Manic Street Preachers Get Universal, Plan New Year's Single
The Manic Street Preachers recently had to cancel a club date in New York City after frontman James Dean Bradfield came down with laryngitis, but the band is continuing on its American trek in support of its current album, "This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours.
It took a bit of divine intervention for the Preachers to release the album in the U.S., as the group had to extricate itself from its previous American label and find another one, a process that delayed the record's Stateside release by almost a year.
Despite these obstacles, the Preachers have been anxious to return for an American tour in support of "This Is My Truth," and its first U.S. single, "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next," [RealAudio] a song which bassist Nicky Wire thinks is among the group's best efforts.[article id="1447568"]"I think it's the most universal song we've done,"[/article]Wire told
MTV News. [article id="1447568"]"Even though it's inspired by the Spanish Civil War, everywhere we've been, people just look at it as a generational thing. They really do see that humanity is at a crossroads."[/article]
[article id="1447568"]"Every country has just sort of degenerated,"[/article] he continued. [article id="1447568"]"Human people are just not doing the right thing's anymore."[/article]Because of the time between the record's U.K. and U.S. releases, the Manic Street Preachers have already laid down a few new songs, including one which the group plans to issue in the first week of the new millennium."I think it's difficult with us," Wire said of the recent sessions, "because we're always writing songs, and we've got six new songs done, but wedon't wanna jump the
gun and record them. We just want to find a new direction. It's not enough having songs anymore. We want a new challenge, really. We want a new phase in the career."
"There's one song we've done called 'The Masses Against the Classes,'" he said, "which is kind of 50 percent recorded, and which we will hopefully release as a one-off single in the first week of the year 2000." [RealAudio]This weekend, the Manic Street Preachers' U.S. tour is scheduled to roll into the Metro in Chicago on September 18 and the Quest in Minneapolis on September 19.
