In my kitchen cupboard there’s a mug in red, black and white. It sits there next to the Leeds mug, the Wuthering Heights mug and the Yorkshire Tea mug. On the side it reads “Everyone is guilty of the good they didn’t do,” a quote from French philosopher Voltaire. It’s a heavy message to ponder over a morning brew.
This drinking vessel has hosted many gallons of tea. It has survived three student flats and at least eight house moves, outliving its crockery siblings by decades. I often think of its message when I do something selfish; when I rush past someone asking for spare change or when I’m wasteful in some way. I bought this Manic Street Preachers mug when I was 16 from the merch stall at Doncaster Dome.
I’m the girl down the front. My friends are not with me. I’ve just wriggled forward to the densely packed first three rows and my hand is tantalising close to the barrier. I take my place just as the lights dip, squarely in front of Nicky Wire’s bass guitar. It’s hot and sweaty and the crowd surges as the band arrives, Nicky spreading his Wales flag across an amp. The opening chords boom and we all sweep forwards.
It’s then that my feet lift from the floor. Wire is doing scissor kicks and wrapping a black feather boa around his microphone. We are aloft. There’s another surge of bodies. And the next thing I know I’m in a muffled underworld, a hazy blackness descending. It’s all too quick to panic. I’m just… gone.
I come round sometime later to find myself propped up against the Dome’s back wall. In my hand is a bottle of water, presumably given to me by a steward. I snap into reality and hear the Manics’ most famous song, Motorcycle Emptiness. I’ve missed the bloody gig. But then I look down and see that I am covered in black feathers. Nicky’s feathers. Holy relics of fandom.
I wanna be your only possession. Traci Lords could have been Kylie Minogue when she sang those words on Little Baby Nothing. Kylie was Richey Edwards’ first choice for this dark duet about beauty, virginity and “loveless slavery”. But they couldn’t get access to the Australian popstar (they did eventually perform and record with her years later) and then Richey developed a fascination with Lords, an American porn actress.
As Simon Price puts it in his Manic Street Preachers biography, Everything, Lords was “the USA’s unofficial Madonna: an under-the-counter Monroe, a word-of-mouth superstar”. In other words, perfect for Edwards’ vision for this inverted rock anthem about female exploitation. “Everybody thinks, ‘Traci Lords, dirty slut,’ but she’s actually one of the most articulate Americans we’ve ever met,“ Nicky Wire once said, with a brutality that might get him cancelled today. After hearing the demo, Lords responded more gently: “I listened to the tape and really identified with the character of the song.”
Little Baby Nothing was released in November 1992, 30 years ago this month, the seventh track from the Manics’ debut album Generation Terrorists, and a noise-polluting, angry, sixth-form rallying cry against everything, but especially capitalism. It was a hard listen and belonged in Kerrang! as much as the NME but the band insisted it would soon be heralded as the “greatest rock album ever”. They also vowed it would be their only LP, sent to explode the world before they disappeared in the debris of their own genius (at the time of writing they’ve put out 13 further albums). Little Baby Nothing, along with its melodic rock sibling Motorcycle Emptiness, stood out from the other, wiry, impulsive, punk-metal tracks because of its sheer tunefulness. The song soars through ever ascending phases, a kind of multi-chorus orgy, and piles up classic Manics lines as it goes. Rock ‘n’ roll is our epiphany!
But on their sound alone, I should never have fallen for the Manics. They flirted with the stadium pomp of heavy metal, singer James Dean Bradfield screamed too much, and the band were pleased when they topped the rock charts, while my sister and I only had eyes for the indie countdown. For a wannabe mod with raver tendencies, liking them made no sense at all. I was destined, though, to love them. They offered a way of thinking, of being, of arguing. Little Baby Nothing, just those three words alone, sounded like a gothic short film. I had to know more.
In the track’s promo video, directed by famed NME polemicist Steven Wells, a stubbly James Dean Bradfield in black sleeveless vest belts out the song inside a slogan-daubed studio. “All rock ‘n’ roll is homosexual,” it reads above his head. And there’s the famous lyric that best showcases the Manics’ existential fridge magnetism: “Culture, alienation, boredom and despair.” A pink triangle, imitating the symbol used by the Nazis to identify gay men, is overlaid with a Soviet Communist hammer and sickle. Richey and Nicky are not present (apparently only James Dean Bradfield bothered to turn up for the shoot) but this chaotic scrapbook of words and provocation clearly comes straight from them, via Wells. Traci Lords is not here either. Instead, an actress mimes her lines with “read my lips” written along her thigh in red lipstick. It’s an absolutely mad visual mess. And I was absolutely fascinated.
I first glimpsed the Manics on a poster in Smash Hits in around 1992. Dressed in department store women’s blouses defaced in felt-tip pen (more slogans), their Coronation Street punk mesmerised me. They didn’t look like anyone else. I remember staring at the page for a long time, unsure of the messages meeting my eyes. I was not even sure if these figures in thick eyeliner with back-combed hair were men.
A few years later I discovered what it really meant to love the Manic Street Preachers through a boy at school who lived on a farm. He had a pool table and he let us sit on the high hay bales when his dad was out. Patrick had older brothers who were into music and so he had already been schooled in the angry rock of Generation Terrorists and the melancholia of The Holy Bible and Gold Against the Soul. He made a series of tapes for me and I fell quickly for it all: the poetry, the politics, the Plath. By now it was 1996, Richey Manic was already a missing man, and Everything Must Go was the painful return without him that made the Manics the household name they had always wanted to be. I took home the cassettes and listened intensely, drinking deeply from the Manics mug.
One day I will find those feathers. Somewhere they live in a box with the gig ticket from that night. I’m almost wary to begin the search. Perhaps they stay more beautiful, just out of reach.
Manic Street Preachers. Little Baby Nothing. Released November 1992.
Update: I found the feathers! You can see them here with news of my book, Connection is a Song.
Anna Doble
November 2022
For your savage amusement 
Such a great read – and genius photo xx