1 Motown Junk

More than many of my teenage favourites, the Manic Street Preachers have been a great band to grow up with. Their 1994 masterpiece The Holy Bible, being played in full on tour this week and next, was there for me in my youth with its fury and politics and screaming. As I grew a bit older, they were there with the more subtle beauties of Everything Must Go and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. And just as I hit some sort of angsty midlife crisis, here they are singing Let’s Go to War and Sex, Power, Love and Money on Futurology. But one of the most perfect singles the Manics ever released was one of their earliest: Motown Junk opens with a maddeningly looped sample from Public Enemy, growing in volume as it makes its intent unavoidably clear: “REVOLUTION REVOLUTION REVOLUTION”. It’s swept aside by a fusillade of stabbing, brat-punk power chords and James Dean Bradfield’s pumped up, pissed off dismissal: “Never ever wanted to be with you / The only thing you gave me was the boredom I suffocate in.” It’s a gleefully violent rejection of pop as mass opiate; as brainless, numbing spectacle. (The band, of course, actually love Motown.) It’s concise, shock-tactic brilliance is a disillusioned finger-flick to decades of musical history, and the betrayal of pop’s promise of youthful dreams. “Songs of love echo underclass betrayal / Stops your heart beating for 168 seconds / Stops your brain thinking for 168 seconds.” And what do these young upstarts from Wherethefuck, Wales, wish to put in place of the music industry’s neverending boy-meets-girl narrative? “We live in urban hell / We destroy rock’n’roll,” promises Bradfield in his parting shot. Motown Junk was perhaps too good to sit comfortably alongside anything else on the Manics’ double-disc debut, Generation Terrorists; it exists best as a piece of standalone genius, a call for an uprising that only sort of happened. As Greil Marcus characterises the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK in his book Lipstick Traces (which was a huge influence on the Manics – so much so they named their B-sides and rarities compilation after it): “The shock communicated by the music becomes a shock that something so seemingly complete could, finally, pass almost unnoticed in the world of affairs.”

2 You Love Us

A friend of mine at university used to mock my Manics obsession by dismissing them as “Bon Jovi with A-level politics”. He never seemed to understand that this was sort of the point. The band adopted the schlocky hair metal reviled by many early 90s critics because they wanted to reach as many people as possible – people like them in backwater areas who grew up listening to hard rock, not post-punk (though the latter was the band’s first true musical love). They wanted to be, they said, Guns N’ Roses meets Public Enemy – the riffs from the former, the political ire of the latter – and to sell 16m copies of their debut and then split up. Though they didn’t have November Rain-style production gloss, thanks to months spent practising the entirety of Appetite for Destruction in his bedroom, by the time the Manics’ double-disc debut came out, James Dean Bradfield certainly had the guitar skills. Generation Terrorists isn’t short on thrillingly ludicrous, deadly serious declarations of intent, and priapic Slash-style licks, but You Love Us has always had a special place in my heart. Many’s the band that rejects capitalism, consumerism, fame even, but few actively throw the devotion of their own fans back in their faces, as the Manics do here, and are loved for it. “We are not your sinners / Our voices are for real,” they spit, wrenching back control from the press, who had alternately mocked and hyped them, and the fans who were already religious in their adoration.

3 Little Baby Nothing

Few mainstream rock bands embrace feminism, gender and sexual fluidity more than the Manics (see, for example, Emily, about the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, or Born a Girl, or this photograph), who reject stock masculinity while embracing the big riffs that were so long masculinity’s preserve. For this track, they originally wanted to duet with Kylie Minogue (Nicky Wire was once beaten up in Blackwood for wearing a Kylie T-shirt), but her management rejected the suggestion. A few years later, she’d be getting her skull bashed in by Nick Cave, and the Manics would contribute songwriting to her 1997 Impossible Princess album. For this track, though, they decided to use instead the vocals of Traci Lords, an actor who’d suffered a traumatic childhood, rape and sexual abuse and went on to star in porn films. Shortly after Lords’s 18th birthday, US authorities discovered she’d been underage in nearly all of the films she’d appeared in. Lords felt used by both the porn industry and the media in the ensuing scandal, which painted her as a victim while simultaneously revelling in the prurience of the story. She began studying at the Lee Strasberg institute, and tried to break into mainstream movies, with mixed success. Her history gives the song much greater power than if Minogue had sung the part, and Lords’s voice has a pained, poppy gutsiness that brings frustrated life to the lyrics about a woman trapped in a male fantasy: “My mind is dead / Everybody loves me / Wants a slice of me / Hopelessly passive and compatible”. In the final section, Bradfield and Lords shout a fabulous self-validation: “You are pure, you are snow / We are the useless sluts that they mould / Rock’n’roll is our epiphany / Culture, alienation, boredom and despair”. It is, like Yes from The Holy Bible, a song of solidarity with the sexually exploited, and those who exploit their own sexuality because they have few other options.

The best moments of the Manics’ classically overblown second album, Gold Against the Soul, are lifted clear of the grunge-influenced rock chug by classic songwriting and melody, as on Roses in the Hospital, From Despair to Where, and most especially on La Tristesse Durera. Particularly pertinent in the year of the centenary of the first world war, it sees the band sticking true to their commitment to steer clear of love songs in favour of less tired, more important topics. The song is sung from the point of view of an impoverished veteran who has sold his medal (“it sells at market stalls, parades Milan catwalks”) and resents being wheeled out and used as an image once a year by those who cannot possibly understand what he’s been through (“I see liberals … I am just a fashion accessory”), while he deals alone with the neverending sadness of the title, borrowed from the last words of Van Gogh. The sense of anger and loss is driven to cathartic heights by a dramatic, emotive bassline, and one of James’s most brilliant, climactic guitar solos, with a monumental scale befitting the subject.

5 Faster

James has described this song, probably the most arresting and dominant single from 1994’s The Holy Bible, as sounding like “becoming”, and it’s a good description of its joyous energy, almost malevolent in its self-confidence. Very much rhythm guitarist and lyricist Richey Edward’s song (The Holy Bible being the last album he would contribute to before his disappearance in 1995; he was declared presumed dead in 2008), it celebrates the same sense of working-class pride in knowledge that A Design for Life would later eulogise: “I am stronger than Mensa / Miller and Mailer / I spat out Plath and Pinter … a truth that washes, that learned how to spell.” The song sounds like a revolution engine starting up, a fearsome exhilaration energy, with a shrieking, leaping, grating guitar line, a machine-gun staccato verse cramming in Edwards’ every word. Its darkly rushing chorus is a perfect example of how Bradfield’s music lifted Edwards’ lyrics into something that, though harsh, was also full of an almost joyous energy, a mile-a-minute thrill and a sense of limitless audacity. Despite the album’s reputation for angst, the overriding sense is one of self-awareness, strength and responsibility, the standout line being undoubtedly “self-disgust is self-obsession, honey”.

6 A Design for Life

It’s a close-run thing between this song and Pulp’s Common People for the most perfect class-war anthem of the 90s, but for me, the grandeur and beauty of A Design for Life bring it romping home. Conceived of as a riposte to what the band thought of as the appropriation and marketing of a false working-class culture by the middle classes during Britpop (they were particularly disgusted by the sneery tone of Blur’s Girls and Boys and its depiction of the 18-30 holiday crew). The song celebrates autodidacticism, taking its arresting opening line “Libraries gave us power” from a sign reading “Knowledge is power” carved over the door on a library in Newport. The Manics’ line is, in turn, now inscribed on a plaque at Cardiff Central Library, which they were asked to open. The song, with its strings giving it the right air of beauty and dignity, is a sweepingly emotive statement of anger turned inward: “I wish I had a bottle / Right here in my dirty face … We don’t talk about love / We only wanna get drunk.” Some, at the time, saw in that latter line a criticism, but Bradfield set them straight: “Part of that lyric has no irony in it at all. For a start, as a person, I’ve been in many a situation where I know not what to say but I know what to do, where I’m not articulate enough to make myself understood, and yeah, sometimes I do just fucking wanna get drunk, definitely and utterly; sometimes the most base reaction is the only one I’ve got.” A Design for Life remains a jaw-droppingly perfect song, its learning and anger, unlike The Holy Bible, not crammed in, but distilled to a precise, powerful essence. It’s music that, while making no compromises in its spirit, reached the widest audience as they first aimed to do. The band knew that after Edwards’ disappearance, they couldn’t, musically or lyrically, try to be a pale imitation of what they were before. This was the perfect comeback, clearing the way for their future (Simon Price’s book Everything, about the Manics in the 90s, is essential reading).

7 Tsunami

It was weirdly derided at the time of release, and is still the least favourite of many fans, but I get shivers every time I hear this song, probably because of the spindly, icy, treated electric sitar intro. The chorus, with its buildup of “in-between, in-between, in-between, IN BAHTWEEN” before the irresistible rush of release, is one of their all-time killers, and the lyric a prime example of Wire’s ability to hunt down particularly affecting Welsh stories as the basis of songs (see also the instrumental Hughesovka (Dreaming a City) from this year’s Futurology, based on the tale of a Welsh entrepreneur who founded a city in Ukraine, or the references to Patagonia, a place where there are still Welsh-speaking pockets thanks to 19th-century migration, in Ready for Drowning). Jean and Jennifer Gibbons, two Welsh sisters known as the Silent Twins, gave up speaking at the age of eight, communicating only with each other in a secret language. They dreamed of being writers, but were placed in Broadmoor secure hospital after a series of petty crimes. While in prison, they decided that one twin needed to die for the other to be released, to live a normal life, and to begin talking again. While the twins were being transferred to Caswell hospital in Bridgend, Jennifer died, and June subsequently began to talk; the tsunami of the title is the rush and liberation of language.

Some of the most exciting moments in the Manics’ more recent albums have been those where they allow in other, often women’s voices. And if Nicky Wire has often said that he writes from a female perspective (something Born a Girl from This Is My Truth … addresses directly), and this is one of his triumphs. Nina Persson takes up his words with force to match James in this ringing, shining boy-girl back and forth, a conversation between a person past the brink and a friend who wanted to help them. The title is the last line of a suicide note left by a friend of someone close to the group. It’s not the only suicide note to feature on eighth album Send Away the Tigers – that of Tony Hancock, whose phrase for banishing demons gives the album its name, appears on its title track: “Things went wrong too many times.” Richey Edwards had thought Hancock’s note one of the most beautiful things he’d ever read.

When I first heard Let’s Go to War played at Brixton Academy, I laughed at loud in glee. It’s fun. It’s even sort of silly. It’s a jubilant assertion of faith, the need to purify yourself through righteous anger. Backed by Welsh musicians H Hawkline, Gavin Fitzjohn and Cate Le Bon, the barked, glammy chorus, with a semi-classical guitar motif in the style of PiL’s Death Disco, was a darkly funky battle cry. It gave, that night, early warning that Futurology was not going to be just another really good Manic Street Preachers album, but instead, a genuine rebirth of a band willing to stretch their necks out again. In the lyrics, Nicky Wire shakes off doubt “all the complications / All the deviations” and rouses himself and the band to action with old-school Manics starkness: “Working-class skeletons / Lie scattered in museums / And all the false economies / Speak falsely of your dreams”.

10 Last Christmas

It’s hard to believe that at the Manics renowned December 1994 performances at the now-demolished Astoria in London, James donned a Santa hat and played Wham’s soppy festive classic. But as with their weirdly affecting acoustic cover of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, the B-side to Everything Must Go, or their take on Frankie Valli’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, the song manages to be both entirely heartfelt and undercut with a creeping bleakness, fitting it in the great tradition of using-your-paper-hat-to-dry-your-tears-in-the-corner-of-the-Christmas-party tracks. Ding-dong merrily on high!

You don’t necessarily think ‘Christmas’ when you think ‘Manic Street Preachers’, but the band who wrote Freedom of Speech Won’t Feed My Children and Mausoleum actually have their own Christmas song: 2007’s free release The Ghosts of Christmas. It’s surprising how well a bit of levity and stylistic cheese sits on them, and with Nicky Wire’s nostalgic lyric about a perfect 70s Christmas (“Hot Wheels on the dinner table / Too much sherry with mum unstable”), this is a full-speed-ahead, self-consciousness-free tribute to the deathless Christmas songs of yore. It’s Slade to the power of Wizzard with bells on and a festive trumpet solo. Just the thing to get you back in the spirit after The Intense Humming of Evil live.