Over the past decade, the Manics have not been shy in celebrating milestone anniversaries. There’s been 20th anniversary tours for their 1994 classic third album The Holy Bible and its all-conquering follow-up Everything Must Go, deluxe remastered box sets for Know Your Enemy, Gold Against The Soul, Lifeblood and more whilst 2011’s National Treasures – The Complete Singles and an accompanying live show was a euphoric salute to the trio’s mastery of the seven-inch going back to 1991’s Motown Junk.
The celebrations to mark The Holy Bible’s 30th birthday, which was in August earlier this year, were a little more muted. The band’s only public event was a one-off screening of Kieron Evans’ excellent concert film Be Pure – Be Vigilant – Behave but speaking to this writer recently, singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield said he had marked the milestone in his own way.
“I’ve been playing all the guitar parts from The Holy Bible,” he said. “We posted me doing the solo from Faster up on Instagram. In a strange way, The Holy Bible was probably my most involved guitar album. There’s so many parts there where I kept thinking to myself, ‘I’ve got to do better than John McGeogh, I’ve got to do better than Stuart Adamson, I’ve got to do better than Andy Gill, I’ve got to do better than Paul Weller, and so it was a lovely challenge and I’ve been strangely playing and relearning the solos from The Holy Bible lately.”
Asked about another solo that his bandmate had also posted online, the berserka, monumental lead part that brings the menacing Archives Of Pain to its frenzied conclusion, Bradfield said he had put a lot of thought to it.
“The Archives Of Pain solo was one of my biggest being an utter pretentious fuck with method guitar playing,” he stated. “I had a whole theory in my head about the power of a legal state, the illegality of the power that the state wields upon you and how it kind of turns people into automatons and how they eventually rise from the yoke of real state power. I had it all in my head, I wrote the solo with that in my head. It was a bit of a folly. It was me being a complete and utter dunderhead. But it's nice to be pretentious when you're that young. It's good, it's an adventure and it gives you power.”
Bask in the glorious folly below:
