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Nicky Wire awoke on 12 May 1994 to the news that John Smith, leader of the Labour Party, had died of a heart attack, aged fifty-five.

Wire hadn't necessarily been John Smith's biggest champion. Since taking over from Neil Kinnock in 1992, the leader of the opposition's modest public profile and risk-averse strategy had thus far succeeded only in frustrating both the left and right wings of his party. Early into recording The Holy Bible, Nicky had been midway through a gesticulatory rant about how Labour would never win an election with Smith at the helm when he accidentally knocked over James Dean Bradfield's beloved white Gibson Les Paul. Both watched in horror as the guitar's neck snapped. But nearly three months on, Smith's sudden, wholly unexpected death struck Wire as symptomatic of a grievous prevailing mood. 'I didn't feel at all well around this time,' he says. 'For the rest of the year I thought I was going to have a heart attack.'

Smith's death occurred the morning after Manic Street Preachers returned from Braga in Portugal, where they had played their first show since Bangkok the previous month a trip overshadowed by Richey Edwards slashing his chest in the Thai capital's MBK Hall dressing room with a set of ceremonial knives gifted to him by a young fan. Not for the first time, Edwards's act of selfharm had been witnessed by an NME journalist and photographer, thereby feeding the ongoing mythology of rock 'n' roll doom that seemed to swirl around the band. Portugal too had been traumatic, with Edwards's behaviour indicating Thailand fitted an ongoing pattern. 'Things were going awry,' Wire told NME's Stuart Bailie. 'We had to put him to bed one night... he just burst out crying in the car.' James Dean Bradfield added: 'It was horrible. Richey was crying uncontrollably all the time.' The band members began to feel that Portugal was becoming their 'bogey country': during their previous visit, on 7 December 1993, they heard the news that their manager Philip Hall had died.

Shortly after the band returned from Thailand, one of Edwards's best friends from university killed himself. A couple of weeks earlier, as work on The Holy Bible neared completion, Kurt Cobain was found dead at his home in Seattle, aged twenty-seven. 'The zeitgeist of this year in general is fucking death and destruction,' said Wire. Bradfield phoned Edwards to tell him the news about Cobain. 'I can't pretend I remember what he said,' Bradfield later recalled. 'Not "good on him", nothing so easy to digest as that, but it was something which expressed admiration. [I remember] thinking: "Please just react in a human way rather than on an intellectual level. Just leave it as it is if something is happening and it's bad, just leave it there.""

— 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure by Keith Cameron (Page 123 - 124)

The sleeve of Generation Terrorists featured a quotation specific to each song, presenting the album as the musical sum of its literary and philosophical inputs. In contrast, Gold Against The Soul had just one: Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi's poem 'Song of Those Who Died in Vain', an indictment of war's political architects that gave voice to 'the innocents slaughtered . . . the conquered. . . [the] already dead', ending with the promise, 'If the havoc and the shame continue/We'll drown you in our putrefaction.'

Printed in full - clearance for which delayed the album's release by several weeks - Levi's poem wasn't linked to any one particular song, but seemed most apposite in relation to 'La Tristesse Durera (Scream To A Sigh)'. The song's title came from Vincent Van Gogh's final words ('la tristesse durera toujours'/'the sadness will last for ever'), albeit chosen by Nicky Wire for their poetic resonance rather than any desire to create a song about a suicidally depressed artist. 'I remember scrambling around, thinking I actually need to write a lyric about a subject, rather than just "culture, alienation, boredom and despair". Because there was still this idea that we were po-faced Marxists or something. And you know, the myth of war heroism and the way we treat old people is very much A Subject. So I wrote loads of the words and then Richey's definitely come in and added some.'

— 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure by Keith Cameron (Page 103 - 104)

With Use Your Illusion I e II successfully bought, along with a CD for Ollivier to thank him for the lift (he chose Metallica's 'Black Album'), they drove back to Surrey and an expectant Nicky Wire for the two-and-a-half-hour listening session. 'We stayed up all night playing those albums,' Wire later recalled. 'It was really bad, because the first side of Use Your Illusion I is terrible, and we were like, "Fucking hell, what's gone wrong?"'

The malevolent energy of Appetite For Destruction was now barely visible beneath multiple layers of hack rock cliché and filigreed turgidity like 'November Rain'. 'Terrible' or not, however, the first week numbers for Use Your Illusion I e II were consistent with Guns N' Roses' status as the world's most commercially potent rock band, with sales of 685,000 and 770,000 respectively. The quality of the music was secondary to the fact of its actual existence: recording and mixing sessions overran so much that the Use Your Illusion tour began three months before the albums it was supposed to promote were even finished. But as time would prove, size matters only up to a point. When Nirvana arrived at MCA's London office in early November for a day of interviews before the European leg of the Nevermind tour, they were confronted with a wall-sized poster honouring GN'R's 31 August gig at Wembley: 'Guns N' Fuckin' Roses! Wembley Fuckin' Stadium! Sold Fuckin' out!' Invited to comment on his labelmates' achievement, Kurt Cobain took a pen and added to the poster: 'Big Fuckin' Deal!'

— 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure by Keith Cameron (Page 70)

'Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.'

– Thomas Jefferson

— 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure by Keith Cameron (Page 64)

The lyric's original inspiration came when Nicky heard a radio documentary about Silent Spring, the landmark 1962 book by Rachel Carson which exposed the environmental impact of pesticides such as DDT and the co-dependent relationship between the scientific and military industries. (In 2016, David Attenborough cited Silent Spring as the book that changed the world most after Darwin's On the Origin of Species.) Beyond the specific reference to 'Exxon', which had topicality due to ongoing repercussions from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, Wire and Edwards applied a broad-brush treatment, positing humanity's eco-selfishness as a metaphor for capitalism's imperialist exploitation of developing economies ('Third world to the first'), whereby the poor pay for the greed of the rich. Amid some ear-catching singalong lines 'Worms in the garden more real than a McDonald's' - its overall message gets a little lost in the all-pervasive hysteria. Ultimately, 'Slash 'N' Burn' was all about the inescapable logic of that fourbar motif, preferably with added cowbell.

'I was extremely excited by everything about "Slash 'N' Burn" once we were done,' Wire says. 'Obviously it's the naivety, the youth and the glory - the vainglory - but it still lifts me when I hear it. Because it's so overreaching. A band trying so hard to be something that they actually can't be, that they're never going to get to, even now.'

— 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure by Keith Cameron (Page 60 - 61)

'Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.'

– Lord Thurlow

— 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure by Keith Cameron (Page 56)

'We wanna be the biggest rock 'n' roll nightmare ever and we wanna take the monarchy and the House of Lords with us... We've spray-painted our school shirts to wipe out the brainwash and the boredom. . . When we jump onstage it is not rock 'n' roll cliché but the geometry of contempt." Wells was bedazzled. 'They have more energy and anger and intelligence than any other band I have ever interviewed,' he declared.

Melody Maker's Bob Stanley was treated to similar hot metal gold: 'We want to set fire to ourselves on Top of the Pops!' Meanwhile, Andy Peart of Sounds asked where the Manic Street Preachers might be in twenty years' time. 'In the grave,' Wire declared, with Richey adding: 'Hopefully.'

— 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure by Keith Cameron (Page 23)

There's a sense that the Manics' musical achievements are taken for granted, a byproduct of the fact they never broke up, even at the moment when their situation appeared utterly broken. Also, because their individual components are so idiosyncratic, the Manics have had a surprisingly limited musical influence. Apple Music's 'Inspired By Manic Street Preachers' playlist is thinly spread over fifteen tracks of mostly generic nineties alt-rock, and even features one solo track each by James Dean Bradfield and Nicky Wire to bulk up the numbers.

On the other hand, a search for 'Manic Street Preachers' on the academic digital library JSTOR brings 858 results. More scholarly papers have been written about the Manics than bands formed in emulation. This partly explains why other groups of their generation are playing stadiums on the nostalgia circuit, yet the Manics have always dealt in a different currency. Anyone seeking to fathom today's contemporary landscape of tech-dysfunction and resurgent fascist demagogues could do worse than sift these 168 songs for clues from history. Educators as well as entertainers, there's something glorious about their desire to continue the dialogue. As Sean Moore says, 'To achieve the perfect song - that's the only thing that keeps us going.'

— 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure by Keith Cameron (Page 5)

'For us, music and words came first, and everything else was secondary.'

– Richey Edwards, 1993

— 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure by Keith Cameron (Page 1)

Jag fortsätter att hitta min frizon i Spermaharen. Det är nåt med den totala idiotin, den fullständiga meningslösheten, som befriar mig.

Det finns en scen i Woody Allens Hannah och hennes systrar där Woody Allen är på väg att ta livet av sig men istället av en slump hamnar på en Bröderna Marx-film på bio och får tillbaka sin livslust av deras tramsiga dans. Så är det för mig också. Jag lyser upp när jag befinner mig nära epicentrum av det mest meningslösa. Meningslösheten ger mitt liv mening där jag inte trodde mig kunna hitta nån. Verkligheten är för svår att stanna upp vid, bara det mest meningslösa och idiotiska kan ge mitt liv den känsla av fantastiskhet som fortfarande genomströmmar mina drömmar.

Vilken ynnest att jag just i denna tid är kontrakterad att leverera litervis med dårskap varje vecka, annars hade jag inte haft nånstans att stoppa allt det självhat som nu förlösts och sköljer över mig.

— Självbiografi. 1984-2001 by Martin Luuk (Page 302)

Jag vet vad människor menar när de säger att de vill vara fria. Först vill de vara fria att vara sig själva, men det är bara en chimär. En station man passerar. Den verkliga friheten är att vara fri från sig själv.

— Självbiografi. 1984-2001 by Martin Luuk (Page 260)

Broder Daniels första skiva hade inte gjort nåt vidare intryck på mig, jag avfärdade dem som ett skämtband, men när den andra kommer med "Work" som förstasingel går Putti och jag och ser dem på Studion och jag blir helt knockad. Det är ett band som är lätt att identifiera sig med, ett band för alla losers och misfits och outcasts. Deras texter är korta, ibland bara en rad eller två som upprepas, men de säger allt som behöver sägas.

Every day is just the same, every day is just the same.

De är som en liten passionerad knytnäve mitt i det glada ironiska stockholmska 90-talet och i flera år ska jag se dem närhelst jag kan, tio år äldre och ett huvud högre än pandatjejerna som är deras största fans, men precis som dem känner jag starkt att BD bara är "mitt band".

Ibland tänker jag: Det jag vill göra har inget med humor att göra alls. Andra dagar tänker jag att det är precis tvärtom: Jag ÄR humor, allt jag gör, vartenda steg jag tar, vartenda andetag är ren och oförfalskad humor.

— Självbiografi. 1984-2001 by Martin Luuk (Page 251 - 252)