It’s pretty much a rule that whenever I try to review The Manics I try to throw in some oh so cool quote so that you all know it’s not just The Manics who are well read.

So, as the reissue of “The Holy Bible” sells by the bucketload - and their most recent proper album, the relatively stillborn “Lifeblood” clogs up the racks unsold – The Manics are back with their first UK tour in a couple of years, blooding the songs from the new album to an audience of generally nostalgic pusheads, and giving us a set that feels like nothing more, and nothing less than a greatest hits revue, punctuated by odd forays into ‘here’s one off our new album’.

Already the Manics have become, wether they like it or not, a nostalgia act, a stadium-filling name now struggling to fill arenas : for the first time in their career shows are not selling out, and what was once multiple nights at Arena’s have now become one-night-stands spread out across the country.The Manics are no longer of the moment, but of their moment, and that moment is 1996.

You wouldn’t know it down the front, from the devotion of the eyeliner clad few, the glitterati, who still devotedly buy consume and die everything Manicy : the t-shirt with a fake-fur-tie printed onto it has long sold out.

It’s also, for those of us with long memories, a night that is both right and deeply deeply wrong. Despite The Manics playing with the passion, the fervour, the energy rarely seen in Manics shows of recent years - fuelled by a mixture of a deep love and disgust of humanity that they always have fed upon, it fails to communicate to the crowd.

The new stuff, the fabulous “1985” which sees the band practically levitate on a MBVesque wall of sound as they are surrounded by twenty year old news footage, footage of a time that is both too close and yet too far away from now is a tour de force, and a song that should, by rights the next national anthem : but here the cavernous void that is Wembley sucks the air from the crowd. As James emotes “Morrissey and Marr gave me choice”, and black and white archive footage of The Smiths on BBC2 juxtaposes with Coal Riots and The Milk Thief herself, the crowd, bar a few, just watch.

Like the opening night at Brighton, an experience I couldn’t help but despise, the band are now bolstered by Guy Massey, an anonymous, and utterly redundant, inaudible second guitarist. For some of us, the Manics hiring a second guitarist is a really big deal. On the scheme of things it is enormous. For some it is no big deal, to have a second guitarist, an anonymous nobody playing Richey’s old parts, standing in his former spot. I have not forgotten so easily : to casually wheel on this jobbing hack as if it were No Big Deal is, to be frank, to those of us to whom Richey was loved, a slap in the face. To some Richey is a relic, a history that never existed outside of television footage and record sleeves. To me, he was real. Someone I spoke to a couple of times, and whilst I could never claim to have known him, he was far more real to me than a multitude of distant heroes who were I never met.

Even when Richey wasn’t there, his absence was a presence. For years the band never even went over to Richey’s side of the stage. There are some people to whom Richey is more, A LOT MORE, than just some guy they used to play with who is now a mere prologue to history.

So Guy stands there, passionlessly playing the same rhythm that James does for most of the set, except when James solos, and then Guy’s turned down so you can barely hear him. For a third of the time he doesn’t even play at all - most of “You Stole The Sun”, for example. Only on a handful of songs (“Austrailia,” “1985”, “No Surface All Feeling”, “A Design For Life”) can he even, really, be heard.

And I’m thinking ‘why?’. The Manics sounded fine without him. They didn’t need to get a new guitarist. And they didn’t need to do it so sneakily and surruptiously. As if nobody would notice.

And that’s what hurts.

So, when the band strike up “Faster”, Richey’s signature song encapsulated in a few short lines, it’s desperately wrong. The song has NEVER sounded better. Not been dispatched with so much passion and venom as ever, and yet, it’s still somehow empty, wrong, hollow, for such a song to be dispatched without even knowing who the Richey-clone is.

Still, when Richey went missing, they told us it was an ear infection. When he tried to commit suicide in Cardiff in mid-94, we were told he had nervous exhaustion. “I’ve been too honest with myself….” the song says. But still not honest enough.

Dispatching the intial feelings about such a move though, The Manics are undoubtedly a band that are, sadly overlooked somewhat in terms of cultural impact. Only ten years after they split will they be feted as a band as important – and sometimes more so – than The Clash. If in doubt, just listen to the songs, these kitchen sink dramas, three minute microcosms of the beauty and the beast that is our lives, and the fact that life itself never changes, and all great art reflects what it is to be human.

“I don’t wanna be a man” – Life Becoming A Landslide.

Around us meanwhile, the band play on. Images bombard us from all sides, abstract yet powerful imagery from history are interpolated with contemporary footage that grabs right to the heart of these confused and utterly contradictory times. Songs from history live for a few minutes then die.  And these songs speak for themselves : intelligent, fierce, and a thousand times more relevant and meaningful than near enough every other band out there.

For the finale, “A Design For Life”, a song that should’ve by rights been Number One (instead of “Return of The Mack”), and also a national anthem, the band are still pulling out the stops : like The Sex Pistols, they mean it, maaaaaaaan, and this, they need this, like we need this. It’s so much more than merely music, so much more than just words and sounds and chord structures. This is great art, art that says so much more about what it is to be alive than music to make you Forget Your Shitty Life And Feel Good For A While.

Dare to be beautiful. Be brave and bold. If you aim for greatness, sometimes you just hit that ceiling.

Sometimes, if you try, sometimes you succeed.

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