Manic Street Preachers have compared their new album ‘Futurology’ with their 1992 debut ‘Generation Terrorists’.
Speaking in the cover feature of this week’s NME, which is on newsstands or available digitally, the band’s bassist Nicky Wire says that like their debut album, ‘Futurology’ is “ludicrous in its ambition”.
“We’re trying to talk about abstract art movements in a fucking three-minute pop song, and there’s so much eastern Russian stuff in there on songs like ‘Black Square’ and ‘Mayakovsky’. It’s got the same ambition as ‘Generation Terrorists’, but it’s more cultured. It has that intent, though: it’s got the post-punk jaggedness of ‘The Holy Bible’, but it merges that with the retro-futurism we’ve always been obsessed with.”
Elsewhere in the feature, Wire says that he admires Russell Brand’s “contrary” ideas about abstaining from voting but that ultimately he feels “reality” won in the comedian’s quest for a revolution based around abstaining from voting.
“There’s a bit of me that just loves people being dickheads and being absolutely contrary,” he says. “But then I spent most of my life thinking that democracy is one of the greatest things about living in this country. So there’s the ying and the yang of the great Situationist spectacle, and reality. I think reality won in the end. I think voting should be compulsory under law, anyway. The bottom line was he didn’t seem to have any policy apart from ‘drug rehabilitation for all’!”
See below to watch a new video of Wire and Manic Street Preachers frontman James Dean Bradfield discussing UKIP.