Best reissue of 2012. Manic Street Preachers: Generation Terrorists 20th Anniversary Edition.
"We're going to write one album, sell sixteen million copies and then split up." (Nicky Wire, 1991.)
Twenty years and ten studio albums later... that clearly didn't happen. Nevertheless, Generation Terrorists, Manic Street Preachers' first album is still one of my desert island discs, and for its 20th anniversary Sony has made it even better. Or at least even longer, with two bonus CDs of demos, rarities, B-sides and one extra track on top of their already-drawn-out 18-track début.
As I wrote earlier this year: for some questions, I'll never know the answer. Like "where will you be in ten years' time?" Or "what's the actual definition of a sport?" Or "where does a snake's tail begin?" Like "do you drink soup or eat it?" Or "why is there a light in the fridge but not the freezer?" Or "who'd win in a fight between a shark and a crocodile?" But "What's your favourite song?" is a question I can answer (and often have answered) in an instant: 'Motorcycle Emptiness'. Track four and the high point of Generation Terrorists, 'Motorcycle Emptiness' is an anti-consumerism anthem, loosely based on Rumble Fish, one of S. E. Hinton's young adult novels that I read in primary school. Musically it's a combination of two very early Manics songs, one of which is included on CD 3. Bizarrely, the home demo of 'Behave Yourself Baby' is the Manics sounding like The Seekers crossed with Belle & Sebastian and a sixties girl group rather than the Guns 'n' Roses of Generation Terrorists, but it's where the Middle 8 of 'Motorcycle Emptiness' originated. 'Go, Buzz Baby, Go!' isn't here on the album, but it made up much of the rest of the song, and it totally sounds like Ratcat. Finally, there are a couple of stories about how James Dean Bradfield came up with the most uplifting guitar riff ever. One is that he dreamt it, the other is that (like the piano hook from Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello) he ripped it off Dancing Queen. Put it all together and you have the greatest song ever written, about youth culture as a product and as an alternative to the mainstream.
"We'll never write a love song, ever. Full stop. Or a ballad." (Nicky Wire, 1991.)
Yes, ultimately, they did both of those things, but on Generation Terrorists, 'Motorcycle Emptiness' flows straight into 'You Love Us' - not a ballad, and not actually a love song unless the line "throw some acid into your face" is able to be included in a love song. Live, this is one of those songs where the pogoing audience shouts along - does the crowd love the Manics or do the Manics love the crowd? (Both.) The better original Heavenly single release is now included on CD 2.
As became a Manics tradition, in the liner notes each track include a quotations from the likes of the Futurists, Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, Camus, Confucius, Ibsen, George Orwell, Nietszche and Chuck D. For protest-singing punks, the early Manics music didn't always preach in a transparent fashion - between James's diction and Nicky and Richey's lyrics, some of the protests can be downright unintelligible. On the other hand, Nat West-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds is clearly about banking. It's either a Nostradamus-like prediction of the GFC, or Nicky ranting about the fact that the banks wouldn't give him a mortgage. One of the most intriguing things about Manic Street Preachers songs is that there's rarely any rhyme or metre and yet somehow it works. There's only one rhyming couplet in all of Little Baby Nothing - written to be a duet with Kylie Minogue but instead was sung with Traci Lords the then-24-year-old retired porn star. At the time the song was recorded, Lords had started her career in porn nine years before. The fact that a teen actress and teen porn star were both appropriate for the song is intriguing, but both of them fit. Kylie did finally sing her part live fifteen years later at the Brixton Academy.
Finally, for the 20th anniversary version, the Manics' cover of 'Suicide is Painless' is a nineteenth and bonus track. In a bizarre coincidence as I sat here writing this review, Channel Ten's The Project played James Dean Bradfield's guitar riff from that version of the song over a report on the mental health of employers.
Generation Terrorists is far from a perfect album. 'Repeat' lives up to its iterative title as both track 8 and track 13, and GT also breaks my own rule about albums not having cover songs on albums (their thankfully more concise version of 'Damn Dog', from the film Times Square.) The original album didn't even include 'Motown Junk', one of the highlights of early MSP and stronger than most of the tracks that made it in (it's now on CD2. Twice.) It's not even the Manics' own best album, or even in the top two. Like Caesar, the early Manics were hopelessly ambitious and hubristic. On vinyl, Generation Terrorists was a double-album that they wanted to release with a sandpaper sleeve so it would gradually (or instantly) destroy itself and the albums shelved beside it. That also didn't happen. What it was released with was a cover image of Manics lyricist and air-guitarist Richey Edwards' torso and bicep, his Useless Generation tattoo airbrushed into the album title. Interestingly the shot didn't include Richey's forearm where he'd carved the words '4 REAL' with a razor during the infamous interview in which Steve Lamacq claimed they weren't. In 1992, the Manic Street Preachers really were the pissed-off alienated youths they claimed to be. Their passion was real - they never set out to be anyone's second-favourite band.
So I now own two copies of Generation Terrorists. It's not sixteen million, but it's a start.
