Welsh rockers Manic Street Preachers had their antagonist-intellectual strategy worked out from the start, and it paid off.
Before Manic Street Preachers had played a gig, virtually before they'd even formed, they had a deep conviction that they'd make their mark, in one way or another. "We kind of knew we had a pathway to fame," says bassist Nicky Wire. "Which was basically getting on the cover of the NME and on to Top of the Pops. It was a much simpler time back then. Even when James [Dean Bradfield, singer/guitarist] and I wrote our first song, called Aftermath, in our last year at comprehensive, we deluded ourselves into thinking it wouldn't be long before people started liking this. We get painted as very po-faced, but when you look back, there was a brilliant sense of the ridiculous about us - we were so deluded, in our own little bubble."
Despite having no following in their Welsh homeland, and little experience of the music business, they quickly released a string of indie singles, secured a dedicated management team, and signed to one of the biggest record companies in the world. And in 1992 they released ambitious debut double-album, Generation Terrorists, which referenced Confucius, Rimbaud, Larkin, Plath, Nietzsche and the Futurists.
Bradfield was the Manics' secret weapon, a guitarist so instinctively adept that just two weeks after first picking one up, he could apparently play all of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. He could also sing a bit too, and had a facility for coming up with memorable riffs, all skills deployed with a passionate intensity that made his and Wire's ambitions more than dreams. But then, every member of the Manics, who play New Zealand for the first time on July 2 at Vector Arena, was a secret weapon: for a rock drummer, Sean Moore was unusually musical, a classically trained trumpeter, and both Wire and second guitarist Richey Edwards brought an extra-musical panache that made the band more interesting than the routine indie landfill of the early 1990s. Raised on bands with attitude to spare, such as The Clash and The Smiths, they knew there was more to modern pop than just the music, and they spent hours discussing strategy, tactics, politics, art, literature and philosophy.
"We decided early on that Richey and I were the Glamour Twins, the intellectuals, we could write the lyrics and do the interviews, and that James and Sean could do the music," says Wire. "Me and Richey just had no interest in playing our instruments live. I'd throw mine down and start skipping, Richey would sit on an amp and do his hair, I'd abuse the audience - I'm surprised James didn't crack me one sometimes."
