“All over the world I will back the masses against the classes” – William Ewart Gladstone.
Hello, it’s us again. Welcome to Popular. Welcome to 21st century pop music, now fifteen years old and dreadfully teenager-ish in its surly refusal to admit to any pigeonhole you might want to place it in. Putting the pop culture of this century’s first decade into a historical context is an unsatisfying job: it’s wriggly and shapeless. Some would gloomily have it that pop descended into an ahistorical inertia in the 00s, cycling through a tatty parade of old signifiers. Others would point to this tribe or that as keeping its vital spirit alive. From either perspective, trying to grab onto this century’s music through its number one records seems a strange proposition.
Maybe Gladstone can help. His famous placing of bets is no kind of socialist endorsement: he was appealing to his notion of a spirit in “the masses” that transcends factional (class) interest – the surges of support for a noble cause that led, in his eyes, to many of Victorian politics’ grand reforming moments, and overturned any partisan support of particular classes for the status quo. By focusing critically on only the best-selling record of any given moment, I’ve tried to place myself to pick up on as many of pop’s broad-based swells of sentiment as I can. There’s a nagging feeling that those kind of hits – the ones that stick around and define a summer, a winter, or a year – are more genuine and worthy of note than the mayfly one-week wonders that might surround them. But this is misguided. The pop charts have always also been about the classes – a mess of overlapping factions and specialisms that sometimes, somehow, get their message through. And the format of Popular also forces me to pay attention to this jabber of enthusiasms that a smoother history might overrule.
So number ones are a volatile balance of the masses and the classes, and that’s why I like to write about them. Still, though, 2000 is a shit of a year for doing it.
There are forty-two singles to cover, more than any year before or since. This berserk turnover is no accident: let’s remind ourselves of what getting a number one took at the turn of the 00s. In general, a hundred thousand sales would do the job. Pick the right week and you could hit the top on barely half that. Competition for number ones was planned to a degree, with release dates shifting back and forth to give bands with strong fanbases the best chance of a week’s glory. Those fanbases knew exactly what was coming, because singles were released to radio weeks in advance so they could build or mobilise an audience. On the relevant Monday, multiple formats in the main record shops helped fluff performance and ensure a high entry and peak. It was an unromantic business: marketers and fans united in what amounted to a business planning exercise, with all the thrill of a well-ordered Gant chart.
With hindsight, you notice two things. First, it’s astonishing the charts of the late 90s and early 00s are as representative as they are. There is a ridiculous number of number ones, but no more injustices than usual. Big records have always missed number one, whole styles have been neglected, but this period is no worse for it than any other. The masses remain in full voice.
The second curious thing is that this system, far from being sewn up, was ripe for gaming, vulnerable to the influence of faction. If you had a big enough fanbase, and picked the right week, you could get anything at all to number one. The charts have never been more open to the possibility of pop theatre than in the 00s: it might have been a golden age for wannabe Maclarens. But almost nobody took advantage of it. Of course, once bands built the kind of support to make trolling the charts a live possibility, most of them simply couldn’t be arsed any more.
It wasn’t just the innate conservatism of the act with an audience to please, though – the very idea of the charts as something that should be “subverted” seemed to belong to a prior age. One of the things that happened after punk was that the relationship of the underground and the mainstream changed. British psychedelic and prog bands didn’t shun the singles charts quite as much as lazy history might summarise, but there was hardly ever an ideological angle to their occasional visits. Punk, and the Pistols specifically, altered that. The near-miss or spiking of “God Save The Queen” became a feat to emulate, a crime to avenge. By 1980 the charts were highly winnable territory – former or tangential punkers like Adam Ant and Paul Weller going straight in at No.1, then pop itself restaffed by the eager and glorious theorists of the New Pop. A series of peaks – of fondly recalled victories – followed: Paul Morley and Trevor Horn’s tactical conquest with Frankie; 4AD getting M/A/R/R/S to the top; the situationist pop chaos of the KLF; the Battle of Britpop. And all these became rolled up into a general sense of an era when the charts “mattered”. But you got the feeling that to many, they mattered because of this possibility of minor, nose-tweaking shock – the classes winning out against the masses, if only for a week or two – and their day-to-day operation was a mere backdrop to that.
The Manic Street Preachers, on the threshold of the 21st century, are almost the last in this tradition. They had the opportunity – a band with enough fans to do something in that torpid millennial January. They had the motive – a band with a long-standing interest in quixotic pop gestures, and a fan’s love of theatrical subversion: they’d even called one of their videos Leaving The 20th Century, after a Situationist slogan. They also had the method – “Masses Against The Classes” was a limited single release, to be deleted after a week, guaranteeing it a compressed sales burst and a high debut placing.
But did they have the song? And who were they actually aiming it at?
It’s very doubtful that “The Masses Against The Classes” is meant as any kind of coherent statement, even more doubtful that you can parse it as one. The Occam’s Razor interpretation is that they wanted a Number One, saw a way of getting it, and slapped a Chomsky quote at the start as a bit of decorative brand-building and because it tickled Nicky Wire. If you take the perspective that a Cuban flag in HMV was an inherent pop good, and the Manics are fixing the charts to provide an alternative to complacency – then “Masses” works as an unfocused blast of wrath. It’s better – a lot better – than Westlife’s “Seasons In The Sun”. High praise, eh? But let’s offer the band the respect of at least trying to read too much into it all.
The quotes it’s topped and tailed by – Albert Camus bringing up the rear – sit in uneasy relationship. “This country was founded on the principle that the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.”; “A slave begins by demanding justice, and ends by wanting to wear a crown”. Side by side, Camus’ fatalism makes this a glum pairing: the liberation of property (which a slave, by definition, is) inevitably ends in the re-establishment of government, and the cycle begins again. The title – Gladstone’s invocation of the historical spirit of the masses, magically separated from their economic interests – offers some kind of way out, however mystical. Break the cycle by backing the decent impulses of the masses against the classes. It’s not an analysis I would agree with, but that’s how the salad of sources works together, for me.
That’s the title and the quotes. The actual song, meanwhile, takes a rather different approach: it’s a haters-gonna-hate sneer. “Success is an ugly word / Especially in your tiny world”: A lot of people, it seems, didn’t like the furrowed-brow AOR direction the Manic Street Preachers had taken themselves in for This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, and the band, in the grand tradition of successful bands throughout history, interpreted boredom as envy. “The Masses” has them striking a defiant pose. Their grumpy old fans are the petty, factional classes, and their stadium-rockin’ newer ones are the noble masses.
It’s a nasty little record by this reading, but to really get how nasty it is, consider what it sounds like. This angry defense of a change of direction is packaged up in a song that’s a deliberate callback to their very first records. The early Manics single “Masses” reminds me of most is “You Love Us” – snotty, scrappy, and the kind of audience- and critic-baiting statement of belief that feels terribly 1992 but no less electric for that. “Masses” is determinedly uglier, though, janking and grinding along on its basic rock undercarriage like a car dragging a broken exhaust along a road. The early Manics never sounded quite this loud, either – boosted by compression steroids into a very deliberate kind of rawness, though compared to those early records what’s been gained in power has been lost in swagger. So what we’ve got is a song played in a manner designed to excited the band’s old fans, powered to number one at a time and using a gimmick that calls back to the Manics’ early theatrical streak, but which is actually a brutal dismissal as elitists of the very people most likely to get enthused by those things. Now there’s subversion. Oof.
“I guess at heart I remain some kind of a crinkly English situationist who wants to have his MTV and critique it too. I am reminded of the story of how high priest of situationism Guy Debord rushed over to London from Paris in the 1960s when he heard that a trained guerilla combat unit was ready for his inspection in Ladbroke Grove. He was directed to military headquarters on the All Saints Road where he discovered a young guy watching Match Of The Day on his sofa with a can of McEwan’s Special Export in his hand…. Debord, quite naturally, stalked off in a rage.” – Steve Beard, Aftershocks: The End Of Style Culture
Score: 4
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Not a Manics song I’ve listened to much. S’pose I’d better before rating it.
Lovely piece of taking-stock, Tom. There’s a cut and paste error in there: “most of thetwo things seem remarkablem simply couldn’t be arsed any more”.
I think I marginally prefer this to their last number 1 but they still sound like a bunch of whiney over-amplified buskers to me.
Boom, into the 00s, a decade I spent largely out of the country ignoring British pop culture entirely. Even in these first couple of years I wasn’t really paying attention. So, looking forward to hearing my lost decade – and there’s a lot of it to get through.
First time I’ve ever heard this (I’d done a complete 180 on the Manics and wouldn’t even bother to listen to anything by them at this point) and what do you know, I actually like it. It’s a pile-up of cynical cliches, jacked up with sports-metal production steroids, vocals tainted with that nasty megaphone protools effect that Subcircus used on every single song, but under it all there’s something undeniable about the sheer wall of energy, and it’s worn me down by the end. It’s not *good*, I can’t go higher than a 7, but I enjoyed listening to it, and will give it another spin now.
James Dean Bradfield on this song: “It was one of [Nicky’s] Blair moments – we need a new policy initiative!”
If memory serves, this literally was written as a sequel to You Love Us (with last year’s Let’s Go To War unnecessarily capping a trilogy no one asked to happen, Godfather 3 style).
This seems like the apex of the popartpolitics experiment the early Manics dreamed of accomplishing. If they’d done a single like this that topped the charts whilst R*chey was still in the band, they could have comfortably split up. As it is, it seems a bit of a forgotten #1 now; calls to mind the oft-mentioned Michael Jackson’s charttoppers pub quiz question.
In retrospect, the artwork, and thrashy disjointed sound of the single (that solo!) is more of a precursor to the equally sloppy/engaging Know Your Enemy LP the following year.
Oh, and it’s probably worth mentioning that, on top of the Twist and Shout intro, one of the b-sides was a cover of Rock And Roll Music. A slightly more coherent manifesto, there.
My 10 year old self adored this. Now it’s a handy pissbreak song at gigs, albeit one I’m singing loudly along with at the urinal.
7
Ephemeral just about sums it up: this was always something of a hit-and-run affair, but considering this as the first number one of the new millenium, it’s still fairly surprising that the only real after-life this song has enjoyed it as a staple question of the pub quiz music round.
It’s far from the finest single the Manics have put out – before or since – but I do think this interpretation is a little harsh. With the possible exeception of Mott the Hoople, it’s hard to imagine another band as relentlessly self-mythologising as the Manics, and ultimately the confusion and defeating sloganeering of The Masses Against The Classes is their take on the ‘statement on the top’. Whether they would have cared to admit it at the time or not, the remarkable level they found themselves at circa 1999/2000 was clearly unsustainable. The Manics have always been, for good and ill, too keen to correct themselves, to take left turns : listening back to This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, I get the impression that even they got bored of that album while making it, the album going from a very much-toned down but still enjoyable run of singles at the head before switching onto a dull auto-drive half-way through, before crashing into the wall with the unfathomably dreadful S.Y.M.M. (As an indication of the level of confusion the band were running under at this point: Wire was pushing for S.Y.M.M. as the lead single, while Bradfield believed Be Natural to be ‘the big one’ – whatever your views on If You Tolerate…, we can all be thankful that some kind of sanity prevailed here.)
So having reached an implausible, clearly temporary peak, the only way to go was down. So why not try and go down on your own terms, entirely aware of your fate and getting your apologies in before it’s too late? It’s a return to rock for sure, but they’d rarely engaged in this kind of chugging pub-punk previously: The Masses Against The Classes sits far apart from the stadium metal sheen of their early work, or the terse post-punk of The Holy Bible. I can understand how this record can come across as sneering and nasty, but like so much of their work, the real audience here is the band themselves. “Success is an ugly word / Especially in your tiny world” – that’s the two sides of the band, the socialist firebrands and the commerical pragmatists, engaging in a very public argument. The song is just one long rebuke of the choices and compromises made to get to the level where such a stunt was possible, a song made not because the band really had much to offer, but to fulfill some kind of promise to themselves that they could try and offer some kind of justfication for their new-found position. As such, we’re left with this: an enjoyable if fairly hollow rocker that offers an olive branch to the die-hards and early fans and goes for a big statement, even though all involved know the only statement they can make is to reveal their confusion, their doubt, and the unspoken truth than this epoch of popularity would come crashing down very soon.
This was a one-time only affair, and they went all in on it – just a shame that the gesture outweighed anything else they might have had to offer. (6)
Good generous comment Endlesswindow – my only problem (to my ears) is they kept doing the lumbering stadium rock stuff on through the 00s even if they knew they couldn’t sustain the popularity.
I think it’s nice they did it and got to number one as a very them thing to do, but it feels to me thar the actual song was firing blanks.
I was one of the people who bought this single during its first week of release, thereby helping to propel it to the top – it’s not often I can say that on “Popular”. Rather than buying it in some kind of bid to force a number one for the Manics, though, I bought it because the press campaign surrounding its release made huge virtue of its “highly limited” status. In reality, copies hung around record stores for weeks afterwards, and the rush was entirely unnecessary. Had the record company admitted that they’d actually pressed up an impressive number of copies in that one solitary week before deletion, I suspect it may have had more of a struggle to get to number one.
Still, I wasn’t to know. I didn’t read Music Week. So on the way into my dull corporate admin job on a bloody cold Monday in January, I entered an independent record store in Central London (I can’t remember which one, but it’s almost certainly not there anymore) with my suit on and promptly got laughed at by the store owner for buying this. Presumably the irony of a young man in a suit buying a Manics single with the Cuban flag on was hilarious to him, and if I’d had the time I might have explained that actually I was on an exceptionally crappy temp worker’s wage, and the suit was itself an off-the-peg cheap M&S job. Record store assistants never seem to realise simple practical truths like this, and it is for that reason that they will never be At The Front Of The Revolution. Bastards.
As for the record itself, I’d caught it a few times on the radio and liked it a lot. It cut through everything else on the air, and sounded hugely significant, almost alarming through a cheap radio’s speaker. One time Chris Moyles played it, and sarcastically yelped afterwards “Yay! It’s like The Clash, The Jam and Slade all meeting together! It’s a rock and roll revolution! It’s… oh, just shut up, I’ve had enough now”. At the time I rudely gesticulated towards the radio, but actually, he was right. I wouldn’t ordinarily credit Moyles with any decent critical insight at all, but upon buying the record, I played it eight or nine times before returning it to the shelf to be completely ignored to this very day. Like the most cranked-up but dumb sixties garage rock, it sounds so forceful the first time around that you’re compelled to pay attention, almost rooted to the spot by it. It’s such a compressed, furious noise combined with interesting sloganeering that you convince yourself it’s in some way important, especially if it’s the only thing that sounds like that on daytime radio. Then, when you finally have a chance to own the record, to get under its skin, to live with it in the context of your own record collection and not the current Radio One playlist… you realise there’s not a lot else there, and it loses your attention swiftly. Still, for that first week it did create enough of a rush for me not to want to dismiss totally out of hand. A 6 or a 7 from me rather than a 4, just for the pure rush of it.
At the time, I knew Manics fans who held this single up as an example of how much the group had lost it, purely because they were trying to reclaim their former Heavenly-era punk glories but had obviously completely forgotten how even that was done. Indeed, this stacks up unfavourably next to the initial releases of “Motown Junk” and “You Love Us”, sounding less urgent, less spunky, less as if they had everything to play for. Because, of course, they didn’t. The irony is that most of their more middle-of-the-road singles of the late nineties are far better than this one. Some bands become too slick and learned to go back to their roots successfully, and sadly I think that’s what happened here – but their more considered, adult approach did bring “Everything Must Go” into the world, which is a near-faultless rock album, and at least half of “This Is My Truth” is far better than most people believe, so the outcome isn’t all bad. And I have to admit that I return to those records far, far more often than I’m compelled to listen to “The Holy Bible”.
Another great piece of writing, Tom. I’d never knowingly heard this before and having done so while reading this I see why. I’m totally with you on this. It feels right and proper that MSP should have the first #1 of the new millenium rather than Westlife, Travis or even something good, more progressive though less iconic…Christ though, what a dreary, sludgey, clangy dirge it is: the first 20 seconds of Chomsky and JDB’s Ah-ah-ah’s cribbed from Let’s Dance seem like they’re going to pull off something magnificent but then it’s downhill into a noisy rock plod in search of a tune. If this had come out in 1992 it would have been a B-side, I can’t imagine it even making the cut on the overlong Gen. Terrorists.
If ever a band had the wrong #1’s…as I said on the IYTTTCWBN thread, for me they’ve at least half a dozen possibly 10s in their back catalogue but I think 4 is about right here. That said, IIRC there’s a magnificent MSP bunny coming up in a couple of Popular years?
Being unburdened with any Manics’ pro or anti bias as I am (they are a thing, but not a significant thing in my personal canon), I can listen to this and think: yeah, a rawk bingo song if I ever heard one. From the “Twist And Shout”/”Let’s Dance” intro, to the guitar solo, to the fist-in-the-air chorus, it’s a tick-box exercise. A quite enjoyable tick-box exercise, though. (5)
#8 unless I’ve got things very muddled – or forgotten a songwriting credit – this is it for them I think and the bunny’s post-millennium hangover can lie undisturbed.
Oh, boo. I thought back on the IYTTTYCWBN someone said Your Love Alone got to #1. Boo and indeed hiss, though there is something even more fitting about MSP’s last ever #1 (admittedly of 2) being the first #1 of the millennium; one foot in the revolutionary future, one in the rock’n’roll past etc etc.
Their next singles, a year later, were a Human Touch/Lucky Town-style double release – I can’t recall anybody else pulling that trick with two singles. It seems they charted side-by-side, less than 200 sales apart – possibly revealing just how fanbase-dependent/New Jersey/Wile E. Coyote they were by 2001. Only it was at nos.8 and 9, rather than Use Your Illusion temporary ubiquity.
Anyway So Why So Sad is boring, but Found That Soul thrilled me. It was what I wanted Masses… to have been, after the sugar rush. It’s a pity it fell just beyond their big era.
Though I do like Tom’s reading of Masses…, and Found That Soul could never have succeeded as a gesture. For that, (7).
Yes, I remember that double-single stunt. More evidence that they cared about the charts, and the theatre of the charts, more than most of the other bands of the era (or since).
Funnily enough, I was asked a question about this at a quiz earlier today. It misattributed the end quote to Chomsky. Mind you another question (that I originally wrote) was edited to categorically state that Sylvia Robinson was male, so.
The Gladstone connection is a strange thing, because Tony Blair (like Margaret Thatcher, but from a slightly different starting point I think) was massively influenced by 19th Century Liberalism and the Whig Interpretation of History, and Blair – then at his zenith – seemed to believe very strongly in the concept of “the masses” (consumerism, Murdoch, Tesco) as, in his mind, the true progressive source against “the classes”, the self-interest not only of the traditional elite (whose loss of its old wariness of capitalism will, of course, become a more prominent theme as Popular goes through the 00s), but of the mutual groups and organisations his party had historically represented. He had, after all, just made an oft-quoted (if not always understood) speech in which he equated supporters of nationalisation in his own party with supporters of foxhunting on the other side as “forces of conservatism” which he was desperate to get away from. Pure Gladstone, as he had meant the phrase quoted here.
But here were the Manics, the arch anti-Blair force alive in the mainstream while the rest of pop kowtowed to him, the last bastion of that very working-class tribalism, the last autodidacts (especially in comparison with the band – five years in age but a cultural century away from them – who were already huge but who’ll only appear here somewhat embarrassedly and belatedly in 2005, when sales were at their lowest). So to say the juxtapositions and connections here are paradoxical is an understatement. Perhaps the stretch required to make a Gladstone quote fit with what they’re clearly trying to say – we are the last real socialists alive – can be symbolic of the stretch required to make them fit in the mainstream by this time, something which on their next album they’d pretty much give up trying and resort to pure Stalinism (“Freedom of Speech Won’t Feed My Children” being the most glaring and egregious example).
But perhaps the attack on “the classes” can be said to pre-empt the problem much of the 21st Century Left – the New Old Left of Jason Cowley and Adrian Tempany – would have with British “urban” pop, as profound a problem as its precursors had with the Beatles. After all, by the criteria defined here it would be “the classes” who would put “Bound 4 Da Reload” into the Popular story a few months later – not “the masses” still desperately trying to believe that ‘Standing on the Shoulder of Giants’ might somehow be any good, “the masses” who would leap on the landfill bandwagon as a supposed resurgence of The Real Working Class Not Like All That 1Xtra Shit. In retrospect, the faith in the rock traditionalism of “the masses” over the *uncontrollable* independent working-class spirit of “the classes” – the latter being so much harder to fit into traditional ideas of socialist nobility and the wariness of commerce which could so often come out as the sort of fear which led Enoch Powell to call many trade unionists “quite good Tories really” – seems to anticipate the New Statesman as it is today, canonising The Last Proletarians In Pop and desperately trying to avoid the fact that it now has its very own New Menace of Beatlism, as great an antipathy to the living, breathing working class as it had half a century ago. And, really, could there be a more fitting way for the Manics to exit the mainstream (their near-returns to Popular in 2004/5 were only possible because of – again – the collapse of CD single sales before legal downloads were admitted)?
(Welcome back, everyone. Feels like about half a century since I last posted a comment here, come to that. But I’ve burnt my own Stalinism out now.)
Welcome back, Tom!
So, what is this…I think the 8th straight UK #1 to not chart in the US? Never having heard it until now, it does seem to strangely appropriate to start off the new millennium with this sort of stunt release. I think I’ll give it 6/10.
For comparison, the first new US number one of the new millennium was Christina’s “What A Girl Wants”. Not a bad song, but doesn’t seem to fit the “start of the millennium” narrative as well….
I bought this the week it came out and was more bemused than elated to see it at number 1 – I quickly lost interest in MATC and preferred the poignant B-side ‘Close My Eyes’ which appeared to admit to the vulnerability that it’s A-side was denying.
It’s strange how the list of Manics singles is so long and varied that even a number one single is not even among their 20 best-known songs.
This has grown greatly on me since the time it was released.
(The lyrical and attitudinal links back to “You Love Us” are surely intentional – but in other ways the sheer hard rock nature of the track harks back more to “Gold Against The Soul” rather than the really spunky angry earlier stuff)
Yes, the politics and message are a bit incoherent…not for the first time for the Manics – and at least they had the good sense, much later on, to essentially repent for idealising Cuba, a state in which a band as ideologically rebellious (and incoherent) as the Manics would surely have been locked up or otherwise suppressed.
But the energy – the arrogance – the drive, the sound – – – – it all works. It’s certainly not the Manics’ best song overall (few can compare, really,still, with “Motorcycle Emptiness” and “Little Baby Nothing”), but it may be the best of their “hard rock” numbers, and it certainly the superior of their two no 1s. A megablast of intelligence and energy, quite uncompromising in its way, despite its obvious flaws and stuck-together nature. I have to admit, for me, this is, just about a very rare (10)
(Obviously I am a Manics fan of long standing – and am most amused at the representation of the band of in the banner to go with this single. I’m sure Miner Willy was from Surbiton, not Blackwood, tho’…)
Good to have Popular back, even if we are revisiting the worst year of my life and in this case (I think) the second to last number one single I actually bought in physical format.
I’m not sure that anybody else has mentioned that, for all its huge sales and awards, there was a sizeable school of thought that This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours was a collossal sell out for the Manics and a betrayal of their ideals. Unfortunately (for everyone as it turned out) the band took the criticism to heart and were panicked into backtracking – the Q review of the next album along summed it up well when they said that nothing is more unedifying than a band trampling on their own product. But that is what the Manics did.
Masses Against The Classes, at the time, felt like an adequate stop gap single. It was clearly aiming at Iron Maiden’s least weeks on the top seventy five by a number one record and failed quite dismally by racking up seven (non consecutive) weeks. On its own merits it’s not up there with their best songs but it passes muster. Unfortunately a year later they served up a whole album of shouty punk that sounded like a parody of themselves – as already noted they released two of the better tracks as singles on the same day, obviously aiming at a chart 1,2 – their second misfiring stunt on the trot. The critics mostly loved it of course, raving about a return to form. When they realised their mistake they turned their fire on the beautiful Lifeblood – the Manics’ most derided record and their most undervalued.
It’s worth noting that although we never meet them again it was a close run thing – they managed a hat trick of number 2 hits before the download era ruled them out as singles contenders. For those who lost touch with them in recent years and haven’t heard their two most recent albums (released a mere six months apart) or haven’t had the pleasure of seeing them live – I can tell you you’re missing a treat. For my money, fifteen years on from this, the UK has no better band currently working.
When I made my post above I must admit I’d forgotten they had a number two as late as 2007 (come back Lena! It isn’t all like the Glitter Band or Mud!) – surely the last year that would have been possible. Must admit that whatever they had meant to me (and it was a very great deal), it dissipated and slipped away a long time ago – the reasons being outlined in my original post here – and even when I would have been a “Je ne suis pas Charlie” type in the mid-late 00s, so willing to ally myself with people who would regard “Bound 4 Da Reload” as illegitimate, “not really working class” in a way I would never do now, I never really wanted to bring new life to the feeling or fervour; the memories were enough.
I don’t know a whole lot about this group’s mythology (and, yeah, I get that with the Manics that means I’m missing a lot of what makes them comprehensible), but Tom’s write-up kinda makes it sound like they’re pulling a Jawbreaker on “Boxcar” move: “you’re not punk, and I’m telling everyone/Save your breath I never was one.” But then maybe I’m trying to impose an American frame of an agglutinated and molecular array of disparate scenes on to what was a more stratified British pop landscape?
I like the Blair quote in #4 though.
#21 – possibly the first Jawbreaker reference on Popular!
The thing with the Manics is that they loved the Clash so much when they started, it was their justification for signing to a major after their fourth single. Only difference is, the Manics were never part of any scene at the time that gave all that much of a crap. They’ve been with the same label ever since.
“I’m tired of giving a reason/When we’re the only thing left to believe in!”
And this is how our new millennium began; with the voice of Noam Chomsky musing on the primary role of government being to protect property from the majority, followed by a “Twist And Shout” harmony intro – except they go one step further and higher, as you would expect them to do – and then a “1-2-3-4!,” a cavernous roar of guitars and drums, and finally James Dean Bradfield, screaming through a Leslie cabinet: “Hello! It’s us again!”
They were tired of being perceived as having gone soft (“So can you hurt us any more?/Can you feel like it was before?”), and the principal aim of “The Masses Against The Classes” – the only number one single as far as I know whose title is derived from Gladstone – was to prove that they still had the original “Motown Junk” rage and magic, so much so that the single’s architecture more or less follows the “Motown Junk” template, from spoken/sampled intro to final chaotic deceleration and proclamations. But the timing of its release was undoubtedly deliberate; it was a limited edition single, released and deleted on the same day (though its two-month chart residency suggests that this policy was not strictly adhered to), with a bold black sleeve featuring the Cuban flag, and was clearly intended to be the first number one of the 21st century.
As was obviously also intended, it managed to blow away the blandness of 1999 in a breath, swept away politesse, making do and mending; the first pop record of the apocalypse (at least until people realised that their computers hadn’t stopped functioning at all and that the world wasn’t going to fall apart). Bradfield roars at the group’s “gone soft” detractors (“Success is an ugly word/Especially in your tiny world”) and pleads that we all have to continue the struggle together (“We’re still so in love with you/And yes, we mean it too”) though finally asserts that the hate powers them as fervently as the love (“Our love is unconditional/Our hate is yours to feed upon”).
Musically its sweep is subtly glorious; the sudden, unexpected quiet break after the first chorus (which Bradfield sings undistorted) with wordless psychedelic harmonies and the guitar intro from – yes – “I’m A Believer”) before the noise storms back in. “We love the winter!” cries Bradfield with memories of 1917. “It brings us closer together.” Suddenly the Manics all fuse together as though this were the last song they would ever play before the song finally comes apart in blizzards of wintry, whining feedback and Bradfield citing Camus on the ramparts: “A slave begins by demanding justice…and ends by wanting to wear a crown!” – that “crown” leered Lydon-style as the music collapses, implying a pledge that “we” won’t do this; not ever. It wipes out Westlife, obliterates compromise; wherever else this new era goes, remember how it – and they – started. And we couldn’t have had a better or more explosive start. 10
#20: the number two blog is resting at the moment but will be coming back when we have time to address it. TPL #359 is proving to be an epic and at the moment nowhere near completion.
That’s now six songs in a row that have scored 4 or less – a Popular record. Well done Sean, Nicky, James, Nicky, Brian, Kian, Mark, Shane, Cliff, some unknown people, Robbie and Geri.
Anto @17 Not so strange, it’s a common phenomenon in this journey. Most people could probably name 20 Everly Brothers songs but few of those lists would include Temptation (#121) I think. And just look what Chuck Berry’s sole representative is, if you can stomach it.
I’d be inclined to say that fans of the Manics weren’t really singles buyers but by this time I think the singles/albums dichotomy is becoming blurred.
The longer-than-expected chart life is a function of the single selling a lot fewer copies than expected when it came out! Certainly my shop was left with quite a few after the first week (couldn’t give it away at £3.99…) In my defence I had to commit to an order quantity way before Christmas, and way before I’d heard the thing. Stir in a fear of selling out by 10am and there’s your overstock.
I imagine Woolies, in a similar position, may have reduced the stock down to clear, providing a smoother than expected chart decline and that unexpected re-entry.
I still see it now and again in charity shops so it can’t have been that limited.
If nothing else, this is a much better critic-baiting post-Britpop comedown song than the execrable ‘Mr Writer’ by Stereophonics.
Like a lot of ‘protest’ #1s, the idea of this is a lot better than the execution. Add me to the list of people mourning the fact that Your Love Alone Is Not Enough didn’t quite give them one last chart topper. Not just because it’s a great song, but because it was probably the last chance for the glorious voice of Nina Persson to get a #1 moment.
This might seem like an odd start to a comment about the Manics, but I’ve been thinking about Mark Ronson a lot recently, trying to figure out exactly what my take on him is. One of the things I’m pretty sure about Ronson is that for most of the standard criticisms of him, he’s well aware of it, probably ahead of you, every bit as much as you’d expect of someone who wrote (although briefly) for the excellent, snarky hip-hop mag Ego Trip. (Does that get him off the hook? No). In that way, he’s like the Manics, a group who were classically in the conversation – they may have had issues with journalists, but they were fully engaged with the discourse of rock journalism. Whereas, I’ve always imagined that, say, Celine Dion was out of (or, you could see it as, above) the conversation. Again, I’m not implying a judgement either way.
(Interestingly, despite the rock dinosaur tag, Dave Gilmour and Robert Plant always seem to have been in the conversation. Mick Jagger, not so much).
The top-and-tailing quotes may recall Motown Junk, but what they put me in mind of is Living Colour’s Cult Of Personality (“And during the few moments that we have left, we want to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand” – Malcolm X).
By now I was seeing the Manics as played out gimmicks, able to form their own personality cult thanks to the martyring of RJE, so when the news broke that they were RELEASING A SINGLE! and then it would be DELETED THE NEXT DAY! my response was a resounding “oh, who the fuck cares?”.
I didn’t buy it.
I didn’t even listen to it until Forever Delayed came out two years later (TIMTTMY had a couple of half-decent songs), and… yeah, I clearly hadn’t missed much. Either that or leaving it two years for a track so desperate to recreate the ephemeral meant that it was by then irrelevant.
Either way, a resounding meh. 3.
Random fact you won’t see anywhere else, a poster advertising ‘Forever Delayed’ remained at Staples Corner Road in North London for a whopping *ten years* until McDonalds ruined it by covering it up with directions to their nearest in the summer of 2012, possibly for those coming off the M1 visiting Wembley for the Olympics.
A part of my youth died a little when it went. It was always reliably there on my bus ride home from Brent Cross Shopping Centre, the title of the album becoming more ironic as the years rolled on.
STATEMENT.
The Manic Street Preachers ended the 20th Century with their Millennium Stadium gig. 70,000 stayed overnight in Cardiff for what was, is, and forever will be the biggest outburst of Manics Fandom ever. (I’m on the video/DVD – you can hear me describe them as ‘the most lyrically honest band in the world’.)
And they started the 21st century by making a powerful statement. As has been noted, this is the Manics at their most self-mythologising – they are the only thing left to believe in, at least as the twin aberrations of the New Acoustic Movement/Indie Betwetters and Nu-Metal/Fake Freaks who were now taking over (I’ll have plenty more to say about that, maybe, one day). They were also turning against THEMSELVES – TIMT was a decent album, but there were some really dull moments on there (Hello, The Everlasting), while this is the Manics showing they are NOT some shitty little indieschmindie band, but a big, dramatic, glamourous ROCK’N’ROLL act.
So to see them play this while we were all willing, and hoping, and praying it would get to number one was something. And it getting to number one was something, a kick in the face for those who would deny Reality, Truth and Intelligence in this new (?) age.
Personally, I prefer it to ‘…Tolerate…’ – it hits my rocky nerve, and it hasn’t been quite as overplayed. In fact, it’s not even guaranteed to make their live set, as anyone who saw their fantastic Holy Bible shows before Christmas will attest to.
After this? Well, it would have been nice if ‘Found That Soul’ and ‘Your Love Alone’ had magically got to number one, and it would have been even nicer if they’d bothered to release anything from ‘Journal For Plague Lovers’ (their second best album and the second best album of the noughties) as a single and it had hit the top. I’m not-so-secretly glad we won’t have to discuss the band-kung-and-the-gang-b-side atrocity that is ‘The Love Of Richard Nixon’, though.
So, yeah…
This is The Manics. This is a Number One single. This is a 10.
——————————————
On a more personal note, this was ALMOST the last time I listened to the Top 40 with a sense of nervousness and excitement about what was going to be number one. This was ALMOST the last time I bought a single to get it to number one. I was 17, about to turn 18, and the charts didn’t appeal as much to me as they had done a few years earlier.
I suppose this is as good as any to say farewell to Popular. Off the top of my head, I think there might be 15 or so number ones, at most, between TMATC and whenever Popular’s present may be, that I want to say something about.
So, yeah, I guess that, to all intents and purpose, this is it for me. I’ll still be lurking – and I’m sure there’ll be some debates I’ll want to take part in – but I’m basically retiring from my role as a League Two Popular Comments Regular (™).
Thanks, Tom, and see you later.
Quite amazing to realise how little the Manics meant to the Australian charts. This is My Truth spent four weeks in the album chart, peaking at number 14; Know Your Enemy spent a single week at number 20. Only two of their singles made the top 50, for a week apiece (“A Design for Life” at number 50 and IYTTYCWBN at number 49). This? Nada. I wasn’t even aware of it until years later – possibly when checking the list of 2000s number ones at this very site – even though I was a fan of their albums from Everything Must Go onwards. Must be because I bought Lipstick Traces rather than Forever Delayed.
Apart from one or two previous listens, this has been my first repeated exposure to the song… and I like it. I’m not sure I buy Tom’s “sneering at their old fans” reading, and without that there’s a lot to like in this blast of punk rawness. (Do I detect a hat-tip to the 1990s’ reinventors of punk at 1:10, when the guitars drop for a few seconds? Smells Like Nirvana.) Maybe it’s Manics by numbers, or maybe it’s just the Manics doing one of the things they do best. Either way, 7.
One of the other things the Manics do best, for this late-Manics fan, is all the stuff that people seem to be bagging in this thread. I loved This is My Truth, and “The Everlasting”, and Know Your Enemy and its singles, and their near misses for the top spot in 2004, and Lifeblood – man, did I love Lifeblood – and then I stopped paying attention for a bit; but then came Postcards for a Young Man, and that was great, and Futurology is pretty good too. I don’t suppose they’ll ever bother the top of the singles chart again, but I’m glad they haven’t packed it in yet, and doubly glad they didn’t follow through with quitting after Generation Terrorists.
#32 Thanks Fivelongdays – glad you’ll still be lurking, and cheers for all your comments over the years.
@33 – You really do need to get yrself Journal For Plague Lovers, for reasons I’ve explained above.
I’m still glad they’re still going, but if they’d split after JFPL, it would have been somehow fitting.
@35 I did buy it at the time, and listened to it once or twice, but it didn’t click and I moved on. Will go back to it, though, and try again. Ditto Send Away the Tigers.
Welcome back, Popular. I was 16 when this decade started, ten years worth of my salad days were coming up, and the first two years or so, before I went to university, were spent studying the charts closely, so hopefully i’ll have a fair amount to say about the next 100 records or so. Not that much of it will have any insight.
At the time, I steered clear of pre Everything Must Go Manics, the sheer intensity of Holy Bible was all a bit much for me at the time, I was much happier with TIMTTMY and its lumbering, overwrought safeness. This was far too reminiscent of the early period for me to really like, and even though its perfectly listenable today, its all a bit po-faced and right on for me to really like.
Good to see Landfill Indie getting a mention…
On the subject of the Cuban flag, I’ll spare you my customary rant about the British left and Latin America – it’s probably on various Freaky Trigger comment threads, but certainly comment 24 on the Ricky Martin one. Anyway, I believe the Manics wised up after actually going there in 2001.
I’m really not getting the admiration for “Your Love Alone…” – to me it’s pretty much a career low point, certainly outdone in the “mainstream pop rock” strand by numerous other songs, starting with “It’s Not War (Just The End Of Love”. “Empty Souls” I could have tolerated as a no 1 (although really: it’s still not a patch on this one), “The Love Of Richard Nixon” – is, at least, kind of admirably experimental…..I guess?
No 2s aside…yes, “Journal for Plague Lovers” is a fine album, but does push to the fore perhaps too much all the obvious Richey shortcomings and frustrations – too much of the synthetic cubist-type cut-up lyrics that attract attention but are usually too incoherent for their own good. I do wish they’d released a single from it – I think my favourite track i one of the less extreme, less in-your-face ones, “This Blood Sport Severed”, but there are more gripping options that might have done better on the charts…perhaps.
As for the more recent stuff, I think “Rewind The Film” is an absolute stunner – the least “Manics” Manics album, arguably, stripped down and the brass section played up – two great singles (their first since “Motown Junk” to miss the top 75), “Show Me The Wonder” (lyrically referencing back to “Found That Soul” as blatantly as TMATC does to “You Love Us”) and the quite, quite gorgeous “Anthem For A Lost Cause” (the videos for both of these, and the album title track form a trilogy set in the mining communities of South Wales – and well worth seeking out in their own right).
“Futurology” grips me less than “Rewind The Film” – but it does provide evidence (in “The Last Jet To Leave Moscow”) that they realised that the whole idealization of Cuba thing was really bloody silly (I see Castro is currently ranting that Islamic State is a plot of the West…) – there are few half-decent tracks, but it is too polished for my taste overall.
It has, however, been an immense pleasure to grow up with the Manics, and see and hear them grow up with me. Back in 1991/92, as a teenager (wearing lipstick to see them at the Kilburn National) I don’t think I would have imagined they would still be a going concern, let alone, basically, a seriously vital band over two decades later.
I remember first watching this on TOTP the week it went to no.1, more specifically, it was their performance of it from the Millennium Stadium gig that was played on the show. I still play it every now and again on my iPod if I’m in a real “angry rock” mood and it still gets me going after all these years.
I wish I could write an incredibly eloquent essay about it but I can’t really add anything that a lot of other people in this thread haven’t already said, plus I’m not as well-read as most other Manics fans. I love how this was the first new #1 single of the 21st century, it’s a shame the rest of the decade got swamped with so much mediocrity in Number One Land. In a way I also kinda find it amazing that a band who came from a small town 10mins up the road from me had a #1 single, in a way I guess it’s more special than a big city like London or Manchester that have spawned dozens of bands.
The whole TIMTTMY era isn’t one of the most fondly looked upon eras for Manics fans, but for a 10-12 year old girl at that period from 98-2000 it was a good introduction to them and it’s a fond bit of nostalgia to me. Of course I wouldn’t dive into the whole manifesto of the band with the whole Holy Bible era until I was in my late teens, when I could be able to handle all that dark, literary material.
Call me a biased fangirl but it’s an easy 10.
METAL [8]
“Your Love Alone”, “The Love Of” are both okay by me, although of course as with basically everything pre-2012 I didn’t hear them at the time.
I would say the Manics have continued to evolve. Their output might have been patchy over the last 12 years or so, but never boring – Exploring many of the facets of their sound but never losing sight of what drew their audience to them in the first place.
I hold a special affection for ‘This Is My Truth…’ I like the stillness and introspection of it, which was necessary after the two albums and four years preceding it.
After I left school I went to live on the North Wales coast for a short while and it’s one of the records that reminds me of that time.
Like Rory, I was enough of an (Australian) Anglophile to discover the Manic Street Preachers circa Everything Must Go despite them being largely ignored at the time here. I think I perhaps remember seeing a video for ‘Australia’ being played on Red, Foxtel’s music channel of the time, and thinking it was alright (the irony of an Aussie Anglophile being exposed to a too-British band singing about a paradisiacal Australia). And then I found Everything Must Go secondhand at a charity shop and loved its sadness and passion and cinematic sweep. I was keen to hear ‘If You Tolerate This…’ (which received Triple J airplay) and liked it but was a bit more bored by follow-up singles. And then the band dropped off my radar; I don’t think I heard ‘Masses Against The Classes’ (or indeed subsequent stuff) until I eventually won a cheap bid for Forever Delayed on eBay on a whim a couple of years ago. I had no idea it was a #1 in the UK until just now, and when I was listening to Forever Delayed it didn’t really stand out. Listening now, the only bit that really stands out is the ‘Twist And Shout’ bit they use to top and tail the song, but the rush of the rest of it is nice enough. The Chomsky quote at the start feels very 2000, from a time when the left seems more idealistic and utopian, when the right wing felt very weak (in a 2015 world where we recently experienced a Republican candidate saying essentially the same sentiments out loud in front of people – Romney and his 47% – the Chomsky quote no longer has the shock value it once had). I feel it’s more than a 4 but not much more. 5-6 maybe.
Bands doing ‘reclaim old glories’ songs, trying to emulate their first couple of albums, very rarely pull it off, do they? I feel like there’s a sort of electricity you can hear in the music when a sound is in the right place at the right time, when it feels like something new, something vibrant. You can hear that electricity 50 years later in the Beatles, or 30 years later in Kraftwerk, in hundreds of other songs/bands. And try as bands might, they just can’t get that electricity when they try to go back to their roots.
It’s funny, listening to Forever Delayed – ‘Motown Junk’ and ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ (which I’d also never previously heard until recently) immediately jumped out at me as having that electricity, and I had no idea until reading this thread they had a seemingly treasured place in the Manics mythology; in my head, the Manics had an interesting-but-not-entirely-successful ‘trying to be Guns’n’Roses phase’, then the interesting spiky Holy Bible phase, then commercial success, then slow decline – I was surprised that what I thought was the ‘trying to be Guns’n’Roses phase’ was as listenable as it was.
Fooled by the ‘limited edition’ ruse, I bought this the week it came out too. Looking back I think I liked the idea of it – the Manics getting angry, returning to their punk roots – better than the actual record. It’s messy, a bit incoherent and ultimately, not as good a song as You Love Us or Stay Beautiful. (Or indeed anything off Primal Scream’s XTRMTR, which came out around the same time and seemed to do the whole ‘indie stalwarts shaking their fist at the establishment’ thing with so much more style.)
I told off a Manics-fan classmate for selfishly buying this in two formats, thus depriving another Manics fan of a copy. Did the band’s socialist principles mean nothing to him.
#44 – Yes – that really kicked this little single into touch, and was seldom off my stereo for months (though I don’t return to it often these days).
Oddly, the first half of 2000 felt like a period when some sort of left-wing political swing might happen. Ken Livingstone getting into office as an Independent (rather than Labour Party) London Mayor felt in some way significant, like the “proper” left of Labour breaking away and winning, but looking back wasn’t actually as significant as it first appeared. He quickly returned to the party when the opportunity arose, and the whole “Independent Ken” phase rarely gets mentioned these days.
The Mayday protests were also particularly charged that year, or at least dominated the media. I seem to remember other bits and pieces kicking off too, which made me wonder whether Labour would shift slightly leftwards in response. A few years later, the Gulf War protests kicked off, Blair ignored everyone, and we were left in no doubt that it would never happen.
To have this single and “XTRMNTR” out right at the start of the year made me feel as if, in both popular culture and politics, changes were afoot. But really, both were just the old guard sounding off in their usual ways, to greater or lesser success, and not significant of any wider trend. I genuinely found that disappointing.
Re46: Also early that year (and relevant in this context!) there was the successful coup against Alun Michael, who had been inserted into the job of First Secretary (now First Minister) of Wales by some extremely crude Blairite strong-arming. That was partly a left-wing reaction, but also a nationalist one. It was a clear parallel to London, both showing that while New Labour was committed to genuinely radical constitutional change, Tony/Mandy/AC were hoping they could do it while maintaining control by inserting their people to run the newly devolved places. The backlash in both cases showed that voters wanted an actual transfer of power.
I have a feeling that IndieKen picked up quite a range of votes, including from people who weren’t necessarily to the left of the cabinet. My mother, for one – my father, who was in a Labour activist phase, was furious with the both of us.
The last single I bought in all formats the day of release. End of an era, of a sort.
3/10.
Now I’ve actually thought about it, I think this was the last single I bothered to buy at all on its day of release. No other examples spring immediately to mind. This either means that major labels employed the “super limited edition, buy it NOW or not at all!” ruse less for singles as the years rolled on, or (more likely) that the acts they did this for weren’t of as much interest to me.
I continue to buy many albums on the Monday of release, of course, but I can’t get much excited about CD singles. Or even over-priced £6.99 7″ singles.
#29 – Stuart Maconie’s Cider With Roadies talks about (amongst other things) the thankless task of running up the NME page where they mailed questions out to bands and printed the replies – most of the “Thursday / Tea / Not sure yet” variety, and how before he heard a note of their music the Manics won his heart with an essay topped with an apposite quote for each answer.