Ben Woolhead is on the spot in Newport for a late-morning hour in the company of Keith Cameron – author of the definitive Manic Street Preachers songography, 168 Songs Of Hatred And Failure – and, naturally, a room full of fans of the Welsh rock icons.
Over the course of four years, music journalist Keith Cameron was a regular visitor to the Manic Street Preachers’ studio Door To The River, located on the outskirts of Newport. The extensive interviews with band members James Dean Bradfield and Nicky Wire which he conducted there were for his magnificent book 168 Songs Of Hatred And Failure: A History Of Manic Street Preachers, published last year.
As part of the second Newport Festival Of Words, Cameron returned to Newport to discuss the book with Kai Jones, onstage at the Corn Exchange. The book, Cameron explains, was initially to be called 70 Songs Of Hatred And Failure, repurposing one of the band’s great lost album titles, but Wire committed him to a considerably more labour-intensive enterprise by insisting on 168. According to Motown Junk, the early single which Cameron contends encapsulates everything you need to know about the Manics, 168 seconds is how long a love song “stops your heart beating” and “your brain thinking”.
Hatred? Because they grew up in and emerged from a south Wales that felt like it had been under political and economic assault throughout the 1980s. Failure? Because it’s a more relatable human condition than success, and because the Manics ultimately failed in what they set out to do: destroy rock‘n’roll with a single album and then implode. They are, in Manics drummer Sean Moore’s words, “an experiment gone wrong”.
The notoriously reticent Moore wanted no part in the book, but traditional band spokesmen Bradfield and Wire were on board from the outset. Typically, Cameron talked to them separately; the occasional joint interviews, he recalls, usually descended into bickering, Wire winding up Bradfield and Bradfield rolling his eyeballs in “look-what-I-have-to-put-up-with” exasperation.
Cameron admits that 168 Songs… could have been compiled through cobbling together quotes from previously published articles and books, but the band’s close involvement – and the subsequent wealth of exclusive commentary – gives it a unique selling point and makes it much richer. However, this did mean having to negotiate over which songs should feature and which should be left out.
Cameron had to use all his powers of persuasion to convince Wire and Bradfield that Underdogs was worthy of inclusion – it was the lead single from 2007’s Send Away The Tigers, but the pair grew to hate it so much it was swapped out for a B-side on the album’s 10th anniversary edition. But they put their foot down in insisting on the omission of She Is Suffering, making it the only song from 1994’s The Holy Bible to miss out.
The Manics have since started playing She Is Suffering live again, which Cameron suggests might speak to their contrarian nature – or that the interviews prompted Wire and Bradfield to reassess their catalogue. Part of what makes the book so engaging is their critical appraisal of their entire career with the benefit of distance – regrets, missteps and missed opportunities, but also positive reevaluations. Cameron recalls being struck by the impression that a band known for their nostalgia had never revisited the making of 2009’s Journal For Plague Lovers, whose songs are built around previously unused lyrics by Richey Edwards – the Manics guitarist having disappeared in 1995, it may be that this album is especially emotionally heavy for the remaining trio.
For Cameron, too, the research process proved illuminating. Manics songs are “portals”, gateways to other worlds (political, historical, cultural), and in the course of teasing out the myriad lyrical threads he found himself going down numerous rabbit holes – not least in tracking down the copies of Revolutionary Communist Party publication Living Marxism that inspired PCP and reflecting on the political climate of his own student days in Edinburgh.
Fielding questions from the floor, Cameron talks about the Manics’ embrace of “happy accidents” and stresses the vital importance of having their own studio (before Door To The River, the group had Faster in Cardiff) to their longevity. The band treat it like going to the office, helpful for self-discipline and focus when they all have other pressures on their time and energy. He names The Holy Bible as his favourite Manics album and their release with the most contemporary relevance – though talks himself out of picking it as an ideal desert island disc for the sake of his own sanity. (Its followup Everything Must Go might be more appropriate, given that it starts with the sound of waves.)
When someone asks whether he’s now tackling the remainder of the Manics’ oeuvre, he laughs but does reveal that the paperback edition (out next year) will include additional chapters on 16 of their best cover versions – an announcement that doesn’t seem to dampen attendees’ enthusiasm for the hardbacks for sale afterwards.
A thoroughly engrossing hour ends with Cameron reading the chapter on The View From Stow Hill – a song from 2014’s Futurology, and Wire’s “stunned underdog elegy for his adopted home city”. Newport has indeed faced a “struggle to revive in a post-industrial era” – but council-backed initiatives like the Festival Of Words as well as the Outline music programme and The Eye, the photography festival relocated from Aberystwyth to the banks of the River Usk, are raising hopes that a cultural revival may be underway.
words BEN WOOLHEAD
