Stitches and Wounds, Doctored Divinity: Manic Street Preachers’ 100 Greatest Songs (2026 Edition)

Hello! It’s us again!

*taken minutes before JDB retired to the lounge with a cigar and a cognac*

Five years ago, serious illness and a COVID-indulged lighter workload allowed me time to complete perhaps this blog’s central achievement when I named and shamed the 100 Greatest Manic Street Preachers songs ever. Well five years is a long time in the heated Manics Discourse that is constantly firing back in forth in my brain*, and the list is already looking dangerously out of date. The petard that I have chosen to hoist myself upon is doing the entire list again. Kinda…

I say “Kinda” because the list won’t be radically different. There are nineteen new entries, occasionally representing the two Manics albums released since the last run down (‘The Ultra Vivid Lament‘ did technically come out before the list was finished, though there was only time to include the album’s lead single Orwellian at #93), and also older tracks that I’ve rediscovered. A lot of the written entries will be the same as they were in 2021 – because, come on now, I’m not going to mess too much with perfection – though there will be a handful of edits, often based on information revealed in Keith Cameron’s new bible ‘168 Songs of Hatred and Failure‘, released in 2025. Some big songs miss out this time: some moxey of me to quote The Masses Against the Classes in the opening line then not even include the silly yet lovable thrash-along that finished #66 last time. With space on the list at a premium, I’ve also decided not to include covers in the 2026 edition, so farewell Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel (#68) and – tragically – Umbrella (#37).

*““I am nothing, but I must be everything”*

(*the doctors actually consider it a serious enough mental issue that I need to wear tags and report to the police every Wednesday. Or maybe that’s because of all those articles about Palestine. Or the dick pics I sent to that primary school message board. Difficult to pinpoint)

Crucially, for the first time, every Manics album will be represented. Yes, even that one. At different points during the 2021 countdown and the statistical breakdown, I described 2010’s ‘Postcards From a Young Man‘ as an “audio abortion”; “an embarrassingly overproduced, butter upon bacon mess”; “an artistic and logistical disaster”; “artistic cancer”; a “genocide of inventiveness”; and “worse than Hitler”, and suggested that upon releasing the album the band “shit the bed so hard that they suffered a pelvic organ prolapse”. I, of course, stand proudly by all of those statements and have just relished the opportunity to repeat them. However, although the album as a whole is still an abomination which should never be spoken of… a couple of songs made it in this time… It’s not even the album with the least tracks, I don’t know what to believe anymore.

So you’ll read about songs from ‘GT’ (‘Generation Terrorists’), ‘GATS’ (‘Gold Against the Soul’), ‘THB’ (‘The Holy Bible’), ‘EMG’ (‘Everything Must Go’), ‘TIMTTMY’ (‘This is My Truth Tell Me Yours’), ‘KYE’ (‘Know Your Enemy’), ‘LB’ (‘Lifeblood’), ‘SATT’ (‘Send Away the Tigers’), ‘JFPL’ (‘Journal for Plague Lovers’), ‘PFAYM’ (‘Postcards From a Young Man’); ‘RTF’ (‘Rewind the Film’), ‘RIF’ (‘Resistance is Futile’), ‘TUVL’ (‘The Ultra Vivid Lament’), ‘CT’ (‘Critical Thinking’) and ‘Futurology’. Yeah, I always spell that last one out in full. Calling it ‘F’ just seems naff. Especially for an album I’d give an ‘A’ to ammi right lads?!?!?! We have a lot of fun here.

*L-R: Nicky, JDB, Sean, Richey (lying down)*

Similarly, I’ll often be referring to the band members far too casually as ‘Sean’ (Moore, drummer), ‘Richey’ (Edwards/James, ex lyricist), ‘JDB’ (James Dean Bradfield, singer and guitarist) and ‘Nicky’ (Wire, bass player and lyricist). Or sometimes ‘Wire’. I really never settle on what I’m calling Nicky Wire, which I like to think reflects my conflicted opinions on the guy in the big old twenty-two-six.

If you don’t have time for the next almost fifty thousand words, here’s the Spotify playlist and here’s all the songs in order on YouTube.

And, er, you might wanna bookmark this page – motherfucker’s gonna be long. Your next 500 trips to the toilet are sorted.

Continue reading →

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

Apr 28, 2024Apr 29, 2024 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 11 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.

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

Love Their Mess and Adore Their Failures: Manic Street Preachers’ 100 Greatest Songs

Sep 27, 2021May 3, 2025 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 29 Comments

Right, holy shit, so am I actually doing this…?

The Manic Street Preachers are the greatest rock band ever. That’s not an opinion, it’s a conclusion that I’ve reached and am now saying it loudly and not listening to any dissenting voices, which in 2021 counts as a ‘fact’.

Their greatness is… complicated… and not easy to explain in a simple intro to a blog post… These 100 tracks aren’t necessarily the greatest songs ever. Even as a pathetically dedicated Manics stan*, even I would argue that they’ve only ever released one indisputable, stone cold classic record from front to back (see if you can guess which one after you read the list!). They may have supernatural control over melodies and how best to ensure a chorus hits just there, but at the end of the day they’re just a rock band. They have never really challenged the very boundaries of music, never pushed things forward or necessarily introduced anything new sonically. I would argue that only one of their albums is truly challenging and experimental, rather than just being a break from what the band usually produce (yeah, it’s the same album…). I mean, Jesus, they once shamelessly released a song including the lyric “The world is full of refugees/They’re just like you and just like me“. That’s unforgivably bad, isn’t it? They can’t come back from that, artistically.

*“You stand there and you think about what you’ve done”*

(*I may occasionally use cool, groovy, young person lingo like ‘stan’ so you think I’m a hip young gunslinger. Not, y’know, old enough to be a Manics fan)

I’m not able to explain their magic here, but over the next one hundred (!) entries you’ll hopefully all have a better idea. It’s not as dominated by the 90’s as I was worried it might be, and every album is represented (apart from one. Because their tenth album is worse than Hitler). I’ve been wanting to find the time to do this for ages, partially inspired by the great What is Music podcast covering their entire discography and reminding me of how many big veiny stonkers this band had bulging out of their collective musical swimming trunks. They’re talking about Muse on that podcast now, a band for morons, so you only need to listen to the last season. My major blind spot is I don’t think they’ve done a decent b-side since 2001. Now, I’m sure I’m wrong, so please correct my ignorance in the comments. Tell me how wrong I am. Post your top tens. Your top hundreds. The Manic Street Preachers’ fan community is one of the greatest in the world, and no other band are as connected with their fanbase and feed off their adoration as much as The Manics. So let’s celebrate that by calling me a fat slut in the comments because I didn’t choose Little Baby Nothing.

If you don’t have time for such nonsense, here’s the Spotify playlist and here’s all the songs in order on YouTube.

And, er, you might wanna bookmark this page – motherfucker’s gonna be long. Your next 500 trips to the toilet are sorted.

Continue reading →

82 Ash Koosha: ‘Return 0’

Dec 1, 2018Dec 1, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

The human race is kind of resigned to losing all of it’s jobs to robots. In their March 2017 paper, ‘Robots and Jobs: Evidence from the UK Labour Market‘, Acemoglu and Restrepo found that the addition of one more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment to population ratio by about 0.18 – 0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25 – 0.5 percent.

Of course, I wouldn’t be the widely lauded and routinely celebrated investigative journalist that I am if I didn’t investigate their findings and see if such statistics could be replicated in the UK job market. Unfortunately, Manchester Refugee Support Network only employs 5 people, so in order to get a proper reading on effect on one robot per one thousand employees I had to measure the effect of

one two hundredth of a robot on our work. I think. There’s really no way of knowing exactly what the maths are, but that’s what I did so it has to be correct.

It’s hard to truly say what would represent 0.5% of a robot, but my contacts in the robots industry* tell me that equates to roughly a robot eyeball. With this in mind, I introduced a fully automated eyeball to the office at MRSN. Well, I initially assumed it was a fully automatic robotic eyeball, but later examinations have suggested it may in fact be closer to a chocolate ball wrapped in tinfoil. Again, there really is no way of actually knowing, but talks conducted with my contacts in the scientific research industry* have confirmed that this trivial matter should have had no effects on the findings.

Continue reading “82 Ash Koosha: ‘Return 0’” →

92 Kate Tempest: Let Them Eat Chaos

Oct 17, 2017Oct 23, 2017 ~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

In Hamburg in 1834, a young army officer, Baron von Ropp, was attempting to woo the uncommonly beautiful Countess Lodoiska, the green eyed widow of a Polish general, but was wary that the handsome young army officer Baron von Trautmasdorf posed a serious challenge for the beauty’s affections. Because this was the early 19^th century, and history is fucking brilliant, Von Ropp felt the best way to lesson the threat of his rival was to slander his good name. Which he did. By writing a poem. About his moustache

+1

Continue reading “92 Kate Tempest: Let Them Eat Chaos” →