

The first three tracks on Lifeblood – 1985, Nixon… and the second/final single from the album (we’ll get to that later!) Empty Souls (69th best Manics song ever. Dude) – immediately suggest that the band past their self-imposed test with flying colours. The album opens with three perfectly poised and expertly produced tracks that sheen with metallic beauty and can sound like dead eyed expressions of melancholy or near perverted expressions of unlikely warmth (“an empathy with paranoid megalomaniacs”). ‘Lifeblood’? 10 outta fuckin’ 10 mate, no notes.

What’s that?

Nine more tracks you say?

Ah.

So… more notes. I guess.

The rest of the album still has numerous highlights though, even if a lot of it is so subtle that it takes roughly – oooooh, I dunno – 20 years to truly appreciate them. I Live to Fall Asleep (49th best Manics song ever) is an almost impossibly beautiful piece of songwriting and reserved musical composition. JBD mentions I Couldn’t Bear to Be Alone by Prefab Sprout and Thomas Dolby’s Airwaves as musical inspirations, and the song is the most delicately gorgeous pieces the band have ever done. I Live to Fall Asleep is more evidence of the melody centred songwriting that was the modus operandi for the whole album. Solitude Sometimes Is is by far the best example of the band managing to construct a typical ‘Manics’ song around the record’s new musical focus. Anthemic; impassioned; epic and evolving despite not even lasting three and a half minutes; and building towards a cooking guitar solo – yep, ticks all the Manics boxes there. But on ‘Lifeblood’ it’s restrained, it’s sparse, it features motherfucking glockenspiel, it’s, yes, so damn elegiac. That bass on Always/Never (84th best Manics song ever)?? Gyatt dayum!! Lord take me now! Perhaps one of the strangest and most atypical songs to ever make a Manics album -funk?? Hidden lead guitars?? – and one that speaks to the different thinking around the ‘Lifeblood’ album. And then there’s To Repel Ghosts, which rationally I know is a brilliant song. Possibly the highest energy track on the record that nonetheless manages to be thematically tights with its ethereal and sweeping ghostliness. But, I’m sorry, it just sounds like Walking Through the Air from ‘The Snowman’ to me, so it’s always difficult to take 100% seriously. Yes, I know, that’s a ‘me’ problem. Regardless, the highlights on ‘Lifeblood’ are amongst the best of the band’s career.

However, the album trips and stutters ever so slightly when the band don’t seem fully committed to the album’s stated purposes. As early as the fourth track, A Song for a Departure, there are too often moments when the band merely benefit from gorgeous production covering over cracks on subpar standard Manics fare. Fragments is very nice, but again more an example of pristine production allowing the band to get away with less than stellar songcraft. It’s classic ‘Track 11’ stuff, musically. The band (and many fans) love Cardiff Afterlife , which continues to baffle me.

Cardiff Afterlife is its own little masterpiece, and 1985 is too. To have an album bookended by these songs is quite something

You’re half right there, JDB

Lyrically, I can understand the importance and weight of Cardiff Afterlife (and we’ll get to those lyrics soon!!), but musically it is amongst the least inspired songs on the record. Sounding like it’s desperately aiming for epic catharsis (and, conceptually, its place as the album’s closing track makes perfect sense), but it’s weak melody and over conscious strings means it fails to reach the scale that the earlier Solitude Sometimes Is hit so effortlessly. And then there’s Emily, which, I’m sorry, is just pants. Boring, low effort, pants. About Emmeline Pankhurst? Dude, at least spell her name correctly!

And then, of course, there’s Glasnost (78th best Manics song ever). Yeah, all that Gorbachev stuff wasn’t completely random. I’m a fucking great writer, yeah?

гласность

In 2004, Nicky Wire wasn’t in a good place. Interviewed in The Scotsman, he explained his frustration with the lack of response to the last album and how politics wouldn’t be as central to ‘Lifeblood’ as it had been to Manics albums in the past:

Know Your Enemy’ was one of the most politicised albums ever. Unfortunately it was four years before every fucker else got interested in politics. It took everyone else a war. Where have these people been the last four years? Forty years? American foreign policy’s never changed. There’s a track called ‘Freedom Of Speech Won’t Feed My Children’ on ‘Know Your Enemy’ about forcing freedom on societies that says everything we ever needed to say. So there’s hardly any politics on the new record. It didn’t feel comfortable joining a debate which includes Green Day, Chris Martin and Fran Healy

The last Manics album with similar melancholic restraint, and similar self concern, had been 1998’s ten gadzillion seller ‘This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours‘, but that had still featured a lot of ‘Nicky Wire Mark I’ use of political and social history as metaphors for personal failings. There was still the Spanish Civil War, the intentional flooding of Capel Celyn, the Hilsborough Disaster, June and Jennifer Gibbons, Winston Churchil’s depression… They just weren’t chiefly paired with a lyric like “England’s glory lives on in world wide genocide/So celebrate Buchenwald as Her Majesty’s heir“. “Well no more!”, said Nicky. “I gave you your ‘freedom of speech won’t feed my children/Just brings heart disease and bootleg clothing’ on the last album and none of you fuckers bought it!!”

But what were we getting in its place?

Openness. Transparency. Glasnost.

There are allusions to the Miner’s Strike in 1985, but the song’s title more refers to when the four childhood friends first thought about forming a band and I’ve always more just assumed that’s what lines like “Circle the wagons, we’re under attack/We’ve realized there’s no going back” refer to. There’s Emily, which Nicky Wire, as always, definitely talked the talk as being some big political statement – “It’s about the idea of Princess Diana taking over the role of the female icon. Someone as vacuous and empty as Princess Diana being a feminist icon is just beyond belief” – but it’s the weakest and most confused song on the album and contains lines as vacuous and empty as “Emily, a modern sense of beauty/Emily, as precious as your memory/A simple word called liberty”. And then, of course, there’s the biggest outlier, The Love of Richard Nixon. Which, I’m eager to stress, was the song chosen as the first single.

Aside from those minor (or miner. Geddit?) references though, the album really is Nicky’s own personal Glasnost. As the (beautiful) song itself states asks: “When did life get so, get so complicated?/When did time start, start accelerating?”. Can’t we all, like, chill out for a bit? Let’s take the balaclavas off, sit cross legged, and have a deep and meaningful conversation about our feelings. And that’s what ‘Lifeblood’ is. The searing chaos and screaming anarchism of ‘KYE’ is actually just more proof of men doing anything before they tried therapy. Well, now Nicky Wire is finally attempting it, and the guy has a lot of trauma. ‘Lifeblood’ is the picture of a man struggling with the idea that he’s unable to find happiness unless under the mask of public perception. A man haunted with ghosts and inner pain. A man longing for seemingly nothing else but isolation and hibernation (“I hate dreaming because it ruins ten hours of bliss“). It’s also a man yearning for the opportunity to properly grieve.

I was kinda joking when I announced that statistic when crunching the numbers on the greatest Manics songs ever. Kinda. More literally, at the point of ‘Lifeblood’, and excusing the three albums where Richey was a contributing lyricist (which were 100% about Richey), their presumed dead former co-writer and “”””guitarist”””” was actually the clear focus of remarkably few of the band’s songs. ‘Everything Must Go’, the band’s first album since Richey’s disappearance, was too busy making paeans to survival and the human powers of perseverance to focus too explicitly on Edwards’s disappearance and their reactions to it. I guess there was Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky (#14), that dissects the mental imprisonment that Richey would have felt in his final days and paints a picture of… Psyche!! That was written by Richey, you rubes! ‘This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours‘ was glum and desolate, sure, but it’s generally Nicky Wire gazing at his own navel while moaning about how vaguely glum and desolate he was. OK, I’m being a tad facetious, but the lyrical standouts like Tolerate… (#8) and Ready for Drowning (#52)* barely feature the ghost at the feast as a central character. You’re Tender and You’re Tired (#92) is probably about Richey, and Nobody Loved You remains one of the extremely rare Manics songs that they’ve admitted is about Richey. But overall the former member remained more of an elephant in the room that they occasionally referenced rather than a central trauma they were willing to properly confront. Then there’s Prologue to History (#46), the fabulously atypical b-side to Tolerate… that mentions a “former friend who’s now undercover” and a “poet who can’t play guitar**” but Nicky still swears on his mother’s life isn’t about Richey. Then the next album was ‘KYE‘ and – lol! – who knows what the fuck is going on there. Maybe Richey is mentioned once or twice in that hour long primal scream of Monster Energy fuelled status updates (relationship status: it’s complicated), garbled in passing between references to Rosa Luxemburg, Waluigi, The Wigan Diggers and Unit 101. I mean this all in the best possible sense, of course: I love that maniacal mess of an album. You’re an absolutely ridiculous band, Manics, and long may that continue.

Love of Richard Nixon as first single?!

(*and… Black Dog On My Shoulder…maybe Tsunami…? It is not a strong album lyrically

**and also the lyric “He’s gone, but I’m no deserter”, which – hooch! – that’s a spicy meatball!)

But ‘Lifeblood’ as an album – both in vague theme and often in literal content – is simply about Richey Edwards. “The main themes are death and solitude and ghosts”, Wire explained in 2004, “Being haunted by history and being haunted by your own past”. Death? Richey! Haunted by history? Richey! Haunted by your past? Richey! The ghosts that float the hallways of ‘Lifeblood’ wailing are all his. These spirits are the subjects of To Repel Ghosts; what Nicky admits “Longing for, it’s been a long time longing for” in Always/Never; you realise that I Live to Fall Asleep is referring to the deep rest that Richey took almost a decade previously (“When did you become another distant friend?/Everyone who loved you stayed, waited till the end/When did you decide that sleep could save your life?”). It underlines everything to such an extent you start wondering if even the attempts to add nuance to the accepted history of Tricky Dicky Nixon may act as a metaphor and the “Death without assassination” line hits different. The final song, Cardiff Afterlife – which I don’t rate highly musically but it is thematically spot on and perfectly sequenced – is obviously framed as both the book closing on this particularly cathartic collection of skin shedding trauma dumping, and also as the final word on Richey’s disappearance. The final anguished wail down a dark tunnel they were no longer sure was populated by anything other than spectral echoes:

If the love between us has faded away
Left in the rain
Scratching at the stains
The paralysed future
The past sideways scrawl
I must give up on this
It makes no sense at all
Makes no sense at all

Of course, in retrospect: lol. It would definitely not be the final eulogy. From this point on, pretty much every Nicky Wire lyric would be about Richey. And we get a bit of a preview of the future healing process in the lyrics to Fragments*. The ‘fragments’ in question most specifically relate to the binders of lyrics and art left to members of the by Richey Edwards before his disappearance (“When there’s time I’ll read your words/There’s no point disguising/You’re the one who’s hurt/Laid bloody and bare to see”). The band would eventually feel ready to take these lyrics on for 2009’s brilliant ‘Journal for Plague Lovers‘ project.

(*the first time Nicky collaborated with his poet brother Patrick Jones on a Manics lyric, with the gorgeous line “Two minutes silence in a century of screams” taken from Patrick’s poem ’11:11:11′. By the way, Patrick Jones released a spoken word album earlier this year. It shits all over Nicky’s anaemic latest. Give it a try)

Or so we thought. If you’ll allow an old man a slight detour: After the band and the record company gave up on the lost cause that was ‘Lifeblood’ and decided there wouldn’t be a third single, the planned b-sides were instead collated onto a self-released EP called ‘God Save the Manics‘. That EP’s final track was its highlight, the gorgeous Picturesque sounding more like a ‘Lifeblood’ track than the two other more straightforward rockers on the EP. Five years later, when the ‘Journal for Plague Lovers’ project revealed the mythical hidden Richey lyrics to the world it became clear that – holy shit! – this little song from an obscure fan release in 2005 actually used them! The lyrics used in Picturesque would later make up parts of All Is Vanity (#21) and Doors Closing Slowly. Of course, because the songs from the ‘God Save the Manics’ EP are included in the 20th anniversary collection then you can listen for yourself and… NOPE! Go suck an egg, the songs aren’t here! It’s an irritating omission that makes the otherwise lovingly curated retrospective feel incomplete.

It’s possible they decided that the collection could do without a release they perhaps haven’t completely made their peace with yet – along with the secret usage of Richey’s lyrics, the release was a bit of a disaster. But this is the Manics! Everything they release is always at least a bit of a disaster! – as the ‘Lifeblood’ era was possibly the band’s most successful one in terms of b-sides, both in terms of numbers and in overall quality. Despite only two singles being released from a quickly abandoned project that the band soon grew to resent, on the 20th anniversary release there are ten b-sides and two further songs included in the Japanese bonus edition that have never actually officially been released outside that country before. I stated in my list of the band’s greatest songs that they hadn’t released any great b-sides since 2001, but the incredible tracks collated here make that statement ridiculous. What’s even worse is that I bought the 2CD and DVD set of both the singles. I likely played each disc once and then deigned it too much effort to keep opening the CD tray on my stereo. Digital media was very much on its way out in 2004, and I already had Limewire open automatically whenever my PC started. Mostly to download porn, granted, but I was probably aware you could get music on it as well. The b-sides from the period are extremely varied, from brilliantly affective rockers like Quarantine (In My Place) and Voodoo Polaroids, to more angular and splenetic tracks closer to ‘KYE’ in spirit like the Nicky sung Dying Breeds and the absolutely bonkers Failure Bound. Oh, and Failure Bound is just another b-side from the era (No Jubilees) played backward while Nicky barks words over it. It’s, erm, rather unique in the band’s catalogue. Oh, and No Jubilees is a gorgeous pop torch song, that like the similar Soulmates is good enough quality for most albums. Then there are the heavily ‘Lifeblood’ coded tracks that, to be honest, would have probably improved the album were they included rather than some of the less inspired tracks. Yes, Emily, I’m looking at you again. The echoing production on Everything Will Be outshines much of the ‘Lifeblood’ album; an album originally titled ‘Litany’ so you assume the track itself would have (justifiably) featured at some point; Antarctic is a layered guitar masterclass; and the beautiful Askew Road features an actual sample of Richey speaking, if you fancied continuing that narrative. And Everyone Knows/Nobody Cares is a gloriously splenetic combination of the ‘Lifeblood’ production style with the ‘KYE’ tetchiness, with also ‘The Holy Bible’s general furious antipathy.

 Everyone Knows/Nobody Cares is pure spite and aggression, a freezing announcement of mankind’s failures. It’s sinister. When Nicky described ‘Lifeblood’ as “’The Holy Bible’ for 35-year-olds”, this feels like a literal interpretation of it.

Flint, Manic Street Preachers Song-by-Song

Yeah, couldn’t put it better than that.

The increased musical prolificacy at this time is interesting considering that Wire has stated how he was struggling with writer’s block over the ‘Lifeblood’ era. The b-sides All Alone Here, Litany, and Askew Road‘s lyrics seem unfinished, with one verse or group of lines simply repeated until song’s end. It’s almost like the band were writing music far quicker than Nicky could respond to, lyrically. And across the ‘Lifeblood’ era, Nicky’s lyrics are often generic platitudes you imagine he put in place assuming he’d think of something better eventually.

Gorbachev’s glasnost was a monumental failure. One that eventually lead to the downfall of the entire Soviet Union and the life expectancy of the newly revived country of ‘Russia’ falling from 65 to 57 — unprecedented in times of peace. Glasnost was an attempt by the most right leaning and reactionary figures in the Politburo to ensure capitalist restoration. USSR’s socialism included measures to combat bourgeois and counter revolutionary influences, along with all your standard gross isms – sexism, racism, fascism. Once these protections were removed, the most powerful were simply allowed greater access to spread their pro-Western and pro capitalist propaganda. In March 1991, the people of the Soviet Union were asked in a referendum “Do you consider it necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, which will fully guarantee the rights and freedoms of all nationalities?”. The vote was boycotted by the governments of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Armenia, Moldova and Georgia, not wanting the will of the people to interfere with their own plans for capitalist land grabbing. They needn’t have bothered. Even though 78% of the 147 million votes cast supported the USSR continuing, it was already too late. Gorbachev resigned as president on Christmas day 1991, by which point the USSR had already ceased to exist, and Boris Yeltsin had banned the Communist Party from participating in elections and had flown the Russian flag outside parliament. ‘Freedom of speech’ didn’t feed Russia’s children, just lead to tanks attacking the Moscow White House.

‘Lifeblood’ was a monumental failure. It entered the charts at number 13 and dropped out of the top 75 in three weeks, never to return. To this day it’s the only Manic Street Preachers album to not even sell 100’000 copies. The choice of first single played it’s part, with many casuals assuming the whole album would be nebulous art synth about disgraced political figures, and many Legacy Fans believing that this was the final straw in the band no longer being the same act they fell in love with in the early 90s. And the band themselves lost interest in promoting it very quickly: a month after the album was released, the 10th anniversary edition of their 1994 magnum opus ‘The Holy Bible‘ was released, and suddenly all the band (and the press, and the fans…) wanted to talk about was that. There are obvious links between Richey’s lyrical masterpiece and the album centred around the long term effects of Richey’s legacy within the band 10 years later, which the band could have trumpeted, but… nah, fuck ‘Lifeblood’. It was very quickly evident as a commercial disaster and the band were much happier talking up their accepted successes (‘The Holy Bible’ has sold around 600’000 copies, making it one of the most commercially successful suicide notes in history). It’s not an exaggeration to say that the public’s apathy toward the album felt like such a rejection of the band that it made them question if it was even worth continuing as a band seemingly for their own amusement. The release of the second single, Lonely Souls, was delayed until January (probably to not interfere with all that ‘Holy Bible’ 10th anniversary promotion), it managed to reach #2 because nobody releases music in January and it was available on about two dozen formats (I bought them all), but got no airplay, had a crappy video and all future releases were cancelled (with I Live to Fall Asleep apparently likely to be the third single). Sean Moore trashing his drumkit at the end of the band’s Top of the Pops performance of the song is probably the symbolic end of the ‘Lifeblood’ era, two months after it started, and the band would rarely play tracks from it live in the future.

Nick had a pretty catastrophic reaction to it all. I remember we stayed in a hotel in Maida Vale called the Colonnade, which is where Alan Turing was born. We were there just as we got the chart result. And Nick has some weird hotel synaesthesia now: if we ever drive past it, he’s nearly sick. It felt as if the edifice was crumbling – like Richard Burton narrating a disaster movie

JDB

I was in this weird hotel in London, just staring out the window, in this really cold room, thinking, “Fucking hell – that’s it”. ‘Know Your Enemy’, in its own way, had been a disaster as well. So, we’d done two on the trot, making music to try and escape ourselves, and they’d both fucking failed

Wire

It very truly might have been it for the band. In the years following ‘Lifeblood, both JDB and Nicky Wire would release their (very decent) debut solo albums. Sean would concentrate on slaying pussy and killing cops, the fucking legend. The experience of ‘Lifeblood’, them asking the fans to embrace their гласность and being so routinely rejected, so very nearly broke the band.

But… You guys, this is a pretty fantastic album. I was one of the Legacy Fans that found the album insipid and lifeless back in 2004. For years and years the best thing I could say about the album was that the first three songs were good. When I ranked the Manics albums in order to avoid reviewing the chronically unremarkable ‘Resistance is Futile‘ back in 2018, I ranked it third bottom (and below ‘Resistance is Futile’, which was obviously me trying to be kind’) and said that it “careers off the rails pretty hideously”. But in the five years since then I’ve grown to appreciate and even admire the focus and clarity of the record. Musically. I still think that the lyrics aren’t amongst the band’s best, and that occasional glimpses of true artistic vulnerability are offset by too much vagueness and apparent lyrical placeholders. But the band (and the producers) render Wire’s writer’s block near insignificant with perhaps the greatest musical backings of the band’s career. It’s a beautiful, coherent and artistically fulfilling record that I would now rank amongst the band’s crowning achievements. If I did that list again, I’d rank it higher than ‘KYE’, ‘Send Away the Tigers‘ and even ‘This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours’. And maybe even ‘Gold Against…’?

Naaaaaaaaaaaah, come on!! That album’s my baby!!

And though the band spent year’s resenting the record and the embarrassing commercial reception, it was kind of the crumbling of the band’s structural integrity that they probably needed to properly rebuild. It encouraged them to take a break and come back more committed to their work. It also would have shown them that commercial failure isn’t actually the end of the world, and perhaps works of art for art’s sake are actually still valid? Sure, the band’s comeback album would be the wonderfully pandering (and plain wonderful) cockrock of ‘Send Away the Tigers’ – and they still had the horrendous artistic holocaust of ‘Postcards From a Young Man‘ to come – but the sonic explorations of ‘Lifeblood’ gave them impetus for their 21st century career. Without ‘Lifeblood’, it’s doubtful they’d have the confidence to release the even more sombre and reclusive ‘Rewind the Film‘, and there are clear pathways from ‘Lifeblood’ to their late career masterpiece, the synth and production heavy ‘Futurology‘. And, of course, it would open the door (Pandora’s Box??) that eventually lead to them feeling confident enough with Richey’s legacy to record ‘Journal for Plague Lovers’. ‘Lifeblood’ was essential to the band to even show them how to still continue as a band into their second and third decades.

Conquer yourself rather than the world

Descartes, quoted on the album sleeve

Thanks a lot to Flint from the Manics Song-by-Song blog, who I might have to admit knows more about the Manics than me. Might. Any quote used that isn’t linked to a source is from the album inlay.