Happy 20th Anniversary to Manic Street Preachers’ seventh studio album Lifeblood, originally released November 1, 2004.
The members of Manic Street Preachers, especially singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield, have been rather unkind to Lifeblood. Bradfield has described the band’s seventh record as the product of a period of time in which the band had simply “run out of juice” and that the results were “disconnected” and “quite blood-less.” The whole venture is dismissed by Bradfield in the 2015 documentary No Manifesto as “a strange anomaly” in the band’s saga.
From the perspective of observing the band as a vital, vitriolic, and colorful punk rock hot-mess, Lifeblood is certainly a standout for the reasons that it does not venture into the band’s previous territory.
Lifeblood’s sound and scope is cold, airy, whiteness, treated guitar sounds, programmed beats, icy synths, and emotionless vocal delivery. Sonically speaking, it veers quite a distance from previous records and in hindsight, subsequent ones too. The record is jarring for all the wrong reasons: easing the listener in, soothing the soul, a record you might stick on during a dinner with (very left-leaning) friends or a comedown after a heavy weekend binge. Descriptions that are wildly absent in association with the band’s ethos.
But is this a bad thing? Once in a while are we, the listeners, not allowed to simply enjoy and let the music wash over us without the added baggage?
I recall excitedly purchasing the record on its day of release wondering to myself what delights could be included. The band’s previous record, Know Your Enemy (2001), was a scatterbrained riot of genre and color. Their trip to Cuba to launch the record felt like forging a new direction in punk rock internationalism. So Lifeblood, I thought, would surely be an extension of this.
Upon opening the CD, an advertisement for a forthcoming 10th-anniversary edition of the band’s third record The Holy Bible (1994) fell out, an exciting reminder of the band’s radical past in which they thought songs about various 20th-century dictators (I’m talking “Revol” here) could be a hit single. Of course, the first single from Lifeblood concerned disgraced U.S president Richard Nixon, so the political content of the past was still apparent here.
But the small advert of The Holy Bible held a somewhat stark comparison to the music and style of Lifeblood. Whereas on The Holy Bible—and to an extent, any Manic Street Preachers record you care to mention—the lyrics are crammed and distorted in order to include them in a song format, Lifeblood allows space and breath to drift in between the compositions—an alarming and disorientating feature.
There are not many sonic predecessors in the Manic Street Preachers’ back catalog to prepare for this departure in sound. The 1998 record This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours included audio experimentation with sound and space on songs such as “I’m Not Working” and “S.Y.M.M.” A number of remixes included on B-sides might slow or compress the original song into something lighter and airier. The band’s collaboration with 808 State on the 1997 song “Lopez” offers an indicator that they had “slow and chill” in their arsenal, whilst the tracks “Door to the River” and “There by the Grace of God,” released and included around the 2002 hits collection Forever Delayed, experimented in sparsity and synths, ultimately remained distinctively Manics.
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Yet, whilst Lifeblood has had its fair share of disses from the band, the record has only grown in appreciation from the fans’ perspective. At first it was discounted as a trip-up along with Know Your Enemy, but it has gained as the band’s fortunes turned around in the post-Send Away the Tigers era of 2007. In a 2015 article published in The Quietus, I myself dismissed the record as “plodding and uninspired.” My own opinion, like many, has changed.
My initial reaction to Lifeblood’s sparse and cold nature meant that my original thinking was that it was a record with very little of the band’s bread-and-butter political polemics. It felt and sounded like a record with nothing to say, which, in the times in which it was released, felt like a requirement of any artistic statement. Green Day, for example, had released American Idiot (2004) only a few weeks prior and whilst that band had adopted the anarchism of punk rock aesthetics, social and political commentary were not what they were necessarily known for. A political band like Manic Street Preachers could have written the record of anti-establishment, anti-corporatism, anti-Bush and Blair treatise in their sleep. They apparently chose not to and with that decision came my initial disappointment.
In some respects this belief was wrongheaded. Despite being delivered in an autumnal tone, the lyrical content of Lifeblood is still apparent.
Take for example the very first single released from Lifeblood. A highly danceable bop that featured a music video with the band donning Nixon masks and playing badminton, “The Love of Richard Nixon” is weird and fun, but also slightly misguided in its lyricism. There was very little need to justify a Republican President who was deemed a crook when in 2004 the U.S. President at the time, George W. Bush, was accused of stealing the 1998 election from Democrat Al Gore and implementing a regime of patriotic jingoism and instigating a War on Terror, which was more about rooting out insurgency at home than abroad.
The song defends the legacy of one of the United States’ most divisive and crooked public figures by calling attention to the former President’s diplomatic work in China and his signing of the National Cancer Act of 1971, the President’s supposed “War on Cancer.” I suppose this acts as a backhanded compliment and a knowing wink to the listener that really the band are being sarcastic. Political journalist Chris Hedges often refers to Richard Nixon as the “last liberal president,” in that he was the last president to understand that citizens could still proactively make changes and challenge the power of the presidency. The line from the song “cowering behind divided curtains” summarizes the paranoia of the Nixon administration, and Hedges examples this also by describing a scene accounted to Henry Kissinger in which Kissinger and Nixon are “cowering” in the Oval Office, watching as Vietnam War protestors crash through a line of parked school buses defending the White House.
An argument that has been made countless times about Manic Street Preachers is that the lyrics, artwork and whole aesthetics of the band lead the listener down various trails of discovery. In my own time as a fan of the band, I’ve read up on the Spanish Civil War, the singer and activist Paul Robeson, feminist writer and author of S.C.U.M. Manifesto Valerie Solanas, and Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution all because they featured in a song or a quote was placed on the artwork of a single release. Perhaps “The Love of Richard Nixon” is Lifeblood’s only true political song, but there is still content that draws the listener to want to learn more.
The graceful “Emily” concerns Emily Pankhurst, a political activist and a leader in the British women's suffrage movement. Whilst the title of “Glasnost” and “To Repel Ghosts” (but not the song’s content) leads the listener to the dying embers of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and the End of History and the paintings and life of Jean-Michel Basquiat respectively.
In and around these songs are more subtle and personal reflections. The opening song of “1985” looks back on the author's formative years of reading, writing, and engaging with the popular culture of the time (“Torvill and Dean’s Bolero”). It is a subject that returns again and again in the themes of Manic Street Preachers songs, most successful and most warmly on 2013’s “Rewind the Film” and 1994’s “This is Yesterday.” But here, with the atmosphere and artic chill of the composition, the picture painted is oppressively melancholic.
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The closing track “Cardiff Afterlife” refers to the band’s missing guitarist and lyricist Richey Edwards and the permanent knowledge of not knowing his whereabouts or the circumstances of his disappearance. The track refers to this state as the “paralyzed future” of the band, and indeed the presence of Edwards is not something the band have been able to shake off easily.
In hindsight, the band haven’t made much effort in distancing themselves from their own history. The numerous reissues of past records and reminders of Edwards in lyrical content are obvious signifiers. “Cardiff Afterlife,” as much as it is about Edwards, is also a song that deals with the band’s fragmenting relationship. After Lifeblood’s lukewarm assessment from fans and critics, the band would take a number of years off and James Dean Bradfield and Nicky Wire would in the interim release solo albums that might have indicated a severed alliance. Thankfully this didn’t happen and the pause in the band’s narrative allowed for renewed vigor.
There is a sense that Lifeblood is apolitical and reflective for a very good reason. The horrors of the world at this time were so turbulent to make an articulate comment on. The Manics have always signposted authoritarianism and abuses of power, but not always during times of apparent overreach of authority. For example, “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next,” the band’s ode to those that took up arms against fascism during the Spanish Civil War came out in late 1998, more than one year into Tony Blair’s New Labour Government, a time in the country’s history of prosperity and renewed national vitality. Blair wasn’t the pariah he would become in his second term, but a modern, hip and good-looking leader who could play guitar and hang out with Oasis. Fascism was a thing of history, so “If You Tolerate This…” wasn’t a warning worth heading, surely? It was gone, dead and buried.
Or how about performing the 2010 single “Some Kind of Nothingness” on Britain’s most popular television show, Strictly Come Dancing, whilst the student protests of November and December 2010 engulfed the country. One of the biggest uprisings in recent times were directed at the government's (then a coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats) decision to increase student fees, despite campaign promises from the Lib Dems to abolish these fees completely. Thousands protested, whilst the Manics, decked out in suits and ties, plugged a pretty mediocre single to millions of viewers.
Or what about 2018’s Resistance Is Futile. The only songs that really challenged the climate of fake news, Trumpian lies, and Brexit chaos was “Distant Colours” and “The Left Behind.” The rest of the record, as bassist Nicky Wire remarked, was an opportunity to look at “art” as “a hiding place.” Thus songs on Yves Klein, David Bowie, Vivian Maier and Dylan Thomas provided great portals for listeners to fall down, but didn’t provide much commentary on the state of the world.
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Before I’m called out for dismissing the Manics’ politics, this pattern of expressing political convictions at non-political times in history and vice versa, should actually be applauded. The Manics have continually reminded us of our complacency in decent times and have given us a “hiding place” in times of trouble. Right now, our world is collapsing into chaos and the themes of “If You Tolerate This…” are suddenly apparent in the rise of neo-nazism and hard-right terrorism across much of the globe.
The Manics have a catalog of records that act as primers for the times, but also places to hide when required. That is what Lifeblood provided at the time and what it continues to provide today. It remains a truly delicate exercise and rare reflective episode in the Manics’ career to date.
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