Chords for Manic Street Preachers interview on BBC Breakfast. Nicky Wire & James Dean Bradfield. 16 Apr 2018

Can you believe it's been over 25 years since they released their first record
and after returning to the studio the Manic Street Preachers are back.
Album number 13 is called Resistance is Futile.
What a great title.
The trio are famed for their politically driven lyrics
and ability to turn difficult issues of the day into slick anthems.
So fans won't be surprised to learn that topics such as Brexit
have found their way into their new material.
We have a brace of them in the studio with us.
Good morning to you gentlemen, lovely to have you here.
Morning.
Let's have a listen first to the new single.
This is International Blue from the Manic Street Preachers.
[Eb] _
_ [Bb] _ _ _ _ You wrote your autograph in _ _ _ _ _ _ [F] the sky
You were good at the falling rain
But you never told us [Bb] why
You painted with fire
_ And _ _ _ she's now [F] read me
The monochrome desire
_ You _ left us too young to [C] explain
_ [Dm] _ _ [Bb] _
_ _ Well you lead us through an empty [C]
room
[F] And [Bb] _ _ _ played me with fire
_ [G] Oh a giant button, it's gorgeous that.
That's [N] lovely.
Yeah, to plan your next holiday destination I hope.
James Dean Bradfield and Nicky Wye are with us.
Thank you so much for coming on gentlemen.
Now, why has it taken such a long time?
_ Where have you been?
We got chucked out of our old studio in Cardiff
and we had to build a new one.
So we bought a property and converted it. _
Which is really boring, I know.
That's a great excuse for not making music isn't it?
We didn't have anywhere to make it.
Was that because it was so, it felt like home,
it was such an important place for you?
Yeah.
And we're kind of like, like you said, this is our 13th album.
We kind of need a clubhouse to operate from.
Another kind of band that can go to hire a studio
and look at the clock and think,
wow we've only got three hours left.
We need a more relaxed piece of life.
We need to watch a lot of TV basically.
We need to watch a lot of sport, _ watch a lot of news
and then kind of think about recording.
You talk about watching a lot of news
and there are so many of the songs are sort of inspired
by things that have been going on.
Let's talk about, you talk about Hillsborough in one of the songs, don't you?
Yeah, I mean there's a track called Liverpool Revisited.
It's just about a magical day in the city.
We were playing there and I'm walking around the city
and thinking of all the culture that had inspired me
from Eckerd and Banyamin and Roger McGough's poetry
and the Beatles and stuff.
And then watching all the stuff from Hillsborough coming through
and the kind of defiance of the city to take on the establishment of Britain.
_ It's just an amazing, just an amazing act of,
so it's kind of a song of, it's an uplifting song.
It's a song about their victory, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
And how do, what sort of response do you get to those sort of
more political songs that you write?
Well, we've always just, our golden rule is to write about what we're interested in.
You know, and I can't say me and Jim get to the studio
and say should we write a love song today because it's just not on our remit.
We write love songs to other people and love songs to a city and stuff
but you know, we try to keep our _ personal lives out of it.
I like one about people giving.
It's kind of uplifting that in some ways, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
And accepting, explain it.
Yeah, it is about acceptance.
You know, the song, it starts off, people maybe think it starts off slightly _
_ _ underwhelming but it ends up with the idea of people stay strong,
that you know, _ it's a song of acceptance, of surroundings
and trying to navigate your way through the bewildering, _ cascading digital age. _ _
_ _ See, you can tell I did poetry in school.
Very good, very good.
You can tell you're a lyricist.
So in terms of the gap, why, I know you're saying about needing a clubhouse
but the reason it took such a long time, the largest gap you've had of an album,
is it pressure from fans to come back or was it just about you feeling in the right place to do it?
Well, kind of, _ I mean, in the subsequent years between the last album and this one,
we did a couple of anniversary tours for the Everything Must Go album
which is kind of our biggest album and the Holy Bible record
which is our most iconoclastic record really.
And so we did some anniversary tours and then kind of we lost our studio
and if you've ever watched Grand Designs, you know how long it takes _ to get a place up and running.
Is it like a Grand Design?
Is it?
James had a hard hat on at one point, you know, I just stayed away.
_ _ You've phoned me up about lintels and steel and stuff.
Have you had arguments about toilets and what sinks you have and all that sort of stuff?
Ah, two toilets somewhere.
_ Sinks down stairs, don't worry.
No, he was more interested where the dartboard was going to go.
_ Well, it's nice that we start from scratch, isn't it?
And the album's had really good reviews.
Do you care?
Yes.
You do?
Yeah, because we grew up, you know, we were children of the music press, you know,
the NME, Melody Maker, all of that, Everything, Q Magazine, you know,
they were our _ kind of form of escapism growing up and we always wanted to_
So it's still in our DNA to just read, me in particular, just read everything, you know, good or bad.
And I don't mind if they are bad, you know, we've had plenty of them over the years.
As long as you're written about, it's a start.
So is it still exciting when you turn on the radio and you listen, oh, that's one of ours? _
That is the goosebump moment for us.
Really? Still?
Yeah, you know, you can have 10 million hits on wherever, on the internet,
but you and your track on the radio for us is just the moment.
And presumably that happens not just in this country, it's got to happen wherever.
Does it happen wherever you travel or what's it like?
Oh yeah, you'll always catch someone, you know, we've been on all day in Portugal
and we, oh, your record was on there all the time and stuff like that.
It's just one of the biggest thrills you can have, you know.
All of a sudden you're doing a gig in Turkey and everyone knows a song that you thought had died a long time ago.
_ _ [Am] _ _ What do you want [Em] people, Nicky, to take away from [F] listening to this album?
Is there sort of an overriding message?
I know we're playing some of your older stuff here.
Yeah, well, it's 20 years old, [D] I [C] think, tolerate. _ _ _
_ I think [G] a mixture of defiance and melancholia.
The idea that _ facing up to realities as [F] we age slightly,
but mixed with a [Ab] sense of still kind of raging against [G] the dying of the light.
_ _ _ You talk about love songs, you don't write your [Dm] own love songs, but Dylan and Caitlin, is that right?
[Am] Yeah, Dylan and Caitlin.
_ _ [N] _
It's a song that's very much a narrative, it's very much a duet.
And obviously _ the relationship between Dylan and Caitlin was very temptatuous.
_ _ They seem to have wrung the _ _ life out of their relationship, you know, his art, the bottle.
_ So usually when people write lyrics about relationships, they like to show the love-intended side of it.
_ _ _ _ This lyric shows both, and it shows the blood, the lust, and the tension that was in that relationship.
And kind of probably fed into Dylan's creative life and Caitlin's too.
_ And the title album, does that come first, does it come last, does it come somewhere in the middle?
Well, we've always been obsessed with titles.
And I did like, you know, Resistance is Futile is very layered.
The idea that _ it's pointless trying anymore, but also this album is so melodic that you have to give in to it at some point.
And the album cover is this old samurai warrior, which, you know, he knows the age of the gun is coming.
But there's still, in his eyes, you can see a sadness and a vague sense of still keeping up the fight, which is, I guess, how we feel.
You talked, didn't you, just briefly about the digital age, and I can't quite remember how you put it.
But do you, you know, how, _ _ presumably in music, it's a brilliant thing in some ways, all the digital technology.
But how does it, what's your assessment?
It's a big question.
I think it's brilliant if you're under 20.
Right.
_ I'm not so sure.
I don't know, I just find it really hard to, _ there's many things you have to [G] keep up with, you know, being in a band.
And that it feels like you've got to do at least 100 times more things than you used to when you started.
Does it, why, because you were having to put the stuff together?
Which a lot of people love, don't they?
You know, I think if you've grown up in that age, that is it, it's self-control, you're totally in tune with it.
But I'd rather just sit down and talk to a journalist and do it that way.
Right.
In the digital age, you know, it is easier to digest music, but it's harder to investigate it.
It's harder to get obsessed about it, I think, in the digital age.
Very interesting.
Thank you quite.
I think we could discuss that for quite some time.
Thank you very much.
We've got to move on.
The Manic Street Preachers album is called, as we said, Resistance is Futile.
And the tour starts the 23rd of