I take little pleasure in writing what follows, because the Sisyphean task of maintaining this idiotic blog is only endurable to me if (a) I am thereby encouraged to explore new music that I’ve never listened to before, or (b) I write about something terrible that I can gleefully eviscerate. Manic Street Preachers’ 1996 album Everything Must Go doesn’t fall into either of these categories. I know it, I like it, but more than that, it’s one of those half-dozen records that I first heard as an impressionable teenager, and which had an enduring influence on my musical taste, identity, fashion sense, hairstyle, layout of my bedroom, neurochemistry, choice of A Levels, choice of career, choice of my children’s names, choice of which bottle of red wine I will now proceed to open, and the venue for my wake. But as today marks 30 years since the album was released, I will reluctantly suspend my usual poison-penned animus against life itself and dutifully sing its praises.
For the uninitiated; Manic Street Preachers are a Welsh rock band formed in 1986, in some unpronounceable post-industrial shit tip near Cardiff where everyone hates Thatcher. They started out like all snotty aspiring adolescent poets; wearing makeup, dressing in leopard-print tights, ostentatiously and publicly reading Camus, and playing mortifying ramshackle punk with “political” lyrics for the entertainment of hostile or indifferent audiences in smoky, beer-soaked working men’s clubs. My 16-year-old scrote of a self was entranced by this origin story, because it mirrored my own experience of growing up as a weedy but confrontational pseudo-intellectual in the north-west of England, in a way that de rigueur American metal never could.
Despite their unpropitious beginnings, the Manics had two aces up their sleeves; a certified guitar genius in the form of diminutive Welsh troglodyte James Dean Bradfield; and scrawny, tormented, bookish lyricist Richey Edwards. They recorded a couple of affectedly literate alternative rock albums, but then, inevitably, they fucked up; Richey went off the rails and descended into alcoholism, self-harm, insomnia, anorexia, drug abuse, and buying Pantera records, before sensationally disappearing without a trace from a London hotel in February 1995, leaving the lads without their figurehead and ideological driving force.
But like Joy Division after Ian Curtis checked out, the Manics duly reinvented themselves, though in this case, they kept the name. Their final album with Richey, 1994’s The Holy Bible, hadn’t made it onto many Gender Reveal Party playlists, to say the very least. It comprised hostile Welsh grunge, Dirt but with lyrics written by a demented social sciences postgrad in a rundown Newport outpatient clinic. Death camps, prostitutes, eating disorders, “dying in the summertime” – you name it, it festers somewhere on this mordant suicide note of a record, which surely represented a significant challenge to Epic’s exasperated marketing department.
When they gathered in late 1995 to start work on a follow up, however, it soon became apparent that the Manics sans Richey had morphed into an entirely different band. Everything Must Go is nothing like its predecessor. This is obvious from the first seconds of the opener, “Elvis Impersonator, Blackpool Pier”; the sound of waves lapping luxuriantly, soothingly, if hauntingly, against the shores of, I presume, sunny Blackpool. What follows is cacophonous, of course, but the vibe is an unmistakable departure; furiously life-affirming, rather than the icy belligerence of The Holy Bible. There are melodies; there are violins; there’s even a harp; and the voice is that of a cherubic Welsh choirboy rather than a barking Soviet commissar come to drive you and your cowering family into a collective farm at gunpoint.
Overall, then, the mood had abruptly shifted to string-drenched mid-90s Britpop, from the very same psychopaths who, just two years before, had gone on Top of the Pops wearing balaclavas and singing “man kills everything” to an assemblage of terrified teenagers in Kylie Minogue t-shirts. You could hear it in their lyrics (songs about the Yorkshire Ripper, no; songs about missing your wife on tour, yes), and see it in their apparel (military fatigues and spray-painted t-shirts, out; casual sportswear and Kangol hats, in). But above all, it was observable in their newfound commercial success. For some reason, songs with opening lines like “I am an architect, they call me a butcher” had never quite managed to crack the charts, whereas “A Design for Life”, the rousing new single, went straight to number 2.
All of this was utterly fascinating and beguiling to me as a spotty 16-year-old, but why? After all, Everything Must Go, as the name suggests, is ultimately the story of freak outsiders who, divested of their tortured talisman, recorded a multiplatinum mainstream rock album. What the cool kids call “selling out”, basically, which was a crime against taste in the mascara-laden eyes of my contrarian, combat boots-wearing teenage self. And yet, something about it connected with me in a way that the band’s previous, nihilistic offerings hadn’t and couldn’t. Maybe it was because, deep down, I like pop, so I appreciated the melodies and the fact that the songs got to breathe a bit, rather than cramming PhD-length essays about the breakdown of Yugoslavia into three-minute post-punk screeds.
Ultimately, though, I do believe that the clinching factor was something about the newly pastoral and elegiac lyrics, which were mostly written by disconcertingly tall bassist and amateur cricketer Nicky Wire, in the absence of his self-flagellating bestie. Wire’s words spoke to me because, though I’d never quite felt at home as a spiky-haired, lipstick-wearing gothic Firestarter, here at last was a Britpop luminary with a poison tongue and nifty sunglasses who defiantly celebrated not sex-and-drugs-and-rock’n’roll, or even grungily fashionable self-destruction, but rather banally suburban virtues of domesticity, solitude, and a weary willingness to carry on in the face of loss.
Everything Must Go thus allowed me to reframe my shameful conservatism as something cool, even combative. As Friedrich Nietzsche (or was it Frederick Durst?) so eloquently put it, “the great epochs of our lives come when we find the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.” Songs like “Enola / Alone” and “Mr. Carbohydrate” gave my perplexed 16-year-old self permission to do precisely that, and I will love them for it until the day I die.
Rating: * * * * *
Standout track: “Enola / Alone”