Description
Signed edition, with a unique cover designed by Nicky Wire and signed by Nicky, James Dean Bradfield, Sean Moore (all members of the band) and Keith Cameron, the writer.
The story of Manic Street Preachers is unique in pop. Raging out of the stricken mining communities of south Wales in the late 80s, they were bonded by friendships, family ties and a self-styled 'geometry of contempt', whereby James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore would orchestrate the daring intellectual broadsides written by Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire. Seemingly condemned to mere cult status by a cruel juncture of artistic triumph, commercial failure and personal despair, the story took an agonising twist when the tragedy of Edwards' 1995 disappearance was followed by a remarkable rebirth built upon 'A Design For Life's hymn to the band's working-class roots, and then the award-winning, multi-million-selling album Everything Must Go, a majestic soundtrack to history and loss.
Less than five years later, Manic Street Preachers played to 60,000 at the national stadium of Wales and had their second UK Number 1 single. Subsequent output has confirmed the band as both a wellspring of restless creativity and a barometer of the cultural conversation. Because it was music that saved them, it's through the prism of their music that Keith Cameron tells the definitive story of Manic Street Preachers, drawing on many hours of new interviews to dive deep into 168 songs, from 1988's debut single 'Suicide Alley' to the late day peaks of 2025's album Critical Thinking.
Writing with the band's full co-operation, his book charts the dynamic evolution of a universe in which Karl Marx and Kylie Minogue happily co-exist, that accords Rush and The Clash equal favour, and where Morrissey & Marr meet Torvill & Dean via Nietzsche and New Order in a single four-minute pop song - all in the name of what Nicky Wire himself calls 'the fabulous disaster' of Manic Street Preachers.
Formed in 1988, and with 14 albums to their name, Manic Street Preachers are an
established feature of British rock landscape. So much so, that it's easy to mistake the
band's ongoing presence as an inevitability. Long before their narrative's traumatic fissure - the disappearance of Richey Edwards in February 1995 - the Manics seemed destined for merely ephemeral notoriety: early gigs were 20-minute exercises in "hate-noise", while their first records scrambled art and politics with punk's Situationist rhetoric, culminating in the rock'n'roll culturecide of Motown Junk ("Stops your brain thinking for 168 seconds").
They promised to make a multi-million-selling debut album and then break up. Inevitably, real life got in the way. History and loss are intrinsic to the Manics' psyche. So too an oft-overlooked sense of mischief. Each record has been a real-time cultural barometer, an intersection point for politics, philosophy, art, even sport, and featuring a diverse cast of characters: Friedrich Nietzsche, John Lennon, Sylvia Plath, Shaun Ryder, Stephen Hawking, Michel Foucault, Jackie C ollins, Neil Kinnock, Yves Klein, Harold Pinter, Richard Nixon, Noam Chomsky, Paul Robeson, Giant Haystacks, Picasso, Steve Ovett, George Orwell and many, many more... plus, of course, the Manic Street Preachers themselves.
This book will tell the whole story, from 1988's Suicide Alley to the present day, via 168
songs chosen by the author and Nicky Wire to illuminate the dynamic evolution of the
Manics' music.
Hardback, slip-case edition, signed by the band and the author
Publication: 11 Sept 2025
ISBN: 9781399607407
Extent: 560 pages
