4 Real
interview w/ Manic Street Preachers, 15 May 1991
Steve Lamacq: The main thing is, that I think in certain instances the image thing takes over from everything else.
Richey Edwards: Yeah, but there are so many bands with things to say who got ignored because they were prepared to almost...not wallow in the shadows, but not make a big deal of the way they look visually. Y'know, and it really is important, because in rock music and pop music, it's always been vital the way people look. And when bands, like, dress down, or make no attempt at an image, you just get bypassed. You find yourself in a subculture or a clique.
James Dean Bradfield: Just to portray human life onstage. I don't think higher grades or elevates the subject matter of the song. It just allows it to reach one plateau, then it dies out.
SL: Don't you think, following on from the Birdland scenario, the look cheapens what you've got to say?
RE: I don't think Birdland, in their lyrics, had anything to say at all. We've got copies of all our words, if you want a copy. We've got loads of lyrics...
SL: But then again, don't you find that, certainly with a live act, you don't get to hear what you're trying to put across?
JDB: Public Enemy are one of my favourite groups, and they've got so much to say and elevate from their works, and when they play live they just try and manifest all that in...well, there's this song, 'Party for Your Right to Fight,' and they say: 'This is a live concert, take all the songs at face value and, if you've got the record, therefore you already know what's in the lyrics.' I just think in a live set you can only ever hope to give energy. And if you made every message clear-cut, and direct towards the audience every time, it'd be too much like Red Wedge or something. People would think, 'party-line politics.'
SL: But surely the whole thing about Manic Street Preachers is impact. I mean, why go and do a cover of NME in an almost glam rock/shock type of way, if you're not going to get something across immediately? You see, the real thing I'm keen to know is exactly what some of the things are you're trying to get across?
RE: We, personally, wanted to make music redundant. Because when I was a teenager, all it was was entertainment, just love songs which never changed my life. It's supposed to be the ultimate youth culture, and it says nothing. So if we could become a huge group, I mean a really fucking massive group, sell millions of LPs, then split up, well...rock music would continue, but at least it would have been made: a definitive statement, which all bands in the past who were supposed to have meant something never did.
SL: All right, so what do you actually want to say on that album?
RE: I wanna sing about a culture that says nothing, I wanna say the fact that basically all your life you just feel like a nobody, you feel like nothing, you're treated like shit. Just, like, you're completely bored, you're offered nothing, you've got nowhere to go...
JDB: Also, we want a chance to attack the obvious targets that people never attack any more. Because they're too frightened to. Because to write about subjects such as the House of Lords, the monarchy, institutionalised corruption, things like that, people just think they've been attacked before, and they think they're just gonna be fucking trodden on. Which they rightly kinda feel. But they're the hardest subjects to write about. And if you can write about those things in an eloquent way, you're tackling the hardest subjects.
SL: So why haven't you done that as a single?
JDB: 'Repeat' does. We want that to be a single.
RE: I don't think many young people have any respect for the monarchy, or for the House of Lords any more, but, you know, a complete negative attitude towards these institutions has gone, and all it has been replaced by is reservations. They're prepared to accept that they are there and they will continue. They don't like it, but they accept it.
JDB: We call ourselves a democracy, when in the second chamber there's more than half undemocratic power. And we're questioning those kinds of things. And for it not to slip into boredom is the hardest thing and that's what we're trying to do...
RE: All we wanted was a band that spoke about political issues. And we've never had one in our lifetime. Like, the music press pushed The Wedding Present down my throat as the alternative, but all they sang about was love songs.
Nicky Wire: Cos where we come from, everybody's in love, and we don't want a band that can write about love.
RE: Love is important to most people, but it's not important to us, that's all.
NW: Aah, you're a really lucky bastard! The women are all over you all the time!
SL: So do you believe that your bold image will help you get the things that you say across to more people?
RE: Yeah, I do. Completely.
NW: Sometimes I think it'll take time. Sometimes I think we could end up like the Stooges. But I know that, at the end of the day, we've got much better songs, and the songs always sort of carry through. We wouldn't have got where we were if we had shit songs. Everybody, deep down, likes these songs, and they might think, with the image, 'Oh, I'm too scared to like them' or 'Oh, with all the hype, I cannot like them,' but that's not our problem. That's the only reason we make an effort for an image, and to say a lot of things - we've got total confidence in the songs.
SL: Do you ever feel uncomfortable with the fact that you're almost sleeping with the industry?
JDB: I decided not to get bitter about it. We had an experience when we first came up to London where we met a publisher, and they gave us two young people, and they were dressed casual, and they were going: 'This is the record industry now, it's not people in suits any more, we're young and hip' but they were just the same as everybody else. So, y'know, I decided everything was totally fucked up. And we're not working from the same old maxim that you've got to work from within, but you've just got to resolve yourself to sign to a major if you care about...
RE: We're prepared to prostitute our art. We're prepared to prostitute ourselves completely just so we get heard.
JDB: Like, our first four months, we were just touring, not doing anything worthwhile.
RE: What were we? We were nothing.
NW: We had the 'New Art Riot' EP, we had a 'Turn On' in NME...
RE: We were with Ian on Damaged Goods. We were nothing.
JDB: In small provincial towns, it's enough to be in a band, as a kind of escape...but where we come from, it wasn't even enough to be in a band.
SL: Doesn't that fuel the argument that it's all a bit of a chip on the shoulder?
RE: Oh, completely!
NW: We are bitter people.
RE: But I don't see that as a problem that we are, like, spiteful, malevolent, bitter people! But most people's lives are really shit.
NW: Yeah, I wish more bands were like that!
SL: The ideal band for me would be a band that touched on personal relationships, who would go through hard times with you...
NW: I watched the telly, there was this concert, and the Bangladesh (flood) victims were on, and I just thought: 'I will not allow myself to write a love song.' Because what will it mean to those people?
RE: Any government is really happy that the working class reduce themselves to a self-sufficient unit of two, completely obsessed by each other, by the girlfriend and the boyfriend.
SL: The problem then is, I don't see how you can like a band like Guns N'Roses.
NW: Musically!
JDB: We do this thing where we take bands...we don't ever put ourselves in the position to be their fanbase. Because we're not fans, in a sense. We realised a long time ago that you can't ask anything from any band because they'll never give you anything. So just take what you want. So we're not fans, we just like those bands: Public Enemy and Guns N'Roses.
RE: Guns N'Roses proved that a rock band can still sell sixty million LPs. And also, a lot of their lyrics, they are completely pissed off. It's called 'Appetite for Destruction,' and everybody thinks 'Paradise City' is a really shit song cos it rhymes 'Paradise City' with 'girls are pretty' but later on it goes 'Captain America's been torn apart/Now he's a court jester with a broken heart.' It's not just shit lyrics.
NW: It bugs us when people don't take the time to look past...I mean, I'll never ever see anything in a lyric by any British band that can mean anything to me, so I've got to look further to Guns N'Roses and Public Enemy.
RE: You could easily say the same thing about Public Enemy, couldn't you? Public Enemy: anti-semitic, homophobic. That's two huge problems.
NW: But we divorce ourselves from that and take the good points.
SL: If a band let me down in any way, that'd be it.
JDB: We just never wanted to be in that position, because we knew that we would be in a constant state of being let down all the time.
NW: You can't put your faith in anyone, because they've always let us down from such a young age.
RE: Because, when you're at school, you're led to believe that music is going to change your life, you hope a band's gonna reflect the way you feel, and they don't. All they do is just reduce you to a shit second gear.
NW: You do get this feeling of total depression. And there's nothing you can do to control it, to smash your walls. And that's what we're trying to articulate.
SL: You couldn't find that in any music, any album?
JDB: In each other. It sounds a bit soppy, but...
NW: We really do love each other.
SL: So what would you say your chief motivation is?
RE: To write music, obviously, and to make people address issues that are really important.
NW: But James wants to write brilliant songs anyway. He's a talented person.
JDB: I just want to create the greatest record ever...boring old tepid muso, aren't I?
RE: It's really hard for us to convince you...that we're for real.
SL: Don't you see that, even if you're just a normal guitar group, from the way you look, act, talk, you're setting yourselves apart?
RE: We just really hope that people will address those issues. I mean, like, I don't know how many letters you read in the music papers, but a lot of the ones that seem to be published say: 'What a bunch of bastards, they wear eyeliner.' and that's full-stop, that's your whole argument! It's 1991, and if people can't get to grips with men wearing make-up, then what kind of society is it? People do come up to us at concerts saying: 'Fucking queers, you wear make-up!'
NW: I'm really happy with that.
SL: If I wore make-up around the village where my mum and dad live, I'd be run out of town. I wouldn't get served in the corner shop. It's just the same. You have to accept and deal with the settings...
RE: But don't you think it's important that those issues should be dealt with? And, I mean, you can talk about it in a song, but it's different to actually go out there and wear it.
NW: But we don't think it's a big thing. It's natural. We just want to look lethal. Like Pete Townshend did.
RE: Like, in Brighton, we got bottled. For 35 minutes, we got bottled. Non-stop.
SL: After that, I just don't see the joy in it.
RE: Oh, I do!
NW: They loved us at the end of it. Instead of going home and beating up their wife, they got rid of their frustrations on us. And that's much better than going around slapping their fucking wife. And it does happen.
RE: At the end of the concert, James went: 'We fucking love you, and if any of you want to fuck us, just come on and do it upstairs.' And at least they'll have gone away and thought about it, that they've physically hurt a band for thirty minutes, and they couldn't do a thing.
NW: They carried us off at the end. Look, we make no pretence about hyping ourselves with what we say. Journalists come to us. We didn't make them write about us.
SL: Hang on, I've got your letters at home!
Sean Moore (en passant): Yeah, but what's wrong with that? We wrote to every band. We were desperate.
NW: We're not ashamed of anything. We want to reach the biggest audience we can because we feel we've got something important to say.
SL: It doesn't worry you, the way you get there?
NW: Well, no! That is the truth. We are total prostitutes. Sluts! If we can get across what we really feel, then that's more important than any credibility.
RE: You can't make a point if the only people who know about you read NME.
NW: NME doesn't mean anything. We can go back home where we come from and no one gives a shit. Why should they bother about a music paper who put The Happy Mondays or us on the cover, who don't sell any records? It's really depressing for me because we come from a real rock-fan kind of area, and when Steve Clarke died from Def Leppard that was a massive issue to them because he was fucking important. But it got about that much in the NME, and Shaun Ryder got a full page for his baby being born. How can anyone justify that? It really makes me sad. Def Leppard are the ones who've sold sixty millions albums and had three No. 1s in America, and Happy Mondays are slogging their guts out and they've sold 1,500. There are a lot of people out there who like rock music and are desperate for status, just like all your Mega City Four fans. They're more desperate, because they've got no work, and they've got nothing in their lives.
RE: They've got to learn that suicide is a career, like, thirty years of a career is a slow death, it destroys you.
NW: We've got to be understood in the context of where we come from. We really have.
SL: But you can't treat rock music like that. Surely, if you want to reach as many people as possible, you've got to transcend that.
NW: That's why we chose rock. Because rock is the most obvious art form. We want to be the biggest cliché at the end of rock. That's what we've always said.
SL: The thing which works with all forms of entertainment is, self-deprecation fuels people's belief in you because they think you're for real. And I find that some people don't think you're for real. Therefore they don't take you seriously.
RE: That is one of the points we want to make, is that we do want to make ourselves larger than life, but it's really important to reflect the feelings of fans considerably like yourselves. We're saying: 'You don't need big stars to tell you how you feel. We know you're pissed off...'
SL: So that's the main thing. That maybe it doesn't seem real to people. So they don't put their trust in you.
RE: You know, where we come from, most people don't believe in bands anyway...
Steve Lamacq: The main thing is, that I think in certain instances the image thing takes over from everything else.
Richey Edwards: Yeah, but there are so many bands with things to say who got ignored because they were prepared to almost...not wallow in the shadows, but not make a big deal of the way they look visually. Y'know, and it really is important, because in rock music and pop music, it's always been vital the way people look. And when bands, like, dress down, or make no attempt at an image, you just get bypassed. You find yourself in a subculture or a clique.
James Dean Bradfield: Just to portray human life onstage. I don't think higher grades or elevates the subject matter of the song. It just allows it to reach one plateau, then it dies out.
SL: Don't you think, following on from the Birdland scenario, the look cheapens what you've got to say?
RE: I don't think Birdland, in their lyrics, had anything to say at all. We've got copies of all our words, if you want a copy. We've got loads of lyrics...
SL: But then again, don't you find that, certainly with a live act, you don't get to hear what you're trying to put across?
JDB: Public Enemy are one of my favourite groups, and they've got so much to say and elevate from their works, and when they play live they just try and manifest all that in...well, there's this song, 'Party for Your Right to Fight,' and they say: 'This is a live concert, take all the songs at face value and, if you've got the record, therefore you already know what's in the lyrics.' I just think in a live set you can only ever hope to give energy. And if you made every message clear-cut, and direct towards the audience every time, it'd be too much like Red Wedge or something. People would think, 'party-line politics.'
SL: But surely the whole thing about Manic Street Preachers is impact. I mean, why go and do a cover of NME in an almost glam rock/shock type of way, if you're not going to get something across immediately? You see, the real thing I'm keen to know is exactly what some of the things are you're trying to get across?
RE: We, personally, wanted to make music redundant. Because when I was a teenager, all it was was entertainment, just love songs which never changed my life. It's supposed to be the ultimate youth culture, and it says nothing. So if we could become a huge group, I mean a really fucking massive group, sell millions of LPs, then split up, well...rock music would continue, but at least it would have been made: a definitive statement, which all bands in the past who were supposed to have meant something never did.
SL: All right, so what do you actually want to say on that album?
RE: I wanna sing about a culture that says nothing, I wanna say the fact that basically all your life you just feel like a nobody, you feel like nothing, you're treated like shit. Just, like, you're completely bored, you're offered nothing, you've got nowhere to go...
JDB: Also, we want a chance to attack the obvious targets that people never attack any more. Because they're too frightened to. Because to write about subjects such as the House of Lords, the monarchy, institutionalised corruption, things like that, people just think they've been attacked before, and they think they're just gonna be fucking trodden on. Which they rightly kinda feel. But they're the hardest subjects to write about. And if you can write about those things in an eloquent way, you're tackling the hardest subjects.
SL: So why haven't you done that as a single?
JDB: 'Repeat' does. We want that to be a single.
RE: I don't think many young people have any respect for the monarchy, or for the House of Lords any more, but, you know, a complete negative attitude towards these institutions has gone, and all it has been replaced by is reservations. They're prepared to accept that they are there and they will continue. They don't like it, but they accept it.
JDB: We call ourselves a democracy, when in the second chamber there's more than half undemocratic power. And we're questioning those kinds of things. And for it not to slip into boredom is the hardest thing and that's what we're trying to do...
RE: All we wanted was a band that spoke about political issues. And we've never had one in our lifetime. Like, the music press pushed The Wedding Present down my throat as the alternative, but all they sang about was love songs.
Nicky Wire: Cos where we come from, everybody's in love, and we don't want a band that can write about love.
RE: Love is important to most people, but it's not important to us, that's all.
NW: Aah, you're a really lucky bastard! The women are all over you all the time!
SL: So do you believe that your bold image will help you get the things that you say across to more people?
RE: Yeah, I do. Completely.
NW: Sometimes I think it'll take time. Sometimes I think we could end up like the Stooges. But I know that, at the end of the day, we've got much better songs, and the songs always sort of carry through. We wouldn't have got where we were if we had shit songs. Everybody, deep down, likes these songs, and they might think, with the image, 'Oh, I'm too scared to like them' or 'Oh, with all the hype, I cannot like them,' but that's not our problem. That's the only reason we make an effort for an image, and to say a lot of things - we've got total confidence in the songs.
SL: Do you ever feel uncomfortable with the fact that you're almost sleeping with the industry?
JDB: I decided not to get bitter about it. We had an experience when we first came up to London where we met a publisher, and they gave us two young people, and they were dressed casual, and they were going: 'This is the record industry now, it's not people in suits any more, we're young and hip' but they were just the same as everybody else. So, y'know, I decided everything was totally fucked up. And we're not working from the same old maxim that you've got to work from within, but you've just got to resolve yourself to sign to a major if you care about...
RE: We're prepared to prostitute our art. We're prepared to prostitute ourselves completely just so we get heard.
JDB: Like, our first four months, we were just touring, not doing anything worthwhile.
RE: What were we? We were nothing.
NW: We had the 'New Art Riot' EP, we had a 'Turn On' in NME...
RE: We were with Ian on Damaged Goods. We were nothing.
JDB: In small provincial towns, it's enough to be in a band, as a kind of escape...but where we come from, it wasn't even enough to be in a band.
SL: Doesn't that fuel the argument that it's all a bit of a chip on the shoulder?
RE: Oh, completely!
NW: We are bitter people.
RE: But I don't see that as a problem that we are, like, spiteful, malevolent, bitter people! But most people's lives are really shit.
NW: Yeah, I wish more bands were like that!
SL: The ideal band for me would be a band that touched on personal relationships, who would go through hard times with you...
NW: I watched the telly, there was this concert, and the Bangladesh (flood) victims were on, and I just thought: 'I will not allow myself to write a love song.' Because what will it mean to those people?
RE: Any government is really happy that the working class reduce themselves to a self-sufficient unit of two, completely obsessed by each other, by the girlfriend and the boyfriend.
SL: The problem then is, I don't see how you can like a band like Guns N'Roses.
NW: Musically!
JDB: We do this thing where we take bands...we don't ever put ourselves in the position to be their fanbase. Because we're not fans, in a sense. We realised a long time ago that you can't ask anything from any band because they'll never give you anything. So just take what you want. So we're not fans, we just like those bands: Public Enemy and Guns N'Roses.
RE: Guns N'Roses proved that a rock band can still sell sixty million LPs. And also, a lot of their lyrics, they are completely pissed off. It's called 'Appetite for Destruction,' and everybody thinks 'Paradise City' is a really shit song cos it rhymes 'Paradise City' with 'girls are pretty' but later on it goes 'Captain America's been torn apart/Now he's a court jester with a broken heart.' It's not just shit lyrics.
NW: It bugs us when people don't take the time to look past...I mean, I'll never ever see anything in a lyric by any British band that can mean anything to me, so I've got to look further to Guns N'Roses and Public Enemy.
RE: You could easily say the same thing about Public Enemy, couldn't you? Public Enemy: anti-semitic, homophobic. That's two huge problems.
NW: But we divorce ourselves from that and take the good points.
SL: If a band let me down in any way, that'd be it.
JDB: We just never wanted to be in that position, because we knew that we would be in a constant state of being let down all the time.
NW: You can't put your faith in anyone, because they've always let us down from such a young age.
RE: Because, when you're at school, you're led to believe that music is going to change your life, you hope a band's gonna reflect the way you feel, and they don't. All they do is just reduce you to a shit second gear.
NW: You do get this feeling of total depression. And there's nothing you can do to control it, to smash your walls. And that's what we're trying to articulate.
SL: You couldn't find that in any music, any album?
JDB: In each other. It sounds a bit soppy, but...
NW: We really do love each other.
SL: So what would you say your chief motivation is?
RE: To write music, obviously, and to make people address issues that are really important.
NW: But James wants to write brilliant songs anyway. He's a talented person.
JDB: I just want to create the greatest record ever...boring old tepid muso, aren't I?
RE: It's really hard for us to convince you...that we're for real.
SL: Don't you see that, even if you're just a normal guitar group, from the way you look, act, talk, you're setting yourselves apart?
RE: We just really hope that people will address those issues. I mean, like, I don't know how many letters you read in the music papers, but a lot of the ones that seem to be published say: 'What a bunch of bastards, they wear eyeliner.' and that's full-stop, that's your whole argument! It's 1991, and if people can't get to grips with men wearing make-up, then what kind of society is it? People do come up to us at concerts saying: 'Fucking queers, you wear make-up!'
NW: I'm really happy with that.
SL: If I wore make-up around the village where my mum and dad live, I'd be run out of town. I wouldn't get served in the corner shop. It's just the same. You have to accept and deal with the settings...
RE: But don't you think it's important that those issues should be dealt with? And, I mean, you can talk about it in a song, but it's different to actually go out there and wear it.
NW: But we don't think it's a big thing. It's natural. We just want to look lethal. Like Pete Townshend did.
RE: Like, in Brighton, we got bottled. For 35 minutes, we got bottled. Non-stop.
SL: After that, I just don't see the joy in it.
RE: Oh, I do!
NW: They loved us at the end of it. Instead of going home and beating up their wife, they got rid of their frustrations on us. And that's much better than going around slapping their fucking wife. And it does happen.
RE: At the end of the concert, James went: 'We fucking love you, and if any of you want to fuck us, just come on and do it upstairs.' And at least they'll have gone away and thought about it, that they've physically hurt a band for thirty minutes, and they couldn't do a thing.
NW: They carried us off at the end. Look, we make no pretence about hyping ourselves with what we say. Journalists come to us. We didn't make them write about us.
SL: Hang on, I've got your letters at home!
Sean Moore (en passant): Yeah, but what's wrong with that? We wrote to every band. We were desperate.
NW: We're not ashamed of anything. We want to reach the biggest audience we can because we feel we've got something important to say.
SL: It doesn't worry you, the way you get there?
NW: Well, no! That is the truth. We are total prostitutes. Sluts! If we can get across what we really feel, then that's more important than any credibility.
RE: You can't make a point if the only people who know about you read NME.
NW: NME doesn't mean anything. We can go back home where we come from and no one gives a shit. Why should they bother about a music paper who put The Happy Mondays or us on the cover, who don't sell any records? It's really depressing for me because we come from a real rock-fan kind of area, and when Steve Clarke died from Def Leppard that was a massive issue to them because he was fucking important. But it got about that much in the NME, and Shaun Ryder got a full page for his baby being born. How can anyone justify that? It really makes me sad. Def Leppard are the ones who've sold sixty millions albums and had three No. 1s in America, and Happy Mondays are slogging their guts out and they've sold 1,500. There are a lot of people out there who like rock music and are desperate for status, just like all your Mega City Four fans. They're more desperate, because they've got no work, and they've got nothing in their lives.
RE: They've got to learn that suicide is a career, like, thirty years of a career is a slow death, it destroys you.
NW: We've got to be understood in the context of where we come from. We really have.
SL: But you can't treat rock music like that. Surely, if you want to reach as many people as possible, you've got to transcend that.
NW: That's why we chose rock. Because rock is the most obvious art form. We want to be the biggest cliché at the end of rock. That's what we've always said.
SL: The thing which works with all forms of entertainment is, self-deprecation fuels people's belief in you because they think you're for real. And I find that some people don't think you're for real. Therefore they don't take you seriously.
RE: That is one of the points we want to make, is that we do want to make ourselves larger than life, but it's really important to reflect the feelings of fans considerably like yourselves. We're saying: 'You don't need big stars to tell you how you feel. We know you're pissed off...'
SL: So that's the main thing. That maybe it doesn't seem real to people. So they don't put their trust in you.
RE: You know, where we come from, most people don't believe in bands anyway...