Nicky Wire and the unity in opposition

Through sunglasses – his first, famed line of deflection – he looks at his image with a dispassion that could be taken for defeat. Tacked to the mirror are photographs, memento mori which Susan Sontag described as testifying to “time’s relentless melt” and all that it takes with it. There’s Wire in full bloom, lined eyes and hollowed cheeks; Manic Street Preacher and countercultural force. And here’s Wire looking upon him, looking upon himself - a legacy spanning fifteen albums between them. The past is irretrievable, but the show must go on.

The video for “Hiding in Plain Sight”, the lead single from the new Manic Street Preachers record Critical Thinking, is a museum. Here, the band which crawled from the wasted slag heaps of a post-industrial Wales to becoming one of the defining bands of the 90s, reference their own tangled history. There’s the naval cap from their artistic apex The Holy Bible, the feather boas Wire would wrap around his leopard print coats and cut-and-paste blazers, photographs of the band’s cultural deity Marilyn Monroe – and photographs of Richey Edwards, their lyricist and rhythm guitarist who left behind an interminable vacancy. In 1995, he disappeared and has since been declared dead in absentia; the band still set up his microphone at every performance. His pale skin and raven hair elevate Edwards to an incorruptible image, a semiotic afterlife he shares with Monroe, Coca-Cola and Jesus. It's a hard thing for his friends to reconcile.

Manic Street Preachers was then, and remains to be, peerless. With Britpop’s lager-swigging machismo dominating the decade, the Manics offered an antidote. When Oasis was espousing the wonders of cigarettes and alcohol, they penned lyrics that wrestled with themes of genocide, socialism and fascism, capital punishment and self-harm with references from a library of thinkers from Noam Chomsky to Albert Camus. In a determinedly masculine era, Wire and Edwards thrived with glamour and genderplay. There was an urgency to their mouthy quips (“If I can shoot rabbits, I can shoot fascists”) and electrocuting truths (“I’ve been too honest with myself I should have lied like everybody else”) – all these cautions and confessions to remind us “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next”.

Graduates of The Clash, the Manic Street Preachers were born to disrupt. In their formative years of fight and risk, Steve Lamacq, then an NME journalist, questioned how serious Edwards was about his art; Edwards then carved the words “4 Real” into his forearm with a razor blade. Eighteen stitches left a lasting scar for the rest of his twenty-seven years. In 1994, the band’s performance of “Faster” on the BBC’s Top of the Pops, with singer James Dean Bradfield wearing a balaclava flanked by flames, earned over 20,000 complaints – the most in the show’s history at the time. A decade later, they would be first popular Western rock band to play in Cuba and shake the hand of Fidel Castro.

After Edwards’ disappearance, the remaining members, Wire, Bradfield and drummer Sean Moore, took a six-month hiatus during which the fate of the Manic Street Preachers was contemplated. Dissolution was likely, but the three of them forced themselves into a rehearsal room – and from that severe darkness came a second, brilliant life. The Manics returned with Everything Must Go in 1996, their most successful record to date which became one of the defining records of the 90s. Though every successive album has been what Wire has jokingly referred to as a “managed decline”, their fourteenth album The Ultra Vivid Lament scored number one in the UK charts. The Manic Street Preachers are a testament to teeth-gritted survival, moving ceaselessly forward because their work is never done and because there is nothing else.

I speak to Nicky Wire a week after his 56th birthday. “It’s a tough one to take,” he says. “There’s nothing as cruel as time” – maybe joking, probably not. With lyrics written predominantly by Wire with the exception of a handful of songs penned by Bradfield, Critical Thinking is an unforgiving act of self-interrogation with age as its grand inquisitor.

“The ultimate betrayal tends to be of yourself,” he shares. “In an era of such fictionalised reality, I think it pushed me to look inward. I’ve always been kind of infinitely interested in myself – and not in a narcissistic way – but because it’s always felt like the final refuge of dependability. Knowledge is internal. I just went off with myself a bit, really… the chronic self-doubt, even toward the point of self-loathing. There’s certainly no epidemic of failure in the Manic Street Preachers or anything, but I felt a strange inertia in myself. I guess I wanted to figure out my own problems because it seems insurmountable to have any view on the macro problems in our society.” In the scorched earth of “One Man Militia”, he writes: “I don’t know what I am for / But I know what I’m against / I’m sickened to death by men / I’m bored to death with myself.”

During the writing of The Ultra Vivid Lament, Wire was mourning the death of his parents and it was coloured with a “warmer sort of melancholia” because of it, a kind of comfort. But Critical Thinking, he feels, is a record of opposites; the way things find togetherness despite their polarities. First, there is the tension between some of Wire’s most despondent lyrics countered with a near-dazzling euphoria in the music. It’s a sound that breaks the Manics’ sacred rules. And then there is perhaps the sharpest contrast of all: Wire and Bradfield’s lyrics, written in isolation from each other.

The album’s cover is by the famed Welsh documentary photographer David Hurn, who shot everything from the Hungarian revolution of 1956 to Sean Connery’s defining images as James Bond. But after inviting the 91-year-old to his house for black coffee after Wire purchased some of his prints, the band felt drawn to this particular image of a road in Arizona. On the tarmac there are three lines, each different, none of them quite meeting. Nicky Wire, James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore, alone together.

“He was 89 when I met him, and I felt inspired to stop moaning and worrying and avoiding work because he was still taking photographs every day,” says Wire. “It gave me a massive impetus to push on through with the album: a photograph is there to be taken, and if you don’t take it, you’ll always wonder what might’ve been.”

The Manic Street Preachers have always had a love affair with iconography. Their 1992 NME cover had been voted the ‘Greatest Ever’ by readers: an indelible image of Edwards covered in inkings of Marilyn Monroe. “Certainly, Richey and I were just as obsessed with photography as we were with music. We were obsessed with ourselves and obsessed with each other,” Wire shares. “I had a moment the other day when I realised that it has been thirty years since he disappeared; he’s been gone longer now than he was with us on this earth. It shook me to my bones, really.”

“I always feel like it’s not my duty, necessarily – because it’s perfectly natural – but he’s always on my shoulder making sure the flame is still burning. I’m certainly not as brave as he was, or as rigorously intellectual, but we shared the same aesthetic ideas. And aesthetics are so important to a band: our images are a kind of archaeology now. That’s the thing I miss most: the insane, delusional bravery of youth and the aesthetic glory of it all. Everything had to be big and massive. We were one of the first bands to say ‘We want everything’ and our image aligned with that. I’m really fucking glad we put the effort in.”

There’s certainly something hauntological about the modern Manics: the future is untenable, almost unimaginable, but their own past seems sharper than ever. In “Deleted Scenes”, Wire writes of “a cancellation before it happened” with the shattering sentiment: “I’m told I’m a symbol of the past / But wasn’t I a king built to last?” Wire shares, “There’s an Anne Sexton quote which was one of the sparks for the album: “I’m a collection of dismantled almosts” – and I think that fits with the idea of the breaking up of things, that the past is still constantly hovering to the point that it's the reality of your present life. I tried to just escape that a little bit, because as a band, it can be quite defeating. You can defeat your own existence.”

The Manics’ survival against staggering odds has always been a mystery as much to the band as it is to their audience, who are always surprised, still captivated. “We are a really bizarre collection of people, both as a four-piece and a three-piece. We were in the same classes at school since we were four-years-old, and we’ve known each other for fifty years. It’s either deeply masochistic or deeply loving. I mean, it’s fucking hard work keeping a band together just as it’s hard work keeping any relationship together. I think it certainly helped that we’ve never known any different.”

Much of this record is a reflection on the fact that “words have just become sacrificed at the altar of critical thinking”. The title track might strike you as a crotchety tirade against “Net neutrality smart meters / Smart water / Smart fucking motorways”, but Wire really takes aim at the way that language has become heavily therapised, self-censored and co-opted by an exploitative ‘wellness’ industry. “Everyone always talks about this idea of ‘the authentic self’, which I just don’t think is a good mantra," he tells me. "Mass murderers are being their authentic self; my authentic self would be pretty unhinged and a gobshite at times, just endlessly ranting to myself in a corner. It’s a meaningless and dangerous phrase. That said, it can help some people live a better life – the moral judgement is very much on myself. But I think critical thinking is about realising you have the power to reject as readily as you accept. It’s important that you still have that capability.”

His acts of resistance are embodied in his habits as equally as they are in his lyrics. Wire obsessively uses cash in defiance against digital algorithms, and he is a custodian not only of all Manics’ ephemera but an immense Polaroid collection in homage to the tactile, real things he takes comfort in. It’s a passion he shares with his 22-year-old daughter who has just completed her Masters at the Royal College of Art; her thesis was on the role of Polaroids in twentieth century culture.

I wonder, through the lens of his daughter, how Wire feels about the world young people find themselves in today. “There is an immense pressure on kids to not make any mistakes,” he reflects. “If you’re going to make mistakes, you should make them while you’re young. But now, it seems like there’s a digital record of them forever – and I can’t stress how lucky I feel having grown up in an age where that wasn’t an issue. There’s far too much unforgiveness toward young people. Surely, we have to give them a greater chance of expression and the ability to fuck up sometimes? Otherwise they’ll never learn. Failure is such an important part of your life and you shouldn’t protect yourself from it.”

Manic Street Preachers were born of the political disruption of the Miners’ Strikes; a generation of neutered men laid to waste, a land with a loss of purpose. Unemployment and destruction coloured their world view. “There have always been terrible times and circumstances, whether it be war or strikes of governments – but this is different,” he notes. “This is a hovering malaise of digital sickness. When we were younger, there was still an ability to dream and escape, and I think to me, those avenues have closed down a bit.”

He tells me of a book called Shadow Work by Ivan Illich. “It’s about how companies, corporations and tech bros, for lack of a better word, have put all the emphasis on us. Whether its’d doing your shopping with no one to serve you, putting your own oil in your car, doing your online banking – its’s all a giant handover of power and responsibility onto us. It’s saying, ‘You have to do every fucking thing’, and it’s debilitating for human beings to be burdened with so much pressure, to be so isolated from people and a community.”

Despite the unforgiving self-interrogations and unflattering reflections of Critical Thinking, on the other side of it, Wire is left with absolute gratitude. “I’m so grateful to be living where I am with the people I know in a rarefied, sheltered existence in some ways,” he shares. “I’m not extravagant, but financial security is in itself a massive fucking pleasure. I’m grateful for the fact we’re not in a war zone because you realise how circumstances for others are a million times more dire than your own, and sometimes you need to have that moment where you look in the mirror and find a deep understanding of what you can do next. We’re learning not to be so terrified of our own shadow, and it’s a long shadow.”