FEATURE:
Stay Beautiful
Manic Street Preachers’ Generation Terrorists at Thirty
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MAYBE not the huge success…
that Manic Street Preachers hoped their debut album, Generation Terrorists, would be, it did do well on the U.K. album chart. It has since been certified Gold. Released on 10th February, 1992, this was an ambitious and sprawling double album from the Welsh legends. Perhaps Motorcycle Emptiness overshadows the rest of the album and is the biggest track. Not that the other tracks suffer by comparison. Charged and full of life, there have been a lot of positive reviews for Generation Terrorists. Whilst some of the mixed reviews point to the overly-long running time and lack of tight editing, I really like the sheer determination and confidence showed prior to the release of Generation Terrorists. A hungry and hugely talented young band, James Dean Bradfield, Richey Edwards, Sean Moore and Nicky Wire, I like the fact they were spit down the middle regarding writing credits. The more musically-minded James Dean Bradfield (lead, rhythm and acoustic guitars) and Sean Moore (percussion and drums) wrote the music for Generation Terrorists, whereas the more lyrically-minded Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire penned the words. I can’t think of too many other bands who have operated in that way. In spite of a few too many tracks in the pack, Generation Terrorists does boast some of the Manic Street Preachers’ best songs. Slash 'n' Burn is a great opener, whilst Love’s Sweet Exile and Stay Beautiful are phenomenal. The band would gain almost universal approval for their third studio album, The Holy Bible, in 1994.
In 1992, there was this curiosity as to who the band were and whether they would endure. I am going to come onto a review of the twentieth anniversary release of the Manics’ debut album. Before that. In 2019, Wales Arts Review highlighted Generation Terrorists as one of the great Welsh albums. It is clear that, in 1992 (and in the year before the album was released), there were no other bands quite like Manic Street Preachers:
“In 1991, the notion of Cymru being in any way ‘cool’ seemed as likely as the Welsh rugby team ever achieving another Grand Slam; the denigration of the band’s hometown by Richey Edwards, the Manic Street Preachers’ part-time guitarist and full-time Minister of Information, being suitably emblematic of the nation’s fragmented declining self-image and its (then) lowly status within the wider United Kingdom. The flag-waving national pride demonstrated by the band in its later incarnation would have been anathema to the four wide-eyed media pariahs in stencilled nylon blouses and skin-tight white Levis who detonated like a car bomb onto the alternative/indie scene of that year. James Brown, founding editor of Loaded, then of NME, and an early champion of the band was nevertheless convinced that the fact that they hailed from Wales incited them from the outset: “In the early 90s, the Welsh were well on their way to becoming the new Pakistanis or the new Irish. It was quite prevalent, I think it probably started with bashing Neil Kinnock, it’d become very common to just slag the Welsh off and I’m sure that probably built up their sense of alienation. They came from Blackwood, where’s Blackwood?”
To a tiny cabal of early acolytes who bought wholesale into the band’s erratic scattergun philosophy of glitter, spray-paint and Marxist polemic the irresistibly magnetic pull of the Manic Street Preachers was a dazzling shaft of light in the prevailing cultural fog of conformity and under-achievement. Yet to many in the music press and in particular their older, more joyless, peers they were nothing more than a bunch of jumped-up mouthy kids, infamously “doing The Clash in a school play”, a fleeting industry in-joke and proof positive that the practically non-existent Welsh music scene was never going to get any bigger than The Darling Buds. A convenient focus of universal derision at first, not least in their homeland where initially the ridicule was at its most acute – the band notably resisted playing any significant Welsh dates until a Cardiff University show on the ‘Generation Terrorist’ tour – by the end of 1991, despite (and possibly, because of) signing a lucrative multi-album deal with Sony, the Manic Street Preachers were, without doubt, the most hated band in Britain.
“The Manics talked lipstick and they talked Lenin, they talked Marilyn and they talked Marx, and they threw it all together and understood that rather than just droning on about the politics, it was the combination of the politics with the iconography that made it exciting. They were full of hate and desire.”
When Generation Terrorists was released in early 1992 it confused and confounded, as the band had no doubt hoped that it would, but possibly not in the way that they’d initially intended. The much-touted aim to sell 16 million copies of this, their debut album (a double album, no less) and then split up in a blaze of wanton self-destructive glory convinced no-one, least of all the band themselves, of the true nature of their master-plan of cultural entryism, yet to those who had only ever viewed the band as nihilistic punk rock outlaws the slick big-budget transformation of the intense syntax-mangling songs that had previously only been heard on the tinny in-house sound systems of the likes of the Bristol Fleece and Firkin seemed a world away from the breathless heart-bursting rage of their initial Heavenly singles. Though with hindsight, the band now regrets the thick layers of industrial major-label polish that was liberally applied to its raw material, it was very much in keeping with the colossal, unapologetic ambition they espoused as part of their calculated ‘year zero’ bedroom manifesto; itself a confrontational rejection of what they felt to be the meek and dreary aimlessness exemplified by much of the British indie scene. The very fact that the embryonic Manics opted to align themselves with the iconic commercial enormity of Guns ’n’ Roses and Public Enemy rather than the anaemic crusty/baggy axis of 1991 was a knowingly confrontational act at the time; America, and black America in particular, being the longstanding nemeses of the UK’s white, provincial indie scene of that period. The band’s other improbable goal, to get ‘Repeat’ and its recurring radio-unfriendly refrain of ‘Repeat after me! / Fuck queen and country!’ to the top of the charts stalled at number 26 though its ‘Stars and Stripes’ album remix by The Bomb Squad at least succeeded in making a tangible link between the band and the broader Public Enemy church that they so devoutly worshipped at.
Like many debut albums, its undoubted high-points (and in Little Baby Nothing and Stay Beautiful those highs are sporadically giddy) are inadvertently diluted by the band’s determination to fatten it up with pretty much everything they’d written up to that point, “to say everything we had to say”. It’s one of the less obviously sloganeering inclusions that most plainly benefits from the major label ‘big bucks’ makeover though; one that showcased the real artistic potential of the band and which for many redefined the perception of the Manics as something other than a comedy Welsh punk band. Motorcycle Emptiness, a game-changing studio construct fused from embryonic songs written on a bunk bed in the bedroom that James Dean Bradfield often shared with his cousin Sean Moore, was initially going to be held back for the band’s second album (proof, if proof were needed, that the ‘one album apocalypse’ was always a commercial non-starter) on the basis that it was thought to be ‘unrepresentative’ of the nascent Manics and a jarring quantum leap in their musical capabilities. Its accessible commercial veneer led by a timelessly killer guitar hook masks a fatalistic treatise on alienation, resignation and despair that had not been so magnificently broached since the earliest days of The Smiths. This populist Trojan horse was, for many, their initiation into the steadily growing cult of the band and coupled with a quote-laden gatefold sleeve that in its promotion of Larkin, Pollock and Henry Miller read like a suggested concise reader for the furiously intellectual insurrectionist–about-town, it laid the foundation for the true commercial success that would see the band lay waste to the mainstream less than five years later. That they did so without the iconic Richey Edwards their precariously driven poster-boy, and alongside Nicky Wire, one half of the band’s compulsive kohl-smeared lyric factory, is an eternally tragic missed opportunity for the cultural insurgency of titanic proportions”.
I will end with a 2012 NME feature, where they name twenty great things about Generation Terrorists. Ambitious, angry and so rich, I think that Generation Terrorists has gained more acclaim and understanding since its release. Thirty years later, it is an album that is still being talked about. The BBC had this to say in their 2012 review:
“Hailing from the former mining town of Blackwood, Manic Street Preachers were always outsiders, but they arrived fully formed in everything but their music. At least two of them, bassist Nicky Wire and lyricist/conscience Richey Edwards, were politically turbo-charged and they had a look which was part New York Dolls, part Cardiff city centre drag act, part The Clash.
The music was the dog being wagged by the tail and as some of the demos on this reissued, repackaged remembrance show, it was angry but literate situationist punk in search of a benevolent producer.
Those demos remind us that sometimes “more” can mean “less”, but the deluxe version DVD’s mix of videos, BBC performances and a 76-minute documentary is engrossing. Somehow – and the documentary confirms that nobody actually seems to know how – this splurge of a proposition found itself signed to an eight-album, major-label deal.
As we now know, Manic Street Preachers were not just for show. They recruited Steve Brown to produce, as much for his work with Wham! as on The Cult’s She Sells Sanctuary and in what still seems like breathtaking hubris, the upstarts demanded that Generation Terrorists be a 71-minute double album. Matching them in giddy recklessness, Columbia acceded.
All these years later, it’s a remarkable work albeit one that’s undeniably flawed and in need of an editor as much as a producer. But its anger (Nat West-Barclay-Midlands-Lloyds railed against bankers decades before fashion caught up), its self-belief (You Love Us, indeed) and its sense of impish fun (porn star Traci Lords co-sang Little Baby Nothing like a Shangri-La) make it an gloriously exhilarating listen two decades on.
And then there was the six minutes of perfection that was Motorcycle Emptiness. The first appearance of the seductive, compassionate, elegiac Manics which dominated their great albums, Everything Must Go and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, Motorcycle Emptiness tempered the swagger with rue, singer James Dean Bradfield crooned rather than shouted and his guitar solo was celestially heartbreaking.
Motorcycle Emptiness towers over Generation Terrorists, but without it, the album would still have triumphed”.
Before finishing things off, I want to source a few points NME made in 2012. They listed twenty reasons why Generation Terrorists is so good and fascinting:
“It didn’t sell sixteen million copies. They didn’t split up. They only just killed Slowdive. ‘Generation Terrorists’ wasn’t the one-off cultural extinction event The Manics had hoped it’d be. No, it’s way more special than that. It’s ours.
‘Love’s Sweet Exile’ was originally ‘Faceless Sense Of Void’. ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ was once ‘Go, Buzz Baby, Go’. The album itself was going to be called ‘Culture, Alienation, Boredom And Despair’. For fun, can someone re-name all of Adele’s songs on iTunes with old Manics working titles and watch popular culture explode?
Check out the ack-ack-ack hi-octane piston pummel driving ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’ out of the speakers, across the room and straight through the wall and tell me the little Welsh munchkin couldn’t out-drum Grohl.
A double-album debut released with the firm intent of selling sixteen million albums, killing Slowdive and then splitting up. That, Egyptian Hip-Hop, is how you do it”.
I wonder how the band members (James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire and Sean Moore) will mark thirty years of their debut. Whilst they all may cite other albums as being their favourite, there is no doubting the importance of 1992’s Generation Terrorists. It introduced us to a band who, to this day, are putting out music and wowing fans around the world. As Wikipedia explain regarding the album’s legacy:
“NME listed Generation Terrorists as the 18th greatest debut album from the last 50 years, describing the record as "angry as it was bright, the Manics blowtorched their manifesto in pulverising punk guitar squeals.” In a 2012 "In Depth" feature, Dom Gourlay of Drowned in Sound declared Generation Terrorists to be the most important debut of the 1990s. In a February 2011 issue of Q it was voted by readers at #77 in "The 250 Best Album's of Q's Lifetime" featuring albums between 1986 and 2011. The same magazine gave the record the award for Classic album in the Q Awards in 2012”.
Definitely among the most important debut albums of the 1990s, I wanted to throw ahead to the thirtieth anniversary of an album that, after all of these years, still sounds so exciting and wonderful! In spite of some bloating and the odd track that could have been nixed, Generation Terrorists is an album that you…
JUST have to love.