FEATURE:
A Design for Life
Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go at Twenty-Five
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I am always keen to mark big album anniversaries…
PHOTO CREDIT: Mitch Ikeda
so it is only natural that I would mark twenty-five years of the Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go. The actual anniversary is on 20th May. I will come to mentioning the twentieth anniversary reissue that came out in 2016. Released two years after the acclaimed and extraordinary The Holy Bible, the follow-up came out when Britpop was raging in this country. Despite that, the album reached number-two in the U.K., and it earned the band awards at the 1997 BRITs. Everything Must Go is often ranked alongside the best albums of all-time. I think that it is a very powerful and moving listen. The fact their lyricist Richey Edwards disappeared before the album was completed means that Everything Must Go is the Welsh band having to adapt to the terrible news and processing life without their bandmate. Although No Surface All Feeling features Edwards on rhythm guitar and a few of his lyrics feature (including Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky, Kevin Carter and Removables), one can feel his absence. Other bands might crumble and release an album that is weak or aimless. Conversely, Manic Street Preachers delivered a sublime and accomplished album that acknowledge the loss they were feeling but also pushed them forward. The title track, Kevin Carter, A Design for Life and Australia are my favourite tracks from Everything Must Go. In spite of the fact I have heard the album the whole way through dozens of times, I still never tire of it.
PHOTO CREDIT: Mitch Ikeda
I want to bring in a fascinating feature from The Line of Best Fit. They wrote about the twentieth anniversary reissue of Everything Must Go and provide background and context about an absolute classic:
“Everything Must Go began its curious gestation in January 1995, when the band spent five industrious days in the House In The Woods studio near Surrey, in the south east of England. They had recorded demos for their debut record there some four years previous and it offered a comforting sense of familiarity. Their time together was fruitful, with early versions of "Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier" and "Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky" emerging and Edwards in good spirits. The claustrophobic intensity of the music eased a little, especially pleasing Bradfield, who would later recall, “after The Holy Bible, I worried that I couldn’t write any music that would please Richey and therefore this would have been an impasse in the band, for the first time born out of taste.”
As the brief sessions came to an end, Edwards distributed gifts to his three accomplices. James received a CD, Sean an unspecified personal item and Nicky was presented with a Daily Telegraph and a Mars bar. They were signs of gentle affection that have since taken on totemic significance, much like every little detail that is known about the days between that point and the discovery of the band’s silver Vauxhall Cavalier at the Aust motorway services just across the Severn Bridge from Wales on 14 February, 1995.
In advance of a string of small American dates, designed to generate interest in a turbo-charged remix of The Holy Bible crafted for international audiences, Bradfield and Edwards were to head out early to undertake a round of interviews. An overnight stop at the Embassy Hotel in London on the final day of January provided whatever tipping point, opportunity or impulsive scenario the latter needed and, in withdrawing £200 of cash each day for the previous two weeks, had clearly been anticipating. At 7am the following morning, Richey Edwards exited reception and vanished. For months thereafter, generating bizarre sightings the length and breadth of the globe was a veritable cottage industry and the tabloid newspapers seized upon the chance to churn out some sensationalist headlines.
This is not the story of his disappearance though. It is the story of the aftermath and how three people used music to make sense of the most ambiguous grief imaginable. He still has a sizeable part to play in events, not least because five of the songs on Everything Must Go feature his lyrics, but idle speculation about his whereabouts shall be left to others.
The record’s first single, the song with which the band chose to step out into the public gaze once again, "A Design For Life", is built around only ten lines. That’s ‘only’ in the sense of size alone, for their impact is not to be underestimated. The boozy culture of Britpop had birthed an asinine notion that the working classes were stupid and driven by simple desires. The reclaiming of their status as those capable of intellectual insurgency resulted in the subsequently slightly misappropriated rallying cry of “we only want to get drunk.” Originally intended to highlight the media’s characterising of that section of society, even the band themselves later admitted that the quest for oblivion when eloquence alludes was a feeling with which they were all too familiar of late. It remains the final song in the band’s live sets, twenty years later.
Its title track remains one of the most grandiose and beautiful ways to tell people to fuck off politely, Nicky Wire conveying the band’s feelings that there was nothing more they could say to those who felt Manics mark 2 represented a betrayal. As for "A Design For Life", “everything had always been really theoretical with the Manics,” explains Wire, “there had always been an idea behind it, which had been great but could hold you back as well. I know it’s a terrible cliché, but it did seem for the first time that music was some kind of salvation.” The moment when Bradfield played it down the phone to Wire, they knew they had their starting point. It had emerged fully formed but now they had to do it justice in the studio and they surely couldn't have imagined what longevity it would possess. Listening back now, their elevation makes perfect sense. In the guitar fetishising Nineties, how could they fail? Even so, it came as something of a surprise. As Nicky Wire put it ten years later, “I don’t think we’d ever been comfortable being loved before, but for those twelve months we were.”
What is hard to imagine, listening to all of this stately, majestic music is the backlash that dominated the letters pages of the music weeklies. “I’m trying not to be elitist in this Manics debate,” wrote one fan at the time, before demonstrating that they weren’t trying all that hard, while another simply proclaimed that “the Manics are dead.” The aforementioned casual crowds may have altered the dynamic a little at the gigs but the transformation was not absolute. History doesn't record whether those irate scribblers returned to the fold, but it's hard to imagine those fans couldn't have found something to love even as recently as 2014’s Futurology”.
I don’t expect there will be any new releases of the album to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary. There will be a lot of conversation and celebration on 20th May. I am going to finish up with a couple of reviews. The first is from AllMusic. It relates to the original 1996 version of Everything Must Go:
“Months after the release of the harrowing The Holy Bible, Manic Street Preachers guitarist Richey James disappeared, leaving no trace of his whereabouts or his well-being. Ultimately, the remaining trio decided to carry on, releasing their fourth album, Everything Must Go, in 1996. Considering the tragic circumstances that surrounded it, Everything Must Go is the strongest, most focused, and certainly the most optimistic album the Manics ever released. Five of the songs feature lyrics Richey left behind before his disappearance, and while offering no motivation for his actions, they do hint at the depths of his despair. Nicky Wire wrote the remaining lyrics, and his songs give the record its weight and balance, confronting the issue of Richey's disappearance in a roundabout way, never explicitly mentioning the topic but offering a gritty dose of realistic optimism offering the hope that things will get better; after the nihilism of The Holy Bible, the outlook is all the more inspiring. Furthermore, the Manics' musical attack has become leaner; their music still rages, but it's channeled into concise, anthemic rock songs that soar on their own belief. Above all, Everything Must Go is a cathartic experience -- it is genuinely moving to hear the Manics offering hope without sinking to mawkish sentimentality or collapsing under the weight of their situation”.
You can buy Everything Must Go at 20. It contains a lot of extras and goodies. Drowned in Sound sat down and provided their impressions about the anniversary release:
“Try to imagine yourself in the position in which Nicky Wire, James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore found themselves in 1995. Your entire adult life (and a bit before that) has been spent making music with your best mates. You’ve just made a gut-wrenchingly personal, career-defining album which tears open the soul and brain of your creative figurehead, leaving it bleeding all over a slightly bemused public’s headphones. And now, as sudden as it is cruel, this person is suddenly taken from you - Richey Edwards disappears, never to be seen again, leaving the remaining three Manic Street Preachers in the awful situation of having to grieve their lifelong friend and eventually figure out what the fuck to do next.
Of course, you probably know what they went on to do. Carrying on as a trio brought them a sustained period of commercial success, and at the time of writing they’ve made three times as many albums without Richey as they made with him. For the hardcore Manics fan it’s weird to consider the fact that he actually had a direct hand in a relatively small part of their discography. His shadow, however, unquestionably looms heavily over the band’s entire history.
More than enough has already been said about the first recorded taster of the Manics after Richey’s disappearance, but that’s simply because ‘A Design For Life’ is one of the most significant pieces of music that any British band has ever produced. Even 20 years on, it’s still jaw-dropping that their first piece of music after such unimaginable personal trauma could be this triumphantly undulating hymn to the working class, still one of the most gorgeous pieces of pop music in history.
Understandably, there’s nothing on Everything Must Go to quite match its wonder, but that’s not a denigration of the album. Indeed, it houses not only some of the best post-Richey music the Manics ever made, but some of their best songs full stop. The title track in particular is an exercise in pure catharsis, a painfully honest cards-on-the-table lyric about coming to terms with your past wrapped in a bombastic pop song, accompanied by an all-too symbolic video.
‘Enola/Alone’, meanwhile, is a pretty standard chunk of Everything Must Go musically, driven by some textbook melodic riffing, but it stands out primarily for some of Nicky’s most naked and affecting expressions of loss. The lines “I’ll take a picture of you / To remember how good you looked” place him in front of his wedding photos looking at two loved ones who are no longer in his life (Richey, of course, and the band’s former manager Philip Hall who died in 1993). The theme of defiance in the face of heartbreak is one which permeates the entire album, and it’s never more powerfully embodied than when James sings “All I wanna do is live / No matter how miserable it is”.
It’s not all late Nineties rock thrills, though. One of Richey’s five lyrical contributions to Everything Must Go, ‘Small Black Flowers That Grow In the Sky’ sticks out like a sore thumb at the album’s centre. A densely concise treatise about a caged animal is juxtaposed with a gorgeous harp arrangement to make one of the saddest songs the Manics ever produced. It’s without parallel as the darkest moment on Everything Must Go, and serves as something of a precursor to the macabre lyrics which would emerge in 2009 on Journal For Plague Lovers, the album which would make full use of the notebooks Richey left behind.
To paraphrase Everything Must Go’s title track, Manic Street Preachers have never been a band to escape from their history. As such, as galling as repeated reissues of records can sometimes be, at least this one brings some kind of new material to the table. A remaster of the studio recordings of the album is packaged with the full 20-song recording of their 1997 show at Manchester Nynex, including seven which didn’t make the cut of the gig’s VHS release Everything Live”.
Twenty-five years after it was released and Everything Must Go is still being discovered by new people. Whether you know the history of the band and the circumstances around Richey Edwards’ disappearance or not, you can put the album on and instantly connect with it. The songs that feature Richey Edwards are different to those written by bassist Nicky Wire. I like the fact that we get very Edwards-esque songs and Wire’s exceptional songwriting. Although there is a sense of tragedy about Everything Must Go, the songwriting and band performances are superb and timeless. On 20th May, the world will mark twenty-five years of…
A titanic and hugely important album.