Garbage Days Revisited #3: Manic Street Preachers - "Gold Against The Soul" (1993)

 

"You were an extinction, a desert heat, a blind illness of my anxiety" - Manic Street Preachers, Sleepflower

I'm well aware that one must take care when writing about the Manics as their fans can be...how to put this politely...a bit touchy on the subject. So I should probably preface the next statement by saying that I would subsequently come to like the band but there was a long period during 1991-92 or so where I just thought they were just a bunch of gobby Welsh twats. The reason why was that, as anyone who remembers the group's early days will attest, the four of them (well, especially Nicky Wire and Richey James) very much had an "us against the world" attitude and weren't slow to let people know it. So when they slagged off groups like Carter USM, the Wonder Stuff and the Senseless Things* as the unambitious face of indie, it rubbed a lot of fans such as myself up the wrong way - supposedly it was a conversation on this very matter between Richey and Mega City Four fan Steve Lamacq that led to the infamous "4 Real" incident. It also led to a lot of the bands I liked firing some pretty barbed insults back at them - I can't remember which band but I do remember a particularly scathing comment along the lines that they sounded like Tigertailz trying to play Clash songs badly...ouch.

* Interestingly, I remember reading an interview with Ben from the Senseless Things fairly recently where he actually said that the Things and the Manics actually got on well back in the day after they'd actually met and hung out together after both bands had made negative comments about each other but neither were allowed to say this in the press by their record labels as they were keen to play up the feud!

So yeah, it was safe to say that my journey to actually quite liking the Manics was a very slow one. When I first heard the likes of Love's Sweet Exile or You Love Us or Slash 'n' Burn, they kind of just left me cold really - it felt like lots of bluster without really hitting home. However, although it was the album we're here to talk about today that was the one that turned my head, I think Motorcycle Emptiness might have been where I started to thaw out a bit towards them. I remember reading an interview with the band around the time of the single where Nicky Wire described it as being influenced by the novel Rumblefish by S.E. Hinton which I was actually reading at the time. A lot of those S.E. Hinton novels had quite an effect on me in my early teens as they told of tales of smalltown psychosis between gangs of youths in the American midwest and growing up in a place like Bradford which although a quite sizeable city has always had more of a smalltown feel about it, I could definitely relate. Bradfordians often remark that their home city is the world's largest village and although it's a joke, there's definitely more than a grain of truth in it with kids, especially ones such as myself who were often just keen to get out of the family home, kind of wandering aimlessly around the city centre on a Saturday afternoon or early evening just desperate for something to do. Add to that going to a school which prided itself on its rugby team leading to a weird almost American-style perpetual friction between the thugs in rugby jerseys and those of us who had little to no interest in rugby (I think I must be one of the few people who went to a school where being a football fan actually marked you as an outsider rather than a jock) especially those of us who were trying to grow our hair or wore long sleeved band T-shirts to school on non-uniform days and it's maybe understandable that books such as The Outsiders, Tex and That Was Then, This Is Now shaped a lot of my consciousness away from music back then. So I guess finding out that the Manics were also fans did make me stop and think "well okay, maybe they're not so different to me"

It's weird to think now but by 1993 there were actually a fair few people already saying it was over for the Manics. Their debut album Generation Terrorists (which I was just starting to get into two years after everyone else by this point) hadn't been the million seller they'd boasted in nearly every interview it was going to be and, much to their chagrin, they'd become another mid-table indie band whose singles generally went Top 30 but no higher - I still remember Nicky in an early interview slagging off Primal Scream by saying "their singles all just seem to go to number 26 and disappear again which proves how fucking worthless they are" so I can imagine the fact that the Manics were now also finding themselves in the same bracket in terms of chart success must have stung a bit. Anyway, that second album they swore they'd never make (lest we forget, the plan as laid out in numerous interviews was for Generation Terrorists to go to number one and sell more copies than Guns 'n' Roses' Appetite For Destruction at which point the band would split up) was now on the way.

Gold Against The Soul traditionally tends to get a bit of a bad rep among Manics fans (though this has lessened a bit in recent years given some of the more mid-paced efforts they've put out since the turn of the millennium) and even the band themselves seem less than enthusiastic about it - while the more celebrated Generation Terrorists, The Holy Bible and Everything Must Go all had their deluxe reissues years ago, it took until last year for Gold Against The Soul to get the same treatment but it's the album that got me into the band. By 1993, I had gone from teetering on the edge of teenage psychosis to well and truly plummeting in and the lyrics to lead-off single From Despair To Where of "There's nothing nice in my head, the adult world took it all away" definitely spoke to my teenage psyche to the extent that I went out and bought Gold Against The Soul the week it came out.

I think the reason I've always had a soft spot for Gold Against The Soul can come down to two songs - album opener Sleepflower and the third single culled from it Life Becoming A Landslide. There's other good moments as well such as the almost Madchester shuffle of La Tristesse Durera, the anger of the title track and Yourself and the punchy Roses In The Hospital but these are the two that have stayed with me and that I still listen to frequently now. There was a year or two in my teens when I used to suffer from really bad insomnia due to problems at school and at home and Sleepflower definitely hit the nail on the head with a lot of the anxieties I was feeling at the time ("Endless hours in bed, no peace in this mind. No-one knows the hell where innocence dies")

Life Becoming A Landslide is still my favourite Manics single all these years later because it just absolutely nailed my mindset when I first heard it. As mentioned, at the time I was having to deal with bullying at school, parents who were constantly rowing at home and generally feeling as if I couldn't cope with a lot of things, didn't really fit in anywhere with life and didn't have anyone to turn to in terms of talking about it. Escaping at the weekend to friends' houses to listen to music offered an escape once or twice a week but other than that, my room kind of became my fortress to shelter from the world outside in. That line of "Life becoming a landslide, I don't wanna be a man..." really did nail it - I really just wanted to stop the world, get off for a bit and go somewhere I could just forget about everything. I mean I never got to the point where I felt like ending it but music really did play a huge part in seeing me through those years and this was one of the main tunes that basically kept me sane.

The story of what would come next with the Manics has been told a million times and this isn't the place for an in-depth version of that but suffice to say that Gold Against The Soul got a muted critical reception (a lot of people seemed to think they were trying to catch a ride on the grunge bandwagon with it at the time which I really don't see at all) and when The Holy Bible surfaced the following year, it was one of the most bleak and uncompromising albums you'll ever hear. I do like that album but I really have to be in the right mindset to hear it and I think weirdly that while the darkness on Gold Against The Soul was what drew me to the Manics, here it just genuinely got a bit too much although I still think This Is Yesterday is a fantastic song and another one which I still listen to now.

I kept on with the Manics for a while after Richey's disappearance - I was a bit disappointed by Everything Must Go at the time (my thoughts were that the band should have changed their name as it sounded so little like their previous output that it might as well have been a different group entirely) but it's grown on me since. By contrast, This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours I remember getting absolutely panned in the press but I actually don't mind it - Black Dog On My Shoulder is a great song and there's a few others such as You Stole The Sun From My Heart and SYMM which I still think are good. It was on Know Your Enemy where I kind of lost interest I think - hearing the aggressive Found That Soul made me think that the band were back to their early sound but it quickly became evident on listening to the album that that wasn't the case. There were a few decent efforts on there such as Let Robeson Sing and Miss Europa Disco Dancer but by and large this one passed me by a bit and I kind of just drifted away from the band after that.

The Manics are still out there of course and I still listen to their music now and again - I listened to Rewind The Film and Futurology and thought both were a bit patchy but again with some good moments in there. I suppose looking back that Gold Against The Soul was very much of that moment both for myself and the band but just that opening strum of From Despair To Where can take me straight back to those four walls in 1993 again when it pretty much kept me going at the time when the flame was burning low. For that, it'll always be my favourite Manics album although I can see why it isn't a popular opinion. But I certainly think it holds up well in the group's back catalogue especially compared to some of the worthy but rather dull efforts that they've done since the millennium.

Life has got better in the intervening years of course - nowadays I'm a happily married man who mended fences with his family soon after exiting the "awkward teenager" phase thankfully. Richey James on the other hand, sadly took a more drastic route out from his problems - whether he disappeared or died I guess we'll never know but wherever he is now, hopefully he's at peace. In the meantime, I don't think anyone could disagree that the Manics deserve their place in the higher echelons of alternative music and for me, Gold Against The Soul is the great lost classic among their albums even if it's just because of what it means to me.