Some bands wear their influences on their sleeve; the Manic Street Preachers paper walls with them. When you climb the stairs to the living room of the trio’s Faster Studios in central Cardiff, you’re greeted by a vast photographic collage of their inspirations: Ian Curtis and Tony Hancock, Miles Davis and Malcolm Tucker, Fela Kuti and Norman Mailer, and so on, in a visual representation of magpie curiosity. The studio is named after their megalomaniacal 1994 single that declared, “I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer./I spat out Plath and Pinter.”
“This jumble of quotes is ingrained in my head,” says the bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire, offering me a pallid brew he not unfairly describes as the worst cup of tea in history. “I don’t even know what I’m nicking most of the time because there’s just a mass of shit in there.” He has a mind like a filing cabinet from which he compulsively plucks quotations (Nietzsche, Stockhausen, Rodchenko), not to flaunt his erudition but because, you suspect, he prefers their formulations to his own: “We’ve always been honest that the things we’re trying to pass on are better than what we can do as a band.” A current favourite, from the American photographer William Eggleston, is particularly apt: “I’m at war with the obvious.”
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