Sarah Cracknell ft Nicky Wire - Nothing Left To Talk About

Sarah Cracknell (from Saint Etienne) has a new solo record - Red Kite - out very soon and asked Nicky Wire (that well known vocalist) to duet with her on her track Nothing Left To Talk About and despite the fact that Nicky is singing (!) it's a bloody beautiful track.

Let's face it, Bradfield, though we love him, is a blowsy, blustery, hit the back wall of the venue kind of singer in the same vein as Sir Tom and Dame Shirley, on this track he would have swamped Sarah's slightly dreamy, delicate, clear vocals. Nicky compliments her voice very well. Enjoy. Buy the album when it's out.

Richey and his portrait

A photo I've not seen before!  Found on plaguelips' tumblr.

Manics at the 930 Club.

 

More absolutely brilliant photos of the Manics at the 930 Club by Dan Kulpa can be found at his website Concert Addicts.

Manics and Jennie Vee at Webster Hall

From the Brooklyn Vegan blog, photos of the @Manics and @jennieveenyc:

 And here's the beautiful Jennie Vee.

Loads more pictures on the Brooklyn Vegan blog.

Manics at Webster Hall

Video of almost 20 minutes of the Webster Hall gig this week!

Stripy socks and gold lamè

I will forever wonder who thought James would look good in gold lamè...

Young and Naked

Shirtless baby Manics. Before JDB had the 'Anxiety is Freedom' tattoo.

James Dean Bradfield Looking Manly With A Guitar

Plus some additional arm/tatt porn (right click for bigger pics).

All photos by Joseph Branston.

PopMatters Interview with James Dean Bradfield

 Talking "Method" Recording and Youthful Delusions with the Manic Street Preachers

By Maria Schurr 15 April 2015

 

(click pic or title to go to Popmatters website) 

 

The Welsh group Manic Street Preachers are one of the greatest bands to have never been accepted by America. Their arguable masterpiece, 1994’s The Holy Bible, has largely been overlooked by American critics and anglophiles alike.

The album’s omission from the ‘90s rock pantheon is both shocking and somewhat logical. On one hand, its scorching, post-punk inflected hard rock was packed with enough deceptively catchy riffs to appeal to a large base of music fans. On the other, inviting songs about capital punishment, eating disorders, and the Holocaust into your ears probably isn’t something the average listener wants to do on a daily basis, if at all.

Those who have heard The Holy Bible are guaranteed to admit here’s never been anything else quite like it in rock music, even if the harrowing tales of former (presumed dead) Manics lyricist and guitarist Richey Edwards don’t quite make for pleasurable listening.

This April brings a once in a lifetime opportunity for those of us in North America who get The Holy Bible, or have lived it, or just love it. After a hugely successful series of UK dates in honor of the album’s 20th anniversary reissue last year, the remaining Manics—singer / guitarist James Dean Bradfield, drummer Sean Moore, and bassist Nicky Wire—are bringing The Holy Bible to the states and playing it in full. Before setting foot on US soil, Bradfield generously chatted on the phone with me about the newness of touring North America and being led by lyrics.

* * *

How did the decision to bring the Holy Bible tour to North America arise?

James Dean Bradfield: The Holy Bible did quite well on import in America. We did an American tour about seven, six years ago I think? We really enjoyed the experience. There’s no doubt, in terms of commercial success, we don’t mean much in America. So, coming to America still feels like a new experience to us, because we haven’t really toured America that much in our lives.

But, despite all that, we have had a lot of requests from a lot of people that had bought the record in America to come and play it there. We thought, “Hell. What’s the downside?” None of us are young, there’s no pretending that, and anything that feels like a new experience to us is good! Bringing The Holy Bible to America will feel like a new experience to us. I think we’ve only ever played “Faster” off The Holy Bible in America.

I was actually there at the last tour, for a couple of the dates.

JDB: Which show?

I came to the show in Philadelphia… (at World Cafe Live)

JDB: Ooh, there weren’t many people at that show [Chuckles].

There were enough! It looked pretty full to me.

JDB: (laughs) I think it will be a bit better this time, to be honest.

I was there and I was at the Webster Hall show in New York.

JDB: The Webster Hall show I really enjoyed. I mean, I love Philly as a town. The center of Philly is a great place to walk around, and the fact that it was the first multi-year capital of America makes it a fascinating place, so I loved actually being there, but yeah… I remember there not being many people in the crowd. But Webster Hall was a great show.

It’s remarkable I can remember those two gigs, because if you’d ask me about a concert I’ve done in Britain, it’d be hard for me to remember ‘cos I’ve played in Britain and mainland Europe so much. But, I’ve played in America so little that every show is quite a distinct memory for me.

The tickets for the UK leg of the tour sold out in minutes and the announcement of the North American tour was met with a lot of excitement. Has The Holy Bible’s gradual rise in popularity ever surprised you?

JDB: Not really. I kind of knew when we were doing it that there was something about the record. I knew I was part of something—with Nick, Sean, and Richey—that was going to have some kind of resonance. I knew it would be intrinsic to quite a high minority of people, if you know what I’m saying? There would be a very large minority of people that the record would connect to, and that it would mean something to them, it would be tangible to them. The album was so locked in to dissecting certain politics, certain events, certain histories, certain psyches, that I knew the record would mean something to somebody out there. For want of a better phrase, I kind of felt as if I was part of something that could become a cult classic, definitely. And then all that kind of rational thinking went out the window when Richey went missing (in 1995).

So I stopped thinking about the record after Richey went missing, because it was indelibly connected to something which was quite a traumatic memory. So I think we kind of parked The Holy Bible in our psyches somewhere when we carried on with (1996’s) Everything Must Go, and we kind of tried to protect him, we tried not to touch it. But then ten years later, we realized that The Holy Bible had sold so many more records post-Richey’s disappearance than it did while he was around. It wasn’t much of a surprise to me, but it kind of crept up on us because we tried to protect ourselves from analyzing it because it seemed like such a pure thing that we didn’t want to sully it with anything.

How has perception of The Holy Bible changed over the years? How do you think future generations will regard it?

JDB: Well, I think there are two categories of records that kind of endure. I think there’s the one kind of record that people say transcends the time that it was recorded in, and it can be recalibrated and you can reimpose it upon any period, and then there’s the other kind of record that sums up the period it was released and created in. I think the second category is what The Holy Bible is in. I think it’s a snapshot of a certain psyche in the early ‘90s, it’s a political snapshot of the post-war era in Britain and Europe, and it’s kind of built in the steps of new Europe’s creation, to a certain degree. It’s not a timeless record, I think it’s a record that really sums up a distinctly different time period.

Do you think the internet has helped in building a larger US audience for The Manics?

JDB: To be honest, no. I am 46 years old and I’m not into delusion any more [Laughs]. I don’t think this (tour) is us re-engaging with the American market and hoping to break it, that couldn’t be farther from our hearts or heads. I think we’re just coming over for the experience of playing in front of an audience that has never really seen us play these songs. In Britain and Europe and Japan, we have played some of these songs in front of fans that we know want to hear them. In America, barely any of these songs have ever been played, and we’ve had so many letters over the years from people saying, “I’d love to hear ‘Archives of Pain’ played live,” or, “I’d love to hear ‘Die in the Summertime,’ I’d love to hear ‘ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforoneday…’.”

This is just a chance for us to actually have those people in front of us and hopefully make them happy! Which sounds like an anomaly from somebody that’s part of such a nihilistic, mad fucking record as The Holy Bible, but it actually will be quite touching for us to play these songs in front of an American audience that has never seen it before live. That’s kind of the deal for us, really. We have no delusions or illusions of having any kind of commercial success off the back of this experience.

I think it’s going to be a very cathartic experience for the people going to the shows. Just hearing “Faster” at those shows six or seven years ago was extremely cathartic for me.

JDB: Yeah, we don’t take any of this lightly. I think the one thing you gotta bear in mind when you actually take on something like this—which has become quite a popular thing in the modern era, people performing a “classic” album in front of a crowd—is you’ve really got to do the record justice. You’ve gotta play the record pretty much as close to how it sounded, you really gotta live up to how the record sounds in terms of emotion, in terms of physicality, in terms of intent, detail. You’ve really got to try and make sure that you don’t at all make any mistakes that kind of belittle the record, so to speak.

The thing you’ve gotta be aware of is that you’re being faithful to the spirit of the record, and the technicality of the record as well. Because The Holy Bible, in its own strange, fucked up, convoluted kind of way, is quite a muso album. It has quite complicated time signatures, there are lots of words interlocked into the drums and guitars, and it’s not something you can pick up and just play after one day’s rehearsing.

How hard was it to get Sony to release the album in 1994? Was putting it out through a major label a triumph in and of itself?

JDB: I’d love to give you the usual corny story, where the musician’s saying, “We fought tooth and nail with our hearts bleeding to get this record out on a major label,” but our experience was nothing like that. Our label, Sony, didn’t question the fact that it was obviously a record that was very dark and that didn’t have any natural singles on it—the lead-off single from The Holy Bible was “Faster”. The record company didn’t once question that, which is remarkable, really. We’re living in this day and age where record companies are even more conservative than they used to be. If a record doesn’t sell after one album, there’s a very good chance that you don’t get a second shot. This was our third record, and the record company never once questioned the artwork, the content within the lyrics, the way it was mixed, the way it was recorded—which was in quite a lo-fi way. And a lot of that has to do with our A&R man at the time, Rob Stringer, who is now the head of Sony in America. He gave us complete artistic freedom. So that’s a strange story really. When you’re hearing people talk about such stuff, talk about the battles they go through with the record company, about how there was just some kind of insipid censorship within the record company—but our experience was utterly the opposite. So, there’s no sob story there.

It could never happen today, I think.

JDB: No, it wouldn’t, and to be honest it didn’t happen as much back then either. We just had somebody that was extraordinary in charge of the record label, and that was Rob Stringer. He had a vision for the record too, not just us. Not all band stories are the same, I don’t think.

I read that the record label had offered you a luxurious studio setting to make what became The Holy Bible, but you turned it down and opted for recording it in Cardiff’s red light district.

JDB: We’re talking about 1993, 1994 here, and that was kind of standard practice back in those days. You go to a residential studio and you record a record. Residential studios back then were really lovely places to create and record. But we knew that it was just wrong for the music. Especially with the lyrics that had inspired the music. We knew that it would be a wrong decision to try and create this kind of music, which had threadbare emotions and hard political intent and acute observatory historical references in it. We knew that if we ended up trying to create this music somewhere in Surrey, England, which had four poster beds and every technical specification you could wish for, there would be something slightly off-message about that.

I suppose, in our youthful, delusional state, we thought there should be some kind of “method” recording, our version of method acting. We should immerse ourselves in a shitty environment to try and replicate the edge in the music. And that’s what we did. We hired a studio which we had used before in Cardiff, which was kind of in the red light area, and had no mod cons. It was a very, very monotone kind of experience. And we decided we wanted that kind of utilitarian vibe to try and rub off in the music, I suppose. It all sounds pretentious and I wouldn’t want to repeat it all now, but we were young.

The Holy Bible is actually what got me into post-punk music. I realize the musical approach came from being influenced by post-punk at the time and it serves the lyrics well. Was there ever a thought that, in choosing that style, you were going to be in complete opposition to what was trendy in the UK at the time, i.e. Britpop? Did you feel there was a need to go against it?

JDB: No, I think our music’s just always been led by the lyrics. That’s given credence and truth by the fact that I need lyrics in front of me to write music. Nicky and Richey would always give me lyrics, and 99% of the time I would always write music with the lyrics in front of me, and I would try and let the lyrics inspire the music. I was being given lyrics like “Yes”, “Of Walking Abortion”, and “Archives of Pain”. Looking at these lyrics, there were twists and turns in there. There’s some kind of indecipherable, fucked up iambic pentameter in there, and I knew that these weren’t normal kind of lyrics, they weren’t even normal for us, really. And I just knew that the music had to twist and turn and convulse with the lyrics, as the lyrics were themselves. So it’s really as simple as that. I love the lyrics, and I remember being given “Die in the Summertime”, and I remember being given “Yes” very early on, and thinking I must follow this muse that Richey created. Richey had written 70 to 75 percent of the lyrics on this record, and I was being given this stuff and I just knew I had to follow his direction. Otherwise I’d be betraying the lyrics themselves.

I don’t really think we were reacting against anything. I think we were just so secluded and so self-insulated against what was going on with the start of Britpop and stuff that we didn’t even pay attention to it. Again, it’s that delusional state of just thinking that you’re right, and I think that’s the place we were in. By the time we’d finished mixing “Faster”, we still thought it could be a top ten hit, that’s how fucked up and deluded we were! [Laughs] Everything was led by the lyrics and they still are.

But we came out of the back of The Holy Bible and of course we wrote “A Design for Life” and Everything Must Go, which kind of got co-opted into Britpop. We never intended it to be as such. But we didn’t care by then. I think we just wanted the music to breathe, and we just wanted to try and drop some of the subtext that had been written around the band. It’s a funny journey from The Holy Bible to Everything Must Go. If you listen to “Faster”, then listen to “A Design For Life”, I think you can see how much a band can change in the space of one album. “Faster” and “Design for Life” are the two lead singles off two separate albums, and it was merely two years between them. And it just goes to show how much a lyric can influence a musician. When Nicky gave me “A Design for Life”, I just felt a certain freedom in the lyrics, I felt a certain sureness in the words that were being written. They wouldn’t have to be understood, they were just stating fact and emotion. On The Holy Bible, despite the nihilism and despite the misanthropic bent, sometimes the lyrics are so pleading to be understood. Whereas on Everything Must Go, they’re just breathing and stating the facts.

In the liner notes of the tenth anniversary edition of The Holy Bible, the album is described by Keith Cameron as “a triumph of art over logic”. This description has always struck me, and I was wondering whether you, as the creators, feel it is an accurate statement?

JDB: It’s always nice when somebody else says it, because you can never say that about what you’ve done yourself, because it makes you an arrogant fool if you make such a statement about your own record or book or film or piece of furniture—whatever you’ve created. But I can see some kind of logic in that statement. I don’t really think a band like us, that comes from a very left wing area and place in history, ever expected to write a song like “Archives of Pain”, which talks about capital punishment and talks about it within a song—openly questions it and openly investigates and doesn’t condemn. I don’t think a band like us, from a working class area in South Wales, were ever meant to write a lyric like “Faster”, that has ambitions of overcoming everything with the power of your own will and your own self made intelligence. And I don’t think that would be married to that post-punk influenced music. So there is a natural ridiculousness of us coming from South Wales, from a very working class, proud area; actually doing a record like this was nothing anyone expected. We didn’t either. So I kind of accept Keith’s statement, and Keith is one of the best music journalists Britain ever produced, so I’ll stand by his statement. It’s always better when somebody else says it.

I guess that’s what critics are for!

JDB: Yeah, and other stuff too [Laughs].

Apology

Sorry I've not been active on here, lots of things going on that I need to concentrate on. Hopefully, I'll get back on the blogging bus (I'd that even a thing?) soon.

Latitude Festival Poster

Seen on the tube today.

@Manics Art

Art by Robert Tirado @roberttirado http://www.roberttiradoart.com/

No Manifesto Clip

Rough cut excerpt from No Manifesto.

Manic Street Preachers in Michael Sheen's Passion

In the spirit of Easter, here are the Manics performing a version of Design For Life for Michael Sheen's Passion Play.

Watch out for Nicky giggling as he's led away at the end.

Manic Street Preachers perform at The Hard Rock Cafe 2011

The Manics play a special intimate gig at the Hard Rock Cafe in London just after Postcards From A Young Man was released.

 This is my rip of the video I found on an old laptop! Enjoy.

From The Quietus Archives: Manic Street Preachers' James Dean Bradfield Interviewed

From The Archives: Manic Street Preachers' James Dean Bradfield Interviewed 

In 1994, the Manics released their career-defining third album, The Holy Bible - and Ned Raggett interviewed a young James Dean Bradfield. Here we look back across two decades of burning rage and cold fury, and publish that interview in full for the first time. Photographs courtesy of Mitch Ikeda 

(Link to original interview on The Quietus website)

Next month, the Manic Street Preachers start their 20th anniversary tour for The Holy Bible, an album that had a great effect on me, a young music journalist, and on so many others - a record of burning rage, cold fury and self-directed violence that took the basics of a rock band but also felt like the careening post-Bomb Squad hip-hop that they loved. The Manics have performed irregularly in the US over the years, but this will be the first time they've toured that album here. In 1995, all that happened was a short promo tour for the American release (in its US mix, since made available via 2004's deluxe reissue). James Dean Bradfield and Richey Edwards were to do the trip together, but Edwards checked out from the Embassy Hotel early in the morning of the American flight, on 1 February 1995, and went missing. Bradfield assumed he'd be in touch soon after and carried out some initial interviews before it became clear that Richey had disappeared. Bradfield returned to the UK, and both the US release of the album and any further plans for a US tour were called off.

I was one of the journalists he spoke to before he flew back. I was living, then as now, in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. Thanks to a friend who worked in Sony's college radio department, I had a chance to talk by phone with Bradfield. I'd only received a promo tape half an hour before the call and hadn't had chance to listen to the whole album.

I believe I pieced together something from the interview for a fairly new LA-area alternative rock magazine which as far as I know barely lasted a couple more issues. To my knowledge the interview has never resurfaced in any collection of articles online or elsewhere about the band. I myself don't have a copy of the first article, though I half-remember reading it in print. The interview published here has been written up for The Quietus from the original tape of the interview; I hope he doesn't mind this long-forgotten moment from his past re-emerging now.

I was just got the album about half an hour ago, and I'm halfway through - I got up to '4st 7lb'. I was trying to distinguish the difference between this album and previous ones. It's almost exuberant, and it's almost unfriendly.
James Dean Bradfield: I think we've just gone back to our old indie days, or at least the first couple of singles we released, 'Motown Junk' and 'You Love Us', on Heavenly. The first version of 'You Love Us' was much more punk-based. Right at the start we got compared to The Clash quite a lot. And I think we've gone back, we've focussed on why we started the band, on all the bands that we loved - Joy Division, The Clash, the Pistols, Gang Of Four, stuff like that. It's almost like we went away and recorded this album outside of the record industry. We went and recorded it without telling the record company, in a demo studio. We did it really quick. It's more direct. I don't think it makes concessions to the listener at all. It's really honest, and it just goes for it.

So it's more of a return to what you started with, rather than a change from it?
JDB: We looked at the last album and… bits of it I like, but I do regret certain things about it. I think we lost sight of what we originally were.

The last album did seem… too polished, maybe?
JDB: There wasn't enough aggression on it, basically. I think I ignored my old record collection. I went back home before I did this album. I went through my old records, and it was Wire, Pistols, Clash, and I was thinking, This is why I was into music, and these are the bands that I wanted to sound like when I was young. Fucking get back into why you were into music in the first place.

And so you just recorded this album without telling the record company?
JDB: We went and did it in a demo studio, without a producer. We just recorded the songs. As far as we're concerned it's not produced, it's just performed and engineered. It's just down, you know?

So one day they were asking, "What are you going to do next?" And you were like, "Well, as it happens, we have this album here."
JDB: No, but it was almost like that. It was like, "We've got this album, it's nearly finished. Do you want to come and hear it?" And of course we needed to mix it. But once the record company knew we'd gone and taken control of the situation, and they heard what we were doing, and they heard the directness, the energy and the attitude, they just went for it. They thought, Ah well, that's okay. We took charge of their own destiny and I think they were almost thankful for that. It takes a lot of work off their hands.

Are you still writing the music with Sean Moore?
JDB: Yeah.

Have you written any lyrics for this album? I know you haven't for previous ones.
JDB: I'm still the voyeur. I write the music and sing other people's lyrics.

I take it you're just very comfortable with the lyrics that Nicky and Richey come up with.
JDB: Well, you know, my dictum, my rule, is that I never, ever write the music without the lyrics. I get the lyrics, then I sit down and I write the music. Other bands, they'll get lyrics and they'll go, "I've got a song that fits that." They'll have a couple of tunes hanging around, which they've just written sitting around the house, and they'll just put it to the lyrics when the lyrics come to them. I don't do that. I get the lyrics and I sit down and I interpret it. I only ever write around the lyrics. That's one of my rules. The other rule is that before I start writing a tune for a song, I've got to take the lyrics for the song to a level of my understanding. There's no point in sitting down if you don't know what the lyrics infer; there's no point trying to write to it. I take what I do on a very interpretive basis.

Does that always agree with what Nicky and Richey are thinking about when they write the lyrics?
JDB: Yeah, I've got another rule. I have all these rules, which I have to understand they're not necessarily going to accept. This may sound a bit pretentious, but it's very voyeuristic - it's almost like an acting role. Somebody who acts doesn't necessarily have to agree with it, he's just got to try to understand but he doesn't have to accept it. But we've all grown up with each other, in the same environment, with similar socioeconomic things, and there's hardly anything we disagree about. So many things we've been through are shared that I feel a natural affinity with the lyrics anyway, just by default because we all grew up with each other.

Do you have any desire to write lyrics of your own?
JDB: I like the way we do things. I think I see a very complete picture of what we do. I think there should be more interpretation in pop music. I like doing it, I'm completely satisfied.

Most of what I've learned about you, apart from through listening to the albums, is from the British press - mainly from Simon Price at Melody Maker. I'm interested in how, especially when you first signed to Sony, you had this dichotomy between your independent message and this major-label, corporate structure. There was a sense of, “No matter what happens, we're part of the machine." Isn't it almost too easy to say that?
JDB: I've always thought that we validated our existence by having so much commentary in our songs, you know? I think our lyrics are brilliant and I think what we say in our lyrics is brilliant. I'm full-on very pompous about that, and I don't even fucking write the things. To get wrapped up in arguments about setting up this new independent state for groups and stuff would completely obliterate any chance we've got of just putting our point across. It's just a very, very simple argument. If you're worried about bands, worried about them getting caught in a corporate machine and prostituting themselves, then you might as well just wipe off your Billboard Top 40, because all those bands are doing it through major distribution. They're doing it through the corporates. They are at the mercy of the corporates. The one thing we're all doing is, we're actually keeping independent language. We're keeping our own dialogue, and that's all you can do. I think it takes a fucking genius to get in the Top 10 and not have some kind of corporation help. It's a fact of life. My father's got a job and he's a good man; he believes a lot of things I believe. I really admire him. But I know his limitations, and I know our limitations. If you think you can take an independent label and make it big worldwide without the help of a corporation, then you're a genius. We're coming to terms with it. There's a lot of things we care about, and there's a lot of things you're right about. We devote ourselves to our songs, basically. That's one issue I'm not going to put myself on a rack about, because I know we've thought about it, we've been on an indie, and the mere existence of independent labels… they're cool, you know. They gave us a break. But one thing you realise when you move from an independent label to a corporation label is that independent labels can be corrupt too - there's corruption on a smaller scale. There's good and there's bad things about independents and corporates. If you really care about what you say in your songs, you'll come to terms with it and just try and get your point across.

Is there a danger that the lyrics can get completely lost in the music, that people won't pick them up? Do you feel that you can only get across to so many people?
JDB: We've been brash sometimes, but even we wouldn't be so contentious or arrogant as to demand something of the audience. I go on the stage, put it out there, and it's at the mercy of them. If somebody comes up to me and says, "I love you as a band. I love the music," and I ask them about the lyrics and they say, "Well, you know, they're fine, but it doesn't really have an effect on my life," I'm not going to pummel their skulls and say, "Why aren't you part of this intelligent experience?" I'm not that didactic. I'm not that dogmatic. Not by nature, anyway. We do it for ourselves first. There's no prerequisites for what somebody's going to take from you.

One thing I also found out through Melody Maker was about Richey and his hospitalisation this past year. At one point, in an interview with Taylor Parkes, you and Nicky were complaining about all this highly unwelcome attention, lots of misinterpretations. It was almost like some of the British press thought, Oh, America had Kurt Cobain and now we have this - our own little homegrown tragedy. Was there a sense of that?
JDB: I won't go into details, but when it first happened, we didn't think, Oh my god, we've just finished an album. The promotional push is all fucked up. We didn't think that. We thought, Oh, fucking hell, you know, our friend, one of our best friends, had gone completely off the fucking edge. And we just dealt with it as four friends, first of all. We realised we had to catch the unwanted attention from the spooks in the press, who get slightly morbid about it, so we wanted to keep it under wraps. We wanted to keep it a secret, we didn't want to make a big thing out of it. And they found out about it - I'm sure somebody from the hospital there in Wales wanted to inform the press about it - so we had it on our hands and they were just breaking the story. You know the British press. We didn't want to seem like we were going to try and use it to our advantage, but some people were going to think that. So basically, yeah. I thought there was a lot of morbid interest there. A lot of myth-makers started getting their presses out. Everybody wants a myth. Myths are so rare these days; myths are a thing of the past. And they just want to be in on it. It's the nature of the British press. We manipulated it - it's the nature of the beast - so we can't really complain, but I did feel they were slightly irresponsible, especially towards Richey's family. They didn't consider the far-reaching effects for his family, and I don't think they were giving his family any privacy. That was terrible. The British music press sets itself up on a higher moral ground, and I thought they were being very hypocritical at one point.

Beyond the music, how calculated is your image and your projection of yourselves, on stage and on video?
JDB: It isn't calculated. When a band pretends to bond with an audience, when a band pretends to be so earnest on stage, and gets offstage and treats everybody like shit, that's very calculated. We just have a very simple explanation of what we do. What we do on stage is basically us copying what we saw as kids, which a lot of people do. We were into The Clash, we were into Public Enemy. We try to project an image which is perhaps slightly larger than life, especially in Nicky's case or Richey's case - it's normal for us because those are the groups we were into. You are what you admire, or you try to be. I see some groups go on stage and touch hands with the audience, and they think they're giving the audience something, and that's bullshit. I've got too much respect for the audience for that. I may not smile much but I like to have a good time. I do. It's a licence to make a complete arsehole of yourself, and I like that.

From what I've heard so far, every song on this album seems to be introduced by a little sample. I was amused by the one at the start of 'Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit'sworldwouldfallapart' - was that something that you found, or did you create it? Because it sounds like a lot of the ads I hear on TV here.
JDB: It's something we found, yeah.

Oh god, I'm sorry. It's another example of American culture at its worst.
JDB: It's the best country in the world too, though. That's what our song's about. The first time I came to America, it was the most immediate impression I ever had: "My god, it's the best country in the world. My god, it's the worst country in the world. My god, it's so interesting - it's the most ethnically diverse country in the world, and one of the most racist in the world." I loved it and I hated it at the same time. It was such a strange, contradictory experience coming here. I think I'm beginning to love it more than I hate it, to be honest.

You talked recently - in another recent issue of Melody Maker - about how Guns N' Roses were good at one point and now they've collapsed. Why do you think that happens? How do you try to avoid it?
JDB: People loved Guns N' Roses because they were like cartoon characters, like caricatures, and I don't think they realised that. Axl Rose is like a composite myth rock & roll character and as soon as he starts taking himself seriously, you know it's going to go seriously wrong. Also, they don't realise that that's how an audience bonds with a band. You see a band like Guns N' Roses and, as corny as it is, they did seem like a gang. Then they all started splitting up, it's obvious they're not even friends anymore. What's the point? That kind of naive bond you have when you're a young kid, it's all lost. It's the same with The Clash. Once all the in-fighting started, you just know that the bond that gave them their music is just gone.

I'm not asking you to predict the future, but do you think that if that happened in your band - and I'm not saying it will - would you split up?
JDB: The only that would make me feel like splitting up is if we didn't get on anymore, because that would be a disaster. We've all been best friends since we were born. If we felt like we weren't best friends anymore, I'd be beside myself. That's never going to happen, I don't think, but that's what would make me feel like, This is not worth it. It's something I enjoy with my friends, being near them, and if it ceased to be like that then I'd call it a day.

I forget which one of you said this, in an interview I read somewhere, you were talking about how you felt you'd read everything, listened to everything, you were almost like, "Well, now what do we do?" How would you answer that?
JDB: I think it was Richey who said that, but I think he was talking about being a fan - he wasn't talking about Richey the artiste or anything. He was talking about being a consumer, somebody wanting to find things he could like and be a fan of, and I think what me and Richey were talking about there - and he articulated it a bit clearer to me, and I kind of understand - we just realised at one point that we're in love with failure. Everything we love just completely failed, whether it be an ideology, even religion… all religions have failed. Well, our religion has failed, Christianity, if you're brought up in quite a Christian background. But all our favourite philosophy or ideology, it's all glorious failure. Our idea of us was packed with much more excitement than reality. It was much more idealistic than the reality. We failed on our own terms, too. I think that's all he meant, really. When you're young, you believe in so many of these things, and you think you can make them work. You think you can take an old idea from an author or something and make it work. But then you realise it's this whole composite of failure - modern life is failure. I think that's what he meant. There's nothing you can really, really, really believe in. There's nothing you know that can't be tarnished by failure. It didn't stop me trying to find something. But you do get the realisation that you can't expect anything to really succeed on its own terms.

If you've reached the point where it seems everything has failed, and yet you're still keeping your eyes open and seeing what might happen, then what do you do - not as a musician but just as a person? You gave me some sense of that, but is there anything more you can say?
JDB: No, to be honest. I really have just come to terms with it. It's like, you just shop around for little bits. You become a magpie and you steal a lot of bits and you take what you need. Almost like we're a lot of thieves, really. We just realise that there's no point taking the whole deal so we just take a little bit and use what we need.

What do you think you've been able to do, with your three albums - or if that has failed, then how has it failed?
JDB: I think, at the start, we established a language. I've always thought the band had an exclusive language, in our lyrics, the way we presented them with the music. I always thought there was something really illogical about us - you could never apply any kind of logic to us. I always thought it was quite religious, that we spoke in tongues. And we did lose it there for a while on the second album but I was quite invigorated by that in a way, because we recognised this ourselves and we got ourselves back on track. We proved to ourselves that we could go and record an album outside of the record industry. We had the strength to do that. We established our own dialogue again, and didn't worry about the consequences. So it's good - we started out with so much arrogance and we started out so blase about what we thought was our own intelligence. We realised that we made a mistake there, but we addressed the situation ourselves. Nobody had to do it for us. For me, that's the biggest achievement on this album.

What do you think is the function of art, of your art? Is it to portray something? Is it to force a decision on the viewer, to leave options open?
JDB: The only way I can answer that is by talking in reference to where I came from. I have a very working-class background on that stuff. When we were just getting into music, the miners' strike was going on and I realised one thing. That strike lasted a whole year, and it completely failed. Everybody lost out on that deal. They lost their jobs, they lost the fight, they lost everything. But I realised in the community, people were almost in love with this martyr kind of thing. They'd all become martyrs. They'd all fought to the end. At least they had that, even though they were left with nothing and they lost, they were almost partying on it. They had a big party, like, "Yeah, we showed our spirit." I understand that, but I think it's one of the sicknesses of the working classes, that they still want their martyrs. Almost like I said before, they're still in love with failure. That's perhaps why we seem a bit nihilistic or a bit unemotional in some of our songs. I think that's because of where we come from; it's quite a sickness, really, to be in love with being a failure, to want to be a martyr to your own community. That's the only thing we've managed to do for ourselves, to take ourselves to a different plane. Even though I love where I come from, and I love all the people where I come from, I think that's our biggest achievement: we realised we don't want to be in love with failure all our lives, and we want to do something about it.