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Manics Discourse that is constantly firing back in forth in my brain*, and the list is already looking dangerously out of date.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.

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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.

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“I’ve Been Calling it ‘Depressive Suicidal Pop Music'”; Don’t Do It Neil Wanna Know What Dragon Tastes Like

Nov 13, 2020Nov 13, 2020 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 6 Comments

You should all absolutely already know this by now, but Philadelphia’s Don’t do it, Neil was already a bit fucking special. Mabel Harper has long managed to combine a Weeknd-esque ability to document the seediness and pain behind revelry and intimacy with an exquisite understanding of how right these wrongs sometimes feel that can sometimes rival Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s grasp of sheer pop bliss. Her songs often sound like the building pleasure leading towards an orgasm while having sex with someone you really shouldn’t, but always with the underlying anxiety of the size of the mess you’ll have to clean up after your messy climax. This has been quite the opening paragraph, hasn’t it?

Worryingly, there were moments in the last couple of years involving suicidal thoughts and hospitalisations that might have led to the brilliant B/X album being her final record. However, Mabel managed to survive and process the experience, and today sees the release of her new album ‘I WANNA SEE WHAT DEATH IS LIKE‘, adding new perspectives on death, grief and mortality to an artist whose personal circumstances already made her one of the rarest perspectives in pop music. As soon as I heard of its release, I had to request an interview. Which meant only one thing.

The carrier pigeon

Yeah, I know, the handwriting’s terrible, but in my defence I asked my personal carrier pigeon (Twattori) to write it himself, so my hands are clean on this one. Unfortunately, Twattori did not survive the journey and so was unable to reach Philadelphia to deliver the message. He didn’t even survive long enough to leave the UK. In fact, he didn’t make it 50 metres from my window. Because I shot him. Seriously, did you see that handwriting? Mabel would never talk to me if she saw that. Christ, Twattori was such a prick wasn’t he?

So I just hit her up on Twitter. I was going to blow her mind with questions she’d never been asked before.

Firstly, and I’m sorry for being the 65’703rd person to ask you this question, but why ‘Don’t do it, Neil’?

In the movie Dead Poets Society, there was a kid named Neil who seemed pretty gay to me. Just a really sweet boy who discovered his love of acting only to have his passion ripped away from him by his father. Long story short, Neil kills himself during the climax of the movie, and it was really, really devastating to me. So “Don’t do it, Neil” means, “Don’t do it, Neil, don’t kill yourself.”

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