 How's the Glastonbury vibe feeling for you? I'm sure everyone has a different answer to me, I'm looking for the hairspray and eyeliner at the moment. I'm not looking for a vibe [I can't type for laughing!!] Have you got anything special planned. Are you gonna be baiting any particular bands from the stage? I really don't want to do that tonight. Don't get my mind working, it takes too much out of me really. Now I guess a few people might think that the Manics have done the Greatest Hits album, they've done the b-sides album, that's generally a cue for a band to split up, isn't it? Yeah but we're writing the new album at the moment, we're going to America in October to record it. I guess I ought to ask you. Have you got your own private toilet this year? No, I've just got a bus this time, so I use the toilet on there. Not quite as nice actually but as Lenin said, In The Future, All Toilets Will Be Made Of Gold For The Public. I think you're the first person we've interviewed that's quoted Lenin. Yeah, well that's obvious, isn't it. They probably quote Naomi Klein. What do you think of British music at the moment. We could really do with a young band like the Manics to come along. I think yeah, if I was young, you'd just want to live in New York wouldn't you, or Detroit. There's brilliant music out there. Well I hope it doesn't rain for you tonight when you're onstage. I hope it does. I hope it absolutely pisses down. That's what Manic Street Preachers are all about. Rainy Welsh nights and West Country thunder will be great. And James can do his Raindrops Keep Falling On Your Head. He's got it in his arsenal. Thanks very much for talking to us, enjoy the rest of the festival. It's a pleasure. When is this on, so I can tell my mother? I had to get Sky Digital especially for this. OK, we'll be putting that bit out on air. Cheers [the cutest little cheers you ever heard] 
Do you look at it as a pleasure to come and play? What, Glastonbury? [smiles] This is the 3rd time we've played, we played 94/95 I think, and 99. It's not quite my idea of perfection. I dunno if we're a Glastonbury band or not really. We're not middle class for a start. That's harsh [Nicky laughs]Will you be wearing tye die Nicky? [he's wearing skinny white trousers and a camouflage shirt that's 2 shades of green with a bit of lilac, and his hair is shorter than it has been, with a fringe brushed to his left, light brown with a blondish tint] I'm not so sure. I'm really looking forward to it. I jest not. Who picks the set list? Me, I always have done, right from the start. It's a pretty unusual setlist for us this time actually. We're doing a couple of new songs. The chap from Groove Armada's playing trombone with us, which is weird. On a new song and Ocean Spray, he's playing the trumpet solo. And doing a couple of cover versions. We're doing Take The Skinheads Bowling by Camper Van Beethoven. An indie classic. It's going to go down great isn't it [bites his lip and rolls his eyes] We're really looking forward to it, we haven't done a festival for a while. So what else tonight, are you going to go back and play La Tristesse, are you going to play Motorcycle Emptiness, what are you going to give us? We're going to do Die In The Summer Time off Holy Bible which we've never ever player live ever. Which is symbolic of the night cos we'll probably be dieing on stage. 
We're joined by - fresh from his triumph - it's Mr Nicky Wire [he's holding a bottle of what looks like lager and is wearing the same shirt with his brown PVC trousers, the blonde is even more noticable in his hair - it suits him] It was beautiful. I've just [he says it like jest] cleaned my teeth [the close up reveals his eye makeup, black eyeliner and copper-ish coloured eyeshadow] That's cos I'm working class you see.Is it a post-gig ritual? You've gotta brush the teeth after a gig and then you're ready to hit the world. So how was it for you? It was brilliant. It's the third time and it's the only time I've had a real Glastonbury moment, I have to say. It was proper [Nicky tries and fails to get his toothpaste and toothbrush into the pocket of his shirt, so he takes a drink from his bottle] It was raining when you played but there was still a massive kinda crowd. I think the more it rained, the more people turned up. They were kinda drawn to our welsh misery. As the rain poured down, they could feel Dylan Thomas and Richard Burton... If you want misery... I feel a bit dour, let's have some Manics. That's a fair point. And David Gray was on, what would you rather see. A bloke shaking his head like that, or us. Have you just kind of arrived today or have you been sampling the delights of Glastonbury over the course of the weekend? I've been watching everything on the telly. It's pretty much what I do all my life anyway. It's been great. Digital tele, what a fantastic invention, isn't it. Saved the world, saved my world. So I've been watching it constantly. Watched Radiohead, the Furries, The Coral, Flaming Lips, all the blood and... I like the fact that on the Sunday, I'm quite glad it started to rain in a way because it's like sunburn followed by trenchfoot [Nicky: gout] just to imprint the memory on your psyche. When it started raining, I knew we were onto a winner. It suits us, it was beautiful. I'm surprisingly emotional. So anyway, you enjoyed the gig, shall we have a bit of a look at it for anyone who is at home. Turn the bass down and put it on [Nicky looks at the screen] Look at those people. 
What's your stage costume like? There's no sailor suit, there's no balaclava, there's no C&A checked shirt, but I think I'll just kind of be quite "olive" today. I don't think Nicky'll be showing his knees off tonight. Oh really? No. It'll probably be raining by then [it was] You might get the thunderstorm that's on the way� I reckon you'll have a good Glastonbury. Yeah. Well, we got no furry animal suits or nothing like that, it's just us. But you don't need it cos you got the music. Yeah. We're elder statesmen.OK, you're gonna do a little bit for us in just a second but first of all we'll take a bit of The Polyphonic Spree. Are you a fan of them? Yeah, I like 'em. I prefer Soundtrack Of Our Lives though, they're kind of in the same ilk for me, I dunno why. Are they? I know there's not as many people, and na-na-na, but there's just something about... There's not quite the religious fervour... YEAH, IT'S THE BLOKE IN THE ROBE ACTUALLY, THAT'S WHAT DOES IT FOR ME. Nicky revealed the band had already demoed six tracks and are heading over to the US to begin recording shortly. "We just really want to make an elegiac pop album, with 10 tracks, really short, really direct and really melodic. Just to make every track a killer! That's the theory anyway. I think we're just trying to push ourselves, to reinvent ourselves sonically. Every band goes through it if you've been around as long as we have, and we've been around almost 15 years. You've got to really. It's exciting at the moment though, I'm writing loads of words and James is writing loads of tunes and everything's ok! We've come to the realisation that we just don't want to disappear for years at a time and come back with a big album. We want to keep ourselves busy" 
How's the next Manics album shaping up? It's time to shake everything up again. What we want to do is 10 cheerful, short pop songs. I say cheerful, but you're only talking by Manics standards - we haven't been on the happy pills.Sean Moore said after Know Your Enemy that you'd only do one more album... Hmm. I think the Stalinist plans for what the Manics would do went when Richey disappeared. I honestly don't know if this will be our last album, but we're not deliberately making it thinking it'll be a finale. Will Dave Eringa produce it again? It's no slight on Dave, but we need to work with someone totally new. We won't be getting a dance producer in, but he'll be of a different background. Will James be writing lyrics this time? Ocean Spray is one of the best songs we've ever done, so I hope James has more lyrics. I'm writing lyrics with my brother Patrick, as part of getting new ideas for the band. That's going very well, we're sparking off each other. Has anyone inspired the new album? Patrick's got me into the poet Carol Ann Duffy, and I wish I'd discovered her work earlier. She's fantastic. Not musically, but the approach Blur took on Think Tank is very inspiring. How has Blur's new album inspired you? We'd wanted to go somewhere completely new, musically and physically. Hearing what Blur have done on Think Tank, it totally confirms we're doing the right thing. It's everything an established band's new album should be. We'll be making our record in America, hopefully it'll be as successful as going to Morocco proved to be for Blur. Any working title for the new album? No, the album title is invariably thrown up by one of the song lyrics. What new bands do you love right now? Oh, does anyone gain anything by me giving patronage to new bands? I think The Thrills are great � and they look like a proper band, which is important � but I think they can live without my praise. What I've been playing most lately is my Whitesnake albums. Are you pleased metal is popular now? No! Every braindead model has an ironic Motorhead T-shirt. If people love old rock so much, why does nobody mention how great Hanoi Rocks are? What do you think of the current scene? Yeah Yeah Yeahs have stolen my look wholesale, it's scandalous. Karen O in pop socks? I was wearing those 4 years ago. Are any of the covers on the new bonus covers CD of special importance? Not as such. If you look at the people we've covered on our B-sides � Guns N' Roses to Burt Bacharach � you can pretty much join the dots and see what makes us sound the way we do. When we came to London, we were almost run out of town for liking GN'R. It makes me laugh that everyone loves them now. Having covered Take The Skinheads Bowling, what do you think about its use as the Bowling For Columbine theme? I think Michael Moore's fantastic in every respect, as is that documentary � I wouldn't call it a film in the proper sense. But he's gone with the Teenage Fanclub cover. I love Fanclub but that version isn't their finest moment. Forever Delayed is on Lipstick Traces, but wasn't it meant to be a single? We had such a great time doing the hits tour last Christmas that we wanted to keep the momentum going. 'Yeah, let's do a new single, come on then!' Then, as is typical of us, by the time the tour finally ended we collapsed over the finishing line in a heap. We could have roused ourselves but Sony had a few doubts about doing the single in January. So we went 'pffft' and pretended we'd never said anything.  "When I look back, I am quite impressed by how unbelievably deluded and ambitious we have been. We can look like fools sometimes but it's only because we always felt we had to try harder than everyone else" Wire ascribes their us-against-the-world attitude to growing up as a tight-knit clique in a small Welsh town. "We were all intensely close and still are. We have always been a bizarrely inverted, perversely moral, deeply flawed collection of people. We thought we were an army, the four of us. We had a serious 10-point manifesto written out: no girlfriends, no love songs, must wear the uniforms at all times. I think we're probably down to about two of them now. No drugs, that's still intact, we don't touch pharmaceuticals. And I guess we never really wrote a love song. Two out of 10 ain't bad!" The Manics have the kind of past that could become a burden, having made so many outrageous pronouncements on their journey from rank outsiders to mainstream stars, but Wire seems at ease with the notion of self-contradiction, exhibiting a surprisingly keen sense of his own ridiculousness. "We formed expecting to break up, so we've been hypocrites from the beginning really, but Richey always used to say to me hypocrisy is an essential part of everyday life. Which applied to him more than most people" Wire looks genuinely sheepish as he contemplates his own tendency to make what he calls "idiot remarks" (which frequently involve him slagging off other rock stars or making ridiculously overblown declarations on the importance of the Manics) "I am smiling and laughing when I say half these things, but it just comes across as pious preaching. My mind is complicated. My brain just never stops. It's exhausting, for everyone else as well as me. I've just irritated people to distraction, I know. It's just the way I am. It's a good job I don't do drugs because I'd be a nightmare" I suspect that the hard, black-and-white world of print journalism has not served Wire well, turning his fey, jokey antagonism into something cruel and pretentious. In person, he strikes me as a gentle character who doesn't take himself too seriously. Certainly his assessment of his bass playing is candid. "I'm simple and solid now. I've had to work at it because I feel I let the others down. I would never keep time with Sean. But that's one reason I miss Richey. 'Cause I was just better than him in the badness stakes so he used to take more stick. He was truly useless. But I think James never gets enough credit for writing such beautiful tunes. Without the music, we'd be nothing. I think sometimes we can drag him down with lyrics, especially Richey's. 'Cause there's so many words in some of the songs, on stage James is left gasping for air" The jokiness can't quite disguise the persistent air of melancholy that hangs about Wire. He constantly makes reference to Edwards. "I don't want to have any more friends. After losing your soul mate, like losing Richey, I can't be bothered. If you're going to spend that much time with someone, reading, writing, educating yourself, then you think, I'm not gonna go through that again, it's too much. I was already married anyway. I'm really close to my mum and dad and my brother. I don't need any more. I guess it's quite a cold thing" The Manics have started work on a new studio album, which Wire jokes will reflect his ongoing state of "malaise and confusion". He tells me about a track called Fragments. "It is about picking through the history that we've grown up with, our heroes, our education, where there's always something, some tiny fragment that can kind of show the way. The whole album is going to be about fragments that can make things a tiny bit better. Little epiphanies. No kind of grand statements. We used to have five-year Stalinesque masterplans, but then, when Richey went missing, we just had to re-evaluate that. It was pointless, because you can just wake up the next morning and someone's gone. That is the biggest shock of all. So, all you are left with is tiny fragments, put together to make some sense of things. Everything is shit. But there are tiny things that make it worthwhile" |
