James Dean Bradfield (Manics) Interview

[Albert Tatlock]

Don't always like them, but always respect the Manics. Plus they're part of the Taffia of course.

Oh dear, what have I done?

(Filed: 29/06/2006) The Daily Telegraph

 

The new solo album by James Dean Bradfield of Manic Street Preachers is as good as anything the band has done. But, he tells Neil McCormick, he is nagged by self-doubt

 

"Most interesting bands start as an idea," says James Dean Bradfield. "It's not really about music; it's dark science. To rely on something intangible can be disconcerting, but you get a lot of power from it. There's serendipity involved, telepathy. It's voodoo."

 

'It was either make a solo record or join a bar band': James Dean Bradfield

 

Bradfield is vocalist and guitarist with the Manic Street Preachers, one of Britain's best-loved bands, a spiky gang of punky, Welsh ideologues who rose through the '90s Britpop boom to become stadium-filling anthemicists.

 

Bradfield is by some distance the most accomplished musician in a band whose gang mentality and cohesive character make them more than the sum of their parts. His intense love for the Manics is evident in everything he says about them. Yet he has just recorded his first solo album, The Great Western (released by SonyBMG next month), a subject on which he seems, by contrast, curiously ambivalent. "It feels very strange doing something outside the circle," he admits.

 

Bradfield's hesitant, self-questioning demeanour ("I really hate the paralysis of analysis; that's when it all starts to unravel for me") suggests he is not at all sure he has done the right thing. "I wanted Sean [Moore, the Manics' drummer] to play on the record," he says, "but he is unbelievably loyal to some indefinable Manics spirit, whatever that shining light might be."

 

Bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire, meanwhile, has made his own solo album, to which Bradfield contributed, as Wire has to Bradfield's. It will be released in September. Which prompts the question, why make a solo album when you have a perfectly good band available?

 

The answer lies in the Manics' almost doctrinal character. They are a band much given to manifestos and polemical statements, defining themselves by often quite arbitrary rules

 

"We practised denial-ism," says Bradfield of the early Manics. "We believed in keeping things tight and clean - no bagginess, no fun, no smiles, no laughter, no love." The group were disappointed with their poppy seventh studio album, 2004's Lifeblood. "It was as if we had almost fallen out of love with rock music."

 

But, rather than quietly address their problems, they announced a self-imposed, two-year hiatus. It has proved too long for Bradfield, who was back in the studio within months. "Music was an itch I couldn't scratch. So it was either make a solo record or join a bar band."

 

In my column last week, I asked if anyone has ever made a solo album - while still in a band - that was as good or better than the band's work. A huge music fan (with a trainspotter-ish fascination for rock marginalia), the question has Bradfield stumped. "That doesn't bode well," he mutters. But, for all his self-doubt, he may actually have done it.

 

A juicy pop-rock belter full of cascading melodies and criss-crossing harmonies, The Great Western is certainly an improvement on the Manics' last outing. It sounds very much like the Manics, but there is a quality of joyfulness that may surprise.

 

"In terms of backing vocals and melodies, a lot of it is quite florid," says Bradfield. "There's a certain bounce to it that would be almost morally wrong for the Manics."

 

It is an interesting interpretation of the concept of morality but it suggests, despite his reservations, that Bradfield has been liberated from his group's ascetic ethos. "I felt as if I could get away with things, which is lovely, really."

 

Bradfield has never been a lyricist in the Manics, instead writing melodies to the words of Richey Edwards (Manics polemicist-in-chief, who disappeared in 1995) and Nicky Wire.

 

"Doing the solo album, I backed myself into a corner. To be quite truthful, I do wonder if I have enough to say."

 

Curiously, it is in the shaded areas of uncertainty that Bradfield has found his own lyrical voice, writing an emotional, highly personal and literate set of songs centred on his complicated feelings about his relationship with Wales and England.

 

"I moved away from Wales as a young man, but I have been drifting back over the years. It's quite horrible sometimes, the intangible sense of something calling you, and not knowing what it is.

 

"I was drinking in a place in the valleys a while back and got to chatting to an older bloke. He said, 'Don't forget, the mountains will never let you go.' That's not something wistful; it's really true. It fascinates me how you can change so much as a person, but there can be something inside you, a small spot you can never eradicate, which can be something as simple as a landscape, which affects the way you think and feel."

 

Bradfield believes he and Wire's solo adventures will add some "light and shade" to the Manic Street Preachers, but I don't expect he will be fighting for the inclusion of his words. If anything, the solo experience has only made him more conscious of the comfort and support he finds belonging to a group. Performing shows with a band of hired hands has proved "a tiny bit upsetting".

 

"Live was always going to be the hardest bit," he says. "I must have played over a thousand shows with the Manics. I used to love it when Nicky and Richey, without even looking at each other, would both jump in the air at the same time. It makes you feel as if you're an unstoppable force.

 

"Now people are looking at me and thinking, 'Right, you're a songwriter are you? Engage me then. Come on, show me what you got.' That's hard."

[Welsh Rich]

Andrew...

 

I really like the single and actually looking forward to the album which I wasn't originally. Was looking to see him in London but clashes with another gig I'm going to unfortunately.

 

Really liked this bit:

"I was drinking in a place in the valleys a while back and got to chatting to an older bloke. He said, 'Don't forget, the mountains will never let you go.' That's not something wistful; it's really true. It fascinates me how you can change so much as a person, but there can be something inside you, a small spot you can never eradicate, which can be something as simple as a landscape, which affects the way you think and feel."

 

And it certainly applies to me - you can never escape the pull of it, there's always a part of you that gets drawn back and the longer I spend away from Wales (which seems to be more and more now) the more the draw back is...

[Albert Tatlock]

"I moved away from Wales as a young man, but I have been drifting back over the years. It's quite horrible sometimes, the intangible sense of something calling you, and not knowing what it is."

 

I hear you brother!

[Welsh Rich]

I've edited my post above yours to reflect the same thing

[Albert Tatlock]

James Dean Bradfield, ULU, London

By Gavin Martin

Published: 13 July 2006 The Independent

The birth of Manic Street Preachers front man Bradfield as a full-blooded lyricist, songwriter and solo artist has taken 15 years.

 

Bradfield's use of the group's two-year lay-off to record and tour his debut album, The Great Western, could indicate how institutionalised he has become - a slave to the album/tour cycle that was established during the fabled group's 17-year career.

 

But it is much more - a better album than the Manics have made for a decade, the passionate, sometimes dark, heart of the Blackwood-bred band laid bare.

 

Bradfield's big searing tunes present valiant harmony-coated rock that is matched by poignant and perceptive lyrics. His words are stripped clean of the pained intellectualising and garish overstatement that have often marred the band's work.

 

A stocky figure in working-man black T-shirt, Bradfield brandishes a series of electric and acoustic guitars and between songs remains a wry, undemonstrative figure. He belittles his Manic-less stature as he welcomes the crowd to "an evening with James Dean Bradfield and The C Stream Band" and leads the four-piece into the suitably Springsteenesque opener "Run Romeo Run".

 

Death and fond memories stalk new album standout "An English Gentleman", vocally he is at full tilt - the plucked acoustic entr

[Welsh Rich]

Not a bad review in the Indie above, read it over lunch, not quite sure what they're getting at in places mind.

 

Got the new album to review - very much a grower, though not sure I'd say it's better than anything the Manics have released in a decade - I've always liked their political edge.

[Azzurri]

Everything Must Go is my favorite Manics album, although i thought Lifeblood was pretty decent. it's not as bad as i thought it would be, considering the bad reviews it got. I also like "This is My Truth..." and everybody seems to hate that one.

[street spirit]

I liked This Is My Truth as well. Know Your Enemy and Lifeblood, not so much. The Holy Bible is still my undisputed, untouchable, hands-down favourite though.

 

The solo record is ok.

[Welsh Rich]

Nice interview in the Independent today

 

When the Welsh act Manic Street Preachers announced a two-year sabbatical in April 2005, their singer/guitarist James Dean Bradfield soon missed making music. So, while other rock stars might have taken happily to the golf course, he found himself teeing up his debut solo album.

 

The only problem was that, after two decades (and counting) fronting the Manics, Bradfield had grown used to a steady supply of lyrics penned either by bassist Nicky Wire, or the band's former rhythm-guitarist, Richey Edwards. Writing the lion's share of the group's music has always been a cinch for Bradfield, but the credits for the Manics' seven studio albums say that only "Ocean Spray" (a song about his mother's death from cancer in 1999) has words by him.

 

It was with some trepidation and a few teething problems, therefore, that Bradfield tackled a whole album's worth of lyrics for his solo project. "I thought I was going to have to call Bernie Taupin [Elton John's lyricist]," he jests. "The first four songs I wrote on my own were rubbish, but, once I came to terms with delving into my past, and convinced myself that it wasn't a tacky approach, things got much better."

 

As the title The Great Western suggests, the train rides between Cardiff and London that Bradfield regularly undertook while making the album were a catalyst. This was, after all, the same journey that he and the fledgling Manics had often made when their world was young. With Bradfield, now 37, retracing he and his bandmates' steps, the resultant record is a somewhat wistful, yet typically demonstrative, glance in the rear-view mirror, its lyrics touching upon the philanthropy of the Manics' late publicist, Phillip Hall, and the still unresolved disappearance of Edwards, who has been missing, feared dead, since 1995. The Great Western also finds Bradfield grappling with his relationship to Wales, its pull on him now stronger than ever.

 

Fittingly, the singer and I have met in Cardiff, in Bute Park, to discuss all this. Swarthy-looking in his white V-neck T-shirt, Bradfield chain-smokes Marlboro Lights and fidgets with leaf-litter when questions are delicate. He baulks at nothing, though, and is warm, self-effacing and genuine.

 

We talk about

[Welsh Rich]

Pipped you to it!

[Albert Tatlock]

Pipped you to it!

I've deleted it now

[Albert Tatlock]

Nice review too!