Tag: nicky wire

Overweight and Out of Date? 30 Years Ago, The Manic Street Preachers Escaped From Their History With Everything Must Go

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

Two months ago I was out having a drink in London. And someone says to me, ‘How can you be out having a drink?’ I say, ‘What the fuck are you on about?’ He says, ‘If I was you I’d be in my room chopping myself up by proxy for Richey.’ People think they know how they’d react if they were his friend. But I don’t feel that I’d been Richey’s friend at that point, because you didn’t have a clue what had happened at all. There were no equation.

JDB to the NME 1996/05/11

THE PURE MOTIVE

It’s an origin story that now seems as notorious and as recognisable as Bruce Wayne’s parents being gunned down in Crime Alley. Yaddayaddayadda, eve of American tour, yaddayaddayadda, Vauxhall Cavalier found parked on Severn Bridge, yaddayaddayadda, not seen since February 1st 1995. And if I were to map out the disappearance of Richey Edwards (the band’s co-lyricist, Minister of Propaganda, and “guitarist”) here again in detail you’d probably let out a groan at the waste of time similar to that you’d release were the next Batman film to feature of yet another scene explaining what happened to Thomas and Martha. Also, I don’t want to victim blame, Mr and Mrs Wayne, but ‘Crime Alley’? What did you think was going to happen?

The band would be forced to deal with the emotional devastation of the never solved disappearance of its central member and the members’ childhood friend for the rest of their career. Though, even by the point of that missed flight to the US, Richey Edwards had long been taken from them. ‘The Cult of Richey’ may not have been named as such yet (and, as far as I can tell, may well have first been coined by Manics bassist Nicky Wire to refer to the hysteria around Richey’s disappearance in 1996), but it really began to form following Richey’s hospitalisation just before the release of ‘The Holy Bible‘. And then that album was released – with its largely Richey-penned lyrics that perfectly chronicled the overwhelming power of everything on our fragile and sensitive souls – and it was like, no, he’s ours now, you can’t have him. Even before Richey’s disappearance, fans would write into NME and Melody Maker expressing how deeply they understood his condition. Even suggesting that, maybe, only they know how to save him? And what was all Richey’s self-harm and self-destruction if not our saviour offering up his own sacrifices to atone for our sins??

The problem with being as talented as any artist in history at giving voice to the inner torments of humanity, is that people are going to start believing in real parasocial connections. How could they describe my feelings so well if we weren’t already so close??

But the problem with artists is that they have an infinitely frustrating tendency to move on and evolve far quicker than their audience.

ALL YOU SEE IS MORE AND MORE JUNK

27 Clipse: Let God Sort Em Out

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

This is culturally inappropriate.

Wow. I am so impressed. This is quite an astonishing achievement after all this time. It’s actually really refreshing and – dare I say it? – inspirational for someone so long in the game still able to surprise us. The fact that I – Alexander Franchise-Palmer – can still highly rate this album despite the very public feuds that Pusha T and I have had in the past, is an incredible show of maturity and commitment to my unbiased reporting. Maybe there’s still hope left for us all?

“a website”: I have a name, you know??

And by showing how I’m actually the bigger man and appreciating how some things in life are some important than silly little rap beefs (which Pusha’s and mine most definitely was), this all kind of means that I won the feud, doesn’t it?

So, erm, yeah, suck it, Pusha T, choke on my hairy balls.

you were checkin’ boxes, I was checkin’ my mentions

2025’s New Gold Star Artists (and a couple of RIPs)

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

Sigh, I guess I should explain the rules again? To be honest, if this is one of your first times reading The Most Trusted Voice in Music then you really should start with the first post from December 1st 2014 and then read through the next 791 entries (or “chapters”, as I like to think of them) until you’re ready to read this post. Necessary Evil might be oversimply referred to as a ‘Blog’, but it’s actually more of an epic tale – a poem, really – that only sampling parts of risks lessoning its artistic impact. What’s happened to this generation’s attention spans?

OK, the criteria for qualifying for the Necessary Hall of Fame as a Gold Star Artist:

  • At least three albums
  • All albums featured on the Necessary Evil best of year countdown since 2007

There were three new Legit Bosses crowned on the the 2024 list, and here’s my ranking of their three albums so far, which will soon be added to the ongoing Hall of Fame.

And, excitingly, for the first time this year we have two artists that have brought great shame on their careers, their legacies, and their entire families by dropping out of the Gold Star Artist Hall of Fame. Both (predictably) Soccer Mommy and (perhaps surprisingly) Illuminati Hotties released records in 2024 that weren’t considered good enough for the end of year lists, so they are forever banished to the dreaded Ex-Gold Star Graveyard. There, they are both feted to rot for eternity. A ridiculously harsh ‘punishment’ for the supposed crime of releasing a record that I didn’t think was quite as good as their previous three+? Especially tough considering Soccer Mommy’s previous three albums were all released before the list shortened to 40 albums and all finished outside the top 40, so could arguably be being punished for remaining as good as they ever were?

Yes.

Sorry, SJW cuck snowflakes, take your woke ideas of fairness and ‘not treating people like shit’ back to Libtardia. This is Necessary Evil. We hit harder here.

KAPOW! CRRAACK! ZGRUPPP!

The Decline and Lull: The Manics Grow Dull Gracefully on ‘Critical Thinking

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

The Manic Street Preachers’ fifteenth album is one that is extremely easy to appreciate, so long as you’re ready to accept an entire trolley worth of caveats.

Firstly, this is the band’s 15th [FIFTEENTH] album. Few bands with any kind of success ever get this far, never mind a band that started out already preplanning their self-destruction, and coming 34 years after a debut-album the band promised would be their last. And, hey, for a group of three men in their mid fifties this ‘Critical Thinking’ is a great accomplishment. My colleague at work recently had her 50th birthday, and would she be able to produce an album of this quality? Highly unlikely.

Imposter syndrome, fuck that!

Legit Bosses: The 143 Best Songs of 2024

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

Hey, look, I’m getting better at this. Recently, I went on a massive cull of the 2024’s greatest songs to make this list as tight and as concise as possible, so that it would be sure to represent the absolute best of the best and would be as brief and easy to write as possible. And look! There are only one hundred and forty three tracks this year!! That’s a whole seventeen less tracks than last year! This post is going to be a breeze!

spoiler: this song is going top five. It INVENTED GAY POP, show some respect

OK, three weeks laternow, and I’m almost done! This post will be longer than most books you read, but to be fair most of the ‘books’ you read are Dr Who fanfic.

So, yeah, these songs are really good. And they get better as the list goes on. That’s how these lists work.

Here’s the YouTube playlist, which I know is the only thing most of you care about.

How much of an intro do you need, seriously?

A/79/232

#19 elbow: AUDIO VERTIGO

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

We live in a troubling age

Falling leaves in an unearthly autumn light
Become the frame
And chip my curse away
Above the waves, you can still see where we drown
No looking down
Oblivion’s oblivion

Her to the Earth

So, let’s quickly get everyone up to speed. Don’t worry, we’re only going to go as far back as the Six Day War in 1967, but – who knows – perhaps we’ll talk about earlier events with similar players later in this list. In 1967 though, when we begin our tale, the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had been handed information by the Soviet Union that Israel (hi there!) were gathering troops in preparation to invade Syria. Nasser phoned up the Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and was like “Hey, that’s our mate, can you not?” and Eshkol was like “We’re not even, bro!” so Nasser was like “Yeah right mate, I’m just going to expel all these United Nations Emergency Forces that are here to ensure our 1949 Armistice Agreements” and then Eshkol was like “Na-uuuuuuhhhh!!” but then Nasser was just like “Er, yeah-uh! And also, you can’t use our Strait of Tiran anymore” so that made Eshkol go all red and like scream “Dude! That’s where we get all our stuff from! And that would totally be an act of war!”. Then Nasser did it anyway, because YOLO. Israel bombed the fucking shit out of Egypt, taking the entire Senai Peninsula, plus Gaza as a little souvenir trinket, but I imagine that’s the last we’ll be hearing about that tiny strip of land. Israel warned King Hussein of Jordan not to enter the war, but they also bombed the shit out of Jordan’s airbases on the first day of the war. So Jordan gave troops to support Egypt and Israel bombed the shit out of Jordan, capturing the West Bank and ensuring Jerusalem was in Israel for the first time. The combined Arab country losses were around 15’000, Israel less than a thousand. Israel also killed 15 UN peacekeepers – coz Israel gonna Israel! – and 34 American soldiers, because they’re the only country allowed to do that apparently.

Oh, and around 413’000 Palestinians were of course expelled or killed in this process, but that’s barely worth mentioning. For Israel it was just Monday.

Ilham Ahmed Hammad Khattab

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

~ Lex Leeson ~ 10 Comments

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.

this is fine

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.

i’ll mention the album soon i promise

Legit Bosses – The 160 Best Songs of 2023

~ Lex Leeson ~ 30 Comments

In their 1972 book ‘Psychology of the Arts‘, Hans and Shulamith Kreitler tried to explain the reasoning behind why certain people react in certain ways to certain pieces of art. However, they deemed that to fully explain it, your knowledge of each person would need to “extend over an immeasurably large range of variables, which would include not only perceptive, cognitive, emotional and other personality characteristics, but also biographical data, specific personal experiences, past encounters with art, and individual memories and associations”. Sounds like a lot of work, right? Well, luckily, I’m here to just tell you what the best music of 2023 was, so all that effort behind your own personal psychosis can be sidestepped altogether. Think of it as my new year’s present.

no spoilers on what number this particular classic finished

And there’s one hundred and sixty this year. Maybe one hundred and sixty one. Because there was a lot of great tunes released in 2023. While limiting the Necessary Evil list to just 40 albums still meant there was space for at least one ‘meh’ album and one absolute stinker, over the past week I’ve actually had to really edit this list down to prevent it being ridiculous. And yet here we are: 160. Maybe 161.

I’m also going to be giving shout outs to particular golden moments in certain songs – similar to what I did in 2018 – and for each of those I’m going to be using a picture of one of the greatest moments in the short history of All Elite Wrestling, because… well… I get the horrible feeling that company is cooked and I hope to look back on this list in five years time and laugh at how pessimistic I was.

Can I finish this before 2024 and maybe have some days off before I go back to work?? Let’s seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

[Edit: No. No I cannot. Not even close.

You’ve got some playlists though, will that make you happy?? Here’s the countdown on Spotify and on YouTube, minus the unavailable songs on whatever platform]

I REMEMBER NOTHING, SO THERE’S NOTHING TO REGRET