MANIC STREET PREACHERS – "The Masses Against The Classes"

Not a Manics song I’ve listened to much. S’pose I’d better before rating it.

Lovely piece of taking-stock, Tom. There’s a cut and paste error in there: “most of thetwo things seem remarkablem simply couldn’t be arsed any more”.

Boom, into the 00s, a decade I spent largely out of the country ignoring British pop culture entirely. Even in these first couple of years I wasn’t really paying attention. So, looking forward to hearing my lost decade – and there’s a lot of it to get through.

First time I’ve ever heard this (I’d done a complete 180 on the Manics and wouldn’t even bother to listen to anything by them at this point) and what do you know, I actually like it. It’s a pile-up of cynical cliches, jacked up with sports-metal production steroids, vocals tainted with that nasty megaphone protools effect that Subcircus used on every single song, but under it all there’s something undeniable about the sheer wall of energy, and it’s worn me down by the end. It’s not *good*, I can’t go higher than a 7, but I enjoyed listening to it, and will give it another spin now.

Ephemeral just about sums it up: this was always something of a hit-and-run affair, but considering this as the first number one of the new millenium, it’s still fairly surprising that the only real after-life this song has enjoyed it as a staple question of the pub quiz music round.

It’s far from the finest single the Manics have put out – before or since – but I do think this interpretation is a little harsh. With the possible exeception of Mott the Hoople, it’s hard to imagine another band as relentlessly self-mythologising as the Manics, and ultimately the confusion and defeating sloganeering of The Masses Against The Classes is their take on the ‘statement on the top’. Whether they would have cared to admit it at the time or not, the remarkable level they found themselves at circa 1999/2000 was clearly unsustainable. The Manics have always been, for good and ill, too keen to correct themselves, to take left turns : listening back to This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, I get the impression that even they got bored of that album while making it, the album going from a very much-toned down but still enjoyable run of singles at the head before switching onto a dull auto-drive half-way through, before crashing into the wall with the unfathomably dreadful S.Y.M.M. (As an indication of the level of confusion the band were running under at this point: Wire was pushing for S.Y.M.M. as the lead single, while Bradfield believed Be Natural to be ‘the big one’ – whatever your views on If You Tolerate…, we can all be thankful that some kind of sanity prevailed here.)

So having reached an implausible, clearly temporary peak, the only way to go was down. So why not try and go down on your own terms, entirely aware of your fate and getting your apologies in before it’s too late? It’s a return to rock for sure, but they’d rarely engaged in this kind of chugging pub-punk previously: The Masses Against The Classes sits far apart from the stadium metal sheen of their early work, or the terse post-punk of The Holy Bible. I can understand how this record can come across as sneering and nasty, but like so much of their work, the real audience here is the band themselves. “Success is an ugly word / Especially in your tiny world” – that’s the two sides of the band, the socialist firebrands and the commerical pragmatists, engaging in a very public argument. The song is just one long rebuke of the choices and compromises made to get to the level where such a stunt was possible, a song made not because the band really had much to offer, but to fulfill some kind of promise to themselves that they could try and offer some kind of justfication for their new-found position. As such, we’re left with this: an enjoyable if fairly hollow rocker that offers an olive branch to the die-hards and early fans and goes for a big statement, even though all involved know the only statement they can make is to reveal their confusion, their doubt, and the unspoken truth than this epoch of popularity would come crashing down very soon.

This was a one-time only affair, and they went all in on it – just a shame that the gesture outweighed anything else they might have had to offer. (6)

I was one of the people who bought this single during its first week of release, thereby helping to propel it to the top – it’s not often I can say that on “Popular”. Rather than buying it in some kind of bid to force a number one for the Manics, though, I bought it because the press campaign surrounding its release made huge virtue of its “highly limited” status. In reality, copies hung around record stores for weeks afterwards, and the rush was entirely unnecessary. Had the record company admitted that they’d actually pressed up an impressive number of copies in that one solitary week before deletion, I suspect it may have had more of a struggle to get to number one.

Still, I wasn’t to know. I didn’t read Music Week. So on the way into my dull corporate admin job on a bloody cold Monday in January, I entered an independent record store in Central London (I can’t remember which one, but it’s almost certainly not there anymore) with my suit on and promptly got laughed at by the store owner for buying this. Presumably the irony of a young man in a suit buying a Manics single with the Cuban flag on was hilarious to him, and if I’d had the time I might have explained that actually I was on an exceptionally crappy temp worker’s wage, and the suit was itself an off-the-peg cheap M&S job. Record store assistants never seem to realise simple practical truths like this, and it is for that reason that they will never be At The Front Of The Revolution. Bastards.

As for the record itself, I’d caught it a few times on the radio and liked it a lot. It cut through everything else on the air, and sounded hugely significant, almost alarming through a cheap radio’s speaker. One time Chris Moyles played it, and sarcastically yelped afterwards “Yay! It’s like The Clash, The Jam and Slade all meeting together! It’s a rock and roll revolution! It’s… oh, just shut up, I’ve had enough now”. At the time I rudely gesticulated towards the radio, but actually, he was right. I wouldn’t ordinarily credit Moyles with any decent critical insight at all, but upon buying the record, I played it eight or nine times before returning it to the shelf to be completely ignored to this very day. Like the most cranked-up but dumb sixties garage rock, it sounds so forceful the first time around that you’re compelled to pay attention, almost rooted to the spot by it. It’s such a compressed, furious noise combined with interesting sloganeering that you convince yourself it’s in some way important, especially if it’s the only thing that sounds like that on daytime radio. Then, when you finally have a chance to own the record, to get under its skin, to live with it in the context of your own record collection and not the current Radio One playlist… you realise there’s not a lot else there, and it loses your attention swiftly. Still, for that first week it did create enough of a rush for me not to want to dismiss totally out of hand. A 6 or a 7 from me rather than a 4, just for the pure rush of it.

At the time, I knew Manics fans who held this single up as an example of how much the group had lost it, purely because they were trying to reclaim their former Heavenly-era punk glories but had obviously completely forgotten how even that was done. Indeed, this stacks up unfavourably next to the initial releases of “Motown Junk” and “You Love Us”, sounding less urgent, less spunky, less as if they had everything to play for. Because, of course, they didn’t. The irony is that most of their more middle-of-the-road singles of the late nineties are far better than this one. Some bands become too slick and learned to go back to their roots successfully, and sadly I think that’s what happened here – but their more considered, adult approach did bring “Everything Must Go” into the world, which is a near-faultless rock album, and at least half of “This Is My Truth” is far better than most people believe, so the outcome isn’t all bad. And I have to admit that I return to those records far, far more often than I’m compelled to listen to “The Holy Bible”.

Being unburdened with any Manics’ pro or anti bias as I am (they are a thing, but not a significant thing in my personal canon), I can listen to this and think: yeah, a rawk bingo song if I ever heard one. From the “Twist And Shout”/”Let’s Dance” intro, to the guitar solo, to the fist-in-the-air chorus, it’s a tick-box exercise. A quite enjoyable tick-box exercise, though. (5)

Oh, boo. I thought back on the IYTTTYCWBN someone said Your Love Alone got to #1. Boo and indeed hiss, though there is something even more fitting about MSP’s last ever #1 (admittedly of 2) being the first #1 of the millennium; one foot in the revolutionary future, one in the rock’n’roll past etc etc.

The Gladstone connection is a strange thing, because Tony Blair (like Margaret Thatcher, but from a slightly different starting point I think) was massively influenced by 19th Century Liberalism and the Whig Interpretation of History, and Blair – then at his zenith – seemed to believe very strongly in the concept of “the masses” (consumerism, Murdoch, Tesco) as, in his mind, the true progressive source against “the classes”, the self-interest not only of the traditional elite (whose loss of its old wariness of capitalism will, of course, become a more prominent theme as Popular goes through the 00s), but of the mutual groups and organisations his party had historically represented. He had, after all, just made an oft-quoted (if not always understood) speech in which he equated supporters of nationalisation in his own party with supporters of foxhunting on the other side as “forces of conservatism” which he was desperate to get away from. Pure Gladstone, as he had meant the phrase quoted here.

But here were the Manics, the arch anti-Blair force alive in the mainstream while the rest of pop kowtowed to him, the last bastion of that very working-class tribalism, the last autodidacts (especially in comparison with the band – five years in age but a cultural century away from them – who were already huge but who’ll only appear here somewhat embarrassedly and belatedly in 2005, when sales were at their lowest). So to say the juxtapositions and connections here are paradoxical is an understatement. Perhaps the stretch required to make a Gladstone quote fit with what they’re clearly trying to say – we are the last real socialists alive – can be symbolic of the stretch required to make them fit in the mainstream by this time, something which on their next album they’d pretty much give up trying and resort to pure Stalinism (“Freedom of Speech Won’t Feed My Children” being the most glaring and egregious example).

But perhaps the attack on “the classes” can be said to pre-empt the problem much of the 21st Century Left – the New Old Left of Jason Cowley and Adrian Tempany – would have with British “urban” pop, as profound a problem as its precursors had with the Beatles. After all, by the criteria defined here it would be “the classes” who would put “Bound 4 Da Reload” into the Popular story a few months later – not “the masses” still desperately trying to believe that ‘Standing on the Shoulder of Giants’ might somehow be any good, “the masses” who would leap on the landfill bandwagon as a supposed resurgence of The Real Working Class Not Like All That 1Xtra Shit. In retrospect, the faith in the rock traditionalism of “the masses” over the *uncontrollable* independent working-class spirit of “the classes” – the latter being so much harder to fit into traditional ideas of socialist nobility and the wariness of commerce which could so often come out as the sort of fear which led Enoch Powell to call many trade unionists “quite good Tories really” – seems to anticipate the New Statesman as it is today, canonising The Last Proletarians In Pop and desperately trying to avoid the fact that it now has its very own New Menace of Beatlism, as great an antipathy to the living, breathing working class as it had half a century ago. And, really, could there be a more fitting way for the Manics to exit the mainstream (their near-returns to Popular in 2004/5 were only possible because of – again – the collapse of CD single sales before legal downloads were admitted)?

(Welcome back, everyone. Feels like about half a century since I last posted a comment here, come to that. But I’ve burnt my own Stalinism out now.)

I bought this the week it came out and was more bemused than elated to see it at number 1 – I quickly lost interest in MATC and preferred the poignant B-side ‘Close My Eyes’ which appeared to admit to the vulnerability that it’s A-side was denying.
It’s strange how the list of Manics singles is so long and varied that even a number one single is not even among their 20 best-known songs.

Good to have Popular back, even if we are revisiting the worst year of my life and in this case (I think) the second to last number one single I actually bought in physical format.

I’m not sure that anybody else has mentioned that, for all its huge sales and awards, there was a sizeable school of thought that This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours was a collossal sell out for the Manics and a betrayal of their ideals. Unfortunately (for everyone as it turned out) the band took the criticism to heart and were panicked into backtracking – the Q review of the next album along summed it up well when they said that nothing is more unedifying than a band trampling on their own product. But that is what the Manics did.

Masses Against The Classes, at the time, felt like an adequate stop gap single. It was clearly aiming at Iron Maiden’s least weeks on the top seventy five by a number one record and failed quite dismally by racking up seven (non consecutive) weeks. On its own merits it’s not up there with their best songs but it passes muster. Unfortunately a year later they served up a whole album of shouty punk that sounded like a parody of themselves – as already noted they released two of the better tracks as singles on the same day, obviously aiming at a chart 1,2 – their second misfiring stunt on the trot. The critics mostly loved it of course, raving about a return to form. When they realised their mistake they turned their fire on the beautiful Lifeblood – the Manics’ most derided record and their most undervalued.

It’s worth noting that although we never meet them again it was a close run thing – they managed a hat trick of number 2 hits before the download era ruled them out as singles contenders. For those who lost touch with them in recent years and haven’t heard their two most recent albums (released a mere six months apart) or haven’t had the pleasure of seeing them live – I can tell you you’re missing a treat. For my money, fifteen years on from this, the UK has no better band currently working.

I don’t know a whole lot about this group’s mythology (and, yeah, I get that with the Manics that means I’m missing a lot of what makes them comprehensible), but Tom’s write-up kinda makes it sound like they’re pulling a Jawbreaker on “Boxcar” move: “you’re not punk, and I’m telling everyone/Save your breath I never was one.” But then maybe I’m trying to impose an American frame of an agglutinated and molecular array of disparate scenes on to what was a more stratified British pop landscape?

I like the Blair quote in #4 though.

“I’m tired of giving a reason/When we’re the only thing left to believe in!”

And this is how our new millennium began; with the voice of Noam Chomsky musing on the primary role of government being to protect property from the majority, followed by a “Twist And Shout” harmony intro – except they go one step further and higher, as you would expect them to do – and then a “1-2-3-4!,” a cavernous roar of guitars and drums, and finally James Dean Bradfield, screaming through a Leslie cabinet: “Hello! It’s us again!”

They were tired of being perceived as having gone soft (“So can you hurt us any more?/Can you feel like it was before?”), and the principal aim of “The Masses Against The Classes” – the only number one single as far as I know whose title is derived from Gladstone – was to prove that they still had the original “Motown Junk” rage and magic, so much so that the single’s architecture more or less follows the “Motown Junk” template, from spoken/sampled intro to final chaotic deceleration and proclamations. But the timing of its release was undoubtedly deliberate; it was a limited edition single, released and deleted on the same day (though its two-month chart residency suggests that this policy was not strictly adhered to), with a bold black sleeve featuring the Cuban flag, and was clearly intended to be the first number one of the 21st century.

As was obviously also intended, it managed to blow away the blandness of 1999 in a breath, swept away politesse, making do and mending; the first pop record of the apocalypse (at least until people realised that their computers hadn’t stopped functioning at all and that the world wasn’t going to fall apart). Bradfield roars at the group’s “gone soft” detractors (“Success is an ugly word/Especially in your tiny world”) and pleads that we all have to continue the struggle together (“We’re still so in love with you/And yes, we mean it too”) though finally asserts that the hate powers them as fervently as the love (“Our love is unconditional/Our hate is yours to feed upon”).

Musically its sweep is subtly glorious; the sudden, unexpected quiet break after the first chorus (which Bradfield sings undistorted) with wordless psychedelic harmonies and the guitar intro from – yes – “I’m A Believer”) before the noise storms back in. “We love the winter!” cries Bradfield with memories of 1917. “It brings us closer together.” Suddenly the Manics all fuse together as though this were the last song they would ever play before the song finally comes apart in blizzards of wintry, whining feedback and Bradfield citing Camus on the ramparts: “A slave begins by demanding justice…and ends by wanting to wear a crown!” – that “crown” leered Lydon-style as the music collapses, implying a pledge that “we” won’t do this; not ever. It wipes out Westlife, obliterates compromise; wherever else this new era goes, remember how it – and they – started. And we couldn’t have had a better or more explosive start. 10

#20: the number two blog is resting at the moment but will be coming back when we have time to address it. TPL #359 is proving to be an epic and at the moment nowhere near completion.

Anto @17 Not so strange, it’s a common phenomenon in this journey. Most people could probably name 20 Everly Brothers songs but few of those lists would include Temptation (#121) I think. And just look what Chuck Berry’s sole representative is, if you can stomach it.

I’d be inclined to say that fans of the Manics weren’t really singles buyers but by this time I think the singles/albums dichotomy is becoming blurred.

I still see it now and again in charity shops so it can’t have been that limited.

This might seem like an odd start to a comment about the Manics, but I’ve been thinking about Mark Ronson a lot recently, trying to figure out exactly what my take on him is. One of the things I’m pretty sure about Ronson is that for most of the standard criticisms of him, he’s well aware of it, probably ahead of you, every bit as much as you’d expect of someone who wrote (although briefly) for the excellent, snarky hip-hop mag Ego Trip. (Does that get him off the hook? No). In that way, he’s like the Manics, a group who were classically in the conversation – they may have had issues with journalists, but they were fully engaged with the discourse of rock journalism. Whereas, I’ve always imagined that, say, Celine Dion was out of (or, you could see it as, above) the conversation. Again, I’m not implying a judgement either way.

(Interestingly, despite the rock dinosaur tag, Dave Gilmour and Robert Plant always seem to have been in the conversation. Mick Jagger, not so much).

Random fact you won’t see anywhere else, a poster advertising ‘Forever Delayed’ remained at Staples Corner Road in North London for a whopping *ten years* until McDonalds ruined it by covering it up with directions to their nearest in the summer of 2012, possibly for those coming off the M1 visiting Wembley for the Olympics.

A part of my youth died a little when it went. It was always reliably there on my bus ride home from Brent Cross Shopping Centre, the title of the album becoming more ironic as the years rolled on.

Quite amazing to realise how little the Manics meant to the Australian charts. This is My Truth spent four weeks in the album chart, peaking at number 14; Know Your Enemy spent a single week at number 20. Only two of their singles made the top 50, for a week apiece (“A Design for Life” at number 50 and IYTTYCWBN at number 49). This? Nada. I wasn’t even aware of it until years later – possibly when checking the list of 2000s number ones at this very site – even though I was a fan of their albums from Everything Must Go onwards. Must be because I bought Lipstick Traces rather than Forever Delayed.

Apart from one or two previous listens, this has been my first repeated exposure to the song… and I like it. I’m not sure I buy Tom’s “sneering at their old fans” reading, and without that there’s a lot to like in this blast of punk rawness. (Do I detect a hat-tip to the 1990s’ reinventors of punk at 1:10, when the guitars drop for a few seconds? Smells Like Nirvana.) Maybe it’s Manics by numbers, or maybe it’s just the Manics doing one of the things they do best. Either way, 7.

One of the other things the Manics do best, for this late-Manics fan, is all the stuff that people seem to be bagging in this thread. I loved This is My Truth, and “The Everlasting”, and Know Your Enemy and its singles, and their near misses for the top spot in 2004, and Lifeblood – man, did I love Lifeblood – and then I stopped paying attention for a bit; but then came Postcards for a Young Man, and that was great, and Futurology is pretty good too. I don’t suppose they’ll ever bother the top of the singles chart again, but I’m glad they haven’t packed it in yet, and doubly glad they didn’t follow through with quitting after Generation Terrorists.

@33 – You really do need to get yrself Journal For Plague Lovers, for reasons I’ve explained above.

I’m still glad they’re still going, but if they’d split after JFPL, it would have been somehow fitting.

Welcome back, Popular. I was 16 when this decade started, ten years worth of my salad days were coming up, and the first two years or so, before I went to university, were spent studying the charts closely, so hopefully i’ll have a fair amount to say about the next 100 records or so. Not that much of it will have any insight.
At the time, I steered clear of pre Everything Must Go Manics, the sheer intensity of Holy Bible was all a bit much for me at the time, I was much happier with TIMTTMY and its lumbering, overwrought safeness. This was far too reminiscent of the early period for me to really like, and even though its perfectly listenable today, its all a bit po-faced and right on for me to really like.
Good to see Landfill Indie getting a mention…

I’m really not getting the admiration for “Your Love Alone…” – to me it’s pretty much a career low point, certainly outdone in the “mainstream pop rock” strand by numerous other songs, starting with “It’s Not War (Just The End Of Love”. “Empty Souls” I could have tolerated as a no 1 (although really: it’s still not a patch on this one), “The Love Of Richard Nixon” – is, at least, kind of admirably experimental…..I guess?

No 2s aside…yes, “Journal for Plague Lovers” is a fine album, but does push to the fore perhaps too much all the obvious Richey shortcomings and frustrations – too much of the synthetic cubist-type cut-up lyrics that attract attention but are usually too incoherent for their own good. I do wish they’d released a single from it – I think my favourite track i one of the less extreme, less in-your-face ones, “This Blood Sport Severed”, but there are more gripping options that might have done better on the charts…perhaps.

As for the more recent stuff, I think “Rewind The Film” is an absolute stunner – the least “Manics” Manics album, arguably, stripped down and the brass section played up – two great singles (their first since “Motown Junk” to miss the top 75), “Show Me The Wonder” (lyrically referencing back to “Found That Soul” as blatantly as TMATC does to “You Love Us”) and the quite, quite gorgeous “Anthem For A Lost Cause” (the videos for both of these, and the album title track form a trilogy set in the mining communities of South Wales – and well worth seeking out in their own right).

“Futurology” grips me less than “Rewind The Film” – but it does provide evidence (in “The Last Jet To Leave Moscow”) that they realised that the whole idealization of Cuba thing was really bloody silly (I see Castro is currently ranting that Islamic State is a plot of the West…) – there are few half-decent tracks, but it is too polished for my taste overall.

It has, however, been an immense pleasure to grow up with the Manics, and see and hear them grow up with me. Back in 1991/92, as a teenager (wearing lipstick to see them at the Kilburn National) I don’t think I would have imagined they would still be a going concern, let alone, basically, a seriously vital band over two decades later.

METAL [8]

“Your Love Alone”, “The Love Of” are both okay by me, although of course as with basically everything pre-2012 I didn’t hear them at the time.

Like Rory, I was enough of an (Australian) Anglophile to discover the Manic Street Preachers circa Everything Must Go despite them being largely ignored at the time here. I think I perhaps remember seeing a video for ‘Australia’ being played on Red, Foxtel’s music channel of the time, and thinking it was alright (the irony of an Aussie Anglophile being exposed to a too-British band singing about a paradisiacal Australia). And then I found Everything Must Go secondhand at a charity shop and loved its sadness and passion and cinematic sweep. I was keen to hear ‘If You Tolerate This…’ (which received Triple J airplay) and liked it but was a bit more bored by follow-up singles. And then the band dropped off my radar; I don’t think I heard ‘Masses Against The Classes’ (or indeed subsequent stuff) until I eventually won a cheap bid for Forever Delayed on eBay on a whim a couple of years ago. I had no idea it was a #1 in the UK until just now, and when I was listening to Forever Delayed it didn’t really stand out. Listening now, the only bit that really stands out is the ‘Twist And Shout’ bit they use to top and tail the song, but the rush of the rest of it is nice enough. The Chomsky quote at the start feels very 2000, from a time when the left seems more idealistic and utopian, when the right wing felt very weak (in a 2015 world where we recently experienced a Republican candidate saying essentially the same sentiments out loud in front of people – Romney and his 47% – the Chomsky quote no longer has the shock value it once had). I feel it’s more than a 4 but not much more. 5-6 maybe.

Bands doing ‘reclaim old glories’ songs, trying to emulate their first couple of albums, very rarely pull it off, do they? I feel like there’s a sort of electricity you can hear in the music when a sound is in the right place at the right time, when it feels like something new, something vibrant. You can hear that electricity 50 years later in the Beatles, or 30 years later in Kraftwerk, in hundreds of other songs/bands. And try as bands might, they just can’t get that electricity when they try to go back to their roots.

It’s funny, listening to Forever Delayed – ‘Motown Junk’ and ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ (which I’d also never previously heard until recently) immediately jumped out at me as having that electricity, and I had no idea until reading this thread they had a seemingly treasured place in the Manics mythology; in my head, the Manics had an interesting-but-not-entirely-successful ‘trying to be Guns’n’Roses phase’, then the interesting spiky Holy Bible phase, then commercial success, then slow decline – I was surprised that what I thought was the ‘trying to be Guns’n’Roses phase’ was as listenable as it was.

I told off a Manics-fan classmate for selfishly buying this in two formats, thus depriving another Manics fan of a copy. Did the band’s socialist principles mean nothing to him.

Re46: Also early that year (and relevant in this context!) there was the successful coup against Alun Michael, who had been inserted into the job of First Secretary (now First Minister) of Wales by some extremely crude Blairite strong-arming. That was partly a left-wing reaction, but also a nationalist one. It was a clear parallel to London, both showing that while New Labour was committed to genuinely radical constitutional change, Tony/Mandy/AC were hoping they could do it while maintaining control by inserting their people to run the newly devolved places. The backlash in both cases showed that voters wanted an actual transfer of power.

I have a feeling that IndieKen picked up quite a range of votes, including from people who weren’t necessarily to the left of the cabinet. My mother, for one – my father, who was in a Labour activist phase, was furious with the both of us.

Now I’ve actually thought about it, I think this was the last single I bothered to buy at all on its day of release. No other examples spring immediately to mind. This either means that major labels employed the “super limited edition, buy it NOW or not at all!” ruse less for singles as the years rolled on, or (more likely) that the acts they did this for weren’t of as much interest to me.

I continue to buy many albums on the Monday of release, of course, but I can’t get much excited about CD singles. Or even over-priced £6.99 7″ singles.