Ahhhhhh... happy memories... Seen em twice now... First time was in Exeter after This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours... good gig ina fucking awful venue... Second time was in Cardiff for the Know Your Enemy tour... fucking blinding gig... one of the best I've ever been to... Yeah, the Manics are an important band for me... Fly... .
well...yes i love them, i hate to play this manics welsh boy card, but hell why not! they're a local band for me, and i mean, i grew up listening to them to a large extent, but i must say i only like the first three albums and bits from a design for life. As for anything after that their the biggest bunch of sell outs known to man...but hell im an early manics fan.
Oh....i love the manics...... Nearly Saw em at the Isle Of Wight Festie just gone, but it wasn't meant to be......:H
The thing that has always amused me about the Manics is that they are a band where greatness has always gone hand in hand with bollocks... You could argue that Generation Terrorists was several tracks too long... certainly Gold Against The Soul suffered from a couple of duff songs... but, of course, all that was swept away by the sheer aggressive balls of The Holy Bible which has gone on to be rightly recognised as one of the best albums ever... You cannot seperate Everything Must Go from the circumstances in which it was created... this is why it is so rightly seen as a triumph in the face of adversity... many bands would have crumbled under those circumstances... indeed, some fans would have preferred the romantic myth whereby the Manics would have acknowledge the unfillable gap left by Ritchie and called it a day... bollocks... this would have deprived us of one of the last great political hit singles in A Design For Life... What many "fans" seem to moan about is what they perceive to be a move towards a more mainstream sound... again, this is total bollocks... listen to Gold Against The Sould and Everything Must Go back to back and they both have that epic rock ambition... No... the problem arrives with This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours... this is the album where we see tha band trying to cope with the effects of Ritchie's dissappearance... it is such a significantly downbeat album... full of depression and self-pity but minus the anger and agression that balanced The Holy Bible... at the time, it chimed exactly with my sense of depression... if they had stopped at this point, it would have marked a sad and sorry end for the band... Thankfully, they came back with Know Your Enemy... and rediscovered a sense of spite... a sense of anger and indignation... but they will never be able to discard that sense of melancholy sadness... remember that Ocean Spray was written by James Dean Bradfield about the death of his mother from cancer... I'm interested to see what they do next... the fact that they are working with veteran Bowie producer Tony Visconti fills me with hope for something interesting... Fly... .
i saw them at leeds festival a couple of years ago and it was amazingly good...they used the opening of jump by van halen to lead into motown junk...they played little baby nothing and loves sweet exile and faster...i honestly can't remember any of the other songs tho...but they were all amazing... they're one of the bands i'm so glad i saw when i did...because otherwise i wouldn't have bothered...
