Richey Edwards on the two core philsophies of the Manic Street Preachers
The Manic Street Preachers were a band out of time. A group neither ahead of nor before their time, because I can’t imagine any period of British rock being an ideal fit for their Clash meets Guns N’ Roses via the Communist Manifesto sound. Perhaps if their debut album, Generation Terrorists, had dropped in 1985, seven years earlier than its actual release date, it could have been the bridge between Red Wedge and the booming Sunset Strip metal scene.
Honestly, though, that would involve the early Manic Street Preachers, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, wanting to be part of a club that would have them as a member, which was always unlikely. The band always tried their hardest not to fit in with anyone, and thus, no real scene took them on as their own. Too heavy for shoegaze, too poppy for grunge, too weird for Britpop, too clever for indie sleaze. Yet despite this, the band have been thriving for almost their entire career.
Thus, we get to the core paradox at the heart of the band. They have an unerring belief in the power of rock ‘n’ roll, just not anyone else’s ability to do it right. They’re the band that most sums up that old adage that inside every cynic is a disappointed idealist, and no one sums this up better than their beloved, dearly missed lyricist Richey Edwards.
Edwards was the beating heart of the Manic Street Preachers before his disappearance. He may have never strummed an actually plugged-in guitar in his life, but he was in charge not only of the lyrics but of the band’s message and the way in which they delivered it. He was in charge of everything to do with the band’s image and presentation and for a band that intimately knew the importance of looks, that was saying a hell of a lot.
The two core philosophies of the Manic Street Preachers
For a band with as much to say as the Manic Street Preachers, it made a certain degree of sense that they had a member acting as their director of communications. Who didn’t just do interviews on the band’s behalf but relished doing them, and relished communicating subversive, radical ideas to a young, switched-on readership of pop obsessives.
The best example of this comes from an interview Richey gave to Sylvia Patterson of the band’s beloved Smash Hits, where Edwards ended up pretty definitively defining the philosophical core of the band more or less by accident. Spurred on by nothing more than a fairly innocent question about how Richey recuperates after a heavy night of drinking.
Richey responds: “Well, the first thing I do every day is I wake up, dial nought for room service, go ‘vodka & orange’, put the phone down, lie there ’til it comes, put the TV on and think about our two philosophies of life: ‘there must be more to life than this’ and ‘it’s all fucking bollocks’.” In facetiously answering a question about hangover cures, Edwards defined not only the philosophical core of the band, but something even deeper than that.
He defined the everlasting battle that rages at the heart of the Manic Street Preachers. One that would rage on long after he’d depart. Those two contrasting urges to let everything burn because there are people who deserve that, but also to make things better, because there are people who deserve that too. Long may that battle continue, and let’s hope that other people learn to join that battle too, both in music and beyond.
