Manic Street Preachers have opened up about their hopes to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their classic fifth album ‘This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours’.

The No.1 album from 1998 contained the huge singles ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’, ‘You Stole The Sun From My Heart’, ‘Tsunami’ and ‘The Everlasting’. The record went gold in its first week, and saw the Manics become an arena band – headlining Glastonbury and V Festival in its wake, as well their legendary New Year’s Eve gig into the year 2000 at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium.

Now, after announcing their new album ‘Resistance Is Futile’ with lead single ‘International Blue‘, bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire has told NME about their plans to honour the album, after they did the same with the seminal ‘The Holy Bible’ and ‘Everything Must Go’ in recent years. The band re-released both records, as well as playing them in full on tour.


“It’s 20 years of ‘This Is My Truth’, so we might do something around that,” Wire told NME. “Only because we have so much stuff that’s never been heard. In my archive, that’s the one that takes up the most space. I don’t know about gigs, but there’s just so much stuff that no one has ever heard. It’s our biggest selling album.”

He continued: “There’s a brilliant unreleased version of ‘Tsunami’. The original demo of ‘Tolerate’ is actually so crap, that it’s brilliant. To think that Rob Stringer came down and saw that one as a first single, then we’d go on to sale three and a half million albums around the world with a lyric like that. I still wonder how we did it.”

Asked about their plans for their upcoming UK arena tour, Wire added: “We’ll play Some more oddities. We did the Q Awards and chucked in ‘A Song For Departure’ and that went down really well, so there will be a few ‘Lifeblood’-ers in there, that’s for sure. James is desperate to get ‘Prologue To History’ in the set. I did tell him there are about 5,000 words in that song so his lung capacity needs to be up.

“There are going to be quite a few nice surprises. ‘Slash N’ Burn’ is going to go back in. Maybe a few more from ‘This Is My Truth’ too, as it is 20 years. Maybe we’ll throw in a few slightly different ones from that.”


“On the single and the whole album, there are a lot of mini tributes to things that make your life feel a little bit better,” Wire told NME about new album ‘Resistance Is Futile’. “Rather than my internalised misery, I tried to put a sense of optimism into the lyrics by writing about things that we find really inspiring.”

He continued: “I wouldn’t go as far as to call it ‘escapist’, but it does feel like we’re building our own world. It goes back to the idea of when we started the band with us four insulating ourselves and germinating ideas. It’s not about purposefully switching yourself off from the world around you, but just trying to find inspiration. Otherwise you just get swamped in a sea of total negativity – which is fine. It’s not like we haven’t done that before.”

Check back at NME soon for more of our interview with Manic Street Preachers

‘Resistance Is Futile’ will be released via Columbia/Sony on April 6, 2018 – and can be pre-ordered here.

Manic Street Preachers tour dates and tickets

The band’s upcoming UK arena tour dates are below. Tickets are available here.

23 April NEWCASTLE, Metro Radio Arena

25 April GLASGOW, The SSE Hydro Arena

27 April BIRMINGHAM, Arena

28 April MANCHESTER, Arena

1 May LLANDUDNO, Venue Cymru Arena

2 May LEEDS, First Direct Arena

4 May LONDON, The SSE Arena Wembley

5 May CARDIFF, Motorpoint Arena