Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on December 2010
When Metropolis spoke to Carl Barat a few weeks back, he talked about, “stepping away from the big guitars” to create the music for his new solo album. Writing the songs on piano and using a musical template of balladry refracted through French cabaret, classical strings and one or two other genres, the album was a big departure from the typical rock stylings of previous groups The Libertines and Dirty Pretty Things.
But making an album and going on stage are two different things. Guitar bands are ubiquitous for a reason, and that reason is ease of deployment. The instrument offers rough-and-ready control and a certain element of postural security that, say, someone with a harp, glockenspiel or theremin doesn’t enjoy. So, when Carl Barat takes the stage for his support slot with the Manic Street Preachers, it’s not tinkling ivories and gypsy violins to the fore, but rather the old road-tested format of guitars, bass and drums.
Not that he’s abandoned his recent change of direction. That wouldn’t be possible, as tonight’s show is all about the tracks from the recent album. Just to prove it, there are a couple of string instruments stage right, and a switch on the Casio at the back that uncorks the sound of a grand piano from a circuit somewhere. Still, it’s definitely the old rock-format instruments that have the upper hand as “Carve My Name” crawls out from under a squashing bass.
Next song “The Magus,” with its spacier mix of elements, comes across better. Barat’s voice works hard but effectively to navigate the different moods, twists and turns that the song unleashes, while former Dirty Pretty Things stalwart and Klaxons journeyman guitarist Anthony Rossomando provides tasteful, understated promptings on the six-string.
Next up, the catchy torch ballad “So Long My Lover” gets off to a good start but then falls into a plodding rock groove, as does “She’s Something,” a bright, effervescent song with an element of fragility. Halfway through, its brittle brilliance gives out like a light bulb and it loses its way. This underlines the problems of delivering songs that aren’t really rock with what is–apart from a few trimmings–essentially a rock format.
The tensions this creates between the Rock Barat and the Non-Rock Barat are all blissfully swept away when the group ends a short set by plunging into the only song not off the new album, the jaunty, bustling Libertines classic “Don’t Look Back into the Sun.” A sparkling, streamlined and improved version, with great guitar lines, sends the band out on a high.
When they emerged shortly before the pyramids were built (it now seems), the Manics were predicated on the Sex Pistols template of a shambolic, self-destructive teen band–with slashed arms, bleeding mascara, and thrilling live shows–that would disappear in a puff of anarchic smoke. The message was, “If you don’t see them now, it’ll be too late.”
Of course, Richey Edwards—who dominated their image if not their music—fulfilled that nihilistic promise when he mysteriously disappeared in 1995, presumably drowned by jumping into the Bristol Channel. But the three remaining members of the Manics have proved to be a solid, long-running proposition. If, as Japanese urban legend has it, Sony puts a timer in its products to make them expire just past warranty, they obviously forgot to do so with this lot.
The truth is the remaining trio are as hard as nails, especially the band’s focal point and musical powerhouse, James Dean Bradfield. The vocalist and lead guitarist has the chunky, powerful build of the miners of the Manics’ Welsh homeland, as does his cousin Sean Moore, who fills the drum stool. One could quite easily imagine them in some imaginary Welsh village of the past, donning pit helmets and taking the elevator down to the coalface.
But rather than Stakhanovite discipline, it is the romantic ideal of rock-and-roll destruction and wasted youth that still defines the band’s image. When they emerge at Studio Coast, the left side of the stage (the Richey side) is left empty, while on the right side there’s Nicky Wire. The tall, gangly, cross-dressing bass player—obviously a bad fit in the coal mine of that imaginary village—comes across more as the sinister minister from the chapel (with a not-so-secret fetish for feather boas), and, indeed, whatever lyrical message or ideology is appended to their songs is mainly his doing.
They kick off with “You Love Us,” a song from their 1992 debut album Generation Terrorists. Punchy and uproarious, the first impression is of a tight, hard-working band, keen to put in a good shift. You almost feel you’re at the coalface again.
Not for nothing did the Independent’s music critic, avowed Manics fanatic Simon Price, refer to them as the last great British working class band.
The ascendant verve of “Your Love Alone is Not Enough” heightens the mood before they launch into early classic “Motorcycle Emptiness,” with its incendiary yet strangely reassuring riff and feedback wail.
After this initial climax, they change gear with the rather plodding “The End of Love” and the erratic melody of the awkwardly named “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time.” The latter song, with its blank verse lyrics and pseudo-intellectual musings, shows the Manics’ readiness to squeeze un-rock sentiments and un-roll phrases into rock songs, a bit like watching Nicky Wire wander down a tunnel dug by Bradfield and Moore. Sometimes this creates something interesting, sometimes just a lot of bruised brain matter.
“Roses in the Hospital” is not exactly “Welcome to the Jungle” either, with its overwrought, angst-ridden lyrics, but the Sixth Form poetry is launched at us with full conviction by Bradfield over a funky riff that leads to some Slash-like guitar pyrotechnics. It’s almost as if he feels pricked by the over-intellectualized lyrics to show that the Manics are actually a straight-forward G N’ R-style rock band, and not Sylvia Plath. It’s this tension between the down-to-earth, straight rocking Bradfield and the over-read sophistry of Nicky Wire that makes the Manics still such an interesting band after nearly two decades in the limelight.
Next song “This is Yesterday” veers dangerously close to the saccharine lilt of “Sorrow,” a well-known song from the ’60s, once covered by David Bowie.
However, the audience seems inclined to forgive this plagiarism, sensing that the “boyos” are only getting the wind back in the sails for the next big push. This is “Everything Must Go,” the title track of the 1996 album that segued so well into the Britpop mood of the mid-’90s and greatly widened the band’s popularity. Combining an elegiac vibe with a sweeping expansiveness, the epic pop-rock goes down well.
A kind of mutual comfort zone has now been established between band and audience.
Recent ballad “Some Kind of Nothingness,” the punchy pop of “You Stole the Sun From My Heart,” and the chugging pleasantry of “Ocean Spray” unfurl on the sunlit uplands of the concert, as the audience graze on the music like a herd of contented sheep.
Well-worked versions of “La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)” and “Suicide is Painless” a.k.a. “The Theme from Mash” pass the same way, adding to the creeping mood of complacency, despite Bradfield’s soulful vocal, conveying tenderness and pain. Sensing this, the guitarist tries to rock it up with some more Slash-like guitar breaks. But whenever the Manics feel they’re losing their edge, they can always invoke the spirit of Richey Edwards, and they do this on the next song.
“I remember Club Citta nearly twenty years ago,” Nicky Wire tells the audience by way of introduction. “I think of the neon loneliness. I think of Mr. Richey Edwards.”
The punkish squall of “Motown Junk” then blows through the venue, bringing back the febrile excitement of their early days. Right on its heels comes one of the Manics’ true classics, “If You Tolerate This,” with its soaring, evocative melody and oddly ironic undertow. These two very different songs in such sharp conjunction together produce an almost chemical reaction in the audience, which erupts.
The next few songs show similar but less successful attempts to juxtapose the group’s punkish, incendiary roots with their more mellow pop sensibilities. The speed-metal of “Faster” is ironically dedicated to support act Carl Barat, while “Golden Platitudes,” a track that Bradfield says was written for the UK general election earlier this year, is a lovely song, but one that Susan Boyle will probably cover in the near future. As he wails, “Where did it all go wrong?” over the kind of sing-along anthemic chord changes that Oasis were masters of in their glory days, I reach for my imaginary glow stick.
A slightly tired-sounding version of “Tsunami,” relying a little too heavily on effects from the support musicians, tells us that we’re near the end, and of course the Manics don’t do encores. Nicky Wire then describes Bradfield as a mix of Slash and Steve Jones before the band say goodnight and launch into a finishing-post version of “A Design For Life.” But would Slash and Steve Jones ever start a song with a lyric like “Libraries gave us power”? Of course not. That’s what makes the Manics so unique and precious.
