“One day we will return, no matter how much it hurts, and it hurts.”
– Manic Street Preachers, “Futurology”
Following Journal for Plague Lovers, Manic Street Preachers produced what they described as their “last shot at mass communication,” 2010’s Postcards from a Young Man, which led up to a second greatest hits collection called National Treasures and a marathon gig at the O2 Arena, at which they performed all of their singles. Speaking of the National Treasures concert, Nicky Wire commented, “Doing that O2 show it did feel like perhaps we could leave a lot of… not the memories but the fucking baggage behind. […] There is a real power in those last words of ‘P.C.P.’ and everything. Just the desperation in that” (qtd in Martin, “Richey” 35). Memory and forgetting continued to inform the Manics’ work and hyper-reflexivity. In 2014, Nicky said,
We’d just done […] Send Away the Tigers, it was fucking everywhere […] and there was this nagging feeling that we’ve done all this; that people are still convinced we can’t be the band we were. It’s a fucking powerful entity, this band. It’s a joy, but it’s a weight. It feels like something you can never escape from sometimes. That’s my own neurosis; I’m not blaming everyone else. I spend way too much time thinking about this band.
(qtd in Martin, “Regeneration” 28)
Despite promising to take a long break after the O2 gig, Manic Street Preachers released two albums over 2013 and 2014: the subdued, melancholic Rewind the Film, and Futurology, a foray into the promise and past of modernism and post-punk, which paradoxically moved the band into the fastest forward motion of their last decade. Robert Barry describes Futurology as “shot through with a certain kind of melancholia, with mourning for a time when other futures remained available,” and Nicky said, “[i]t’s got the same ridiculous ambition as Generation Terrorists, but it’s more cultured. It has that intent, though; it’s got the post-punk jaggedness of The Holy Bible, but it merges that with the retro-futurism we’ve always been obsessed with” (qtd in Martin, “Regeneration” 29). James also refers to The Holy Bible in his comments on Futurology:
It’s the first time I’ve been given lyrics since The Holy Bible, where I’d think ‘I never thought I’d be writing music to a lyric like this.’ […] With ‘Misguided Missile’ it felt like we were trying to cram as much narrative into the song as possible, like we did on The Holy Bible with ‘IfWhiteAmerica….’, ‘Misguided Missile’ has four different choruses, four different lyrics - no bands do that anymore.
(qtd in Burrows)
These references to The Holy Bible coincide with the familiar Cyrillic font and reversed “r’s” on the cover art for Futurology. Tellingly, Simon Price writes: “THAT version of the Manics was back, and Futurology was going to be one of THOSE albums” (“A Masterpiece”). The archive fever remains a powerful force.
The lead single from Futurology, “Walk Me to the Bridge,” is a case in point of hermeneutics exploding. Not only does it allude to Nicky’s renewed sense of belief in the band after crossing the Øresund Bridge and to the art of Die Brücke, but as Price notes in his review of the album, one can’t help thinking of Richey’s connection to the Severn Bridge, especially in the chorus: “So long, my fatal friend / I don’t need this to end / I reimagine the steps you took / Still blinded by your intellect / Walk me to the bridge / Walk me to the bridge / So long my faithful friend, I don’t need this.” Whilst the instrumental bridge to the song recalls the exhilarating soar of the middle eight in Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Cutter,” the metaphor of the bridge that cannot be crossed due to the impossibility of witnessing is reiterated. Felman and Laub discuss this impasse in relation to Albert Camus’ The Fall and the inability to witness difficult knowledge:
when the woman is precisely not seen falling off the bridge, at the moment when her fall is being missed, when the body strikes the water — and when history strikes — with no seeing and no hearing, with the failure of the passerby — of the historical bystander — to be a witness, the scene of history is symbolically and radically transformed. Physically and metaphorically, the bridge no longer is a bridge: a safe passage from one bank of the Seine to the other. A bridge, from now on, can always lead nowhere, end in a dead end, or fall apart, lead to an abyss, not only for the woman but for her witness, whose own life also loses its continuity, its sense, its ground and its balance. (199)
The precarity of the belated witness continues to haunt the Manics’ work even as it evokes the future, and their schizoidal split in identity still operates and is made manifest in the fact that the band felt the need to release two separate records instead of the intended one. In an interview with Dan Martin, James explains that the original “plan had been to record one sprawling opus, dubbed ‘70 Songs Of Hatred And Failure,’” but then they came to the conclusion that “‘the tracks will harm each other; it’ll turn into an even more incoherent version of […] “Know Your Enemy”’” (qtd in “Regeneration” 28–29). The Manics’ insight into the dichotomy of their identity, along with the use of “harm” to describe the result of both sides meeting, is revealing.
Though the Manics were originally quite hedgy and noncommittal about the possibility of doing twentieth anniversary shows for The Holy Bible, it didn’t seem conceivable that a band so defined by the archive and committed to its own memory would miss such an opportunity. So we waited. And thus, I found myself awake at 4am on September 26, 2014, heart racing, to purchase tickets online for all three of the Holy Bible shows at the Roundhouse in London, located 6,300 kilometres away and six hours of time zone apart from my home in Winnipeg, Canada. These three Roundhouse gigs before Christmas were pregnant with the meaning of the notorious 1994 Astoria gigs played before Christmas, as well as with the three-night residency in May 2009 at the Roundhouse for their Journal for Plague Lovers gigs (not to mention the fact they used the Roundhouse as the set for their “A Design for Life” music video). In my own, perhaps compulsive, journey into memory work and repetition with a difference, I not only attended all three Roundhouse gigs in December 2014, but also the Holy Bible show at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto in April 2015. The multiple viewings of nearly the same gig in consecutive nights do beg the question of how they can be remembered. I suppose this question only intensifies for those fans who end up seeing dozens or hundreds of shows by the same band.
The day after arriving in London, my accompanying friend, Laura, and I managed to see the Anselm Kiefer exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts on its last day, and with its meditations on individual and cultural memory, especially the difficult knowledge of the Holocaust and Germany’s response to it, it became a perfect overture to the triptych of Holy Bible shows we were about to see. Looking at Winter Landscape, I heard the chorus of “No birds, no birds” emanating from the silent, bloodied snow. I was also reminded of the quote from Kiefer, which Nicky cited in an interview, “Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas.” The enforced ruins of the monumental Holy Bible find their traces straight through to Futurology, producing as much as they preserve.
Admittedly, there are gaps in my memory of the Roundhouse gigs despite my best efforts. There are elisions and indefinite shadows — likely even false recollections — that blur them together. Then there are moments, some significant and some more trivial, that remain. As Jane Blocker writes about attempting to capture the ephemerality of performance, “[t]o write a history of performance […] is to experience and engage with desire, desire for that which is already lost” (xii). By trying to recreate what I saw, I feel increasingly belated and conscious of the narratives, the récits, that I’m telling myself. Besides my memory fragments, I have a handful of notes I made after I had already travelled home and the series of photos I took. Of course there is also the shaky footage captured by others on YouTube, but these supposedly mimetic recordings never seem to correspond with my own experiences and only leave me with an uncanny combination of déjà vu and jamais vu. So, these are the moments I think I know.
Each show was prefaced by a longer wait in the queue outside the venue in our attempt to make the best estimate of the ideal ratio of waiting time to desirable places in front of the stage. In spite of the relative balminess of the London December (at home it was more likely to be –20°C than +10°C), I spent much of the time contemplating the word “chilblains,” and wondering whether sitting for hours on cold pavement caused them. I also read and re-read the awning across the street that advertised “hot dogs, liquor and vintage sounds ‘til 3AM” when I wasn’t answering curious passersby questions about why we were all sitting outside the Roundhouse for hours wearing military gear, sailor suits, leopard print coats and boiler suits (one particular boiler suit had the very Manics slogan of “Rimbaud was a cunt” scrawled on the back).
Due to a particularly strict security guard who made Laura check her camera before entering, I spent the first gig separated from her on the stage right side, listening to the pre-show Erol Alkan DJ set and the conversation between two fans discussing their favourite Manics records (incidentally, neither favoured The Holy Bible, but instead loved Generation Terrorists and Send Away the Tigers). The seamless DJ mix was an appropriate precursor, taking in the obvious post-punk influences on The Holy Bible — Public Image Ltd., Magazine, Joy Division, Wire — as well the less obvious ones like The Sound, Grauzone, Cabaret Voltaire, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Killing Joke. Alkan cleverly added tracks from motorik and post-punk artists that informed Futurology, the most current incarnation of THAT version of the band: Simple Minds’ “I Travel,” Kraftwerk’s “Uranium,” David Bowie’s “V-2 Schneider,” Neu’s “Super,” Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Taking Sides Again,” and Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Cutter.” I should add that this mix was repeated on the third night, and on the first night it didn’t make it to “I Travel” before the lights went out and the Chemical Brothers’ remix of “Faster” began. The crowd chanted “it’s so damn easy to cave in” just before the band made their way to the stage, which had been draped in Apocalypse Now red light and camouflage netting. James wore the dark navy sailor suit, Nicky wore the camouflage, and Sean wore the Russian beret behind a drum kit emblazoned with the CCCP logo used at the time of The Holy Bible. I know I remained overly conscious of the carrier bag holding my vinyl copies of The Firstborn is Dead, Scott Walker Sings Songs from His TV Series, and To Bring You My Love, which I had unthinkingly purchased a few hours earlier in the Camden Stables Market, and then spent the gig either clutching them to my body, or trying to wedge them between my numb feet. The first three songs flowed into one another, only punctuated by the appropriate audio samples as intros, with the audience swept up by the intensity and near surreality that this was actually happening live within metres of their faces. The fact that the Manics were performing without their regular accompanying musicians for this set was visually striking and affective; they seemed both strong and vulnerable. Notwithstanding James’ battle with a “Christmas bug” that was supposedly affecting his vocals, the only indication he wasn’t on full form was his allowing the audience to pick up any missed bits of chorus and his general lack of movement away from his microphone. In other words, there weren’t any backward kick spins. To alleviate the seriousness and bleakness of the content, there were a few of the obligatory remarks of gallows humour from Nicky like “Here’s ‘Mausoleum’ the feel-good hit of the winter” and “Richey wrote ‘I T’d them’ instead of ‘tossed off’ because he was such a polite boy.”
Erol Alkan’s remix of Futurology’s “Europa Geht Durch Mich” played through the intermission, indicating the break between sets and band identities, as the Manics changed out of their Holy Bible uniforms and regained their regular backing musicians. The first song of the second set was “Motorcycle Emptiness,” and all I can remember is leaping up and down, occasionally belting the words into the air as I tilted my head back and caught a glimpse of the dizzying, concentric roof above and the singing fan in a sailor suit behind me. I also remember trying to time my jumping to coincide with the man next to me, so that I didn’t keep colliding with his elbow. I remember nerdily singing along to the guitar parts of the brilliant instrumental “Dreaming a City (Hughesovka),” the Futurology track that manages to encapsulate the hope and failure of both industry and ideology in the present-day Ukrainian city of Donetsk, a city that represents the major upheavals of the twentieth century and beyond. I recall my excitement and disbelief in watching actress Nina Hoss sing her parts for “Europa Geht Durch Mich” directly in front of me as the electronic grind borrowed from Simple Minds’ “70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall” pulsed in the background. I remember Nicky warning the audience that this was the last time he would ever be singing “Divine Youth,” and that he was doing it to help out the ailing James. In a nod to the Astoria gigs, James sang Wham!’s “Last Christmas” and segued into “A Design for Life.” Part way through the first half of “A Design for Life” I was hoisted into the air on the shoulders of a stranger behind me. I remember the heady mixture of looking around at the rest of the people packed onto the floor below me and the soaring music; unfortunately, security ensured that I had to come down soon after I had been lifted.
Even though I had made sure that I hadn’t purchased any large items this time, the Tuesday gig was much more physically uncomfortable, my face often diving into the purple polyester-clad back of a fan in front of me, my head being punched by a female fan behind me who was vigorously pointing at Nicky whilst I was watching James, and my back being used as a tripod for the man filming the gig from behind me. This time the pre-show DJ mix was from Andrew Weatherall, and though appropriate in its mood, the music itself was unrecognizable to me. I remember Nicky complaining about having left his make-up behind at the hotel, wishing Simon Price was there to assist with this oversight, and making do with gold star stickers plastered to his face. I remember James saying his voice hadn’t been great the night before, the audience shouting “No,” and his resolute “Yes, it was.” I remember Nicky making a comment about knowing The Holy Bible was good when it wasn’t nominated for the Mercury Prize. I remember James requesting applause for Richey, and then requesting more. I remember Georgia Ruth appearing to sing on “Divine Youth,” which she did again on the last night. I also recall James singing a soft acoustic version of “Anthem for a Lost Cause” before the rest of the band came back for the second half. And it rained that night as we exited the venue.
Before the last show, we visited the Kevin Cummins Assassinated Beauty photography exhibit of Manic Street Preachers at Proud Camden, a few blocks away from the Roundhouse. The majority of the photos were from before Richey’s departure, and old Manics songs played in the one-room gallery space; it provided a strange nostalgic refuge to complement the memories being made down the street for the past two nights. It was also a reminder of the excessive visuality of the Manics, and the archive of images they amassed throughout their career, not only documented by Kevin Cummins in the book that accompanied the exhibit, but also in Mitch Ikeda’s Forever Delayed, and Nicky Wire’s Death of a Polaroid. By the third Roundhouse show, it felt like we were meant to prepare by singing “Let’s Go to War,” the Manics fan morale booster from Futurology, which can put you in the correct mindset of steely determination to endure through deadened limbs, the mental and vocal strain of screaming along to the difficult Holy Bible lyrics, the sad state of the uniform you wear every night in solidarity with the band and other fans, the jumps and punches that more often than not punish your knuckles and sternum with the bounce of the camera around your neck. When the drum kit came apart after the first few songs, Nicky was prompted to continue his goading of the rest of the band to destroy their instruments in Astoria fashion. I also remember a small moment in which James made an error at the point of “Hitler reprised in the worm of your soul” in “Archives of Pain,” but as the crowd carried on correctly without him, he just shook his head slightly, made a small smile, and continued into the next line. This was the only gig of the three in which the band played “Walk Me to the Bridge,” and I remember feeling a euphoric chill run through me as the chorus kicked in. For “You Love Us,” James invited Therapy?’s Andy Cairns to the stage to add even more guitar power to the all-out chaos. There was a sense of relief and achievement that we had all made it through these shows, band and fans. James ended the show with “We’ve been the Manics, and you’ve been fucking mega,” and as “A Design for Life” played out, golden confetti filled the air like a shimmering cloud, landing and sticking to the sweaty crowd like a celebratory anointment. I found pieces of confetti about my person well into the following day.
Much of the rest of these gigs are enfolded into each other in some sort of ritualized blur. I remain an unreliable witness in spite of, and perhaps because of, the repetition. The best I can recollect are the abstractions of how it felt — cathartic, galvanizing, maddening, utterly exhausting. It is not often that a live gig can drain you both mentally and physically, but the engagement between the Manics and their fans for these shows proved the mind and body dynamic continue to inform the band’s work.
The Holy Bible experience didn’t quite end with the final Roundhouse gig. We also opted to attend British Sea Power’s Christmas Krankenhaus club night in Brighton on the Friday night. Despite the numerous differences between British Sea Power and Manic Street Preachers, bands who toured with each other, there still seems to exist some strange affinity of cultishness, out-of-step, intertextual art, and the potential for dominating all facets of fans’ lives. Surreal doesn’t quite describe the organized chaos of the night. I do remember that an opening band sang a song featuring the lines “Release the ferrets”; that a man won a stalk of Brussels sprouts after playing a quiz guessing cover versions played by a marimba duo; that members of British Sea Power performed Krautrock Karaoke for an appropriately infinite time (it felt like a Damo Suzuki wormhole had opened up as band members were passed through the crowd, hanging vertically upside down). The British Sea Power set itself inspired a frenzy that I would think is unrivalled at a hardcore gig. Lead singer Yan Wilkinson stared with an almost catatonic madness out on the crowd of pushing, ecstatic bodies. I don’t think I’ve ever quite felt like my femurs might break in half at a gig; if I hadn’t been so numbed and high on adrenaline, I might have felt more concern about being right at the front of the stage, repeatedly sent sprawling over the monitor, half-full beer bottles, and a particularly enthusiastic fan in laddered tights who was now sitting on the stage shaking a tambourine. The entire night ended with a DJ set from Simon Price, and it was at this point that a Manics fan wearing cat ears approached us, clocking my Holy Bible t-shirt from the Roundhouse gigs. She had attended all of the Roundhouse shows as well, and wondered if we had requested that Simon play something from the Manics. To be honest, I was still attempting to collect pieces of my shattered brain and rest my sweaty ruined body, and couldn’t even contemplate asking for anything, or the thought of having to leave the venue and walk back up the hill to the Brighton train station for the first train out in the morning. She eventually requested “Faster” and so we found ourselves mad on Baileys, cider and sheer bruised exhaustion, dancing in the aftershock and proving the strength of that chorus: your blazing mind can truly overtake your broken body in a transcending rush. The next day Laura and I discovered that we both had perverse souvenirs of bruises, six inches in diameter on each thigh. Bruised and soothed all in one night.
The April gig in Toronto came as a surprise since a Manics tour to North America is always a rarity. This time it was Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time at the Art Gallery of Ontario, rather than Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy, but the exhibition proved to be just as evocative and appropriate as a prelude to seeing The Holy Bible live. Basquiat’s engagements with racial violence and inequality in the USA, perhaps most poignantly in the painting Irony of a Negro Policeman, was heightened by the recent unrest in Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as reinforcing the enduring power and tragedy of “Ifwhiteamerica” I also couldn’t help but stop at the black void of To Repel Ghosts and reflect on Lifeblood.
The Toronto show itself felt more subdued than the run at the Roundhouse. The band chose to speak in between the opening three songs this time, breaking some of the intensity, and the crowd seemed to stay quite reverently still through The Holy Bible set. Someone screamed Nicky’s name, and he responded with a grin, a thumbs-up, and a small “Hello.” In the interval, during which he never actually left the stage, James performed acoustic versions of “This Sullen Welsh Heart” and “Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky.” I remember him making an analogy between Wales’ relationship with England and Canada’s relationship to the United States, and I also remember softly singing along with ragged breath to “Small Black Flowers,” thankful that I was finally witnessing it live. I do remember that by the time the band played “You Love Us,” the woman next to me had grabbed my shoulder in sheer excitement as we jumped in unison, and the second half overall seemed to free the audience to respond more physically. All in all, it was a shorter show than the ones at the Roundhouse; the Manics hadn’t taken their back-up musicians with them for this tour, so it felt like they bore some extra weight into their second half. The compression of their time on this tour also forced them leave the venue more quickly than usual.
Surprising to me, only after this gig did I experience a sense of loss. The preclusion and finality of being unable to see The Holy Bible performed in full again was a bittersweet realization. Then again, so much of the way Manic Street Preachers’ art functions is with this bittersweetness. They’re always ending, and they’re always becoming, a dialectic at a standstill.
In Emily Mackay’s NME feature about the rehearsals for the twentieth anniversary Holy Bible gigs, she quotes James’ description of the album, the “feeling of becoming,” to depict the feeling of the rehearsals themselves (“Holy” 35). The idea of becoming speaks to the significance of The Holy Bible as an archive of identity for the band to return to, but it also explains the impossibility of closures and the persistence and productivity of gaps. After the extreme embodiment recorded in The Holy Bible and Journal for Plague Lovers, it is the absence of a body that has created the strongest archival impression. The Holy Bible remains Manic Street Preachers’ Gesamtkunstwerk, a promise to a future that never fully arrives and can never fully be witnessed. In the bonus material of the documentary No Manifesto, Sean and Nicky are shown having an amicable argument over what kind of musical art is truly memorable and will ultimately stand the test of time, Sean on the side of classical music, Nicky taking that of twentieth-century popular music. At one point, Nicky says, “There will always be The Holy Bible.” I couldn’t agree more.