As ever with the constraints of a 200-ish-word review, there's so much more that could be said about Keith Cameron's wonderful new book 168 Songs Of Hatred And Failure: A History Of Manic Street Preachers than I could accommodate in my appraisal for Buzz.
About all of the little gems of information peppered throughout the text. I had no idea, for instance, that Richey James' vision for the follow-up to The Holy Bible was a record that sounded like "a mix between Nine Inch Nails and Screamadelica and Pantera". Mercifully, we got the magisterial Everything Must Go instead.
About how Cameron's discussion of the material on The Holy Bible really brings out what an extraordinary album it is - raw, tortured, provocative - especially given the timing of its release at the peak of Britpop.
About the book's insights into the band's unusual creative dynamic, whereby the lyrics are almost always written by Nicky Wire and then given to James Dean Bradfield to sing, while Bradfield and Sean Moore come up with the music. Bradfield doesn't seem fazed by continually having someone else's words put in his mouth - though he admits that he hasn't always understood what Wire (and James) have handed him, or indeed agreed with the sentiments or views expressed.
About how their songs often inadvertently but sometimes deliberately echo the work of others - artists as diverse as Simple Minds, Guns 'N' Roses, Pink Floyd and ABBA. I now won't be able to hear 'Little Baby Nothing', 'No Surface All Feeling' or 'Intravenous Agnostic' without thinking of Bruce Springsteen, Smashing Pumpkins and Dinosaur Jr/Sonic Youth respectively.
About their dogged survival instinct and their perpetual attempts to write their way out of creative cul-de-sacs and reinvent themselves while still retaining their recognisable identity - something that is all the more remarkable when you consider that, as gobby, contrarian, self-styled generation terrorists, they initially envisaged releasing just one album and then pressing the self-destruct button. However patchy recent records have been, I'm very glad they didn't.
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