There are two concepts which are central to understanding both the cultural importance and continued appeal of the Manic Street Preachers. The first is the band as "a portal" – a doorway into the vast library of music, literature, art, film and politics that furnished their work. The second is the band as "post-cringe" – able to pursue their art in a manner that can transcend any consideration of what is cool.

Both these ideas are why a book like Keith Cameron’s 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure could be commissioned – where the author examines the lyrics, themes, recording, and context of a selection of the band’s back catalogue. To be a fan of the Manic Street Preachers is not a casual proposition. The band are a culture in and of themselves. They’re not simply a band you listen to, as what is so compelling about the band has often been found beyond the mere sound they make.

Instead they’re a band you live inside. A band guided by their curiosity, ambition, and the dualism of their sincerity and absurdity. Alongside this, their encyclopaedic knowledge of the world-at-large means there are always new clues and paths to follow from their albums and interviews. Unlike most alternative bands who see interviews as forums to be evasive, obscure, and mysterious, the Manic Street Preachers have always been open, honest and forthcoming (as well as combative and funny).

The title of Cameron’s book comes from two sources. The first is from the band’s bassist and lyricist, Nicky Wire – a man always looking for a ridiculous idea for the others to talk him out of – suggesting they should write a concept album to counter The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs called 70 Songs of Hatred and Failure. This idea aligned with the band’s instinct for agitation, but also with how they understood their own project as a band.

The band’s original manifesto contained the statement that they would never write a love song. To do so would be a waste of a megaphone. The objective of music was to say something extraordinary, not commonplace. To emphasise this, the band’s first significant release was an anti-love kick to the face called Motown Junk. Which announced itself through the opening line:

Never ever wanted to be with you, the only thing you gave me was the boredom I suffocated in.

Motown Junk’s theory was that rather than religion, it was actually the love song that was the opiate of the masses:

Motown Junk – a lifetime of slavery. Songs of love echo underclass betrayal.

Stops your heart beating for 1-6-8 seconds, stops your brain thinking for 1-6-8 seconds.

This is where the number of songs chosen by Cameron to analyse for the book comes from. One hundred and sixty-eight seconds – or 2 minutes 48 – was considered the ideal length of a pop song for radio at the time. As the band has released 319 songs to date, 168 was both a more manageable number, and one of symbolic value.

While as young political agitators, the band saw hatred as a motivating force, they would also consider their career to be a failure. Both in terms of not reaching their objective of total world domination, and through the loss of guitarist and lyricist Richey Edwards, who disappeared in 1995 and has never been found (he was declared legally dead in 2008). Given the band were primarily a close-knit group of friends (a gang before they were a band), this was an existential loss.

This nature of the Manic Street Preachers has been central to their appeal. Four childhood friends from a nowhere town in Wales kicking against the world. The shared lives and worldview, innate understanding and intense solidarity between them was integral to their music – and what has made them compelling beyond their music. They were not a band that could simply replace Edwards with someone else. The friendship was the band. The loss of Edwards was therefore a failure of concept. The three remaining friends continued without him, but the idea of the band was weakened.

The closeness of the friends was what allowed them to pursue a vision that people outside of themselves would find farcical. Following Motown Junk the band felt they needed a song to use as a retort to those who would envy their agitation, ambition and (projected) success. You Love Us was another deliberately confrontational song – a song of exaggerated confidence designed to goad the British music press into paying them attention. To them, it made sense to write such a song before anyone knew who the fuck they were. Eventually everyone would.

The band’s mythology has long been shaped by the idea of the grand folly – the spectacle of overreaching ambition: the attempt to build something vast, world-altering, and impossible, pursued with total sincerity and commitment, but which ultimately fails. The scale of their efforts, the intensity of their belief, and the gap between aspiration and outcomes is both amusing and captivating.

There are few grander follies in music than the Manic Street Preachers debut album – Generation Terrorists. An album that suffered from its bloated tracklist, its incongruous ideas, and shift in the musical culture between recording and release that made it passé as soon as it hit the shelves.

Surveying the musical landscape in early 1991 revealed to the band that punk had limited pathways to selling the 16 million albums they claimed their first album would. To achieve such a feat, the only path was through the United States, and in preceding years it was hard rock that had been culturally dominant. The idea struck them then to try to fuse together the confrontational radicalism of Public Enemy with the American everyman connection of Guns ‘N’ Roses. Big ideas and bigger riffs. To them it was a foolproof combination.

Only by the time the album was released the world had changed. Nirvana had struck, and gone was highly polished, balls-out guitar licks and in was a sound more abrasive and dissonant. Alongside this, there was a new youth posture of being disaffected, detached and authentic. To be cool meant restraint and disinterest. Boasting – one of the young Manic Street Preachers’ great skills – was now deeply suspicious.

Alongside their poor choice of musical style, the band also seemed oblivious to how their local political references could possibly find traction outside the United Kingdom. It is absurd to think that a guy driving his truck through rural Indiana would be singing along to a song about the British banking system called Natwest-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds. However, the band remained convinced that such an approach would be successful.

When the band did turn their lyrics towards the U.S it was with unvarnished hostility. Songs like Slash ‘n’ Burn and Democracy Coma were never going to connect with people to whom a loyal, uncritical patriotism was an integral part of how they understood the world.

Each move the band made was at odds with what could rationally produce the world domination they sought. But this is also what made them utterly fascinating – an irrepressible will, a romantic idea about what a rock band should be, and a belief that everything was of interest and capable of being incorporated into their world. A band who were both driven and weighed down by their ambition, incapable of connecting their goals to structural realities.

Aside from the mature outlier of Motorcycle Emptiness and enduring appeal of Little Baby Nothing (a song they wanted Kylie Minogue to sing), Generation Terrorists’ legacy lies within its sleeve rather than its sound. Here each song was given a quote to illustrate its theme and place it in a broader political or cultural context. These quotes included authors Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Camus, Henry Miller, and George Orwell, alongside Public Enemy’s Chuck D, and the Sleez Sisters, the fictional band from the film Times Square.

This approach to giving their music a wider context is one they have continued with every subsequent release – albums and singles alike – where there has always been at least one quote from philosophers, poets, actors, politicians, and novelists used to frame their music. It has been one of the central pillars of the band as “a portal”. To the fan, these sleeve quotes act as an invitation into the band’s world. This was especially important for teenagers looking to build their cultural knowledge. It provided both a list of other art to pursue, and made people feel like they were joining a movement with a genuine set of ideas behind it. This is what made the band exciting, and capable of generating a loyalty that could transcend the very uncool sound of their music.

Yet such aspiration for little reward also exhausted the band. There are few bands that have suffered so conspicuously from “second album syndrome”. Rather than adjust to the new cultural environment created by Nirvana, they doubled down. Only this time minus the fist-swinging political missives. As Cameron writes, Gold Against the Soul had the Manic Street Preachers “contemplating subsistence as a moderately successful career rock band”. Gone was the revolutionary fervour, gone was the agitation and spirit, and in its place was a mostly inward-looking album of middling FM rock designed to appease the blandest of radio station programmers and offend no-one.

Where the band did retain some wit and contention it was funnelled into Patrick Bateman, a six and half minute turd-metal epic about the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho (which also managed to squeeze in a back-handed reference to the Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder). The song was initially identified to be the album’s first single, but their record company subsequently refused to release it – with its blasphemy being the stated reason, but foresight probably being the more compelling one. Eventually it would appear as a b-side, and earn itself cult status as a song so bad it has a strange magnetic appeal.

Gold Against the Soul was a clear failure, and has mostly been renounced by the band. However, it did have two redeeming features. The first was La Tristesse Durera, a song that demonstrated, like with Motorcycle Emptiness, the band had a genuine talent for a style of melancholic rock that could connect sadness to a hummable tune. With the song being written from the point of view of a World War II veteran, it was also a demonstration of the band’s willingness to transcend political sloganeering and address global affairs in a more sophisticated manner. Particularly through subjects that conventional progressive politics would deem unfashionable.

The second redeeming feature of Gold Against the Soul was that it was a necessary humiliation. It forced the Manic Street Preachers to reevaluate their approach and clarify their purpose. The band had come to the realisation that they had lost their connection to the music they actually liked as teenagers, and succumbed to a lazy mode of operation that reflected the compromises they’d made. These compromises had brought them neither total world domination nor the dignity of a distinct artistic vision. They had to change.

That change was dramatic. Gone was any attempt to make music that could appeal to a broad audience. In its place was an album of jagged gothic post-punk that spat and snarled. An album of dark, concentrated intensity that had the band interrogating the civilisation rot of the 20th Century; its wars, genocides, serial killers and other moral failings, alongside themes of haunting psychological struggle. The album was a bloodied J’accuse to all and sundry. They called it The Holy Bible. A title both consistent with the band’s penchant for provocation, and reflective of the album’s artistic merit.

With Blur following the herds down to Greece, the Manic Street Preachers had again failed to align themselves with the cultural moment, yet this time it was intentional. The album was a hand grenade hurled into Britpop’s cosy enclave of self-regarding nostalgia. Its thesis was that the 20th Century had lacked a true accounting of its atrocities and enormous cultural changes, moving instead into a comfortable post-Cold War triumphalism. The Holy Bible’s cultural affinity was to be found not within the field of music, but with Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes – the historian’s overview of the period between 1914-1991 – which was released serendipitously almost simultaneously with the album.

Unlike other bands who would use touring Europe as an opportunity to sample the local inebriates, the Manic Street Preachers had instead taken the opportunity to visit the former concentration camps in Dachau and Belsen. This experience led to two songs on the album about the Holocaust – Mausoleum and The Intense Humming of Evil – with Mausoleum’s coda containing what would be the album’s guiding philosophy, a sample of J.G Ballard describing his book Crash – I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.

The Holy Bible’s overarching theories of the century’s brutality came via Of Walking Abortion and Archives of Pain. The latter’s argument was that there lay a lust for, and fascination with, violence deep within humanity’s soul, and the appetite for the rehabilitation of criminals is a sentimental lie that betrays the victims of violence. While rehabilitation may seem politically noble, it actually functions as a form of forgetting, making society more vulnerable to our violent lusts. The song is embellished through a sinister bass line, an escalating and intense instrumental outro, and a truly bonkers chorus that simply lists the names of mass murders and vicious political leaders (replacing Milosevic with Manic Street Preachers the second time it comes around).

Yet Archives of Pain was not alone in confronting progressive shibboleths. Through P.C.P the band critiqued what was then called “political correctness”. The song argued that such a social management system was driven by what Edwards called in his explanatory notes distributed to journalists as the “New Moral Certainty” – a conviction that has only intensified since. The negative effects of such linguistic policing and moral posturing were predominantly worn by both the working classes and those groups who these social rules claimed to be protecting.

It’s a song that continues to offend modern analysts of the album. As what the song demonstrated was the band’s stubborn streak of intellectual independence, and the sharp disconnect between their own socialism – rooted in the mining towns of the South Wales valleys – and the costuming of middle class progressive politics.

Yet the album’s legacy has been less tied to the political lessons of the 20th Century (lessons we’re now failing to heed), and more to the bleak emotional difficulties of its chief lyricist, Edwards. Prior to the album’s release he had been admitted to a mental health hospital, and songs like 4st 7lbs and Die in the Summertime were clear indications of his deterioration. Even the extraordinary boast of the album’s lead single Faster (that is, one who fasts) – I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer, I spat out Plath and Pinter – was indicative of the very opposite.

Six months after the release of The Holy Bible, in February 1995, Edwards and singer/guitarist James Dean Bradfield were due to fly to New York for a promotional visit, instead Edwards left the London hotel where they were staying prior to departure, drove back to Cardiff where he left some items in his flat, and then remained undetected for two weeks before his car was found with a dead battery at a service station near the Severn Bridge crossing between England to Wales. There has been no trace of him since.

After six months of contemplating their continued existence as a band, out of habit Wire gave Bradfield a pair of lyrics, and Bradfield concluded they were both on a similar theme and decided to fuse the two together in order to construct some music. The process was an attempt to create some normalcy during a deeply traumatic period. Yet the result was spectacular, and something the band felt needed to be heard.

A Design for Life was driven by what Wire saw as Britpop cosplaying and commodifying British working class culture. The song was a vast, poignant hymn to the band’s own origins. It was also the sound of the band stepping out of the twin shadows of The Holy Bible and Edwards’s disappearance, and in doing so, achieving something that had previously eluded them – a massive hit single.

The subsequent album, Everything Must Go, produced another shift in style – more expansive and melodic, with an overarching sentiment that Bradfield would describe a “wistful resistance” – a form of euphoric melancholy that the band would come to perfect. All four singles from the album reached the top ten of the British charts, and the album would be certified as triple platinum. Although traction in the U.S continued to elude them, Everything Must Go would transform the band from cult curios into one of the United Kingdom’s biggest bands.

Yet this success was clearly bittersweet. The disappearance of Edwards was not simply a personal tragedy but a rupture at the very heart of what the Manic Street Preachers were – a band built on a deep personal bond between four lifelong friends. Music was the vehicle to express this bond, it wasn’t a bond established by the band. For Edwards to not share in their success diminished the ability to take full pride and celebration in their work.

Yet Everything Must Go was not without Edwards’ input. Five songs on the album featured lyrics written by him. These included Kevin Carter – a portrait of the Pulitzer Prize winning South African war photographer who committed suicide after being unable to cope with what he had witnessed (and been rewarded for). As well as the gorgeous Small Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky, a song ostensibly about animals in captivity – written after Edwards had watched a documentary on the state of Britain’s zoos – but which could also be interpreted as being an analogy for his own time in a mental health hospital.

What the band had achieved with Everything Must Go was distinct from their early conception of what success would look like. There was no accompanying youth revolution, it didn’t bring down the British monarchy, and there were no American stadium tours. Yet it did generate enough interest to demonstrate that the band’s irrepressible will was capable of finally connecting with the broader British public, and doing so while overcoming great personal loss.

This new connection with mainstream audiences offered the band an opportunity to place their ideas into the public consciousness. Which initially they understood. If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next drew upon George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, with Wire contemplating whether he would have the courage and be prepared to make the necessary sacrifices to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War – or any modern equivalent. Despite its subject matter and its blunt and unwieldy title, the song became the band’s first number one single.

Yet the subsequent album – This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours – failed to capitalise further on this opportunity. It was again an inward looking album, often far more concerned with Wire’s domestic world than political commentary. Where this worked well, like with Black Dog On My Shoulder, it was exquisite, yet much of the album felt resigned, timid and insipid. When Wire sought to make a bold statement through S.Y.M.M (which stood for South Yorkshire Mass Murderer) the lyrics were a weird metacommentary about writing a song about the Hillsborough Disaster, rather than directly addressing the administrative neglect that created the tragedy.

The overly earnest album title was taken from a speech by the founder of the NHS, Welsh Labour politician, Aneurin Bevan. It symbolised a conscious choice to connect more overtly with Wales. Songs about the flooding of the Tryweryn Valley to create a water reservoir for Liverpool (Ready for Drowning) and the Welsh sisters known as the Silent Twins (Tsunami) were expressions of this new interest in their country, but they were rare outward-facing songs.

This expression of Welshness was something that Edwards had previously resisted, wishing to avoid what he called “the Kinnock factor”, the certain demeaning attitude towards the Welsh, and the perceived unelectability of former Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock. This was exemplified by The Sun’s infamous headline on election day in 1992 “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.” The idea would stick with Wire as one that may have been the cause of their lack of early success.

The band had initially attempted to record a far more upbeat record with a producer whose background was in electronic music. Yet these sessions were not deemed successful and were abandoned. However, songs from it would surface as b-sides, with one, Prologue to History, beginning with the line – Were we the Kinnock factor? Driven by an Italo-House piano line, it was notable for its stream of references from Shaun Ryder (again) to British middle distance runner Steve Ovett. Despite being discarded as a b-side it earned a full page spread in Select magazine explaining its details.

Such interest in the band was indicative of their newfound success. Despite the languid nature of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours it matched the sales of Everything Must Go. Yet, there was a palpable sense that the band had lost their verve and spirit. Much of this had previously been supplied by Edwards, yet it was also the nature of success. Rather than success facilitating the fantasy of tearing down establishments – as they had conceived in their youth – success instead draws you into a cultural machine, presenting you not with freedom but with compromise.

In an attempt to reset and reclaim their edge, the Manic Street Preachers embarked on what could be seen as their grandest of follies – a concert in Havana. Cuba offered the romance of resistance – revolutionary iconography, anti-American defiance, the illusion of authenticity untouched by Western commercialism. The band had used the Cuban flag on their limited-edition turn-of-the-century single The Masses Against The Classes – a song less political statement and more a petulant response to those suspicious of their success. Cuba symbolised where the band felt more comfortable – as pariahs rather than as parishioners.

Yet the trip to Cuba was a familiar artistic temptation: the belief that a proximity to “history” or “revolution” can restore a sense of purpose and radical idealism. Instead, the band found themselves playing before Castro and being absorbed into the theatre of his regime’s propaganda. Rather than restore the band’s insurgent energy, they sold themselves to a political system they only partially understood. In the process, revealing how vulnerable artists are to political mythmaking and the allure of authoritarian state power. This would be subsequently acknowledged over a decade later on the song The Next Jet to Leave Moscow from their Futurology album.

The attempt to reclaim their youthful spirit via a new album was also an extraordinary failure. Named Know Your Enemy – a phrase generally traced back to Sun Tzu and The Art of War – and leading with Found That Soul, the album was both trying too hard to prove itself and a sprawling, incoherent mess of musical styles and weak subject matter. Where the band’s best albums – The Holy Bible and Everything Must Go – had a tight focus and consistency of both sound and vision, Know Your Enemy was the work of a band lacking in aim and purpose, or, like the trip to Cuba, actively seeking to detonate themselves.

Oddly, the album’s one great triumph – So Why So Sad – has become a song the band have disowned, seemingly disappointing by its lack of public traction, and the confusion created by writing the best Beach Boys song since the late-1960s. An occasionally lazy lyricist, So Why So Sad is one of Wire’s finest lyrics – subtle, not overreaching and paying close attention to each word, as he explored the duality of his personality as both an enfant terrible and lethargic homebody. The song itself is an exquisitely crafted gem, and a demonstration that the band’s musical imagination could extend beyond the guitar.

If Know Your Enemy was utterly baffling to the fanbase who had come onboard through Everything Must Go and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, the band weren’t finished confusing people, and orchestrating their own decline. After their longest break between albums, the band reemerged with an electro-pop song called The Love of Richard Nixon. While the song title continued the band’s fondness for provocation, it was also borne from a fascination and studied interest in grand historical figures, and especially an interest beyond their headline reputations. The band have never been shy about trying to establish a public connection with unusual material – as hit and miss as this had been for them.

There was also a certain affinity between the Manic Street Preachers and the former president – both emerged from modest circumstances and were driven by a force of personality that willed their place in history into existence. Yet success, for each of them, coexisted with a persistent sense of visions unrealised and ambitions thwarted, alongside the obvious penchant for self-sabotage. The lyric “the times they fall behind you“ could apply as readily to themselves as to Nixon – particularly during The Holy Bible period, where the band’s diagnosis of the world now looks prescient.

Prescient could also describe the subsequent album, Lifeblood. Despite its commercial failure, history has been far kinder to it, with a sound more aligned with the musical culture two decades on. The album was also more focused musically, built around sleek synthesised textures, controlled atmospherics and a coherent emotional tone that deliberately set it apart from the era. It was an album designed for a night home alone, rather than a night on the town.

Like The Holy Bible’s rejection of Britpop, here Lifeblood was a rejection of the prevailing musical culture of the early-2000s. A time when guitar music was increasingly defined by the retro-rock revivalism and laddish hedonism of bands like The Strokes and The Libertines – what is now labelled “indie sleaze”.

Despite the band’s long-cultivated image of provocation and fondness for rock ‘n’ roll mythology, genuine hedonism had never interested them; if anything, a deep suspicion towards those pursuing pleasure too enthusiastically had always sat at the centre of their worldview. The band’s rhetoric and public image were often at odds with their actual character: beneath the slogans, eyeliner and confrontational posturing sat a sensibility heavily rooted in the mining communities of the Welsh valleys – hard work, personal restraint, respect, helpfulness, loyalty and politeness. They are quite possibly the only rock band to whom punctuality is a core tenet.

These – now former – mining communities of South Wales are not just central to the band’s origins, but their origin story. The defining event of their teenage years was the Miner’s Strike of 1984-85, which hit South Wales with particular intensity – with mine-dependent communities facing an existential struggle against pit closures and state restructuring. This was not just an industrial dispute between the British government and the National Union of Mineworkers, it was a social rupture that was cultural as much as it was economic.

Coal mining had been central to the livelihood of the region since the late 17th century, embedding itself deeply into the fabric of South Wales. It fostered tightly bound communities defined by deep solidarity, where toil, workplace risk and mutual social dependence shaped everyday life. There was a powerful sense of collective pride in having fuelled the Industrial Revolution – a pride not from wealth or personal status, but the collective social esteem that the physical labour of the Welsh coalfields underpinned modern Britain’s industrial rise. What the government offered in replacement – the Pot Noodle factory – offered no such dignity.

The first song that Wire and Bradfield wrote together as teens was called Aftermath – a commentary on the Miners’ Strike. Ever self-referential, Lifeblood’s opening track was called 1985 and was a song about this first song. Yet 1985 is also about the cultural environment of the time, with references to The Smiths and Torvill and Dean. In interviews for Cameron’s book, Wire remains convinced that 1985 was music’s greatest year, and the song is more of a lament for his teenage years which offered both a social struggle and a vast cultural menu for inquisitive young minds.

The band have often discussed their blissful childhoods, and this has informed a sense of loss as a central theme of their work. The brutal economic change of South Wales, the broader rapid social and cultural change of the past forty years, and, of course, the disappearance of Edwards. Wire had skirted around the issue in several songs, but it wasn’t until writing Your Love Alone Is Not Enough did he address his feelings directly.

The song is blunt in asserting that Edwards owed them something more than just love, he owed the band his presence. An assertion that friendship was a shared commitment to lows, not simply revelling in highs, that Edwards didn’t acknowledge what he had – the privilege of a lifelong bond that offered unconditional support. The song also happened to be phenomenally catchy – enlisting The Cardigans’ Nina Persson for a duet – and revived the band as a popular success.

In 2008, Edwards was declared legally dead. The law in the UK stipulates that after seven years a missing person can be declared dead, but his family and the band had delayed this decision in hope that he might resurface. The band had continued splitting their earnings four ways, even on records that Edwards hadn’t appeared on, in case he did reappear he would have a considerable sum to live off. The official declaration of his death allowed this money to be released to his family.

Yet the declaration also allowed the band to enlist Edwards again as a songwriter. A few weeks prior to his disappearance, Edwards had given the rest of the band a binder of new lyrics. Those that had already been turned into demos – and Edwards had heard – appeared on Everything Must Go, but the other lyrics the band felt they shouldn’t touch. However, they now revised this decision, feeling it was time to give him a proper send off with a new album constructed with his input.

The nature of Edwards’ lyrics lent the band to revisit a sound adjacent to The Holy Bible, and they actively sought a visual symmetry as well. Whereas The Holy Bible had featured a painting by Jenny Saville called Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) as its cover image, they returned to Saville again who supplied them with Stare for Journal for Plague Lovers. The band also used the same typeface, and the backwards Rs they had used in 1994 (itself a device borrowed from the Simple Minds album Empires and Dance).

Several songs concern Edwards’ time in a mental health hospital, and in particular his critique of the 12 Step Program and its religious themes. However, rather than entirely bleak, the album also deploys absurdist humour. Jackie Collins Existential Question Time – “Oh Mummy, what’s a Sex Pistol? – and Me and Stephen Hawking – “We missed the sex revolution, when we failed the physical” were both wry in a way that suggested that Edwards hadn’t entirely succumbed to despair.

Yet themes from The Holy Bible did reappear, notably on This Joke Sport Severed, the sister song to She Is Suffering. The “she” in this song was a metonym for “desire” and the song concerns Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths – the first two are that life involves suffering, and that it is desire that is its root cause. The song interrogates the darker mechanics of male sexuality, and its psychological hold on masculinity.

If She is Suffering was Edwards contemplating the first and second noble truths, then This Joke Sport Severed was him moving onto the third – to actually follow the logic through, and attempt the radical disconnection from human relationships that monks and ascetics have always understood as the only clean solution.

Yet through the song Marlon J.D there is a recognition that such clean solutions also come with costs. The song is written about Marlon Brando’s character in Reflections in a Golden Eye; a man whose rigid self-discipline is itself a prison. Edwards’ fascination with self-denial was apparent through a song like 4st 7lbs off The Holy Bible, yet the film itself demonstrates the pressure that builds – and ultimately bursts – from such austerity. And ultimately it did for Edwards too.

While it was one of the band’s more stylistically consistent and better albums, Journal for Plague Lovers also revealed a tension that had appeared during The Holy Bible. Although that album’s artistic merit made it a record of enormous cultural importance, writing music that served the nature of Edwards’ lyrics moved the band into terrain that made their mission of “mass communication” more difficult.

Following the darker style of Journal for Plague Lovers, the band returned to trying to write a widescreen, continent-sized radio anthem through (It’s Not War) Just the End of Love. A song that sought to embody the “euphoric melancholy” that had been central to their biggest hits. It was an attempt to reassert themselves as a band that could reach a broader audience.

Ordinarily this approach would mark a band as “uncool” in more musically discerning circles. Indie cool runs on a set of unspoken rules: understatement beats enthusiasm, obscurity beats popularity, and trying too hard is sin. Authenticity is everything, even though this produces its own performative behaviour. The in-group is maintained through the cultivation of taste and the signal that there are those who “get it” and those who don’t.

Modern progressive cultural politics imports this same psychological structure. Persuasion gets treated as pandering, big-tent messaging as a sell-out, and an attempt to speak to a larger constituency is seen as a compromise. Just as an indie band loses credibility by chasing a wider audience, a progressive political position loses credibility by being too broadly acceptable. The attempt to convince people becomes evidence of inauthenticity.

The Manic Street Preachers were built on a complete rejection of this thinking. To them, both music and politics was about mass participation. They were about having the communication skills to reach and convince people that something is of worth. While this approach may seem uncool to those who prioritise exclusive scenes or niche ideas, the band’s roots in the Old Labour culture of the Welsh Valleys gave them an instinct that persuading a large constituency was the whole point. The internal rules of indie scenes and modern progressive cultures seemed small in comparison.

Yet also central to the band had been the idea that the mainstream audience can handle bigger ideas in their pop music, and to recognise that being exclusive is actually a form of condescension. The band’s operating principles have been to be open to understanding all culture, to not be snobbish, to be curious, and to find something to appreciate in everything. Their attempts at “mass communication” were often spectacular failures, but the striving was genuine and generous.

This is what made the band “post-cringe”. They simply exist outside of the rules that constrain other bands. Part of this has been what Cameron describes as the “quintessentially Manics mangling of intent and outcomes,” which has been part of their charm, and what has allowed people to give the band a leeway to fail. The scope of the band has always made them worth more than the music alone.

This scope is what allowed them to write and record two completely distinct albums simultaneously. Two albums that highlighted the duality of the band. The first – Rewind The Film – was a paean to Wales, a predominantly acoustic and downbeat reckoning with ageing, loss, nostalgia, and the landscape of the valleys that made them as people.

It was a mostly inward-facing album, yet also contained a glorious burst of exuberance called Show Me The Wonder – a song that could be seen as their operating system. Four working-class kids from Blackwood hungry for music, literature, art, film and politics – it is a song that captures the band’s core conviction that curiosity is not a phase you grow out of but a discipline you maintain. That the simple act of paying attention to the world was both a requirement and a reward.

The second album – Futurology – was outward-facing, a love letter to European culture and political identity. Drawing upon the motorik rhythms of Krautrock and with the influence of electronic post-punk, it is – alongside The Holy Bible – the band’s most musically interesting album. Its idea was to be a statement of Britain’s European connection at a time when the UK was moving towards the self-destructive detachment of the Brexit referendum.

Although the album is often let down by lyrics that are trying too hard to fit the album’s intent, one song that avoids such a problem is the instrumental Dreaming a City (Hugheskova). Although musically a homage to Simple Minds Theme for Great Cities (albeit with some additional prog elements), it is the title of the song that is most intriguing.

Hugheskova was founded in 1869 by John Hughes, a Welsh ironmonger from Merthyr Tydfil – just up the road from Blackwood. Hughes had secured a contract to establish coal and steel works in what is now Ukraine’s Donbas region. The settlement that grew around his iron factory was initially staffed by workers recruited from South Wales. The city was renamed Donetsk in 1961 and grew to become Ukraine’s fifth largest. It is currently occupied by Russia.

Whereas Rewind the Film had looked back at the local platform on which the band were built, Futurology looked forward and outward, towards Berlin, towards the European modernist tradition, toward the idea of the continent as a shared intellectual and political project. The two albums together could be seen as forecasting the rise of Plaid Cymru as now the largest party in Wales – a party staunchly committed to the Welsh nation, yet also keen for Wales to rejoin the European Union.

Upon its formation, the EU chose the shade Reflex Blue as its representative colour as it carried no single nation’s associations. It was the colour of the ocean and the sky, it felt collective and beyond political structures. To the naked eye Reflex Blue and International Klein Blue are incredibly similar. Developed in 1960, Yves Klein had believed his shade of the colour dissolved the boundaries between the physical world and the transcendent, it was the colour that humanity lived inside, connecting generations and cultures.

For a band to whom “everything” has been their animating force, International Klein Blue carried with it a sentiment that clearly required a song. In a latter period where the band struggled to maintain consistency, International Blue, from the band’s next album Resistance is Futile, was a triumph. An uplifting slice of power-pop that took a concept that could otherwise feel distant and abstract and gave it warmth and a racing pulse. At their best, this was the Manic Street Preachers singular gift – the ability to find what may be an obscure idea and make it feel like it belonged to everyone.

Wire developed a niche for writing songs about artists – from Interiors (Willem de Kooning), To Repel Ghosts (Jean-Michel Basquiat), Black Square (Kazimir Malevich), Between the Clock and the Bed (Edvard Munch) and The Secret He Had Missed (Augustus and Gwen John). It was a demonstration of the portal evolving with age, still fascinated, still searching for ideas that can be converted into their own art. Still seeing the band’s mission as conduits.

It is this conception of the band as conduits that drives Cameron’s 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure. The unconventional structure of the book – navigating the band song-by-song – provides an accumulation of intimate details, rather than just the headline-grabbing moments, to create a fuller portrait of both their work and who they are as people. Cameron understood that the band’s follies and failures are not embarrassments to be explained away but the very substance of what made them worth writing about.

This is ultimately what has been central to the band’s appeal – not simply the music, but an investment in a particular way of moving through the world. An insatiable curiosity, a conviction that culture has no hierarchy, and the audacity to think that four boys from a small town in South Wales could create something world-altering.

Yet it has also been the contradictions at the band’s core that made them genuinely compelling – socialists with a fiercely independent streak, antagonists who were honour-bound to the courtesy and decency of the Welsh valleys, intellectuals who believed in pop and the importance of speaking to everyone. And an intensely loyal group of friends who were able to use their collective abilities to create an improbable artistic force, yet through the disappearance of Edwards were unable to remain fully together.

All of this – the contradictions, the aspiration, the follies, the success, the devastation – coheres into a single moment on Still Snowing in Sapporo, the opening song from their fourteenth album. Documenting their first trip to Japan, the song is a neat encapsulation of the band: an awkward, cringey verse coupled with a chorus you can see from space. An acknowledgement of the ambition they could never quite meet, the enormous loss they have carried, and the implicit recognition of the magnitude of what they had actually achieved.

The song concludes with the same immense idea that drove them as teenagers – “the four of us against the world.”

Human beings are inquisitive creatures by nature. This curiosity has cultivated an adventurous spirit, a desire to venture beyond our immediate surroundings, to observe what others are doing, and to absorb what might prove useful. This is the process of discovery and exchange – how ideas are born, fused together, and refined. It is through this endless cycle of encounter and adaptation that we have both created culture and expanded its possibilities.

The moment two groups of people have made contact throughout history, exchange begins, through language, food, religion, music, technology. This is not a modern phenomenon or a feature of our current instantaneous global reach; it is the history of humanity. At our core, we are relentless borrowers and enhancers of each other’s good ideas, and what we now take for granted as “traditional” is often the product of this process. Italian and Indian cuisine without tomatoes, or Thai food without chillies, would be almost unrecognisable, yet neither tomatoes nor chillies are native to those regions, having instead been woven into their cultures through this process of hybridisation.

Nothing is immune from this process. The language I am typing in now is classified as Germanic, but the majority of its vocabulary is derived from Romance languages. After absorbing French in the early centuries of the second millennium, English then set itself off around the world incorporating whatever it found useful. The great utility of the language – and the boundless pages of its thesaurus – is due its inherent disinterest in purity.

This cultural exchange does not dilute cultures, it is the mechanism by which cultures enhance themselves. Cultures that are frozen and suspicious of change tend to stagnate or fade. Living cultures, however, borrow, absorb and adapt from their neighbours, and allow their neighbours to do likewise. With each emerging richer for the transition. We may have created national borders for the sake of administrative efficiency, but it is the traffic across borders that is the real story of humanity.

Yet this natural and timeworn human process remains politically contentious. There is a great paradox at the heart of humanity: the same beings who are drawn instinctively towards discovery and exchange are equally capable of turning inward, retreating into the insular comfort of an in-group. The idea of cultural purity, of ancient tradition and custom, is emotionally powerful, offering people a sense of grounding and coherence – of an unbroken lineage passed down through generations.

This perspective has always been politically seductive, promising a world made simple, where there is one people, one story, and one uncontested sense of home. Its romance flourishes through nostalgia, imagining nations within a golden age before the contamination of outside influence. This is a past invariably more invented than remembered, yet it is a compelling political tool, and capable of great brutality when aroused to its extremes.

Yet suspicion of cultural exchange is not confined to jackboot nationalism. The romance of cultural purity has become a similarly powerful progressive political idea. It has been used to exceptionalise certain favoured groups, to place them outside of the common human story, and to declare that any act of cultural curiosity extended towards them is not an attempt at understanding and connection, but instead an act of “cultural appropriation”.

The accusation of cultural appropriation draws its force from postcolonial theory – the argument that cultural exchange has rarely been a transaction between equals. When a dominant culture borrows from a less powerful one, it does so on its own terms; extracting a concept or aesthetic while discarding the people, profiting from the utility of the idea while marginalising the source community. Culture, in this view, is not a commons to be freely shared but a form of property that should be guarded from theft.

Those who invoke the idea of cultural appropriation rely on two assumptions: that cultures are distinct and bounded, and that cultural elements belong exclusively to the group that originated them and cannot be hybridised. These are the exact same assumptions as ethnic nationalists, only filtered through the oppressor/oppressed binary to create a sense of sympathy for a less powerful group. This lens offers something seductive: the intoxicating thrill of pointing a finger, and a flattering self-image as the guardian of vulnerable cultures.

It was within this modern political environment of heightened cultural anxiety that Swedish songwriter Sarah Assbring – aka El Perro del Mar – boldly created her album KoKoro. The album’s premise was to continue her intimate and melancholic pop – inspired by lo-fi indie-pop, 60s girl groups, and soul – but to enhance it by constructing an album predominantly using non-Western instruments.

The intent was to create a borderless album, one that belonged to everywhere simultaneously. If pop music is the universal connector of humanity, then, Assbring believed, the creation of it should draw upon humanity’s vast array of musical styles and tools.

Of course, branching out from the traditional instruments used in Western pop is not new. George Harrison introduced the sitar into the Beatles’ music in the 1960s on Norwegian Wood. Not to be outdone, the Rolling Stones used the instrument to great effect on Paint It Black. This helped inspire the development of the electric sitar, a hybrid instrument that could be played more like a guitar. B.J Thomas, Steely Dan, and Led Zeppelin all embraced the instrument as providing a sound and feeling that the guitar couldn’t.

In the 1980s, Peter Gabriel sought to fuse what had become known as “world music” to the then-latest advances in electronic instruments to create a highly distinct pop sound. Then expanding this out of pop into Passion, his soundtrack to the film The Last Temptation of Christ. While Canada’s favourite punchline, The Tea Party, attempted to update Led Zeppelin for the 1990s with an array of different Middle Eastern and Indian instruments to augment their overwrought rock.

Yet what marks KoKoro as distinct is that it was made during an emerging period of intense cultural insularity, with its suspicion towards any kind of cross-cultural artistic expression. This suspicion masked itself through the mantra of “diversity” but in practice has advocated for the very opposite – an ethnic and cultural segregation that worked against humanity’s natural curiosity and desire for exchange. Within this climate, KoKoro was an act of courage; a refusal to let the demand for conformity restrain her creative imagination.

The starting point for Assbring was a visit with her son to a music museum that allows visitors to play instruments from around the world. This sowed the seeds for her to immerse herself in music from East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, the Middle East and East Africa. She then tracked down instruments that provided the sounds she liked – the Chinese guzheng, the Japanese shakuhachi flute, Arabic strings, the hammered dulcimer, and Indian tablas and Ethiopian kebero for rhythm.

Her aim was straightforward: to find a new way to write pop music, one with influences that felt genuinely fresh rather than familiar. Obviously, the structure of her songs, and her style of singing, is in the Western pop tradition, but the aim was to augment this with sounds that could ignite new feelings, and a broader sense of musical purpose.

This is how culture evolves. The artist who encounters an unfamiliar instrument is not simply adding colour to their palette, they are restructuring how they hear, how they feel, and ultimately how they think. The guzheng demands a different approach to melody than the guitar. While the shakuhachi’s historical relationship with Zen Buddhism carries with it a unique sense of calm and space. To utilise these instruments is to allow another culture’s way of feeling the world to pass through you.

Here Assbring is no different to the ancient traveller or trader before her. She was simply drawn to new ways to construct her songs out of the usefulness of discovering additional elements. It is both curiosity and necessity that are the parents of invention. At the time, the tools she already possessed had reached their limit, and so, like any practical explorer, she went looking for better ones.

This translated into the themes for the album’s song, with Assbring wanting to address the condition of the modern human being; the state of the world, its pressures and moral direction. The concept was to create an album with a universal voice, and this required building it from sounds that belonged to no single place.

Lyrically Breadandbutter is her most direct statement of universal solidarity, a push back against the tribalism and division that Assbring saw hardening around her. The song is an insistence on our shared humanity and the blunt realities of our common origins. While Clean Your Window is a confrontation with the insularity, narcissism and conformity of the modern social and political environment.

Our modern retreat into insularity has been a search for comfort, yet the outgrowth of this has been to actually make us less happy. Ging Ging interrogates this directly – its lyric “happiness, whatever it means, it’s not enough” captures the restlessness of a society that has material comfort but remains profoundly dissatisfied. Politics, and its social expressions, have become increasingly fixated on groups and grievances, stoking vulnerability and discontent among subcultural identities and emotionally insecure majorities alike. The result is a complaint-driven worldview that feeds anxiety rather than resolving it.

It is curiosity that offers us the path out of this mire. Curiosity builds our resilience. It opens us up to the world and helps us navigate it with confidence. To understand the world is not solely to locate opportunity within it, but it is also necessary to overcome the darker impulses within humanity that seek to divide and segregate.

What KoKoro exemplifies is a kind of apprenticeship to the world: a willingness to learn from the unfamiliar, and to allow that knowledge to build upon and ultimately transform one's work into something that could not have existed otherwise. Assbring did not raid these traditions for exotic decoration – she was doing what humans have always done, reaching across boundaries in a spirit of curiosity and exchange. This is the mechanism by which music, perhaps more than any other art form, has always evolved.

Each of our cultural traditions is actually a layering of influences accumulated over centuries. Cultures are processes, not possessions, they are not bounded and static, but ever-evolving. No culture's identity is diminished by this acknowledgement. It is simply an honest account of how human creativity has always moved – through contact, collaboration, and exchange.

In 1588, with the Spanish Armada off the coast of England threatening to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I and restore the country to Catholic rule, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes was born. He later claimed that “fear and I were born as twins”, and the emotion would become the dominant theme of his work. This work would set a baseline problem for the fields of political science and international relations, defining the worst-case logic for how human beings organise themselves and interact with one another.

What guided Hobbes was a belief that human life is shaped by insecurity, suspicion, and the constant anticipation of violence – a condition he describes as a “war of all against all.” His vision was bleak, yet from it he was able to construct a philosophy that he believed could encourage coexistence. When the threat of war against all went apocalyptic with the invention of nuclear weapons, military strategists found in Hobbes a ready-made blueprint – codifying the idea that peace depends not on trust, but on the fear of mutual annihilation.

By the 1980s, as Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union became more pronounced, the fear of nuclear war radiated throughout the culture. Alongside the daily news, there were the eerie public safety films, anti-nuclear protest movements that filled city squares, and books and cinema that extrapolated this fear out into dire scenarios, all creating an ambient sense of unease.

While fear often works in film, it’s not usually a great theme for pop music. Pop’s primary charm often relies on emotionally appealing feelings like love or nostalgia. Alarm and discomfort don’t get toes tapping or provide emotional highs. Yet this cultural fear also found its way into pop. Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Two Tribes, Depeche Mode’s Leave In Silence, and Ultravox’s Dancing With Tears In My Eyes all were written in response to nuclear anxiety. While Morrissey claimed, in his usual wry tone, that “If it’s not love, then it’s the bomb that will bring us together” – a very Hobbesian sentiment.

This nuclear dread ascended to the heights of the British charts through a pair of polka-dot clad Glaswegians called Strawberry Switchblade, with their single Since Yesterday. Packaged as an upbeat synth-pop song, lyrically the song is a quiet personal reckoning with impending destruction, as the dawning horror of understanding that the life you took for granted may be eviscerated. In this way, thoughts of yesterday become precious precisely because tomorrow has grown uncertain. Counterintuitively, it is dread that teaches us to appreciate the world, as with it comes the comprehension of what we may lose.

This is bleak, confronting stuff. Nuclear dread became a distinct fear as it was something you couldn’t run from or resolve personally. While other fears may be circumstantial, a nuclear war was omnipresent. Instead of being human scale, nuclear fear presented itself on a scale so disproportionate and all-inclusive that the usual instruments of survival were useless, or absurd. This was the fear of knowing that human annihilation was always technically possible, and always somewhere on someone’s desk.

Here there was a reliance on the responsibility of very few individuals operating under intense political pressure. People whose jobs were to act on orders which had unimaginable consequences. What made this more frightening was that fear doesn’t behave in a tidy manner under pressure. The theories of nuclear deterrence, the supposed restraints of Mutually Assured Destruction, didn’t seem strong enough.

The people tasked with monitoring, or orchestrating, the end of the world were subject to the full range of ordinary human weaknesses — fatigue, groupthink, confirmation bias, personal insecurities and the eagerness to please superiors. As well as a lack of vigilance from years of monitoring something that hasn’t happened. Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet officer who in 1983 correctly judged an incoming missile alert to be a false alarm, is celebrated as a hero, but he actually represents something more unsettling: a reminder that the entire architecture of nuclear weaponry rested on one man’s gut feeling working with systems that could create false information.

Strawberry Switchblade were working with the existential loneliness of such an environment. Where the future offers such devastation, that whatever existed yesterday was undeniably preferable. The invention of nuclear weapons, intensified by the ideological conflict of the Cold War, established more than the ability to destroy the world multiple times over; it informed us that Hobbes’s worst-case logic was our unavoidable permanent condition.

If Since Yesterday represented a political and globe fear, then Trees and Flowers was a far more personalised form of fear. Perhaps an even more devastating song, it maps the interior world of agoraphobia, where there is overwhelming reluctance to be in public spaces, driven by the sense that the world beyond familiar boundaries produces a crippling anxiety.

Stylistically, Trees and Flowers dispenses with the synths and is centred instead on guitar and piano. Yet it is the use of oboe that is its key feature. An instrument not often used in pop, there is a clear inspiration taken from Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes, but even one of pop’s saddest hits is outshone by the gorgeous, meandering and melancholic oboe melody on Trees and Flowers.

Such melancholy is the byproduct of agoraphobia’s fears. Sadness weaves its way through a life that can see normalcy outside but cannot participate. What others perceive as ordinary becomes an intense threat, one that compounds anxiety with any attempt to engage with the world as it is.

Agoraphobia is frequently misunderstood as a fear of public spaces, but more precisely it is a fear of the self within these spaces. It is an intense vulnerability of existing in a world without guarantees. A controlled and well-defined space like a home has known boundaries where there can be greater certainty of events. Beyond those boundaries certainty fades. Agoraphobia strips away the faith in our own actions that most of us carry unconsciously.

Søren Kierkegaard understood dread as the inevitable companion of freedom. Anxiety arises because our lives are not predetermined, because each action we take has a degree of uncertainty. For an agoraphobic, this is not an abstract philosophical proposition but a lived, physical reality. Their dread is not over something specific, but is the defining feature of existence.

As he recognised by claiming fear was his twin, Hobbes himself was not a detached analyst of the emotion, but a man who experienced it as a lifelong companion. His political philosophy was an elaborate intellectual attempt to master the personal feelings he could never escape. For Hobbes, to be human is to be perpetually aware of vulnerability, to live in the shadow of what might be done to us in the absence of structure and safety.

What agoraphobia and nuclear dread share, beneath their difference in scale, is the same confrontation with vulnerability. Hobbes understood that humans do not simply fear specific threats, what they fear is unreliability. What Since Yesterday and Trees and Flowers together reveal is this connection between the personal and geopolitical. That trust and confidence are our most valuable currencies, and yet also our most precarious.

Rummaging through a cupboard at his parents house one day David Longstreth came across a cassette case of the Black Flag album Damaged. As often happens with such long-forgotten items, the actual cassette wasn’t inside. But this got him thinking. What if he could recreate the album from memory? And, what if memory was not a facsimile, but an evolving state of reinterpretation? Where in trying to remember something, a whole new formation of it emerges.

Released in 1981, Damaged was one of the defining and most influential albums of American hardcore punk. An album through which much of the subsequent punk and underground scenes defined themselves by. It is a ferocious and claustrophobic record constructed out of a powerful sense of alienation, resentment and frustration. Shaping these emotions into raw, hurtling and abrasive short stabs of energy.

Although mostly written by guitarist Greg Ginn, it is Henry Rollins’s voice that embodies these sentiments and convincingly transmits Damaged into something that sounds like a man who genuinely believes the world has been rigged against him. Institutions and authority are not sources of order but suffocating restraints; the promise of life — respect, dignity, belonging — appears available to others but not to him. Aggrieved desperation is the overarching theme.

The album is one of the most viscerally masculine records ever made. The riffs are fast, jagged, and relentless, the vocals are intense. Everything is turned up to 11 as it externalises an inner chaos – kicking hard against all and sundry. If the frustration on Damaged has a target, that target is existence itself. It is music that wants to smash things, anything, simply for the sake of release.

Yet for all its thrashing, Damaged is also a record of some self-awareness. The band is not simply raging blindly — the album’s power comes from its tension between inarticulate fury and sharp social perception. There’s a wry element to its lyrics. A song like Six Pack is very funny, even as it illustrates self-destructive behaviour.

While we may consider ourselves to currently be in an era of heightened male grievance, Damaged reveals that these emotional wounds inside masculinity are not timebound. The permanence of male grievance is due to an instinct that masculinity must be constantly “proven”, through work, social life, competition, and peer recognition. The loss or denial of these markers are not merely personal disappointments, they are interpreted as a lack of male legitimacy. Grievance then hardens into personal identity, creating spiky, agitated personality traits.

The album is built around a belief that there are social expectations placed on young men that present a path with no viable route. Beneath the aggression of the songs lies a deep insecurity — a fear that the goalposts are always shifting, and that no matter what a man does cannot meet these social expectations.

The narrative that weaves its way through the album is that these expectations themselves are fraudulent. That the whole damn system is designed to produce failure. Anger, then, becomes the only available form of agency — although this is not expressed as a political anger with a coherent direction, but instead a primal howl.

On Rise Above, Longstreth fashions this howl into something more complex. Given his self-imposed concept of working solely from memory, his faulty recollection becomes an opportunity to expand the album’s musical palette. The fast, aggressive, riffs of the original are instead transformed into music more multifaceted and often ornate.

The walls of distortion are replaced by intricate, fingerpicked guitar lines that draw on West African musical traditions – patterns that are constructed to alter and evolve over the course of the song, rather than simply repeating. This is complimented by the use of strings that create dramatic shifts in mood which are highly distinct from the original, replacing its kneejerk feistiness with a broader range of emotions and demeanours.

This is the first of three major stylistic shifts. The second is Longstreth’s own voice – his warbling, lawless, delivery is extreme in ways that is unorthodox for even alternative music – capable of moving from a near-whisper to a throat-tearing scream within a single line. It’s a different form of intensity to that of Rollins, but it makes moments of fury within the songs more dynamic because they often surfaces from music that is otherwise carefully controlled.

It is this careful construction that presents the album’s third stylistic shift and its most striking feature – the complex vocal harmonies of Amber Coffman and Susanna Waiche. These female vocals function as the most radical act of recontextualisation on the record, not only as a counterforce to Longstreth’s voice and the masculine rage of Black Flag’s lyrics, but by introducing an element that is so undeniably gorgeous. The rapid hocketing – where a single melody is split between two voices – underneath the verses of Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie is far outside the scope of punk.1

These sophisticated vocal arrangements are also at odds with the attitude of Damaged. While the lyrics remain more or less the same (or as well as Longstreth can remember them), the musical context around them has been so thoroughly transformed that the meaning they elicit creates a distinct change in what the album expresses about masculinity itself.

It doesn’t mock the frustration at the heart of Damaged, but proposes that the same pain might be carried differently. If the album is to make an argument, it is that masculinity’s instinct to constantly “prove” itself doesn’t need to be a whirlwind of fists and kicks.

Rise Above instead creates a more varied emotional palette. One of highs and lows, of active contemplation as well as frustrated release. On Police Story the contrast between the sparse and tranquil orchestral arrangement, and the abrupt stabs of acoustic guitar and Longstreth’s unhinged vocal delivery, creates this more of a varied setting. The burning hatred of the cops is still there, but it’s more reflective than confrontational.

The overarching sentiment is that beautiful, melancholic, and often unsettling music may be far more impactful than a boot to the face. Whereas Damaged exhausts itself with its own aggression, Rise Above creates a slower form of discontent. It takes the same raw material and creates a broader, more introspective, expression of male frustration. Where Rollins externalises, Longstreth internalises.

This more pensive tone aligns with the nature of the album itself as one constructed by memory. Due to this approach, Longstreth wasn’t working simply with Damaged itself, but the sediment it had left behind – the feelings and impressions of listening to the album as a teenager and then reconstituting these as an adult, with an adult’s wiser cognitive capabilities.

To reconceptualise Damaged like this required Longstreth to filter the album through everything he’d become since he first engaged with it. What emerged is a portrait of two moments simultaneously – the original experience and the expanded reflection of this experience. A document that morphs both nostalgia and frustration into something more mature and prudent.

Due reflection being central to the project, it was apt for Longstreth to rename the album after the one song on Damaged that does exhibit some contemplative maturity – Society's arms of control – rise above, we're gonna rise above.

The grand driver of humanity, according to the philosopher Georg Hegel, is our seeking of recognition. This desire for recognition may come in many forms, from the self-determination of nations, to the rights and dignity of individuals within societies, to striving for privileges above – and dominance over – others, or through personal success – in one’s career, through sport or art, and, of course, to the pursuit of love and companionship.

Recognition motivates both the grand triumphs of human ingenuity and humanity’s destructive impulses. It can be harnessed for the politics of practical improvement, or drag us down into the dark emotions of ideology. It is our permanent struggle, and each one of us undulates daily through the peaks and troughs of its validation and resentment.

At its best, this need for recognition inspires our creative impulses. What this psychological burden has unlocked has been astonishing in its imagination and vision. We are an animal defined by our innovations. And the great works of humanity far exceed our biological imperatives as merely one species amongst many on this planet.

Arguably there is no finer creative pursuit than music. Regardless of the style, music has the ability to be a universal language. It can resonate across cultures and generations, and often conveys far more than speech or writing. Its historical emergence within geographically isolated groups indicates that music is a higher form of expression housed deep within the human soul.

This connection with the soul has led to popular music to become the world’s dominant art form. However, due to our striving for recognition, it also spawned new groups, and competition between groups – from Teddy Boys and Mods, to Punks, Goths and Ravers – or at least it did in the 20th Century, before the internet flattened youth culture. For many, the style of music they listened to, or the bands they liked, was as powerful as any national sentiment. It fashioned habits and social behaviours as effectively as any broader customs or tradition. These musical subcultures found their spiritual home in the United Kingdom, where the weekly music press was able to cultivate a powerful sense of solidarity and antagonism.

This is what made the British music scene so compelling during the latter half of the 20th Century. There were, of course, good bands and good songs, but these were housed inside a culture that strove for something else. To be in a band in the UK was not simply to write, record and perform, it was a statement of intent, and a statement of conflict. It was something beyond just the healthy competition between artists – in the UK pop music was war. Bands were gangs, other bands were the enemy, and shots were fired via the music press.

To have a mouth on you was just as important as having a knack for a musical hook. Those who excelled at this game not only talked constant shit about their fellow musicians, but did so housing a broader social critique. Blur were middle class art school boys cosplaying as working class yobs and needed to be exposed as such, while Coldplay were insufferable bedwetters writing mawkish pap. The better mouths could take this verbal combat and redirect it towards British society-at-large. Unlike their American counterparts, political bands in the UK have always been very funny.

This is because the UK itself is very funny. The paradox of Britain is that it gives the sense that it is striving to improve fairness while simultaneously believing that life should not be fair. This is the arbitrary clip around the ears that drove many of Morrissey’s lyrics – that there are forces of power that one has to navigate, but the manner by which these forces slap you down is what gives you a good story.

The UK’s own permanent struggle is the symbiotic tension between the persistence of class and hierarchy and the relentless hostility towards it. It is both the motion and stagnation of the country, and what produces some of their best art. What makes this funnier is that the British aristocracy seem to believe that the masses are perfectly justified in being resentful towards them. This, of course, will get the masses nowhere, but tally ho they’re doing a fine job trying.

Resentment en masse is, of course, the UK’s national ethos – from the Scots and Welsh feeling ashamed of being conjoined to the English; to the more direct action against this reality taken in Northern Ireland; to the English’s own self-loathing and obsession with decline. It’s grim up north, and the south are effete wankers. The whole place reeks of discord and decay and that’s the way they like it. It is the compost in which their creativity thrives.

Luke Haines strode into this environment in the early-1990s ready-made to kick against the pricks. He had a novelist’s eye for social detail, a dark dry wit, and a galaxy-size animosity towards whomever crossed his line of sight. He also had a certain fascination with violent subversion.

From the chauffeur fantasising about killing his boss on “Valet Parking”; his attempt to undermine the British tradition of the Christmas single with “Unsolved Child Murder”; having Sarah Nixey’s plummy vowels sing “Kidnapping an Heiress” on their Black Box Recorder project (an apt Haines band name); and seeking to out-shock the provocative conceptual artist Sarah Lucas by writing a song claiming to have killed her.

All this was pop to Haines, and all this was pop in the British tradition. The point was to be transgressive, but to house it in a catchy tune. There’s no point trying to offend people if it’s not going to be on Radio 1. And this is, after all, what the British want. To be the sick man of Europe, and to listen to his songs. The artistic pay-off from Brexit must be just around the corner.1

A debut album with his band The Auteurs nominated for the Mercury Music Prize provided Haines with the kind of recognition he would both disdain and crave. He was brought into the line of sight of those who hand-out official certificates of acclaim – and while such an authority Haines would regard as lacking legitimacy, he nevertheless believed he deserved their adulation. However, his wry, literate, well-crafted songs couldn’t compete with Suede’s sumptuous swagger, and the bitterness this left fuelled much of his subsequent work (despite Suede being the one band Haines claimed to actually like).

For this resentment to find its creative peak, Haines needed a concept to house it in. If the music industry itself was now his enemy, then the only way to force it to give him the recognition he felt he deserved was via extraordinary means. Lacking the genuine audacity to walk into the British Phonographic Industry office strapped with explosives, he did the next best thing – he wrote an album about the Red Army Faction, otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

Beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the 1990s, the West German terrorist group was responsible for a series of assassinations and kidnappings, bombings and arson attacks of government buildings, businesses and military facilities, as well as a plane hijacking in coordination with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Much of this activity was funded by bank robberies.

The RAF believed that the West Germany state was merely a continuation of German fascism, and in responding to the RAF’s violent actions the state would reveal its inherent oppressive nature. This would subsequently inspire an awakening of a revolutionary consciousness within the working class.

Putting aside the idea that the state responding to organised violence2 is somehow oppressive, what motivated the group was the fantasy of ideology. A belief in a predetermined series of events that can be jolted into a reality through certain stimuli. This is how a love of violence justifies itself, and how violence in pursuit of romantic and glorious causes is never deemed to be amoral by its perpetrators.

This kind of dogma thrives within the socialisation of groups. It preys upon people’s insecurities, giving them a sense of belonging, and a reason to conform. This conformity then compounds and intensifies within groups into fervour and zealotry. This is a desire for recognition at work – a belief that these ideas and activities will elevate a person in standing or infamy. Or deliver them raw political power.

Yet in their collective struggle for recognition, groups like the RAF frequently display an almost comical lack of self-awareness. Mired in projection, they fail to see themselves in what they claim to oppose. The legacy of the Third Reich actually existed within their worldview – a belief that fear is the most powerful motivating force, and it should therefore be the central organising principle of society. Whatever ideals they may have claimed to hold were simply a smokescreen in aid of this objective.

All this was great material for Haines’s style of songwriting. The Auteurs's songs like Idiot Brother and Modern History were built on a certain kind of social stupidity – people who operate with absolute surety but with limited self-discipline or contemplation. Such types have always been fair game for a biting British satire. In the RAF, Haines had found a subject matter where these traits were writ large. Where the intensity of belief and lack of restraint was in extremis.

The subject matter also allowed Haines to distil his own musical persona into the album in a manner more acute than his work with The Auteurs or Black Box Recorder. Ramping up the violence and building a more exaggerated social environment – with its own distinct hierarchies of power to navigate and absurd scenarios borne from the attempt. It also allowed him to highlight the unhinged posturing of the RAF. For Haines, unhinged posturing may be a positive, but, whether his own nihilism was real or affected, it was a sentiment certainly lay at the heart of the RAF.

While the preceding albums by The Auteurs were light on experimentation3, with the Baader Meinhof album Haines expanded his musical palette to meet the concept of the work. A deep funk bass synth evoked the 1970s peak period of the RAF’s activity, while tabla and Middle Eastern strings were designed to highlight the collaboration between the RAF and the PFLP. Haines’s raspy voice oscillates between detached deadpan and faux-drama, giving songs like Meet Me At The Airport and There’s Gonna Be An Accident their requisite satirical edge. It was an unique sound that elevated the album from an intriguing side project to being Haines’s meisterwerk.

What Haines had found in the RAF was a subject that not only highlighted his own gritty preoccupations, but one that resonated with the glamour of popular culture. To many who see radicalism in art and politics as being indistinguishable, the RAF were deemed cool. Victims are, of course, subjective to radical politics, and causes are easily rationalised. With a membership drawn from the educated middle classes, the RAF saw themselves as part of the creative intelligentsia, and were therefore able to garner sympathy within this cohort across the West. The RAF’s image has proved enduringly fertile for both film-makers and, more telling than ironic, merchandisers.

What guided this sympathy was an instinct within the creative classes that passionate intensity should be at the forefront of human endeavour. The exhibition of spirit. The excitement of action. The thrill of violence. The belief there is a genuine form of human animation, pure in motive, and utopian in vision. This may have been deluded in its attachment to the RAF – or any political group, for that matter – but it remains a powerful craving.

While the creative classes may often be seduced by passion and ideology, Hegel’s intellectual forefather, Immanuel Kant saw the arts and sciences as a way of channelling humanity’s competitive instincts into productive outlets. Following World War II, the Brits put this theory into practice. As its empire declined, the UK developed a knack for directing these impulses away from conquest and domination into becoming a cultural superpower. With the arguable exception of Sweden, its per capita impact on popular music is unsurpassed.

From the 1960s onwards, the UK has produced an astonishing series of both ear-catching and eye-catching musicians. It housed a culture that incentivised both musical innovation and idiosyncratic personas. Yet this culture relied on certain social conditions to flourish – a persistent social hierarchy, the conformity of national manners and a communal form of emotional repression. Without these there would be nothing to kick against. Great art requires a personal revolution against received etiquette.

Certainly Haines saw his own music as a cultural insurgency. This was, after all, a man who titled The Auteurs’s live album No Dialogue With Cunts. Yet what Haines embodied was the UK’s peculiar form of national sentiment. To be British is to be engaged in one’s own personal struggle against Britain. What provides Britain’s habits, and its innovations, is the daily thrust and parry of negotiating its various contradictions and humiliations. To soundtrack this national terrain is both rebellion from it, and submission to it.

Yet his extreme embodiment of this national sentiment was also something that limited Haines as a popular musician. While other quintessentially British artists from David Bowie to The Smiths to even Belle & Sebastian were able to find traction outside of the UK with music that was very rooted in place, Haines’s pitch black humour and an antagonistic posture was never going to translate well across the Atlantic. There are few albums as bleak and sinister as Black Box Recorder’s debut – aptly titled England Made Me. An album so fundamentally alien to America’s culture of sunny optimism and earnest patriotism. Or the culture America had until its own crisis of recognition plunged it into an emotional spiral and authoritarian strife.

Hegel’s philosophy of history recognised that human beings’ self-worth is intrinsically tied to the value placed on them by others. An artist requires an audience, and although admiration and praise from critics and chin-strokers can elicit a certain amount of pride, ultimately it is popular appreciation that history remembers.

Hegel also saw that fundamental to being human was the taking of risks in pursuit of this recognition. The ability to risk one’s life made someone the master of their own domain – an achievement of freedom that transcended both social constraints and the natural instinct to keep oneself alive. This is certainly the spirit that guided the actions of the RAF. Slaves to ideology, but masters of their own metaphysical place on Earth.

Yet a more rational pursuit of risk is to create art that has ambition and vision. To take an idea and explore its possibilities and potential. For it to be daring, clever and insightful. To push the boundaries of imagination, place it in the public realm – within the vulnerability of light – and hope that others will understand and appreciate its purpose.

Haines felt that he never found the reward for his risk. Following on from the Baader Meinhof album, the closing song on the fourth and final album by The Auteurs – before he went solo for diminishing returns – addressed this lack of recognition directly. With his requisite bitterness, but ever confident belief, Future Generation saw the then musical landscape being unreceptive to his genius, and insisted instead “the next generation will get it from the start.”4 Before concluding with the assertion that “This music could destroy a nation”. Which, to Haines, in his very British manner, is surely music’s point?

Copenhagen is my local airport. From Melbourne I fly into Kastrup, go down the escalator to the train station, and catch a train across the Øresund Bridge into Sweden. No need to change trains, as there are three routes that service southern Sweden from Copenhagen. I jump on the train to Karlskrona, which goes through Kristianstad – where I have spent half my year since 2022. It’s all very easy and convenient – the wonders of borderless travel and societies that privilege public transport.

When I’m not catching trains or ferries around Europe then Kastrup is also my airport for popping around to its various cities. As I love to be on the move – and for an Australian there’s still the novelty of international flights not being day-long events – I suspect I may now be close to spending more time at Kastrup than Tullamarine.

Due to this there are little things I notice each time I pass through. Towards the gates that service most European cities there is a ramen shop. And at this shop there is almost always a pair of salarymen. Crouched over their noodles, with a can of Sapporo or Asahi in hand. Not the same salarymen every time. Just salarymen. Waiting patiently for their next flight.

The salaryman achieved his peak during Japan’s post-war boom and in particular during the 1980s and early-1990s – where almost every new piece of technology that entered into the family home was Japanese. He represented the ethos of Japan’s extraordinary economic ascent, which led to the cultural reach that Japan gained as a result.

The salaryman is the loyal and dedicated white collar businessman, working long hours and prioritising his company’s interests over his own – especially his family. Oftentimes he could seem bland and robotic, interchangeable with the next salaryman. Much of Haruki Murakami’s work is driven by characters seeking to break the salaryman mould. To find something in life more meaningful, or fantastical.

Despite having lost his cultural ubiquity as Japan’s relative economic strength has weakened, the salaryman is still fanning out across Europe. Occasionally you’ll find yourself next to them (they travel in pairs) on a flight as they move between meetings. Their work is tireless and thankless. So even short trips are an opportunity to nap. Your shoulder may find itself used in service of their manufacturing works or heavy industry concern.

Salaryman, the band, were not Japanese. But in many ways their music – and that of the Chicago “post-rock” scene that birthed them – was a product of the world Japan created. In the late-1990s, Japan was still considered the futureworld, and many of these bands were trying to soundtrack this future. Some more literally than others.

In their music you can hear the complex patterns of the Tokyo Subway, or the locked-in, rhythmic hum of the Shinkansen. Drawing from dub, krautrock, prog rock, jazz and electronic experimentation, the objective was to create textures and timbres that reflected a palette of humanity, and both its creation of – and interaction with – the modern world. Sometimes dark, sometimes beautiful. Often subtle, occasionally not.

While variants of post-rock would embrace the lushness of the natural environment, from its centres in Chicago and Montreal, the genre would be both urban, and urbane. To these artists, the city was a style of living and way of thinking. They recognised the city as humanity’s hub of creativity, where opportunity and advantage lay, where ideas and culture are born and cross-pollinate. To be on foot in the city is to feel its vim and vigour. The 20th Century was humanity’s urban century, with around 16% of people living in cities at its beginning, to around half of people by its conclusion. This triumph required a soundtrack.

The salaryman would, of course, be nothing without Tokyo or Osaka. Few societies have taken advantage of this movement of people to cities as Japan. With its remarkable period of economic growth following World War II driven by its rapid urbanisation. While the titans of its technological advancement may have been so influential to have been afforded their own kami – or force of nature – within Shinto, it has been the salaryman who has been the executor of this spirit. The man who worked the details, made the practical arrangements, for little acclaim and acknowledgement.

In that way, the name of Salaryman the band demonstrates their kinship. Not only through the urbanism that drives their respective work, but due to an under-appreciation of their efforts. Salaryman never gained the critical plaudits or achieved the public reach of contemporaries like Tortoise. But they worked the details, moved the needle forward a little, and were an important part of the expression of their surrounds.

Over recent weeks I’ve been reengaging with my teenage love for Australia’s – and possibly the world’s – most criminally overlooked band, Bluebottle Kiss. As a Melburnian I don’t usually endorse (or condone) anything that comes from Sydney. As a general rule, Melbourne’s inherent belief that good art cannot possibly comes from a city like Sydney is correct. Yet there are exceptions to every rule. And Bluebottle Kiss are the one exception.

The Portuguese Man O’ War is known in Australia as a Bluebottle; it has an excruciating (and occasionally deadly) sting, and a kiss is – or at least should be – something delicate. It is the dynamic juxtaposition of the band’s name that is reflected in their music – being both highly agitated as well as melodic and tender, often within the same song. It is the band’s fondness for violent changes which most typifies their sound, often leading to a series of musical choices that may bewilder those less inclined towards indie rock’s noisier experiments. Jamie Hutchings – the band’s songwriter – is a man who will write a sparse plaintive lullaby and then perceive its only possible conclusion is to drown it in a pool of feedback.

Such an approach obviously has its limitations in terms of commercial appeal, but what is curious is the lack of traction that Bluebottle Kiss were able to gain within the people who are drawn to this kind of music. Angular, scratchy guitars were the next developmental stage for those whose musical consciousness was raised by Nirvana. Bands like Sonic Youth, Fugazi and even Polvo may not have been hugely popular, but were able to gain decent sized fanbases of those invested in the more adventurous and interesting side of indie rock. Their critical respect also gave them a longevity – with modern dads still trapped in the 90s racking up these bands’ Spotify counts.

It is possible that never knowing where a song may lead – or why it ended up where it did – could prove confronting to some. It makes dancing or even toe-tapping difficult. Convention in music is convention because it aligns with certain inclinations and expectations. Yet to those who find incongruous shifts to be thrilling, Bluebottle Kiss should have been a compelling prospect.

Broadly, there are a pair of structural reasons why neither success nor acclaim failed to happened for Bluebottle Kiss. The first is the obvious isolation of Australia from the drivers of global music exposure. While culturally Australians have an inflated sense of their own global standing – like Ceaușescu convincing the Romanian public that they were the world’s third superpower – the truth is that no-one actually thinks much or cares much about Australia. There have been Australian bands that have gained international attention, but this is only a small percentage of the good music that the country has produced (with the caveat that not all Australian music that has become internationally popular is good).

Alongside this there was also the unique local radio terrain that the band struggled to negotiate – or, more accurately, failed to understand them. In the 1990s Australian popular music radio – regardless of the city – had generally had two or three commercial chart music stations, a bloke-rock station (gender affirmation for the Australian male), a classic hits station, and Triple J – the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s youth station. For an American audience, Triple J is akin to college radio in terms of content, but as a single nation-wide station. The BBC’s Radio 6 Music would kind of be the United Kingdom’s equivalent, although it is a little more adult-orientated.

As an aside, despite the great upheaval of modern technology and the new ways we consume culture, the social framework of these stations is still how I understand the world. In this era of identitarian obsession I maintain that the only way to truly categorise people (or anything really) is via 90s Melbourne radio stations – and every station doubles as an accusation. Culturally, Sydney is a “Fox FM city”, for example, being the juice bar of a city that is it. While Perth would be a “Triple M city”, given that I don’t think there are any women who actually live there.

For an Australian alternative band getting airplay on Triple J was paramount. It was a way to reach enough ears with youthful enthusiasm to be able to drive album sales and concert attendance. As a station with national reach it was an obvious central hub to target. Yet getting played on Triple J also came with a certain stigma – prescribed by those who thought such a thing was incredibly uncool. Once you graduated from “Triple J music” to more sophisticated listening choices looking down on the station became an integral part of your musical and cultural posture.

This affectation is especially pronounced for Melburnians due to the extra element that the city has on its radio frequencies. Alongside the conventional radio stations described above, Melbourne has a number of highly important – and well supported –community radio stations. Community radio may not be unique to the city, but the prominence and impact of Melbourne’s stations is one of the city’s defining features. These stations have maintained their position in the city’s cultural landscape even as technology has revolutionised the music industry.

These stations have no playlists, each show is generally dedicated to a specific genre and presented by people who actually know what they are talking about – marking them as distinct from the vacuous and insufferable “personalities” that host programmes on other radio stations. Due to the knowledge and credibility of specific music show hosts their influence as tastemakers is significant.

This was the second problem Bluebottle Kiss ran into – convincing the hosts of the right shows on Melbourne’s community radio stations that they were both interesting and cool. Yet trying to square the circle of gaining the necessary exposure required on Triple J to make the band viable and impressing people who defined what was cool is incredibly difficult.

An early jangly indie-pop song like Autumn Comes Too Soon was designed to find traction on Triple J, but it hid the true sound and intent of its parent album – Fear Of Girls (particularly the kick in the face of its opener Claim). A song targeted at one particular audience would mislead another. Or mislead both. This would become a tactic the band used frequently, with lead singles often showing the band’s less confrontational and more accessible style. This, however, also failed to find great success with a Triple J audience. Even if Hutchings was quite adept at writing excellent hooks.

Taste in Australia is set from Melbourne because there’s no possible way it could be set from anywhere else. But as you can tell from this tone there’s a great deal of cultural snobbery that comes with it, and a close-mindedness. If you’ve been designated a “Sydney Triple J band” by Melbourne’s tastemakers then Melburnians are not going to make the effort to disavow this perspective.

With the band initially – and very briefly – signed to Sony’s “alternative” label Murmur – and leading with singles that disguised the band’s true nature – this is exactly what happened. Being label-mates with Silverchair meant there was also a great deal of guilt by association, and this was all Melburnians needed to avert their ears. An attitude that was recognised by the band themselves in their song Return To The City Of Folded Arms.

This placed the band in an appreciative purgatory – far too arty and difficult for Triple J, yet wrongly perceived to be some middling, run-of-the-mill major label Sydney band by those who would otherwise been receptive to their sound. For a bit over a decade this is effectively where they stayed – releasing six albums and numerous EPs that would clearly mark them as one of Australia’s most interesting and best bands, but without any recognition of this in terms of either popularity or critical acclaim.

Yet Bluebottle Kiss pose a bigger problem than just their own unfortunate lack of success or respect due to these structural factors. More broadly, they symbolise that the recognition for all forms of art comes down to a certain amount of luck. The quality of one’s work doesn’t guarantee success. Success – as in the ability to gain a decent amount of recognition and earn a living from your work – relies on a lot of random factors going in your favour.

Luck remains one of our great philosophical puzzles. It is seen as something that happens to us. Unpredictable or uncontrollable forces that provide us with fortune or misfortune. Luck can be life altering. Whether bad or good.

We don’t live in a world of pure agency. Our own agency relies on the agency of others. A set of ears that would have understood a band like Bluebottle Kiss working at the right radio station at the right time could have transformed their public reception. This person may have applied for job at said station, but another candidate was preferred. Or someone of influence in the American music industry on holiday in Australia catching a glimpse of the band may have changed their fortunes. This person may have had a last minute change of plans and gone to a different pub.

There are an infinite number of decisions both big and small that effect not only our own lives, but grand historical events. A new book by the social scientist Brian Klass called Fluke examines this phenomenon. How the knock-on effects of random chance is the dominant social force. It is something that we are all often unwitting slaves to.

Of course, a band like Bluebottle Kiss has made choices that can define their luck. A chorus as lilting and gorgeous as Underneath The Pier morphing into a sinister outro of pummelling drums, deep brown noise and piercing feedback is a choice made knowing that many people will find it disconcerting (even though it’s actually awesome). Repurposing that melody could have been the one to gain the band greater recognition.

Yet, to have done so would have undermine what made the band unique. To compromise on one’s art is another choice, but not one that offers the rewards of risk. To compromise is pragmatic, and pragmatism is often a sign of maturity in our politics, but it is not what we should seek and expect from our art. The purpose of art is to challenge and excite – to be spectacular. Music should have ambition for the band and the listener alike. To provoke the random forces of luck.

Yet maybe in doing so Bluebottle Kiss came up against another structural factor – a cultural suspicion of intricacy within the Australian psyche. I’ve written previously about the country’s aesthetic disinterest and its relationship to Australia’s lack of economic complexity. Maybe aural complexity is also something that Australians find difficult to digest? If this is the case Bluebottle Kiss never stood a chance.

I was raised by the radio. I was around five years old when I figured out how to work one, and taking it into my room it became my constant companion and primary exposure to the outside world. In a family that didn’t have any particular cultural interests, the radio became my primary social influence. It was how I discovered ideas and developed curiosity. It was the radio that gave me a critical platform of knowledge and a way of approaching the world.

This is not to say that I was listening to sophisticated commentary on the latest world affairs. It was commercial radio that initially drew me in. Chart music. I was obsessed with the charts. In Melbourne, on one such radio station Saturday nights were dedicated to the Australian Top 40, with Sunday nights the American Top 40. While being fascinated by comparing the two, I would also create my own personal Top 40, moving songs up and down each week. Introducing new songs as I discovered them.

In the mid-1980s to early-1990s, and as a child, to be a music enthusiast required dedication. Without the ability to purchase music, to hear music that you liked required sitting by the radio and waiting. This led to hours of time spent patiently by myself. When my parents purchased a cassette recorder I quickly monopolised it. It gave me the ability to capture songs off the radio so I could hear them on repeat. A double cassette recorder allowed me to make my own mixtapes.

As I aged and gained the ability to be more independent, the radio remained the dominant feature of my life. I wasn’t a social teenager. I attended an all-boys school, and as each year progressed it became increasingly clear to me that the company of men was not something I enjoyed. Yet I wouldn’t speak to a girl around my own age until I was 19. So I would spend the vast majority of my time in my room. However, I didn’t gauge my independence by my sociability, instead I understood it through the expanding of my musical interests.

In Melbourne there is a path of musical development one can follow from commercial radio to the ABC’s youth radio station, Triple J - that played more alternative music – through to the city’s wonderful community radio stations like 3RRR and PBS. These stations eschew the playlisted formats of conventional stations and instead broadcast highly specialised music programmes from an array of genres and eras, presented by people with serious knowledge of the music they play.

The radio was a distinct form of cultural engagement and education because it required imagination. The act of simply listening allowed for far more interpretation than the television, and so it was a more personalised experience. Prior to the internet, there wasn’t the easy access to information on bands and musicians that could distract from the imagery you could create yourself in your own mind, or the random pieces of information you could put together from a glimpse of a band photo, or catching video clip. Music had mystique.

This mystique was compounded by the low transmission quality of the radio. Songs taped off the radio and then transferred multiple times between cassette tapes would produce a further distinct degradation of the sound. Yet this was not a negative, as the degradation became essential to the listening experience. It was the sound of days that blended into each other, the hazy space between waking and sleeping. The crackle and murmur of solitude.

Cindy Lee’s album What’s Tonight To Eternity? is built on this sentiment. A sound that sees the lo-fi quality of the recording as a feature of the listening experience. The creation of a sound that seeks to evoke a certain kind of nostalgia, one that embraces the fuzziness of remembrance. This kind of music has come to be described as Hypnagogic Pop, a genre related to the chiefly British Hauntology, and which spawned the garish 80s pastiche Vaporwave (with its niche visual subset, Simpsonswave).

Nostalgia is now arguably our dominant cultural experience. While Gen X and Geriatric Millennials may not yet be the captains of industry, they are the captains of culture. These groups are those who were culturally active in the pre-internet era, but whose teenage years – or early 20s for older Gen Xers – were lived during the crossover period. They are fascinated with this era (roughly early-80s to mid-90s), and are keen to feel it once again through the music, films or TV series that they create.

However, unlike the first album by How To Dress Well, which attempted to recreate the distant hum of early-90s R’n’B filtered through the PA system of terrible suburban shopping malls, Cindy Lee has sought to reimagine a different era, that of 1960s girl groups – a musical era that the artist was not actually alive to experience at the time, but one that has gained a certain reverence with musicians who seek to blend experimental forms of music with elements of pop. Broadcast being the prime – and unimpeachable – example.

In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym distinguishes between “reflective nostalgia” – which is aware of hardship and loss, and “restorative nostalgia” which seeks to resurrect a romanticised vision of the past. The former serves the purpose of reminder, a way of understanding the past as an essential tool for creating a positive future. While the latter tends to be mired in a rose-coloured rear view vision, and in its extreme forms seeks social structures that are in tension with modern-day realities.

Instead Cindy Lee’s music is what can be described as “revised nostalgia” – a reimagining of a past that never was. This involves an interpretation of 1960s girl groups that is far darker and more sinister than the original music movement (the experiments of Joe Meek aside). What’s Tonight To Eternity? is bleak, eerie and confrontational. Its hooks often compete with abstract noise and distortion, with the album at times being both elegant and off-kilter.

The collapse into a wall of feedback on I Want You To Suffer would seem like the self-sabotage of an otherwise astonishing pop song without understanding this conceptual framework. While the wistful filmic strings on The Limit are purposefully recorded too loud to create audio peaking, and they seem to float above a song that feels like it being both constructed and deconstructed simultaneously. It is an album that is committed to the details of a clouded recollection, while also creating a distinct re-imagining of the past.

Returning to Melbourne in May 2021 after six months in Iceland, I was required to spend two weeks in hotel quarantine due to Australia’s Covid-19 protocols. This enforced solitude felt reminiscent of my childhood with days alone with the radio. I had only discovered What’s Tonight To Eternity? several days before leaving Reykjavík and both the sound and the sentiment of the album was intensified by the setting. Playing the album on repeat as I drifted in and out of sleep due to both jet-lag and the need to kill time.

Not that I found the quarantine difficult. In fact, I felt preconditioned for such extraordinary circumstances. Although I have friends, I have never been in a romantic relationship. I’ve never thought it could be possible. I haven’t had either the instinct or expectation that forming such a relationship would be a natural part of my life. This is partially due to the learned solitary behaviour from my youth, and partially due to considering a relationship to be a privilege that I could never justify.

Despite this, I don’t think I have ever felt lonely. Of course, one would have needed to experience love and connection to truly understand loneliness. It only exists in symbiosis with its opposite. And loneliness can also be relative. Highly sociable people can feel lonely in mere hours by themselves, whereas I can easily go a week without speaking to another person. Yet I would not consider myself a misanthrope.

Loneliness for Hannah Arendt was a particular way of being, something she distinguished from solitude. For Arendt, solitude was necessary to be able to engage in an internal dialogue. It was what allowed people to forge independent and creative thought. It was how people fostered empathy. Arendt believed that “living together with others begins with living together with oneself.”

Loneliness, on the other hand, was the very opposite. It was a lack of empathy, an inability to think complex thoughts, to weigh options and perspectives. It was an avoidance of commonality, and therefore devoid of conscience. Arendt believed that loneliness was tied intrinsically to ideology; the need to submit oneself to the ideas of others. One may feel the need to belong to a group, but this was distinct from being civic.

Yet solitude cannot be an absolute. If one is entirely solitary then it prevents the lessons drawn from contemplation from being implemented. To be civic requires actual civic engagement. This is where I find myself, not lonely, but not civic either. Stuck instead within a ruminating purgatory. It’s a state that attracts me to albums like What’s Tonight To Eternity? – where reflective, restorative, and revised nostalgia all compete for ascendency, because lived experience seems out of reach.

This is how nostalgia becomes a defence mechanism, because even within reflective nostalgia the pull of romanticism is strong. So while my attachment to the radio was sincere and highly formative, it was also driven by external pressures. An unstable home environment meant that being alone in my room was less a choice and more of a necessity. The radio became my way of adjusting to this reality. I can claim that this was formative in a positive way in terms of the expanded horizons I feel I have from my interest in music, but it was only developed in response to a negative. A negative that still dictates the way I live decades later.

The Old English term Wēalas meant “foreign” or “outsider”. It was the word the 5th and 6th century Anglo-Saxon invaders used to describe the original inhabitants of Great Britain. As their conquest pushed the speakers of Celtic languages to the edges of the island, the word transformed from a brutal description of the people inhabiting their own lands to the common term we used to describe those who now live on the island’s central west, Wales.

The Welsh, however, refer to both themselves and their land as Cymru, with the language they speak being Cymraeg. The Welsh language has a close modern - and barely alive - relative to the south in Cornish, and also the slightly more active Breton, the language of those who were pushed out of Britain altogether, ending up across the channel in France. Irish and Scottish Gaelic are more distant relatives. But these are all languages that are still fighting the effects of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Great Britain.

Languages do not only need large numbers of speakers to flourish, they also need legal structures, education systems and bodies of cultural works. For a language to truly thrive it must maintain a geographical area where speaking the language is not just a right, but an everyday necessity. Unfortunately, it is also often the case that a language must have the ability to physically protect itself from hostile forces seeking to replace it.

Or have a more unique tactic. While the arrival of English created an enormous threat to the Celtic languages of Great Britain, English itself suffered an existential crisis after the Norman Conquest in 1066, when French became the language of the state. English survived by simply eating French over the next few centuries, bastardising itself beyond recognition, and creating the language I am writing in now, which is effectively Franglais.

As this reconfigured English reclaimed the state, it set about further exerting itself across the island. Between the years 1536 and 1543 the then-English parliament passed a series of laws - known as the Acts of Union - that incorporated Wales in England’s legal structures. As a result the language of administration, the law, and crucially, education in Wales became English. Welsh had lost a number of key assets in its defence.

However, despite this enormous pressure from London, Welsh remained the primary language of a large majority (67%) of the Welsh population up until the mid-19th Century. Without any official status, it was the language’s cultural output that carried the weight of its survival. Although localised eisteddfods had been held since the 12th Century, the first National Eisteddfod of essays, poetry and music was held in 1858 in northern Wales, as not only an exhibition of cultural and linguistic pride, but also a prominent act of resistance against the structural pressures that English was placing on the Welsh nation.

Alongside a strong tradition of literature and music, the language’s other bulwark against English was the church. While the state had become an entity that only operated in English, the church was under no obligation to conduct services in the language, and maintained a tradition of being a Welsh-speaking institution. The publication of the first Welsh bible in 1588 can be seen as crucial in giving the language a cultural garrison capable of resisting Anglicisation. Particularly within the Nonconformist churches that had broken with the Church of England.

However, during the 19th Century it was not only the legal and administrative force of English that Welsh needed to resist, as there was also an incredible economic force that also drove Anglicisation. Early in the century Wales has become the world’s biggest producer of iron, and by the mid-century in Wales more people were being employed by heavy industry than by agriculture. This made Wales the first industrial society. By the end of the century around a third of the world’s coal was being extracted from Wales, and 1 in 4 workers was a coal miner.

This economic and social transformation created large migrations from rural to urban areas and greater contact with English as the language of work and the language of social structures. The incentives to learn English became far more pronounced, and the daily necessity of Welsh decreased. While the burgeoning trade union movement in the second half of the 19th Century sought to protect the economic interests of this industrial workforce, it was, unfortunately, largely indifferent to the Welsh language.

As well as these powerful economic forces, the education system in Wales became increasingly hostile to Welsh. A draconian instrument called the “Welsh Not” was introduced into schools designed to discourage the use of Welsh on school premises. The Welsh Not was a wooden board with the letters WN on it that was tied to a string. The first child caught speaking Welsh in school each day would have to wear the Welsh Not around their neck until the next child was caught. The child who was left wearing the Welsh Not at the end of the day was then punished.

The United Kingdom’s census of 1911 found that the percentage of Welsh speakers had dropped to 43% of the population. Yet the 20th Century would prove to be even more devastating, as technological advances made the cultural dominance of English more pronounced, and the secularisation of Welsh society took people away from the church. By 1981, the percentage of Welsh speakers had dropped to a precarious 17% of a population of 2.8 million.

Despite this decline, the roots of the language’s subsequent defence lay in a BBC radio address in 1962 by the Welsh poet Saunders Lewis called Tynged yr Iaith (The Fate of the Language). In his lecture, Saunders provided a history of the language since the Acts of Union, the then-present state of the language, and predicted that it was heading towards extinction should serious measures not be taken to enhance its usage.

The lecture was seen as being the catalyst for the creation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society), an activist group that advocated for the right to use the Welsh language for official purposes such as tax returns, electoral forms, birth certificates, and especially for education. The group became notorious for ripping down English-only road signs, painting large-scale slogans in prominent locations, as well as staging protests at media outlets that were broadcasting insufficient Welsh content.

Yet Lewis’s lecture also coincided with the shifting of perspectives towards minority affairs, and a critical reassessment of traditional structures, that was occurring in the 1960s. This included a recognition that there was a cultural importance in the preservation of Welsh, and that the language was not something that simply needed to be stamped out. Progress may have been slow, but the decade was the turning point in Westminster understanding the value of cultural pluralism.

The first official recognition of this emerging perspective came in 1967 with the Welsh Language Act, which allowed for the use of oral evidence to be submitted to courts in Welsh. The act also allowed (although did not require) for various official forms to be issued in Welsh. These were small steps, but were crucial in giving advocates for the language a platform to build upon.

Although the 1980’s began with the census revealing a further decline in the language, what was to follow in the next two decades was a revolution in Welsh affairs. After the Thatcher government initial reneged on a commitment to grant a licence to an exclusive Welsh language television station, her government reversed their position again, and in 1982 the channel S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru) - Channel Four Wales - was launched, providing the language with a prominent outlet for what had become the era’s dominant from of media and public information.

Then followed a series of reforms including the 1988 Education Reform Act which gave Welsh full recognition as a core subject in the school curriculum. Subsequently, the 1993 Welsh Language Act established the principle that, in the conduct of public business and the administration of justice, the Welsh and English languages should be treated on a basis of equality in Wales, and that Welsh should be promoted and facilitated.

The 1998 Government of Wales Act led to the creation of the Welsh National Assembly (Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru) - known now as the Senedd - which transferred a number of powers from the UK parliament to Wales (although far less powers than those granted to the also newly formed Scottish parliament). But crucially education became a responsibility of the new assembly, and in 1999 Welsh was made a compulsory subject for all pupils in Wales (either as a first or a second language) for 11 years, from the ages of 5 to 16.

Although the presence of the language in the education system has given Welsh a renewed prominence, this does not mean there is a policy of creating a fully bilingual population. However, the Welsh population survey that was concluded in September 2021 found that now close to 30% of the population - or 892,500 people - had a good knowledge of the language, although this decreased to around 24% of the population who could read and write fluently. The Welsh government’s strategy is to increase those fully literate in Welsh to at least one third of the population by 2050.

While the language now has a state infrastructure to defend, support and promote it, the resilience of the language in the face of a hostile British state and the cultural juggernaut of English can be attributed to a great tradition of the arts within the Welsh-speaking communities. Although all cultures have strong forms of artistic expression that are central to their identities, Wales has a particular reputation as the “Land of Song.” With the choral music that emerged from its Nonconformist churches driving much of the world’s perception of the nation over the past few centuries.

This tradition of song, of course, has attached itself to popular - and not so popular - forms of music. While a number of Welsh bands singing in English have had considerable success, a strong Welsh language music scene has also continued to exist in the country. Despite the temptation to sing in English in order to reach a wider audience, singing in Welsh has not only been a natural form of expression for Welsh speakers, but also an important act of resistance to the cultural and political dominance of English.

The Super Furry Animals are a band who have straddled that line. Emerging in the mid-1990s with a pair of mostly Welsh language EPs, the band subsequently found great success in the UK after switching to English. The band’s first three albums - Fuzzy Logic, Radiator, and Guerrilla - brought them considerable critical acclaim and a prominent presence in the UK’s music press. With their playful and imaginative neo-psychedelia and surrealist lyrics finding a dedicated audience among those who were tiring of Britpop’s 1960s nostalgia, as well as its Anglophilic chest-beating.

Yet their decision to switch to singing in English also brought them some initial hostility from the Welsh language press, who felt this was an act of betrayal. Here the band found themselves trying to negotiate their comfortability and confidence in being Welsh, and the ardent and aggressive nationalism that formed part of the politics around the Welsh language.

The band would often bemoan the sight of Welsh flags at their shows, seeing this as essentially the same as the St George’s Cross being flown at an English band’s concert. The band rejected the idea that it is only the nationalism of dominant groups that people should be suspicious of. That it was not just power that made nationalism dangerous, but a cultural insularity and an exclusive identity as orientating features.

The band instead saw themselves as European. The European Union had given smaller nations a larger identity to orientate themselves around, one that allowed them to embrace their cultural distinctiveness while eschewing a cultural insularity. The Welsh independence party, Plaid Cymru, remains a staunchly pro-European party, seeking to rejoin the EU should they manage to achieve their goal of separating from the UK. Although given the Labour Party’s firm grip on populous South Wales (and thus the Senedd), this doesn’t look likely in the foreseeable future.

Of course, the band’s distaste for nationalism did not mean overlooking the historical attempts to suppress the Welsh nation, nor the innate cultural differences between Wales and England. A song like Mountain People from Radiator is built around the historical power imbalances between the two nations, and a sense that the Welsh are a distinct people that require recognition as such. The subdued ballad could be mistaken for romanticism were it not for the way it morphs into a bizarre techno wig-out halfway through.

For the Super Furry Animals fourth album, Mwng, the band decided to return Welsh. There was a certain cunning and subversion to this. Having built a loyal fanbase and a keen media interest by singing in English, the band was able to pivot this attention towards the Welsh language. Giving Welsh an exposure it may otherwise not have had.

The album also saw a shift in the Super Furry Animals’ musical direction. After the technicolour onslaught of Guerrilla, the band chose to pursue a more minimal approach to instrumentation, coupled with a lo-fi production, although without sidelining their creativity and imagination. The album was also a lot darker in tone than their previous albums. More introspective and forlorn.

Mwng addressed many themes directly related to the Welsh nation and Welsh language. Ymaelodi â'r ymylon is something of a bitter retort to the sense that the Welsh are on the periphery of British society, looked upon with scorn and disdain by the English. A - not without merit - feeling that has become entrenched in Welsh thinking. And one that the deindustrialisation of much of South Wales has only exacerbated, as decisions made in London have led to the region’s economic decline, and placed renewed stresses on its social fabric.

These impersonal economic forces, driven by people who are both far away and insulated from their effects, also drives Pan Ddaw'r Wawr. A song about how the forces of globalisation had led to the dominance of mega-languages like English and Spanish, and threatened the existence of Welsh, and similar indigenous languages which struggle for space, both within nation-states, and within the new cosmopolitanism. Francis Fukuyama’s Last Man - a concept he adapted from Nietzsche - was not going to be a Welsh speaker.

Yet, despite this pessimism, during the Covid-19 pandemic there was a noticeable uptick in Welsh learners on the hugely popular app Duolingo. The BBC reported that these new learners were not only Anglophone Welsh people, but instead came from a range of different countries around the world. The same global forces that can work to reduce humanity’s vast array of unique cultures, can also breed an incredible curiosity in them as well.

This curiosity was also apparent in the British public’s reaction to Mwng upon its release in 2000. The album entered the UK’s charts at number 11, a phenomenal achievement for a non-English language album. Recognising this, in the House of Commons, Plaid Cymru MP, Elfyn Llwyd, proclaimed the album to be part of “a new wave of confidence in the Welsh nation.”

The album’s influence on younger Welsh musicians has also been apparent, with a noticeable increase in the number of musicians who feel confident to use Welsh as the primary language for the art. Being aware that this doesn’t have to silo them into a niche market within Wales itself, but can be a powerful tool for a much broader communication.

The importance of using music not only to communicate in minority languages, but to build a cultural catalogue that can reinforce the language. Or, in the case of Gwenno, attempt to re-establish a language. After releasing her debut album mostly in Welsh, Gwenno then turned to her other native language of Cornish. Being one of only around 500 fluent speakers of the language, and inspired by the success of Mwng, she has recognised that for the language to once again flourish it needs a strong body of cultural works to provide attraction to it.

Taken outside of its cultural, political and linguistic context, Mwng is a strong album on its own, worthy of great merit. Usually it should not be deemed extraordinary for a band to sing in their native language. Yet, due to the history of English domination within the UK, and the policies of the British government which marginalised the language for so long, Mwng has become a revolutionary album.

Yet in its success, it is not to be overlooked that there has also been a strong demonstration that the British public were willing to buy and listen to an album in a language that they didn’t understand. The shift in thinking towards the protection of minority languages, cultures, and pluralism in general that began in the 1960s has now firmly taken root. This is an overwhelmingly positive development that couldn’t have been imagined by the Welsh nation for the bulk of the past several hundred years.

Daniel Smith is a courageous musician. One may think that all art requires a certain amount of courage, or at the very least confidence. Yet musicians who write music for a known, ready-made, audience operate with a certain safety net. They’re providing goods for a pre-established market. This form of art lacks the same bravery as those who create art with no natural constituency. Or in the case of Smith, music that has two seemingly mutually exclusive constituencies.

The Danielson Famile are Smith’s actual family (“famile” is pronounced “family”). The band is comprised of his sisters, brothers, wife, and best friend. They make pop music - in the broad sense - but it’s not music that you will ever hear on the radio, on TV, or in a shopping mall. Their songs are often upbeat and filled with incredible hooks, striding with the certainty of a group who are assured of their abilities. Yet the band’s arrangements are often built on a series of bewildering choices for anyone with a conventional understanding of pop music, taking strange twists and turns, impatient and hyperactive, like children changing their minds mid-cartwheel. Added to this, Smith has a shrill falsetto that frequently jumps several octaves into what can only be described as a screech.

As a result, the Danielson Famile have often been categorised as “outsider music”. This a category that seeks to describe musicians making music without any kind of self-awareness, or understanding of conventional styles or trends. It is considered to be a more “authentic” form of music-making. These types of musicians exist outside the mainstream not because they want to, but because they are uninfluenced by - or unaware of - the pressures of acceptability or acclaim. They often may think they are creating popular music. Their naïvety is considered their value.

Although there is some overlap between this kind of art and the music of the Danielson Famile, it would be misleading to portray the band completely in the same way one would The Shaggs or Daniel Johnston. More like Japanese band, Maher Shalal Hash Baz - the musical vehicle of Tori Kudo, who actively recruits bad musicians in order to make an intentional wonky sound - the music the Danielson Famile make may seem off-kilter, but it actually has intent. A musicianship that is professional in its amateurism.

This kind of music has a niche audience. Yet it is one that has been cultivated online as people have uploaded obscurities to YouTube, and its much lauded algorithm has given new leases on life to long forgotten music, or even music that was never known in the first place. A project like Awesome Tapes From Africa, has taken home-made cassette tapes made with limited resources that were traditionally distributed in local markets in West Africa and given them a new global distribution network and appreciation.

There’s a certain ear required to hear this kind of music. Although not an entire reversal of one’s expectations of music, as these artists are not bad. The appreciation of this type of music is not ironic. But instead one is listening for an additional spirit within the music. To understand more of the personalities and circumstances that have gone into creating music. To grasp that process is just as interesting as the final product. The Danielson Famile exists somewhere in this milieu. They are a spiritual band, you need to feel them as much as you need to hear them.

This spirit is also what marks the Danielson Famile as unique, because they have an added component that makes them quite distinct from the music most obscurity hounds gravitate towards. The Danielson Famile make Christian music. Or to be more accurate, a great many of their songs have direct and overt Christian references, while all are immersed in Christian themes. It is the band’s central, explicit, motivating force. Although one would not call the band evangelical in an overt manner, conversion is not an explicit goal.

Yet usually when we think of Christian music there’s an assumption that this music would be mostly bland adult contemporary or other middle-of-the-road genres. Even Christian music aimed at younger people tends to try and fix itself to the prominent styles of the time. There is an obvious purpose to this, as the music is intended as a vehicle for a collective spiritual connection, to communicate a universal message, and an attempt to attract people towards Christianity. It needs broad appeal.

What makes Daniel Smith such an intriguing songwriter is that he has discarded this general assumption about the purpose of Christian music. He simply writes through instinct. Operating without a blueprint, or an intended audience, instead his music seems almost to be a series of involuntary spasms. It’s the sound of an id, it has a child-like discord to it. The music goes where Smith feels it should go, to not be restrained by any rational calculations.

This is the courage to make music devoid of any social expectations. What Smith has instead is faith. Not just religious faith, but rather the faith that someone, somewhere, will hear the Danielson Famile and it will make a connection. His is deeply human music, because it embraces the eccentricities of humanity. It upholds these as an unambiguous good.

Yet this is not music that is interesting simply because it is strange. The band’s uninhibited positivity is also a pleasure to hear. Once you adjust yourself to their approach, and let your own inhibitions subside, there is a real joyfulness to their music. One that doesn’t require being a Christian to embrace.

Fetch The Compass Kids was the band's fifth album, and the album where Smith began to develop greater focus, and the ability to self-edit. Previous albums had been sprawling messes that were captivating in their own way, but lacked the ability to consistently translate what is so beguiling about the band into an accessible block of songs. Fetch The Compass Kids instead was 12 short, sharp songs that retained the band’s astonishing strangeness, but gave these attributes some more conventional form.

Which isn’t to say these songs are easy listening. They still consist of skewed song structures with odd counter-melodies, baffling shifts in tone and tempo, and Smith’s idiosyncratic voice that tends to chirp and squawk both above and beneath the music, intersecting in complex ways with those of his sisters and wife. It’s all quite awkward. But at the same time this is pop music. It invites you to tap your toe and sing along. Yet there’s just some work you need to do in order to accept the invitation.

The album’s title is a subtle, but clear, indication of the album’s themes. This is an album about finding an ethical and purposeful compass within a rapidly changing world. Yet this is not a reactionary sentiment. Inquiry into the shifting nature of human relations is not the same as being suspicious of it.

Yet there is a deep contradiction within our dominant politics that houses an (often justified) moral indignation coupled with cultural permissiveness that blurs the lines about what we owe each other as humans. The “self-actualisation” that has come to be central to what people expect of their place in society is often built on an anti-egalitarian individualism that prioritises the self over community goods.

Smith is not a scold. But there is a recognition within his lyrics that we are in a period of cultural decadence that is eating away at human bonds. Two decades on from the release of the album this is even more pronounced. One doesn’t have to root this critique in Christianity to recognise its salience.

But as Smith is a Christian, he does. Seeking to find a more common humanity within his Christianity. Here the album’s title track asserts that “the compass kids run to the compass passion.” Of course, The Passion in the biblical sense encompassed a period in Jesus’s life that runs from his return to Jerusalem through to the crucifixion and resurrection. These events included acts of anger like his expulsion of the merchants and money changes from the temple, yet rather than an emotive or excited state, Smith is instead using the passion in a form closer to its Latin root, invoking Jesus’s endurance and patience.

The song’s chorus is a plea for this compass to “lead me to the passionate tree.” This line links it to Fathom The Nine Fruits Pie, a song later in the album which enthusiastically runs through a list of the fruits of the Holy Spirit - “Love and joy and peace and patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” When performing solo, Smith has often played from within a nine fruits tree.

Yet these songs are far from dour theological tracts. There is a playfulness to Smith’s lyrics, and a sly sense of humour that one wouldn’t necessarily expect from an artist who is also serious about their religion. Rallying the Dominoes draws an analogy between Smith’s fear that he cannot organise his time effectively and the early-1990s toy Domino Rally. With the song inexplicably containing pleas from his sisters and wife to “Calm down, Dan!” While We Don’t Say Shut Up absurdly contains the shouted refrain of QUIET TIME! IT’S THE QUIET TIME!

While the band is generally unable to be categorised, the influence of twee-pop is clearly strong. This is a genre that is often derided as confecting innocence and being far too cutesy for grown adults. But more sympathetically it could be deemed to be drawing inspiration from the playfulness and imagination of youth. This doesn’t necessarily exclude being without serious ideas. The Danielson Family can easily fuse the creativity of youth with the search for spiritual fulfilment. To do so may even be necessary.

This is an added element of Smith’s courage. It’s the convergence of the unorthodox nature of the Danielson Famile’s music, which can often be respected depending on the musical niche, and the general suspicion towards Christianity within the artistic realm more broadly. For artists - of any type - to announce themselves as Christian is to invite suspicion. It is deemed to not only be very uncool, but it arouses scepticism towards their work. It is seen as anti-intellectual, a belief in magic over substance.

Yet religion in general is an attempt to make sense of the world, in the same way as art. Most importantly, within the roots of religion lies a desire to do so without cynicism. Religion’s initial approach - before it became an identity - was curiosity. Religious ideas are born from a seeker’s eye, and a mind that thinks critically and creatively.

This is an obvious contrast to much of the Christianity that has come to dominate the United States, which has instead become deeply cynical and often highly manipulative. Here religion’s attempt to understand the world has transformed into a fearful and insular hostility towards it. It has moved away from curiosity and communion towards a form of cultural zealotry, while also ironically abandoning the struggle with doubt that is usually a central tenet of Christian faith.

Smith is not unaware of these problems, which suggests that the endurance of The Passion and the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit that Fetch The Compass Kids is built around is not directed at unbelievers, but instead at Christians themselves. Smith is not only presenting himself as a highly unconventional artist to a highly sceptical indie music culture, but also as an innovative thinker to Christian culture that often seems divorced from its principles.

The album’s most beautiful, even conventionally beautiful, song is its penultimate one, Can We Camp At Your Feet? A song that is also potentially its most radical. Its sentiment is one that sees the curiosity and communion of religion as not being reliant on a church or an authority that claims to hold the key to spirituality, or indeed heaven. Smith and his family are not Quakers, but there is a Quaker sentiment here. That the relationship between the individual and god needs no intermediary. That the temptation of corruption that comes through hierarchical structures is real, and frankly pervasive, and that this requires challenge.

That this challenge is also coming through music that is challenging could be considered an essential part of the process. These philosophical movements towards an improving humanity don’t come without serious work. There is a new protestantism here within Fetch The Compass Kids. One that recognises the degradation and decadence of the modern church, and in response, in his own idiosyncratic manner, Daniel Smith nailed his 12 theses to the Church door.

There is a unique Canadian symbiosis with America. While other countries may feel the United States as a constant presence - in various positive and negative ways - arguably no-one feels it in such a daily, all-pervasive manner as Canada.

Over three-quarters of Canada’s exports go to America, US$2 billion in goods and services cross the border each day, as did - prior to the pandemic - 400,000 people. Ninety percent of Canada’s population lives within 160 kilometres of the U.S border, and the border is what Canada orientates itself by, physically, economically, and it has to be said, culturally.

These realities have bred a particular Canadian captivation with America. An unavoidable cocktail of fascination, repulsion, love, fear, bemusement and frustration. There’s an acknowledgement that Canadian life will always be bound to an American world, but that Canadians don’t have to be overtly happy about this.

There is a clear imbalance of power between the two countries, but what the United States exudes in sheer economic and cultural weight, Canada returns with a subtle defiance. This is often in the form of a desire to correct American excesses. With higher life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and greater income equality, educational attainment and social mobility, Canada can portray itself as a kinder, gentler, society.

Sorry if you should find me

Thinking of only the things that I need

I’ve been living in America in churches of greed - it’s sick!

And there is, of course, a certain Canadian smugness about this. While the U.S may be such an overweening presence, Canada sees itself existing on a higher moral plane, one where Canadians can look down upon the U.S, while the U.S is failing to even notice Canada. Although it would be unfair to suggest that Canadian identity is simply a knee-jerk anti-Americanism, as there is something more nuanced in Canadian society than just a defensive and self-conscious desire to not be American.

The Trump-era may have fed into Canada’s sense of moral superiority, but most Canadians would very readily realise that gloating about American politics has its limits when this politics has the potential to destabilise the U.S in such a dramatic fashion. Canadians would prefer to quietly smirk and shake their heads at the U.S, not have to hold a genuine fear for the country’s future. Or have to contemplate what a fanatical, agitated and volatile America would mean for Canada. There is both genuine sympathy and blunt self-interest in Canada’s concerns for the current state of the U.S.

Yet Canadian identity cannot help but be defined by its geographic reality. This is compounded by Canadian nationalism having its own local weaknesses. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself told the New York Times in 2015 that Canada was a “post-national state” with “no core identity”. Rather Canada is a state of competing strong regional identities, begrudgingly thrown together in an attempt to create some form of counter-weight to its behemoth southern neighbour.

Into this milieu strides Vancouver’s Dan Bejar, known by his nom de guerre, Destroyer. It would be misleading to suggest that Bejar is a man entirely obsessed with the United States - he has other obsessions - but references to the country appear so frequently within his work that he clearly - and consciously - inhabits this unavoidable Canadian preoccupation. For any English-speaking artist the American market is obviously crucial to financial success, although for Canadians it is also crucial for self-respect.

As a lyricist, Bejar is wry, biting, all-too-knowing, self-deprecating and habitually self-referential. He is incredibly funny, but he also exists within a certain niche, a self-contained world built on a familiarity and bitterness towards various music styles, the types of people who inhabit these cultural scenes, and the inconsequential squabbles between them.

Quiet, Ruby, someone's coming

Approach with stealth

Oh, it's just your precious American Underground

And it is born of wealth

With not a writer in the lot

Bejar lacks the voice of a conventional singer, and is often purposely off-key; a tool he uses for emphasis and effect. While his songs are full of fascinating detail, it is also incredibly difficult to discern exactly what he is singing about. Yet across his 13 albums there is a recurring theme built on his fascination with the music industry at large, as well as his own place outside it. He has an air of satirical superiority, which often leads him to steal lines from other artists and morph them to suit his own purposes.

Oh life, is bigger

Than a life on the run from the United States

His third and fourth albums Thief and Streethawk: A Seduction were effectively concept albums about his own grand vision for his art that somehow was unfulfilled by an industry that was hostile to him and an audience that was unaware of him. On Streethawk Bejar identified the problem as his particular style of music, indebted more to English bands than the type of music that could capture him an audience below the 49th Parallel.

And write your English music though you know it will come to no good.

When brilliance has a taste for suffering, and you're softer than the Western world.

Yet it is here where his 9th album, Kaputt, took a stylistic turn towards the U.S. While Bejar has a penchant for genre-hopping, from indie-folk, to ramshackle and glam rock, new wave to baroque pop, verbally there had always been too much going on in his songs for them to find a space in society outside of the bedrooms of the most dedicated music obsessives. He made music for people who care about music. However, Kaputt was a conscious attempt to change this. To make an album that could be played in cafés, a vehicle to work his way into the broader culture via osmosis, rather than directly through his acerbic wit.

But for this to be successful Bejar would have to restrain himself. To withdraw his wordiness and unique singing style, to be minimal with his lyrics and minimal with delivery. He achieved the latter by recording his vocals lying down on the studio couch, giving each song a sense of langour that would be less confronting in a public space. While making each line direct and precise. Editing became more important than writing.

Only two songs from the album, Suicide Demo For Kara Walker, and Bejar’s magnum opus, Bay of Pigs - a previous stand alone single tacked onto the end of the album as a somewhat awkward, but not unwelcome fit - would be composed in his previous loquacious style. The former being the reworking of a poem that artist Kara Walker had sent Bejar. All other lyrics would be stripped down to their bare bones, to be as succinct and unobtrusive as possible.

The musical vehicle for this shift was equally as distinct; with Bejar and his collaborators creating an album of soft rock, smooth (and occasionally free) jazz, and New Romantic pop. The album was built around clean guitars, icy synthesisers and a lot of saxophone. Here Kaputt was something of an homage to the 1980s, a move that may have seemed ironic at the time, but has proved to instead be ahead of the curve.

It was within the album’s title track - and first single - that Bejar identifies that maybe this shift in approach would bring him the attention in the U.S that he believed he deserved. As the song enters its coda he muses to himself “I wrote a song for America....who knew?”. Due to his habit of self-referencing, this line would return towards the end of the album in a song simply called Song for America.

While Kaputt, the single, may have stylistically been aimed at the U.S, its chorus was built around a yearning for the golden era of the British music press - “Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME, all sound like a dream to me.” An era that Bejar himself would have been highly aware of during his teens and early-20s, but whose musical career would not align with.

Here Bejar was not only continuing his long-standing theme of positioning himself outside of the main drivers of the music industry and of the listening habits of the general public, but was also romanticising an era before music became so easily accessible. When you had to wait by the radio for a certain song to be played, where details about bands came via album liner notes, and - in the UK at least - the highly influential weekly music press. When music seemingly meant more than just a periodic recreational activity. When being a serious music fan required serious work.

Yet, ironically, Kaputt’s revitalising of musical styles from the 1980s was also signalling the dawn of a new era of music consumption. In the closing years of the new century’s first decade the possibilities of the internet as a distinct vehicle for music distribution were starting to come into full effect. The ability for people to exist within any or all musical eras was developing a solid digital infrastructure (Spotify was launched in 2008). This was especially the case with YouTube, which was quickly becoming the repository for long forgotten, overlooked, and obscure music. Driven by an algorithm that has an uncanny ability for recommending mysterious and unappreciated music, both within genres and across them.

Kaputt’s sound was the result of this era-hoping, the rediscovery of styles that had fallen out of fashion, but had found fresh ears due to the modern technological capabilities. All eras move through phases where they are viewed with suspicion, scorn, or amusement, but at some stage a re-appreciation of the era emerges. Kaputt marked the beginning of this process with the 1980s. The decade’s niche categories like Italo-Disco and Japanese Environmental Music have been revitalised, as has the era’s pop music, something the Black Mirror episode San Junipero from 2016 utilised to great effect.

Of course, Bejar himself would both love and revile himself being seen as this kind of cultural harbinger. His instincts would be to avoid making a similar album to capitalise on the new musical landscape that he would usher in. The prevailing tension within his musical persona is one of both attraction to music as a collective cultural phenomenon, and a deep suspicion of everyone with a similar attraction. As a result, for Kaputt’s follow-up, Poison Season, he would recreate himself as something of a pre-rock ‘n’ roll crooner.

Yes, I'm familiar with your scene

Some would say shockingly uptight...

Hey, mystic prince of the purlieu at night

I heard your record, it's alright

Kaputt would bring Bejar the kind of American attention that every Canadian secretly craves, the ability to both be acknowledged by their overbearing southern neighbour, but also the opportunity to subvert them in their own distinct Canadian way. The album would find itself reaching number 62 on the Billboard charts, Bejar would make an appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and he would find himself invited to perform at the Coachella, the annual Californian mega-festival, attended by everyone Bejar would despise.

Yet Bejar’s widescreen cynicism couldn’t take further root across the border. His approach, his eye, and his wit could only come from existing in the shadows of something larger and more powerful. A power often oblivious to the effects of its own actions, and culturally unconditioned for a perspective that could only have come from the unique geographic, economic, and historical terrain that Canada inhabits.

Pierre Trudeau once claimed that living next to the United States was “like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” These twitches and grunts are what Bejar feeds off. Unable to alter this reality, and unable to ignore it, the best he can do is find some form of amusement in it.

In the early hours of 1 February 1995, Richey Edwards, lyricist and guitarist with Manic Street Preachers, left London’s Embassy Hotel and vanished. Two weeks later his car was found next to the Severn Bridge, the major crossing between England and Edwards’ native south Wales. Edwards and the band’s singer and guitarist, James Dean Bradfield, had been staying in London as they were due to fly to New York the next morning to promote the band’s third album, The Holy Bible, which had been released in the United Kingdom the previous August. Bradfield flew to New York by himself, but the band quickly cancelled all further activity. Without Edwards it seemed the band’s short, but eventful, career was over.

Manic Street Preachers were a band before they ever picked up any instruments. The four friends grew up in the small Welsh mining town of Blackwood and became an inseparable group from an early age. Bradfield had become friends with bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire as they began school, forming an unlikely odd couple with the tall lanky “mama’s boy” Wire, towering over the small but pugnacious Bradfield. Drummer Sean Moore was Bradfield’s cousin, but they grew up as brothers, sharing a bunk bed in a room that would become the four boys’ clubhouse and later band HQ. Edwards lived a couple of streets over, the others affectionately called him “Teddy” due his soft, amiable features.

In a provincial backwater disconnected from the styles and trends of London and Manchester, the boys nevertheless became music obsessives. The 1980s was arguably the peak period for the British music press — with the country able to sustain three weekly papers dedicated solely to the latest indie and alternative music — and each week the four would forensically examine these publications for every detail, arguing over the merits of various bands, and developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of the era’s musical landscape. When it came time to try to gain the attention of the music press themselves they created dossiers on the country’s music journalists, detailing their likes and dislikes, and catering their polemic press releases to each writer’s specific interests.

Growing up films and books were considered just as important as music, and references to a wide variety of art would come to pepper their work. Yet it was politics that most forcefully drove the band’s ambitions. Their teenage years coincided with a tumultuous period in south Wales (and the UK as a whole). The Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher was determined to phase out the country’s nationalised coal mines and reduce the power of its trade unions. This led to a bitter year-long miners’ strike (1984–85) that tore at the nation’s fabric. As a region heavily reliant on the mining industry, south Wales disproportionately felt the consequences of Thatcher’s policies, and held out their strike the longest, yet ultimately their resistance proved futile.

For the four boys the lesson was clear; they needed to devise a plan that would prevent them from being at the mercy of the powerful and impersonal forces that emerged from London. Bradfield told the BBC in 1998 that the goal was to become “so intelligent that we would never get beaten” in the way their parents’ generation had. For this, Edwards and Wire would both obtain degrees in Politics from the University of Wales to give the band its intellectual weight, while Bradfield and Moore worked a variety of jobs to fund its creation. With a sound and political posture stolen directly from The Clash, and outfits borrowed from the New York Dolls, the band they created stood out as odd — if not absurd — during the height of Madchester. Yet this was the point.

The central idea of Manic Street Preachers was to be a band apart. To exemplify their own insularity as a gang — and sense of hostility toward the powerful industry they were attempting to conquer — their early manifesto pledged that they would never become friends with other bands, most of whom they claimed to hate in their press releases and various interviews. They defined themselves by what they were against, and this was almost anything that would get them attention. During the band’s first television interview Wire and Edwards — finishing each other’s thoughts — would declare that “we’ll never write lovesong, we’ll never write a trip-out, we’ll never write a ballad” (a line that would later become the chorus to Saint Etienne’s “Wood Cabin”), and claimed that it was actually the British tabloids they were seeking to reach, rather than gain the “easy critical respect” from the music press.

The closeness of the friends provided the platform for their unique division of labour. Edwards and Wire would write the lyrics, which Bradfield and Moore would then construct into songs. However, while Bradfield was the band’s singer and lead guitarist, it was Edwards who was effectively the band’s frontman. He was their Minister of Information; the band member whose education, articulation and vision for the band conceptually made him best suited for engaging with the press and promoting the band’s ideas.

This included his ability to make compelling — if not disturbing — statements of intent. In 1991, backstage after a show in Norwich, the NME’s Steve Lamacq questioned the band’s authenticity, with Lamacq’s indie ethos offended by the band’s glam outfits and ostentatious rhetoric. As Edwards explained that Lamacq’s perception of the band was wrong, he took a razor blade and calmly carved “4 REAL” into his arm. The wound required 18 stitches, and would be the first sign of what would become Edwards’ consistent displays of self-harm. The NME went into meltdown over whether it should run the pictures (it did, in black and white).

Two months later the band released a single that contained the line “I laughed when Lennon got shot” gaining themselves more shock value. Its follow up “You Love Us” baited the press and public further. For the band this antagonism was an essential part of their art. Their ambition was to not just become the greatest rock and roll band of all time, but to be a culture in and of themselves, to provide a series of clues and challenges for their listeners, and most importantly, be a force for radical political change. Whatever means necessary it took to accomplish this goal was all fair game.

However, until The Holy Bible the band’s mouths and mythology had been far more compelling than their music. Yet in some way this was by design. Inspired by the enormous success of Guns ’n’ Roses, for their debut album the band abandoned their tinny punk for a hard rock sound aimed squarely at middle America. The goal was to try and slip their subversive lyrics into global mainstream consciousness. They claimed their debut album would sell 26 million copies and inspire a youth revolution, and having achieved this aim they would subsequently break up. It didn’t, and they didn’t. And after a second album of tepid and slick stadium rock (minus the stadiums) the band seemed to be idle and idealess, destined to be remembered for providing some good quotes to the British music press, but for little else.

Yet as Edwards’ personal difficulties became more pronounced he was also entering into a period of intense creativity. He had taken over as the band’s primary lyricist, as well as becoming its creative director (he is credited with “design” in The Holy Bible’s liner notes, to be understood as not just as its visuals). This was again an odd approach for a band, given that Edwards’ guitar playing skills were such that he didn’t play on their records, and played simplified parts on stage. But he provided the band’s conceptual framework and direction, and artistically his vision was now crystallising into something far more substantial.

Abandoning the Trojan Horse of polished rock, instead the group would return to the bands they would obsess over together as teenagers; Joy Division, Public Image Ltd, Magazine, Skids, Siouxsie and the Banshees. When their record company offered them a studio in Barbados to record the album they instead chose a £50 a day hovel in Cardiff’s red light district. Here they would create an album of dark and abrasive post-punk, a sound that would better suit the dense and nihilistic lyrical themes that Edwards was writing. Delving into his deep well of cultural knowledge, Edwards would also collect samples from films, newsreels, documentaries that would introduce each track, providing the listener with a cultural marker for the songs that would follow.

The Holy Bible was a disturbing and deeply confronting album. The NME labelled it “vile”. It was an album that laid out the warts and gashes of the 20th Century, serendipitously seeming to follow the themes of Eric Hobsbawm’s Age Of Extremes; the historian’s account of the period from the first World War to the end of the Cold War. It contained two songs about the Holocaust (Mausoleum, The Intense Humming of Evil), alongside explorations of the masculine deficiencies that led to fascism (Of Walking Abortion), and the authoritarian lust for violence (Archives of Pain). Yet it was a stark illustration of Edwards’ mental state that the album’s most desolate songs (Yes, 4st 7lbs) were personal rather than political, as he struggled with anorexia, alcoholism, self-mutilation, and emotional isolation. Prior to the release of the album Edwards would spend 10 weeks in a psychiatric hospital for treatment for these issues (the others played the Reading Festival as a three-piece to cover his bills).

In retrospect, on listening to the album Edwards’ disappearance seemed inevitable. Or at least some other event that would create a schism within the band, despite their closeness as friends. Bradfield has subsequently stated that he felt he would no longer be able to write music that would please Edwards, whom he believed wanted the band to become more extreme. While on The Holy Bible he had done an extraordinary job of musically interpreting Edwards’ vision, the sheer weight of the album, a weight Bradfield disproportionately carried as the singer/guitarist, was something he felt he couldn’t repeat.

But it was also the weight of Edwards deterioration that was straining the band. Just prior to Christmas 1994 they would play three consecutive shows at London’s Astoria theatre. During the final show, in a cathartic release, they would destroy all their equipment, as well as the Astoria’s lighting system, causing £26,000 worth of damage. It felt like the end of something. By February Edwards was gone.

As half a year passed without any sign of his return the three remaining friends decided to reconvene as a band. Wire had given Bradfield some new lyrics, and one song in particular stood out as something they felt “deserved to be heard”. Encouraged by Edwards’ parents, they also thought that reviving the band might create the conditions for him to resurface.

As a statement of the band’s resurrection, A Design For Life was an extraordinary single. A song that retained the lyrical intent of The Holy Bible, but smoothed out the rough edges, creating a mature assertion of the band’s proletarian origins and an ironic retort to the way the British working class were perceived. Its bold opening line — “Libraries gave us power” — was adapted from an engraving above the entrance to a library in Newport, Wales. The song’s Spector-esque waltz gave it an anthemic feel, but without being overwrought. It was both sardonic — “We don’t talk about love, we only want to get drunk”, and sincere — “I wish I had a bottle, right here in my pretty face, to wear the scars, to show from where I came.”

The song catapulted the band from music press curios to mainstream appeal, peaking at number 2 on the UK charts. Although the band would bristle at any association with Britpop — the lyric was written in response to what Wire saw as Britpop’s bastardisation of working class culture — the sound was adjacent enough to find an audience within the era’s dominant musical environment. The band’s initial goal of reaching a wide audience with literate and subversive songs was finally starting to take shape.

Following the dense and claustrophobic sound of The Holy Bible the band wanted their music to “breathe a bit more”, and Bradfield wanted to be a different singer; to actually be able to sing rather than scream and spit. And so Everything Must Go was another musical reinvention; an album of elegant reverb-heavy alternative rock, one that pivoted the anger and nihilism of The Holy Bible into an understandable deep sense of melancholy, but also a display of resilience. Bradfield described the album as “wistful resistance”.

After the highly coordinated imagery of The Holy Bible, with the band styling themselves as an insurgent group; dressed in military outfits, with camouflage netting adorning their stages — alongside Edwards’ highly curated sleeve — they now opted for a conscious non-image. Always aware of musical history, they took inspiration from the design of New Order’s first album, Movement, and sought to project a blank, no-frills, appearance. The focus would simply be on the twelve songs on the album, all other ideas would be sidelined for now.

While Edwards may not have been physically present for the album, five songs feature lyrics by him (two co-written with Wire), with these songs having existed as demos prior to his disappearance. However, even in Edwards’ lyrics there was a noted shift in approach. Gone was the torrent of words that would often have Bradfield engaging in heroic feats of vocal gymnastics to try create a workable song structure. Instead his lyrics had a more conventional rhyme and metre, making them a much better fit for the more spacious sound the band was developing.

Yet his fascination with tragedy has not abated. The song Kevin Carter focused on the South African photographer who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his photo of a starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture, waiting for the child to draw his last breath. The burden of what Carter had witnessed (and been rewarded for) led to his suicide several months after accepting the prize. Alongside this, the album’s centrepiece, Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky, explored the plight of animals kept in captivity, written after Edwards had seen a documentary on the state of the UK’s zoos. Although it is not hard to also read the lyric as an allegory for Edwards’ time spent in a psychiatric hospital.

Beyond Edwards’ direct contributions his presence looms large over the rest of the album through Wire’s lyrics. The title track directly addresses the band’s continuation as a three-piece, an earnest plea to both Edwards and the band’s fans for forgiveness for carrying on without him. While the song Australia was an expression of Wire’s desire to get as far away as possible from the situation that had befallen the friends. Bradfield and Moore channelled this sense of escapism into the album’s most upbeat moment; creating music of escalating momentum designed to be played in the background of sports highlights (a goal they’d achieve). Enola/Alone brought the blunt reality of the situation to the fore with the bitter assertion that “All I want to do is live, no matter how miserable it is.”

The album’s two concluding tracks — Further Away and No Surface All Feeling — give a greater sense of the stress the group had been under leading up to Edwards’ disappearance. Despite seemingly addressing the situation both songs were actually written prior to the event (Edwards even played guitar on the demo of No Surface All Feeling, some of which was included in the song’s outro). Famously close, these songs are an indication of how dispirited Wire had become as Edwards’ health deteriorated. Wire would tell The Guardian in 2009 that aside from the gravity of Edwards’ disappearance, “the real tragedy is when you lose someone kinetically, someone you’ve known since he was five, you’ve done all those things with and you feel you can’t communicate.” Wire would subsequently write a number of songs about his lost friend, with “Your Love Alone Is Not Enough” from the 2007 album Send Away The Tigers being the standout.

Everything Must Go would gain the band both critical and commercial success. All four singles from the album would become top 10 hits in the UK, with the album achieving Triple Platinum status. The band may not have achieved its initial revolutionary goals, but with songs about Sylvia Plath (The Girl Who Wanted To Be God) and Dutch abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning (Interiors) they had finally brought their erudition into the mainstream consciousness, at least in the UK and through parts of Europe.

They had also created a deeply human album. While their combative posture had often given the impression of the band as snide and inhospitable, this had always been a front, a tactic they used to gain attention. Although it was also a defence mechanism, born from their deep suspicion towards the political and cultural powers outside of their provincial origins. However, Everything Must Go lowered the veneer, it gave the band a greater sensitivity, and also a sense of vulnerability that they had previously been reluctant to display, although without any self-pity.

While Edwards’ lyrics on The Holy Bible had been astonishingly honest, they weren’t exactly inviting, and often too intense to be empathetic. With Everything Must Go the band had little choice but to acknowledge their loss, confront their mortality, and to present themselves in a more inclusive manner. It was this less confrontational approach that allowed them to achieve the kind of mass communication that they first dreamed of in Bradfield and Moore’s bedroom.

After Everything Must Go, although the band would write the odd great song, they would enter into an extended period of malaise and misdirection. Making a series of albums that would be anaemic (This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours), incoherent (Know Your Enemy), and indifferent (Lifeblood, Send Away The Tigers). Occasionally making naïvely ambitious grand gestures, like playing in Cuba and meeting Fidel Castro (the folly of which would be subsequently noted in the song Next Jet To Leave Moscow), but mostly easing into a comfortable and unchallenging existence.

Despite his body never being found, Edwards would be declared legally dead in 2008. The decision would provide the impetus for the band to use a folder of lyrics he had given Wire a few weeks before his disappearance, which the band had previously not felt comfortable using. With Edwards once again anchoring the band, they seemed rejuvenated and refocused. The Steve Albini-recorded Journal For Plague Lovers would return to the more abrasive sound of The Holy Bible and be the most consistent set of songs they would release since Everything Must Go.

As a band created out of an insular personal solidarity in the face of powerful historical forces, the tragic loss of Edwards had a profound effect on the band not just emotionally, but also conceptually. While on Everything Must Go’s title track Bradfield pleaded for the band to be “Freed from the memory, escape from our history”, as a band all too aware of History, there was a knowing sense that this was impossible. Yet there was an opportunity for the band to evolve their approach, to find a new way to transmit their ideas. While The Holy Bible remains the band’s great didactic artistic statement, Everything Must Go was the sound of the Manic Street Preachers embracing the art of conversation.