Interview with Sean taken from alt.music.manics newsgroup: their homepage BORED OUT OF MY MIND
Natalie: Once upon a time, there was a well-known (at least here) Polish radio
presenter, who interviewed many celebrities in his life. He decided to write
a book which contained most of his interviews... Can anyone guess why I
bought it? On the cover, among other bands, there was this one: Manic Street
Preachers! Inside, there were interviews with Sean Moore and James Dean
Bradfield, so how could I let the book lie there on that shelf, and let
someone else buy it? There's a CD attached to the book, which contains tiny
bits and pieces of the interviews... So I translated them back into English, and now all you lovely people on amm can read it.
Here's a chat with Sean, it was in 1996, but it's pretty interesting...
You've never seen this before, unless you listened to the Polish Radio 3 in
1996. And it's yet another unbeatable proof that Seanus Moorus is a genius:
From the first day I heard the music of Manic Street Preachers, I knew that a very important band appeared on the world's music scene and I'm happy that they're constantly gaining more and more popularity. The album 'This is my truth, tell me yours' released in 1998 can be considered one of the most important music events of the decade. It sometimes happens that I can't get in touch with an artist for years. In the Manics' case, it was different - during 4 months our ways crossed four times in three cities. First, I had a 10-minute talk with Sean Moore on the phone, and of course, new album was the pretext.
Sean: We've recorded the album in France, using the equipment from the
well-known studio, Abbey Road. The LP 'Dark side of the moon' was recorded
on it. We worked from August 1995 to January 1996.
Reporter: Was the recording more exciting because of the equipment?
S: Yeah, maybe a bit, although we look at the world from a distance. It's
simply a very good equipment and that's why we decided to do it.
R: The new album is easier than the previous ones. Is it a new direction that you decided to go?
S: We're not driven by fashion, but our own instincts. Our previous albums
seemed to be very dark to many people and that's why the group of people who
received us was smaller. We decided to brighten up our music to make the
group bigger.
R: I've been trying to define the word 'music', can you help me?
S: Music is a set of noises, which the listeners consider more or less
pleasant to listen to.
R: Is it a set of noises for you too?
S: It's a quite cold definition. For me music is the way of intercepting
certain moments, as well as feelings. That's how I see it.
R: And then suddenly it turns out that 'intercepting certain moments' released as an album gains much audience and you get a gold disk.
S: Giving awards to bands doesn't seem to be necessary to me. It's like
patting somebody on the back. It's nice, they tell you that you've won a
silver, a gold, then a platinum disk. But that kind of fuss with all those
awards isn't necessary.
R: Why do you think so?
S: Manic Street Preachers are a small band coming from a small valley in
Wales. Well, mainly thanks to concerts we've managed to see a bit of the
world for the last five years, to widen our horizons. However there's still
something inside of us that calls back our small, Welsh town in the valleys.
R: I'll return to the 'set of noises'. In your first records there were echoes of punk music. What do you think about the Sex Pistols' comeback?
S: Punk is like a postcard from London today, it's a symbol of a product.
Some of its features were characterised by Malcolm McLaren and The Sex
Pistols at the very beginning of their careers. But that's not everything,
because most of its important messages, like honesty and independence,
vaporized very fast. I mean, even though you've got to look forward, you've
got to progress, you've got to get mature. Punk for me is very young, very
angry, very vibrant music, we felt like that when we were 15, 16, 17, 18.
We've gone through a lot, we've realised our own mortalities and things, so
now it's more of a reflection of emotions, of someone who's gone through
that, the angry, young emotions against the world.
R: You used to mention the biggest bands of the 70s very often. Did those messages die now?
S: When we started, we used everything. From the beginning our fascinations
were all about The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who. Then it was all the
way through Led Zeppelin to The Clash. Now it's even Stone Roses or Happy
Mondays. We've always liked British music and we used it as much as we
could.
R: Even though you were born in the year when The Beatles stopped recording?
S: Of course, not only we surrounded ourselves with big albums of rock
culture, but we reached as deep as possible.
30 July 1996.