HELSINKI INTERVIEW LIVESTREAM
choose LOW which is 56k [4.26 mins]

Sean in Helsinki [he's interviewed wearing his baseball cap and havana sweatshirt, sitting at a table]

[your album contains some songs that sounds quite unorthodox from the manic street preachers point of view, for instance Miss Europa Disco Dancer and So Why So Sad that has a sort of beach boys sound, where did the ideas for these come from]

It's things that we've always listened to it didn't seem to bother the clash when they did rock the casbah and songs like bankrobber. We've never fallen into any categories, we've never liked to be pigeonholed into any categories. We've always done what we felt we wanted to do. At that time we were listening to stuff that we haven't listened to for a long time and it just seemed to come out in the music. I remember having Abba records bought for me when I was a child and I suppose some of it's come through.

[how have your fans reacted to your new songs]

We've got a broad spectrum of fans, we've got a hardcore from the early days [stirs tea] sort of generation terrorists through to the holy bible. There's songs on here that are just as thoughtprovoking and just as youthful as some of those, like intravenous agnostic for one example, that song would easily go on the holy bible.

[how do you feel the success of this is my truth has affected your credibility]

I think it can always be proper and provocative, it's just about things that you believe in, I think that doesn't go away through success. The thing that really annoys me is that people look at numbers, sort of how many that you've sold and not about the things that you write which is far more important and it's like coca cola, because they've sold 60 billion bottles a year, it doesn't make it any different from the coca cola that you drank 10 years ago. I suppose you could change the ingredients slightly but it still remains coca cola. The same with manic street preachers, you can change things slightly ... I don't think we've been diluted in any way whatsoever. I still think we write songs passionately about things that matter to us and hopefully matter to a lot of people but because of this very fast moving and very consumerist world that we're living in, things tend to sort of turn over very quickly.

[let's talk about your trip to havana, how did the cuban audience react to your gig]

They didn't know the songs, they didn't know any of the lyrics but it only took them about 2 or 3 songs into the set before they started dancing. And we thought our songs were almost impossible to dance to. So there must be some sort of life and some sort of soul within our music that evoked some sort of emotion from them [me: it's the drums!! someone tell him the effect they have on you] Whether it was the right one or not, I don't know. We'll just have to wait and see.

[you are known to be a film buff as well as a video game addict. Can you name your 3 best video games right now and why]

Formula 1 2000
Porsche Legends [that's on playstation, the other one's on playstation 2]

And the other one is on PC which is Hitman, cos you've got an opportunity to take out all the people you don't like.

[do you like racing games?]

I like racing games because you can drive as fast as you like and you don't get any speeding tickets, you don't lose your licence and you can crash as many times as you want.