Stewart Gardiner has a not quite Proustian reaction to the Manics’ anniversary reissue of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours

Part I: My Truth

“In the beginning / When we were winning / When our smiles were genuine” – Manic Street Preachers, “The Everlasting”

Concrete Islands exists in the form it does because of my interest in the intersections between music, literature and film. The Manics tower over one such intersection for me; not gatekeepers, but enthusiastic guides. An earlier generation encountered or were convinced to explore the likes of JG Ballard and William Burroughs through Joy Division. For me and many (un)like me it was the Manics. Although I can’t remember if I read specific authors because the Manics quoted them on record sleeves / talked about them in interviews, or whether I was already going down particular literary paths. Might be that I was sometimes taking the safer option (reading a lot of Jack Kerouac for instance) and the Manics made sure I had to take the more dangerous route too (hello Bill Burroughs). The Manics swallowed up literature and re-forged it in their music, aesthetics and cultural dialogue. A feedback loop opened up between band and fans – reading books was a badge of honour rather than something to be embarrassed about. I’d come out of years steeped in rave music, house and techno, and was introduced to the Manics by my girlfriend of the time (she made me a tape with The Holy Bible on one side). Soon after I went off to university to study English Literature. I was then the perfect version of me to become a Manics subject.

I ate up books like there was no tomorrow (“The past is so beautiful / The future like a corpse in snow” – “Condemned to Rock n Roll”) and finally felt like I was being who I was meant to be. Of course that’s never the whole truth (my truth as unknown to me as yours is to you), especially at that age. But it allowed me to be part of something that connected aspects of my (inner and outer) lives. And holidays back home from university gained a particular poignancy – hanging with friends into the Manics in our small town, having each now read more of what the Manics referenced. Which meant getting drunk and taking Burroughs books down to the beach (by the North Sea) to read passages aloud from. Insufferably pretentious; thrillingly alive.

Part II: Post-Truth

“I hung up and took a taxi out of the area…. In the cab I realized what had happened…. I had been occluded from space-time like an eel’s ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso…. Locked out…. Never again would I have a Key, a Point of Intersection….” – William Burroughs, Naked Lunch

This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours wasn’t a break up record for me and the Manics, but it signalled change was on the horizon. I went to the album playback event at Fopp on Byres Road, Glasgow, bought the vinyl and enthusiastically listened repeatedly to (mostly) the first side. A generous assessment would simply put this down to how much I adored “The Everlasting” and “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next”. Another take is that I was more heavily into hip hop at the time and was DJing again. Either way, it signalled a changing relationship between me and the Manics. It was the first Manics album I didn’t consume obsessively from first listen. I was occluded from living with the Manics for a time, but was never actually locked out the house.

I’ve probably listened to This Is My Truth more in 2018 than any year previous. Which was true even before hearing the 20 Year Collectors’ Edition. Why now and why not so much then? As the Manics’ oeuvre has expanded over the years, it is easier to contextualise certain directions the band have taken and there’s therefore less need to directly compare against the earlier records. Maybe I didn’t realise that This Is My Truth was as angry as anything they’d done. Perhaps it is an anger I could only relate to when I was older. Nicky’s lyrics here deal less with slogans and more in introspection, albeit often against the background of twentieth century moments.

In Retromania, Simon Reynolds rails against the culture of reissues, special editions and box sets. A sentiment it is hard not to disagree with, but which I find it difficult to condemn the Manics for. While This Is My Truth isn’t close to being as essential a set as the Generation Terrorists or The Holy Bible 20th anniversary releases, it at least makes a case for reappraising the record as more than the Manics appeasing the masses. This is helped by the decision to promote b-side “Prologue to History” to the album in the place of “Nobody Loved You” (which becomes a hidden song rather than disappearing entirely). Altering the programming of a record would once been seen as a controversial act, but in this age of streaming isn’t even unusual. The Manics aren’t doing so on a whim, and have successfully done so before with Send Away the Tigers. There’s a permanence to their decision making (cemented by the cover adopting a different photo from the same shoot by Mitch Ikeda). “Prologue to History” itself sees the Manics on blistering form. The kind of Manics track that makes me want to get young and drunk on a freezing cold beach to shout out Burroughs routines. The nagging piano line is pure “Step On” era Happy Mondays (Nicky even references “Shaun William Ryder” in the lyrics), which powers a blistering socialist anthem, all Greil Marcus punk rock. They translate disillusionment and self-deprecation into empowering statements of intent: “So I water my plants with Evian / A brand new Dyson, that is decadent”. Which is not only funny, but a succinct portrait of Nicky Wire during the period of the Manics’ greatest commercial success.

Elsewhere on the set there’s a disc of demos, which has become a familiar Manics practice with the two CD “book” editions of their albums. Demos are interesting for the completist, but are hardly expected to supplant the originals, so their ultimate worth is archaeological rather than anything definitive. The final disc collects the remixes (of which David Holmes’s reworking of “If You Tolerate This” is the highlight) and b-sides together in one place. Despite claiming to hate dance music, the Manics always got interesting artists to remix their work in the days when bands would commission multiple remixes for two-disc single releases. That very concept makes this a time capsule of sorts.

I only need to look at the quotes on the sleeve of Generation Terrorists to trigger a Proustian experience – I get thrown back into some briefly livable past. This album is a rather different proposition, yet not an unpleasant one. Studying This Is My Truth in the present invites me to reassess and reconfigure, learning to accept that the Manics were looking forward when I could only look back.

manicstreetpreachers.com

Stewart Gardiner
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