Lock up your T-shirts and CDs

The way they were: Manic Street Preachers, c.1990

Since 1996, every couple of years or so, for a period of about a year, I have to be careful which T-shirt I grab from my drawer and also have to sacrifice a small part of my CD collection.

Why must I do this?

Because every couple of years since 1996, Manic Street Preachers release another terrible album, and I have to ensure I am not seen wearing or listening to anything that might associate me with them.

I first heard of the Manics in July or August 1990. They had just released their third(?) single, "Motown Junk", and had featured on a TV show (Rapido, was it?). Two of their number wore make-up and tight white jeans and home-made T-shirts with various pseudo-political slogans. Those two looked spooky cool, like twins or camp gay lovers. The other two looked a bit lame, with no make-up and bad haircuts.

I was in a band at the time. I figured we were way better than the Manics. The history books, though, seem to dispute this.

Eventually, a few months later, I succumbed to the charms of the group. I bought their first album as soon as it was released. I bought the singles, the T-shirts. I went to see them several times throughout 1992, once even being on the guest list to interview them for a fanzine, though the interview fell through.

I still have the unused ticket from that gig. I'd bought it before knowing I'd get on the guest list. I figured I could sell it at the venue, but there was no one there to sell it to! The place was almost completely empty.

The band went from strength to strength, via a somewhat unconvincing second album, up to and including the powerhouse masterwork The Holy Bible. I mean, how can anyone not love an album that opens with the words "For sale. Dumb cunts, same dumb questions"?

Then the inevitable happened. Their lyrical genius, chief architect, and self-harming anorexic Richey Edwards disappeared in early 1995. No one has seen or heard from him since, and if he is dead his body has never been found.

If that was inevitable, so too was the downhill slide of the Manics' music. From the top of the world, musically speaking, to another unconvincing album, followed by a fifth, sixth, and now seventh studio album. I stopped buying their records (singles and albums) after that fifth album. For me it was unlistenable, and not in the good way that people said The Holy Bible was unlistenable, or PJ Harvey's Rid of Me, or Nirvana's In Utero.

The Manic Street Preachers had become unlistenable in that they had become old, tired, and boring, writing lyrics about household chores and, in interviews, praising the virtues of Dyson vacuum cleaners.

This morning -- a bit behind the times, I know -- I heard their latest single for the first time. I am so mortally embarrassed. I thought they could sink no lower than they already had, but I was wrong.

I know I should make sure not to listen to any Manics records for a good few months. But I also feel I have to wash my brain now, clear my eardrums. Perhaps the only way to do that is to listen again to the band at their peak.

I feel like someone has taken a hugely important part of my past and razed it to the ground, only to build a fucking McDonald's on top of it. Manic Street Preachers have become a bunch of cunts. And not in a good way.

No more will they write the sort of lyric that must be every parent's nightmare:

4st 7lb
Days since I last pissed
Cheeks sunken and despaired
So gorgeous, sunk to six stone
Lose my only remaining home

See my third rib appear
A week later all my flesh disappears
Stretching taut, cling-film on bone
I'm getting better

Karen says I've reached my target weight
Kate and Emma and Kristin know it's fake
Problem is diet's not a big enough word
I wanna be so skinny that I rot from view

I want to walk in the snow
And not leave a footprint
I want to walk in the snow
And not soil its purity

Stomach collapsed at five
Lift up my skirt my sex is gone
Naked and lovely at 5 stone 2
May I bud and never flower

My vision's getting blurred
But I can see my ribs and I feel fine
My hands are trembling stalks
And I can feel my breasts are sinking

Mother tries to choke me with roast beef
And sits savouring her sole Ryvita
That's the way you're built my father said
But I can change, my cocoon shedding

I want to walk in the snow
And not leave a footprint
I want to walk in the snow
And not soil its purity

Kate and Kristin and Kit Kat
All things I like looking at
Too weak to fuss, too weak to die
Choice is skeletal in everybody's life

I choose my choice, I starve to frenzy
Hunger soon passes and sickness soon tires
Legs bend, stockinged I am Twiggy
And I don't mind the horror that surrounds me

Self-worth scatters, self-esteem's a bore
I long since moved to a higher plateau
This discipline's so rare so please applaud
Just look at the fat scum who pamper me so

Yeah 4 stone 7, an epilogue of youth
Such beautiful dignity in self-abuse
I've finally come to understand life
Through staring blankly at my navel.