A really interesting and insightful read for anyone who is a fan or casual listener of Manic Street Preachers. As a huge fan of the band myself, I thought this brilliantly covered the timeline of the band and felt really personal.

A book for true fans of the band. This is a very detailed account and gives a whole new insight into the work of the Manic Street Preachers.

Pleased to be granted my wish as a forever fan on the manic street preachers! In a career that’s spanned thirty-five years and generated fourteen albums, fifty-three singles (two of them UK number ones), four Brit Awards, two Ivor Novellas and inspired literally hundreds of university dissertations, quite a few PhD’s and the odd specialist subject on Mastermind, Manic Street Preachers have become, in the words of their 2011 singles collection, national treasures. The Welsh trio (who, to many, will always be a quartet) have a uniquely intense impact on their fans; educating them as much as they entertain and inspire. This book collects fourteen brand new essays, one for each Manics album, from fourteen different writers from diverse backgrounds, tracing the band’s impact on fans and culture and setting each of their works, from 1992’s Generation Terrorists to 2018’s Resistance Is Futile and beyond, into context. The essays are linked by a detailed month-by-month biography by music critic and Manics fan Marc Burrows (The Guardian, The Quietus, Drowned In Sound), who compiled and edited the book, tracing the band’s development from glamourpuss upstart intellectuals to the elder statesmen of British indie rock, via an era-defining run of hits, an historic trip to Cuba and one vanished genius. Manic Street Preachers: Album by Album includes a complete discography and is sourced from in-depth archival research, making it one of the most comprehensive and detailed works devoted to the band yet compiled. Absolute must read for all fans on the group!

Ah, now this was a tricky one. I know the editor, who also writes a fair chunk of it, and I enjoyed his previous book (a biography of Terry Pratchett) enormously. But the topic...well, depending how you count, I like almost exactly half of it. I'm intensely (intensely) keen on the five Manic Street Preachers albums with Richey content, and I have an odd and largely extratextual* fondness for the scrappy Know Your Enemy, even if I am of the appropriate demographic and dickishness to still mainly think of it as Know Youre Nemy. The rest of it? Mostly I've never heard them; usually I'd give the singles a chance, and that was more than enough. Still, I decided on balance to venture in on this, and I'm glad I did. The first of the essays proper is by Rhian E Jones, whose Clampdown I recently enjoyed, and as there it's clear we're in the hands of someone whose nineties was consistent with mine, as against the nightmare John Harris version which has since become hegemonic. No, this is the nineties where one pot of glitter gel was worth ten lumpen Beatles wannabes, as prefigured and partly summoned by the Manics' first album, "a perfectly preposterous record. A militantly sincere, kamikaze, this-is-it last stand of a first album." Flawed by any standards, not least the band's own impossible pre-release promises, she's nevertheless dead on when she says that "if The Holy Bible was, in Bradfield's words, 'a series of essays', then Generation Terrorists was an essay in itself, albeit an overlong and overly ambitious one handed in late with a hopeful grin." We're in similarly sure hands with the next few pieces – and it's interesting that (leaving aside the edge case of B-sides compilation Lipstick Traces) only the Richey-less albums get essays by male contributors. Which I'm sure can't have been intended to support the perception of those of us who think of the Manics with him as a band who played to girls with awesome outfits, and the Manics without him as a band who played to Oasis fans (especially given as far as I know said male contributors, they are very much not that lad stereotype), yet there we are.

Despite which, the contributors have been chosen well enough that the pieces on the other albums do still make good reading. I decided early on that I was going to treat the book like a low-stakes contest, Strictly Come Manics or something, and actually give a full listen to one of the sans Richey albums, based on the cases made for them here. Except that got complicated too; Burrows himself builds a plausible case in defence of the "alienated, disappointed, sighing" This Is My Truth, but I still have strong enough memories of my one agonising nineties encounter with that one that it was never going to be in contention (fun fact: several friends assumed I was suffering and displacing a delayed reaction to my first break-up, and I suspect to this day still wouldn't credit my disbelieving "No, seriously, have you heard how bad it is?"). Similarly, Adam Scott Glasspool offers a great redemptive reading of Lifeblood, but I know full well that almost everyone hates that, the band included, so that would just have been silly. And probably the best piece of writing in the book is Burrows' other full essay, on Rewind The Film. It's an elegiac, impressionistic memoir of young love - for a band and for a person, intertwined - and it's a gorgeous read. It's undoubtedly the piece here which will stay with me the most, and you could very nearly not notice how it also frees the book of any obligation for anyone to make a case for the album Rewind The Film. Regarding which, in the culmination of a lovely running joke from the linking timeline sections: "Regrettably, for the first time since 2004, no-one says the new Manics album is 'their best since Everything Must Go.'"
So yeah, anyway, I ended up giving Resistance Is Futile a go on Friday morning. And while it's certainly better than This Is My Truth, if you'd told me it was the third and weakest JDB solo album I would have seen no reason to doubt you. Certainly nothing there fit to touch the hem of Love's Sweet Exile or Sleepflower.

As well as two of the essays proper, a coda on the new album, and some frequently entertaining footnotes to the other contributors' work, Burrows also provides the linking timeline, a bed on which the assessments of the records can rest. As per the 'best album since Everything Must Go' gag mentioned above, he turns what could easily have felt like a plodding obligation into a fun read in its own right, and one which was genuinely quite handy to a lapsed fan like me who hasn't really been following the story since Simon Price's biography Everything. If it's noticeable that the controversies have died down from the scorched earth offensiveness of the early days to occasionally saying something slightly disobliging about Radiohead (who, to be fair, did drop off even more disastrously after a strong 1990s than the Manics), then interest is maintained by things like the various tours which 'coincidentally' enable the band to watch the rugby as part of a work trip, as well as hints of lost projects like the Magnetic Fields-inspired 70 Songs Of Hatred And Failure. With distance, too, comes an inevitable degree of reassessment of the band's whole project. After all, to be a fiery, self-destructive, wilfully divisive band was pretty cool during what felt like the faintly dull consensus culture at the end of history. Now...well, since the end of the end of history, nowadays faintly dull consensus culture doesn't sound like such a bad thing anymore, so no wonder if the Manics have struggled to find a place in the ongoing clusterfuck which is not itself faintly dull. Generally the book has far more sense than to get hung up on provocations from back in the day which would end a career now, though there's some interesting angles on the grand gesture of the Cuba gig, a typically Manics move but one whose significance feels ever muddier as it recedes into the distance.
(Although I was annoyed when Andrzej Lukowski did a Canute with the line "Also, the actual Fidel Castro turned up, with his quip that the gig would be 'louder than war' giving the band a bona fide new slogan." As tends to be the way nowadays, there are a few little glitches and typos scattered through the book, but most are minor and one - "Frankie Valley and the Four Seasons" – would once have been a great music press headline for a Manics piece. This, though, gets the story back to front, which is more of an issue)

So, yeah. Not a book to win me round to the non-Richey Manics, but I'm not sure there's one that could. Certainly one that kept me entertained and engaged along the way, and one which reminded me quite what a fabulous, ludicrous band they were in that long-lost age of their pomp. And it should go without saying that their best album since Everything Must Go was Journal For Plague Lovers.

*To be fair, at least in my youth a lot of what made me like a lot of the records I liked was extratextual. It's never just the music.

(Netgalley ARC)

Definitely one for the fans, this is a thoughtful and insightful recounting of the Manic Street Preachers on an album by album basis. Plenty of context and back story to keep the reader interested!