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.

Post #500, wherein I pay tribute to Richey Edwards and consider whether my idea of love comes from a childhood glimpse of pornography

Richey Edwards, chief lyric writer for Manic Street Preachers, was a genius. I am thinking about him right now for the same reason I do every December. On 21 December 1994, Richey played his last gig with the group, and so ended an era. So we saw the demise of the most important rock band Britain had seen in many years. On the very cusp of world domination. At the top of their craft. Well, where else can you go but down when you're at the top?

I was there that night, at London's Astoria. I recorded the gig for posterity, just as I had several Manics gigs before, on a portable tape recorder. I didn't know this would be Richey's last gig and that within four months he would disappear, never to be seen again.

But as one fire ended, another began. I returned home that night to an answerphone message telling me that my first nephew had been born. And on the subject of babies...

I'm unsure now, but it's likely that the Manic Street Preachers song "Little Baby Nothing", from their debut album Generation Terrorists was what introduced me to the "charms" of Traci Lords. Shortly thereafter I first saw some of her work, but only snippets buried among other scenes on "Best Of" tapes borrowed from my boss at the comic shop where I worked. Of the seemingly thousands of Traci Lords films out there, a great majority are actually compilation videos that contain scenes from her films. To add further confusion, many of these videos are known by more than one name: issue 1 (1990) of the UK Traci fanzine Norma K says, "Talk Dirty to Me 3 has three other titles", and it goes on to list them as Trials of Traci, Sensual Mermaid, and Irresistible Siren.

But let's go way back for a minute and think about my earliest exposure to pornography. I think I was about 12 years old. It's difficult to be sure now that so many years have passed. Some neighbours of my parents came to visit and they had a Betamax tape with them. I didn't know what was on the tape, but I seem to recall that we kids were ushered out of the lounge so it could be viewed. Later I was told it was a horror film, and I had no reason to disbelieve that. At a later date, though, probably during the school holidays, these neighbours' kid found this horror tape; it was labelled "Blood on Satan's Claw". Sounds like a horror movie, and it is a horror movie (known as Satan's Skin in the US). But what was on the tape turned out to be my first exposure to porn.

I don't recall anything about that film now. Through the years that followed, though, I (as many young men do) acquired various porn videos from various sources. A few of them are now long gone, unfortunately. But I can't quite bring myself to trash what I still have on tape, even though they sit in the cellar, virtually unloved, waiting for me to transfer them to disc. The quality is so poor, though, that it seems pointless putting them on to DVD. So titles such as Sex Boat, 19 and Nasty, Mr John Makes Candles at Home look set to lay there until the end of time. Okay, that last title doesn't actually exist; it's what my supplier wrote on the label to hide the fact that it was porn. "Mr John" is of course John Holmes, but I don't remember why the reference to candles. This same chap had about 30 three-hour videos of porn. I mean, he was quite the collector.

I remember one time when he came back from the States, one of his suitcases got lost, and it was the case full of all the porn he'd picked up there. This was back in the days when porn was literally outlawed in the UK -- about 1992. There was no legal hardcore porn back then. All you could get was badly cut versions of hardcore or terrible simulated stuff. He called me up; he was in a terrible state. He'd had to leave his key with airport officials, just in case they needed to do a random routine check of his baggage when it finally arrived. I stayed at his house with him, his dog, cats, and a couple of other pet things that rhyme with cats but I won't write down because Red can't bear even to see the word. We waited until about 11 o'clock, playing video games and watching his pirate copy of the extras from the Alien laser disc. And finally the suitcase arrived, unopened, no questions asked.

A couple of years later, and I was working in London as the manager of a betting shop near the Holloway Road. One morning when I was alone in the shop one of my punters came in. He was probably in his mid-50s but looked a bit older. Typical old-school London bloke. "Oi," he said. "You like blue movies?" Despite trying to be a professional businessman, what could I say? "Yeah, course," that's what. He produced a couple of tapes from his pockets. "You want these for a tenner?" So I bought them blind, little knowing that one of them would contain my first full-length Traci Lords film (although she is only in it for a couple of scenes, I think): Black Throat. It's a film in which Rosco, "a typical white guy", sets off to find Madame Mambo, an expert in fellatio. What follows is "an odyssey of sexual rendezvous". It's a good movie!

Porn flicks these days are not really as good as those old ones, are they? Don't we all feel that way? Indeed, this is part of the tale told in Boogie Nights. Video saved the industry undoubtedly. Made it bigger than ever. But despite the huge budgets bestowed upon porn these days, they still look pretty cheap compared to the movies that were shot on film. And with very few exceptions -- Jenna Jameson, for example -- surely there aren't the same sort of stars out there these days. I guess, though, it's horses for courses, and people will be nostalgic for what they first encountered, much as they do for music and (non-porn) films and actors.

Certainly, it's true to say that I am not extremely well versed in modern "blue movies". Some of what I've seen is pretty good, though, so maybe someone out there reading this can point to to the true classics of 21st-century porn cinema -- the stuff that a whole generation will look back on and say, "Y'know, that's where my idea of love comes from"...

The cult of the ever-youthful dead pop star

One of my earliest childhood memories -- and certainly my first real brush with popular culture -- is the death of Elvis. Of course, I knew not who he was really, although I do recall telling my mum that her boyfriend was dead. Seems I was wrong, though, and it was Alvin Stardust who she had a thing for.

Regardless, the notion of dead pop star as icon and cult was born, for me, there and then, and I lapped up Elvis's music via my dad's record collection. Sadly, my brother and I probably ruined many highly collectable discs in the process.

Other dead icons preceded Elvis of course: Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix to name but a few. I have nothing much to add. I despise The Doors and Morrison. Joplin, whatever. Hendrix, yeah he's all right...

A couple of years later I discovered Buddy Holly. This one had been in his grave a while longer, of course. But so devoted was I, that I soon acquired everything I could. The great thing about picking up on a dead artist was that the output was finite. (Or so it seemed in those days.)

It wasn't long before I turned to punk and the Sex Pistols. Oh, look, one of them's dead. I'm sensing a disturbing pattern here... Although it goes without saying that, as this list progresses, Sid Vicious will be seen as the odd one out, being as he was an untalented loser and all.

The 1980s passed without a real notable pop-star death for me, with the exception early on in that decade of John Lennon, and so we move on to the '90s.

In 1991, the Manic Street Preachers landed in my lap with a bang. It felt good to get in at ground level with a new band. Good look, good music (although I thought my band was better at first).

And then came Nirvana. And within a couple of years here was my first first-hand taste of rock martyr, suicide, or whatever you want to call it. Here was an artist who had meant something to me while he was alive, only to have him do himself in. I was used to having dead heroes, but this was my first dead hero that I knew when he was alive.

And then, about a year after Cobain's death, Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers disappears. He'd been clinically depressed for ages. Is he dead? We still don't know. Officially, though, he is, as a result of being missing for so long -- 11 years and counting. So he's kind of my own second dead idol.

I guess Tupac doesn't really count, since my interest in his music really began with his death in 1996. Going to back to my roots, picking up the pieces after the fact. Despite my voracious appetite for his material, the supply soon outstripped my demand, and I had to stop buying his records once it became clear that substandard work was being released. Shame to do that to his memory.

And then, most recently, Elliott Smith, just a few short years ago, who took his own life with several knife wounds to the chest. Umm, yeah, that sounds feasible. He was more Wife's guy than mine, but we did see him perform live and he was undoubtedly a major talent, desperately underapprecieted in his US homeland.

Invariably these deaths all occurred at a young age, too. Of those cited, Elvis made it to 42 -- hardly a ripe old age; Elliott got to 34. Nobody else even made it to 30. Live fast, die young, leave a good-lookin' corpse.

Where does all that leave us?

Beyond a doubt, I am, on a certain level, a victim of the cult of the dead pop star. A performer's passing makes me want to at least check out their oeuvre and see what all the fuss is about.

But it's also true, as evidenced above, that I am drawn to the music of these lost, suicidal souls way before they go the way of all things.

What does that mean?

Is it inevitable that those artists -- poets, performers, men of the people, who put themsleves out there, stripped bare for all to see -- are ultimately doomed to an early grave? Is too much passion a short cut to the hereafter? And is there any truth in my belief that the first of these tortured storytellers -- indeed, the reason for our obsession with the dead pop star -- was Jesus Christ himself?