The title track to the forthcoming new album by Manic Street Preachers is one of the great all-time Manics album openers, Nicky Wire taking the lead vocal as he rattles through a list of everything that perturbs him about modern life. When the Welsh trio announced the album a few months ago, Wire said, “This is a record of opposites colliding - of dialectics trying to find a path of resolution. While the music has an effervescence and an elegiac uplift, most of the words deal with the cold analysis of the self.” He could’ve added on the end, “Oh yeah, on the first song, I fucking lose it.” Because that is what he gloriously does in the song Critical Thinking, taking on the sort of empty platitudes you see on cards in Clinton’s or in patronizing hashtags, smart motorways, freeports, algorithms and more.
But one thing he sadly omits from the track, which you can hear when the band release their new record at the end of January, is the detest he holds for cookery programmes. A few years ago, this writer interviewed Wire and innocently asked if he’d ever baked a cake. The question set him off, and the answer was very enjoyable:
“I hate cooking. I hate cooking programmes,” began the bassist. “I find food so boring the way its elevated to this art form. It’s ruined Saturday mornings. We’ve gone from watching the Banana Splitz to watching some fat chef tell us what to eat to make our lives more whole.”
