Mr Edmundo, manics live internet video interview
I transcribed the majority of it
Mr E: We have received a lot of emails during the past couple of days and all those emails end up in this computer right here and I will then pass them onto manic street preachers who are visiting us here today. So very welcome guys.
James: How you doing.
Mr E: How you doing today.
N: OK (he didn't really look ok)
J: A bit tired, a bit promo'd out.
Mr E: Have you in any way prepared for talking to your fans here now.
J: Not really, we've done it lots before, we've always done lots of fanzines and stuff like that so we're kind of used to communicating with fans baby.
N: We're from a different generation when you used to make a fanzine in your bedroom and stick things down with pritt sticks. So I dunno how we'll deal with this.
Mr E: So how important are they the hardcore fans out there.
J: I think there is a hardcore of our fans that we do look to to actually see if we're doing things wrong or right sometimes. A lot of our fans are into the holy bible stuff, our third album. They can be very honest and they can praise you and they can criticise you quite a lot. We tend not to ignore it when they have opinions, whether we agree with them or not. So yeah we do listen.
Me: But what about the other fans who like the new stuff, their opinions count too. This is now not then.
Mr E: We have a bunch of emails so I think we should start straight away. Natalie Jennings from the uk wrote to us earlier on this week and she wants to know James, where did you get those red trainers from. How much were they.
J: Bought them from a shop in cardiff a shop called woody's in cardiff and I think they were about - to my eternal shame - I think they were about £70 something like that.
N: Were they?
J: Yeah they were quite expensive. I've got the black version now becos a lot of my friends took the piss out of me for wearing red trainers. So I've retired them now. They just thought they looked stupid, except for Nick, Nick thought they looked cool.
N: I liked them.
Then he asks about touring...
N: We're headlining Hultsfred in the summer, that's the first big gig in Sweden. Were doing all the fesivals in the summer but I don't think we'll be touring properly til September in terms of driving through europe and playing all the cities we're doing a short british tour when we get back but generally just festivals and stuff, we're turning into a festival band believe it or not.
Mr E: Is that something you're looking forward to playing the big stages...
J: Some of them... festivals can be one of 2 things, a brilliant experience or a terrible experience so you just never know until you actually play the gig. I suppose that makes it a bit exciting, it can go either way.
Mr E: Julia from Spain wants to know everybody knows that you love football when you were in Malaga in Spain recording the album did you see anything.
N: It wasn't the football season so there was no football on at all, it was in the middle of the summer, if you had to push me I'm a barcelona boy. If there's a spanish side I always look out for it's barcelona.
J: Watched lots of football when we were out there, myself and Sean did. Nick didn't like it so much.
N: Golf wasn't it.
J: Lots of golf on. A bit of WWF wrestling for a laugh.
Mr E: Rachel Graves - do you think this will be your last album or will there be any more.
J: You know it's hard to tell the british press do love speculating about when a band's going to split up, especially when they've been together for quite a long time, blur have had to endure all those questions for the last couple of years. I think we definately know that the next album will be a greatest hits, we know that, beyond that we don't know. It's hard to say you'll still be doing this job in 3 years. You might be doing a worse job or a better job. We don't know either. We're taking it more day by day at the moment definately.
It's just because we've said we won't go on forever. Some bands say we'll keep doing it as long as we enjoy it. I don't think that's necessarily the right answer. Sometimes you've just got to to draw a line under something and resign yourself to the historical dustbin. Some bands have got to finish.
Mr E: Rhona Gordon also from the uk says Nicky why are you Wire on the new album but Jones on the last one.
N: I didn't even know that was true, last time I was Jones everyone said why are you Jones so I thought I'd probably go back to Wire to stop everyone moaning but I have no idea it's just not important.
Mr E: She also says can any of you disco dance?
N: James can.
J: I used to be a bit of a motown fan so I used to do a bit of northern soul dancing and stuff like that. Nick used to be a pretty mean dancer.
N: Uptown Girl.
J: At the school disco Nick used to be one of the best dancers.
N: F***ing awful like a geriatric.
Mr E: Colin from Liverpool says who are your enemies and how well do you know them.
J: The actual intent of the album title was directed towards ourselves, know your enemy was directed at us, we felt as if we'd become a bit complacent, we'd reacted to the success on everything must go and this is my truth, we just became a bit complacent and hadn't challenged ourselves as much as we should have on the last album. So initially the enemy was ourselves.
N: But we've got millions of enemies that's for sure, not just ourselves, there's plenty of people out there who hate us. I don't know them all personally but there's a lot of them... it's pretty obvious isn't it. I think that's good, it's healthy that we polarise opinion, people either love us or hate us. That's the way it's always been with us. From the first time we set foot on stage and connected with a lot of people who just understood us and a lot of people just don't get it.
Mr E: Yvonne also from the uk wants to know James did you really smash up your gibson in the coal exchange gig or was it just a fake guitar.
J: Oh god I would never smash up a fake. I've got a bit of a guitar problem. If there's one way I could be accused of being excessive it's in terms of buying guitars. I buy lots of them so I've got quite a lot of gibson guitars so it was a real one. It was my 2nd favourite, no it was my third favourite...
N: It was your baby I thought.
J: My main guitar, my faithful servant, is still locked away safe, this was my third choice gibson so I smashed it up. I just did, I just felt like it.
Mr E: How much do you boys listen to old punk rock these days.
J: Lately before the start of this album I listened to a lot of my old records, lots of Magazine stuff, lots of Wire stuff.
N: Saints.
J: There's a record by the Saints called Stranded, it's a brilliant song and even some really crap punk records like the Dead Boys. So I listened to a lot of records I had from my youth. We all had a break, we finished touring and I just felt like sitting round during the day and playing records so I just played a lot of my old records.
N: Me too. Stuff like early Dinosaur Junior. A lot of punk records are absolute rubbish, we don't sit around listening to the lyrics or anything like that.
J: Dead Boys is bad as it gets.
N: At least they've got that new york trash sort of aesthetic. There's still a taste filter that goes on. Early New Order we listened to which comes out on the album as well.
Mr E: You recorded 26 songs for the album, will all the left overs end up as bsides.
J: Yeah all of them will be used every single one of them. Infact at the end of the next single we'll probably have used all the tracks just about.
N: There'll be one left.
J: We always have shitloads of extra tracks on our singles I would say we do give value for money when we put our singles out. We always put extra tracks on and remixes and stuff.
N: There's a secret track on the album as well which if you let the album play for 16 minutes or 11 minutes?
J: 16 minutes.
N: Then you come across the secret track.
Mr E: So bsides are important.
J: Yeah I think some of the stuff that we go on to trying to do on the next album you can actually see on the bsides from the previous album because we have experiments that we go on to fully realise. So yeah they're quite important to us bsides.
Mr E: What's it like to be a superstar.
N: Ask Liam Gallagher.
J: Ask Damon Albarn, ask Thom Yorke, ask Jarvis Cocker.
N: We're not superstars.
J: All those kinds of bands they've always achieved real fame and we've just always felt as if we're just known for being in this band manic street preachers just because all those other bands have real public faces, we're slightly a bit more anonymous, kind of different from all those other bands.
N: We're not known for celebrity girlfriends and we're not known for running onstage at the brits and doing something, and we're not known for relationship breakups in public, we're just known for being manic street preachers and that's the way we'd like to keep it really.
Mr E: You also have a good relation to the press especially in britain.
J: Sometimes it's really bad. Sometimes journalists feel as if they have every obligation to be firecely honest about us just because we've always been seen to play the press. Sometimes you get really really scathing deeply cutting reviews. It's a symbiotic relationship in every way.
Mr E: Let's move on to cuba. We've got some pictures from cuba. You can comment on them yourself.
J: That's just driving around in a car feeling really really f***** hot just wanting to try and get in the shadows.
N: That's for a documentary on national tv.
J: We were just going through the old part of town here. There was lots of new building going on. You could actually see the poverty, poverty on a scale that we hadn't perhaps seen before.
Mr E: Why did you go there.
J: Because we just felt as if we wanted to go somewhere where the audience didn't know us, where they didn't know anything about us, we weren't going there to sell a record, and that thing of taking yourself outside of the comfort zone just challenging yourself a bit. Just being a bit scared and being excited by the same turn. We realised there's some references in the lyrics (3 or 4 references) to cuba itself. And we just realised there might be some poignancy to some of the songs when we played them there. And it would be an experience where we'd push ourselves and we wouldn't be lazy.
Mr E: You also played a gig there, where was that.
N: The Karl Marx Theatre in Havana, 5000 mad screaming cubans headbanging and disco dancing to us. It was great. The gig was the best thing about the whole trip, no-one knew the songs, we weren't there to prove ourselves we wanted to try and convert people, unfortunately sony doesn't trade with cuba because of the embargo so our records won't be sold there but I think we gave people entertainment with a bit of social insight as well. We just wanted to give cuba something back.
Mr E: We've got some pictures from the gig... FTS live... What's it like seeing this now?
N: It's great.
J: I kind of wish I was playing there again really.
N: It was a great experience. I think only one of our songs they'd ever heard because a local radio station was playing If You Tolerate This but apart from that they were all manic street preacher virgins.
Mr E: A lot of people also have asked about this trip to cuba and Simon Coulson wants to know who's idea was it to drink coca cola at the press conference.
J: I'm just addicted to it, I'm addicted to coca cola. Addicted to guitars, cigarettes, coca cola and whiskey.
N: People have completely missed the point with that though, there was a letter in the nme by some absolute idiot who said that. And the reason we did it was that coca cola was made in mexico. Mexico's always had very strong ties with cuba and they're great friends. If people are too lazy to take the time to look at that then f*** them cos I'm far more intelligent than that.
J: At the end of the day I was playing a gibson guitar onstage. Gibson is one of the biggest symbols of american rock n roll, it's an american rock n roll antique, it stands for so many things american. When you actually go over there you can't rid yourself of all the symbols of coming from the west. It's impossible.
N: If you'd been there at the press conference when we said this was made in mexico all the cubans stood up and clapped.
J: And laughed.
Mr E: Did you bring the british press over to cuba.
N: To be honest it just went out of control. When we said we were going to do this gig we had no idea that people from argentina, from spain, from scandinavia, obviously a lot from britain just wanted to go, we had a lot from ireland, from wales even, so it just rollerballed into a gigantic entity. And the press conference was lots of people in cuba who work for different newspapers as well. So it was a very daunting experience actually, we've never done anything like that before. It was quite scary, being questioned so kind of difficultly. It was hard, had to use our brains.
Mr E: Almost like being asked questions by your fans I guess. Did you meet Fidel when you played there.
N: We did a couple of times.
J: Twice yeah.
N: We met him before the gig in Havana and then we met him the next day. It was a very interesting experience, it was very surreal. The whole 6-7 days was a very bizarre time it was like being in a film. He was very witty and very charming to us. It was just a nice relaxed meeting you know. He looked very cool, he looked like a rock star.
Mr E: What did you say to him and what did he say to you.
J: A lot of it was quite humorous, we said to him that he should wear ear plugs because it would be very loud, this story's been told before but he just said "do not worry you could never be louder than war" and then the next day he said to us "remember last night when I told you you could never be louder than war, you were louder than war" Just felt like one of the best reviews we've ever had you know. And then he talked about the way he wrote his speeches and then he asked us is that the same as how you write songs and perform them you know so he's asking us questions. Trying to relate how he wrote and performed the speeches to how we wrote and performed the songs. Which is kind of a cool question I think really. And for me it was like meeting a real old wise professor who you like to have a drink with in the bar. He was really warm and just witty and charming and just not that kind of stern serious face that a lot of people see, I suppose.
Mr E: Steve wants to know why has pop music got to be political.
J: It hasn't we're not political all the time. On every album there's always some political context. It's because of where we come from. Where we come from is very working class. When we were teenagers the miners strike was going on infront of our very eyes, that went on for a year. So those things formed our opinions and our beliefs when we were young. It's just about where you come from. If you come from the stockbroker belt in surrey then you won't write about the things we write about. It's just about where you come from.
Mr E: Let's move onto another issue. What do you think about Napster (maybe Nicky will wake up now...)
N: The principle of Napster I have no problem with. I don't think it threatens the music industry at all. It's not something I'm particularly interested in because it's not really my generation. I've no problem with the principle, I have a bit of a problem with the idea that it's a wonderful american charitable company that's doing it for free because we all know it just wants to make millions of pounds by selling their shares in three years time. I think people are very naive. I think there was one band sponsored by napster, I forget who it was, and some people seemed to believe that was really cool cos they were getting money sponsored off napster. Now to me it's no different to be sponsored by a drinks company or a car company or anything. It's still sponsored by an american capitalist company. But the actual principle, it's just like taping off the radio. I don't care about our songs being on there or anything, I just... the principle is cool but the company... no company with a managing director is cool. They're all exactly the same profit making people.
Me: as are the manic street preachers and sony.
J: Obviously there's a lot of conflicts that spring up because whenever napster try and download any of our tracks, sony, our record company, are going to go mad and we can't really control sony.
N: I don't agree with the way they handled it at all it was just stupid, sony was.
J: They went and blocked peoples accounts and they went and did that without even telling us (me: but Sean knew) There's nothing we could even do about that.
N: I have to say none of those people, nothing will happen, they were threatened... I'm sure those people are bright enough to get round it (me: yes they did) Not sure exactly what he said next.
N: Sony handled it really badly. I'd love to say we have complete control over everything there's just certain things I don't even know about.
J: It's a tricky question yeah, I've listened to a couple of things kind of downloaded an mp3 (?????) and stuff, the only thing is they sound s***. It sounds terrible. Sometimes you feel that if you spend say 2 weeks over perfecting a song and getting it ready then you realise that people are hearing it like that for the first time, that kind of pisses you off a bit, because you're probably hearing about 50% of the potential of the song, which kind of pisses me off (me: read my album review, I mentioned downloading a new song from the net but I also said I knew I'd be getting the real thing soon, any real fan would, the rest would never buy the album anyway)
N: I mean we used to tape off the radio, I used to tape the top 40 on a sunday. Depends what tape recorder you have, ours was pretty ropey. It's not going to kill music, whatever anybody says, CD sales in the uk last year were the biggest they've ever been. There's so much myth about the 60's, everyone sold records in the 70's. It was the biggest ever sales last year.
Mr E: Let's move on to another issue. Why are you rude to disco dancers on the new album.
N: There's 2 sides to the song. There's a track on the album called miss europa disco dancer. The music is very genuine. James loves a lot of disco from Chique, even Dancing Queen, Abba, whatever. It's just the lyric is meant to be quite funny, ironic, it's a bit of a piss take, you know the lyric is... it's not so much about disco, it's about brits abroad on holiday sort of thing. For us it's like a funny song. The music is really genuine. The music is love and the lyrics are hate.
Mr E: What do you believe happens after death.
J: Me and Nick are quite opposed on this, I believe nothing happens after death, you just die and the only way you live on is in other peoples memory. And that's it.
N: I don't particularly disagree with it.
J: You did the other day.
N: I believe in god that doesn't mean I believe in the afterlife. The soul does live on doesn't it.
J: No it doesn't.
N: It does cos it lives on in the next generation.
J: That's not the soul, the soul is something which is intangible but it's still living. In the ether world. I think nothing. I think the only way you live on is in other peoples minds. If you're still there in other people's minds then you live on.
Mr E: I think we've actually got to finish this off now it's been 30 minutes. Do you have any girlfriends?
J: Nick and Sean are married.
N: I've been married for 8 years now. I married very young. But I'm very happy. James has got about 500.
J: I kind of split up with my last serious girlfriend about 3 years ago. And since then there have been a couple of things that didn't really turn into anything serious.
N: A couple?! (laughing)
J: Stop it.
Mr E: Do you want to say anything to your fans before we say goodbye.
N: Thankyou, the questions must have been great because it went really quickly. Which is always a good sign.
Thanks to foreverdelayed.com where I downloaded this interview and no thanks to sony (they know why - if a fan site has radio recorded mp3's it's hardly hurting a big corporation)
