Review: Rock icons Manic Street Preachers deliver solid gold set at huge outdoor show
When you’ve got nearly 40 years and 14 albums worth of material under your belts, slimming it down into a crowd-pleasing set to suit all ages and tastes for a huge outdoor summer show would be considered a daunting task for many.
Not so for the mighty Manic Street Preachers.
The Welsh rock icons got it spot on for their headline appearance at Trentham Live, serving up a set packed with all the hits – but with a few unexpected and lesser heard treats chucked in for the diehards too.
In a sparkling 90 minutes, which kicked off with the raucous singalong of You Love Us and was completed with the stirring If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next, the crowd were taken on a full and comprehensive tour of the band’s output, which believe it or not, now stretches all the way back to 1986.
But first things first.
The expansive grounds of the Staffordshire beauty spot served up a real feast of music with Welsh songstress The Anchoress and art-rock favourites Public Serving Broadcasting warming things up nicely before the arrival of the Manics – although that said, the concert was one big love-in with all three acts making guest appearances during each others sets.
It was down to The Anchoress, aka Catherine Davies, to get the party started – and sporting a snazzy pink sequinned suit beneath a shock of bright orange hair, her indie rock anthems were the perfect starter.
Selecting tracks from her three studio albums, the spiky and edgy anthems, with more than a hint of Siouxsie and The Banshees and synthpop stylings, show the Manics’ collaborator really knows how to knock out a decent tune or two. A real treat on a warm summer’s night.
Next up and the art-rock musings of the wonderfully quirky Public Service Broadcasting. It’s not often you see a band in suits and ties and being awfully polite these days, but that’s exactly what PSB brought to the party, their set of mostly instrumental tracks about planes, the Miners’ Strike and climbing Everest backed with hypnotic reels of public information films.
The heavily influenced Kraftwerk opener Progress set the tone, with nattily attired frontman J Wilgoose Esq, layering a pulsating beat with vocoder vocals.
As much a history lesson as a concert, the gliding Electra (a love letter to the Lockheed Electra), Spitfire and Go! (focusing on the Apollo 11 moon landings) as well as an appearance from the Manics’ James Dean Bradfield, it certainly made for a more unusual support act – but one which was very much lapped up by and understanding and appreciative audience.
When you see a backdrop emblazoned with a meaningful quote, you know the Manics are on the way and so it was, JG Ballard’s words of “The future is going to be a vast conforming suburb of the soul” as the band took to the stage to the strains of an instrumental version of 1985, the opener to their much-misunderstood and unfairly maligned album Lifeblood.
And if you want to start a show with a banger, look no further than You Love Us.
One of the band’s early outings, the call and response chorus backed with ferocious guitars certainly sets the tone for an incredible night of classic songs.
Everything Must Go and the glorious Motorcycle Emptiness keep up the frenetic opening pace, before a quick drop down into the much gentler and melancholy musings of the beautiful This Is Yesterday.
It’s not long before You Stole The Sun From My Heart gets things bouncing again – and there’s even time to throw in To Repel Ghosts, another track from Lifeblood, before The Anchoress returns to complete what Bradfield describes as her “double shift,” on Little Baby Nothing and Your Love Alone Is Not Enough.
It’s a real treat to hear Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier, the opening track of their best-selling album Everything Must Go – and an even bigger surprise to see the band’s biggest hit, A Design For Life pop up in the middle of the set, for a long time, the perfect set closer for generations of MSP fans.
A beautifully touching acoustic version of Ocean Spray (fused with the trumpet brilliance of PSB’s JF Abraham) led neatly into a feisty Kevin Carter, before a final canter which including From Despair To Where, Tsunami and the truly incredible No Surface All Feeling, another from the band’s Everything Must Go album.
Of course, it was down to If You Tolerate This, a song about the Spanish Civil War to round things off, with the Trentham Live crowd finding plenty of energy to bellow every word back to a clearly appreciative Bradfield and of course, his bandmates, Nicky Wire and Sean Moore.
The panda eye make up, feather boas, stencilled t-shirts and sailor suits may well be confined to the wardrobe of the 90s, but with their cutting edge lyrics, soaring anthems and still fizzing with anger and punk ethos, the Manics are every bit as relevant, brilliant and boisterious as they always have been.
A solid gold night from start to finish.