Once upon a time, I wanted to be a music writer. Thankfully, most of that stuff has long since been lost to the depths of Geocities and printed fanzines, but all you need to know is that I desperately wanted to be Steven Wells and my output reflected that. Yeah.
All of which is to say that I’d planned this month’s newsletter to be a series of vaguely-related bits and pieces on the subject of nostalgia, but my long-buried inner music critic took over and the first one escaped my control. Hopefully these days she’s a bit more grown up and thoughtful.
So, here’s Part One, which talks about my least favourite album by my favourite band, Postcards from a Young Man by Manic Street Preachers.
Over the past few months, I’ve been gradually listening my way through the What is Music? podcast’s deep dive into the Manics’ back catalogue. My most recent listen was their episode on 2010’s Postcards from a Young Man, by a long chalk my least-listened-to Manics album.
I remembered Postcards being fairly well-reviewed when it came out. My own reaction was a resounding “Meh”; I played it a few times and then put it aside. Returning to the album, I wondered if I’d been unfair. Our reactions to art are so often coloured by where we are in our lives when we encounter them, and in 2010 I was in some of the worst mental health of my life. No wonder Postcards’ predecessor, Journal for Plague Lovers, with its scabrous guitars and body horror-adjacent imagery, resonated with me far harder.
Things are different now. I gave the album another chance.
It still left me cold.
It’s inoffensive, listenable pop-rock, which is not what drew me to the Manics in the first place – but their softer, more radio-friendly albums don’t always put me off. In recent years I’ve found myself with a new appreciation for both 2004’s much-maligned Lifeblood and This is My Truth Tell Me Yours, the Manics’ big mid-Nineties hit that seemed custom-designed to shake off their punky early fanbase. Both are mature, thoughtful records that have more to say to me at 40 than they did to the angry teen or twenty-something who first encountered them. So why not this one, too? Listening to What is Music?’s take on it helped crystallise the reasons Postcards doesn’t work for me, and the big one is how it handles nostalgia.
Nostalgia is right there, baked into the album’s title – and despite lyrics like “radio nostalgia is radio death”, it’s been a presence in the Manics’ output from relatively early in their career. Even their excoriating masterpiece The Holy Bible takes a break from songs about genocide and serial killers for the gentle lament of “This is Yesterday” and mourns the loss of an idealised childhood, “clean and so serene”, on “Die in the Summertime”. Journal for Plague Lovers ends on the melancholic grace note of “William’s Last Words”, which serves as the band’s farewell to missing member Richey Edwards. Even their most recent album, 2021’s The Ultra Vivid Lament, looks back at the band’s early days on “Still Snowing in Sapporo”, a gorgeous, swooning paean to times which “may never come again”.
And I love every one of those songs. Why, when Postcards does nothing for me?
Partly it’s in the music. Postcards feels radio-friendly to the point of calculation, afraid to alienate. Hummable pop tunes like “Hazelton Avenue” and “I Think I Found It” are forgettable confections that melt away after a moment on the tongue, while the title track apes the band’s most iconic hit, “A Design for Life,” in a way that feels, well, a little bit cheap.
On the other hand, “This is Yesterday” comes as a desperately-needed moment of relief amid The Holy Bible’s murky guitars and distorted, rapid-fire vocals. “William’s Last Words” serves a similar purpose on Journal for Plague Lovers, and is delivered with a level of sincerity that makes listening to it feel less like being emotionally manipulated, more like intruding on a moment of private grief. There’s a squirmy discomfort to hearing something so personal made into a pop song, and the feeling is heightened by Nicky Wire’s tuneless, unaffected vocal performance, which sounds less like a professional musician than an exhausted father singing a lullaby. Even “Still Snowing in Sapporo”, despite its glittering pop melody, has a glacial, cinematic distance that underscores lyrics about the “video camera filter” through which we see a past that “feels so real, like cheap golden glitter” – always mediated, never to be fully reached or remembered.
Of course, the Manics are a band who’ve always been About The Lyrics at least as much as they’re about those great big pop tunes, and that’s the other place where Postcards disappoints. On the title track, looking back at a more idealistic younger self becomes a source of strength, the song breaking into a triumphal declaration that “this world will not impose its will, I will not give up and I will not give in”. “Hazelton Avenue” begs, “take me back,” and even “Golden Platitudes”, one of the album’s stronger moments, wonders “Where did the feeling go? Where did it all go wrong?”. “A Billion Balconies Facing the Sun” delivers a broadside against a modern world where “we’ve all become our personal gods … a billion faces turned to the screens” that must have felt a little old-man-yells-at-cloud even in 2010.
Ultimately, Postcards fails to complicate its nostalgia, and that’s why it falls apart for me. Compare the first line of “Die in the Summertime”, where the longing for a childhood of scraped knees from playing outside leads to a present-day act of self-harm: “Scratch my leg with a rusty nail / Sadly it heals.” I’m not here to claim that looking back fondly on one’s younger days is always inherently reactionary, but that is one danger of nostalgia. (Take any one of those Facebook groups dedicated to remembering beloved bands and TV shows of the Eighties or Nineties and see how quickly they descend into grousing about kids today with their new-fangled pronouns, or similar right-wing nonsense.) The other is that it’s a paralytic: as James Dean Bradfield sings on “This is Yesterday”, “Why do anything when you can forget everything?”
Whether they’re plumbing stark emotional depths as on the The Holy Bible or acknowledging the simultaneous reality and unreality of the past in more mature fashion, the Manics’ nostalgia is often tempered with the knowledge that pain has always existed, and that at some point, you have to take your eyes off the rear view mirror and look at the road ahead.
Remembering is an act of storytelling, if just to oneself, and as such carries a danger of getting swept up in simplistic, totalising narratives about a simple, golden past. We didn’t have to think about the painful things back then, such stories say – about injustice, or about the vast ungraspable systems that shape our lives, or our complicity in them – and wasn’t that so much nicer? Isn’t talking about those things, making us acknowledge them, a theft of innocence? The reactionary political connections write themselves, mistaking the blinkers of a protected childhood for the absence of bad things. “Do not listen to a word I say, just listen to what I can keep silent,” the Manics sing on “This is Yesterday”. There’s nothing wrong with fond remembering, but we should pay attention to what’s left out of the frame.
The Manics make beautiful, compelling music about nostalgia when they acknowledge its complexities – when they let the past be beautiful, sure, but ungraspable, because of its thorns.
Next time, more nostalgia, but it’s back to your regularly scheduled spec-fic programming. (In other words, I promise at least one tentacle monster to go with my rambling thoughts.)
Writing news
I wasn't expecting to have anything new out this month, but
has snuck in under the wire. My fantasy story "Winter Wears No Crown" opens the issue. Sometimes a girl's just gotta travel to the frozen edges of the world and accidentally become a god, y'know?
I understand there have been some issues with Amazon (
plus ça change
) so paperback issues aren't yet available, but you can order the ebook version at the link above or from the
.
And here's the news I spent most of April sitting on my hands about: I am one of Hay Festival's 2024
! Writers at Work is a creative development programme supported by Literature Wales and Arts Council of Wales, and involves spending the whole festival period on-site, learning from established authors and publishing professionals as well as sharing work with peers. There are some crazy talented people in the cohort, and I'm as intimidated as I am excited.
There are also some (free!) public readings at which we'll be sharing our work as part of the programme, on 29th May and 1st June. If you're heading to Hay, why not
?
What I've been reading
I recently picked up
on a friend's recommendation and enjoyed it a lot -- it's a gripping, imaginative piece of Gothic science fiction that does interesting things with perspective and identity, as well as having some enjoyably skin-crawling creatures.
What I've been watching
The last new film I saw was
Abigail.
I hadn't realised going in that it was based on
Dracula's Daughter
, but I don't think you really need to know that to enjoy it. The title character treads a fine line between creepy and sympathetic, but let's be real -- you're mostly there to see a cast of assorted dumbasses die in ridiculous ways, and it certainly delivers on that score.
What I've been listening to
Appropriately for the theme of this month's newsletter, I've been listening a lot to Emily Breeze's new
. Standout track "1997" is a wryly familiar look back at the life of an alt-rock-loving '90s teen.
That's all from me for this month. 'Til next time!
JL