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.”
The last time he did bake a cake, he said, answering the actual question, was when he was six or seven. “My mum used to let me mess around with pastry, then give me the cream to lick the bowl out,” he remembered. “I can honestly say I’ve never baked, ever. I barely ever cooked. When I was at university I was so inept, a tin of beans I would actually, I wouldn’t open them but I’d boil a kettle and put them inside so the tin of beans would be warm. I was too scared to go in the kitchen, there was so many fucking idiots around. I lived on Kit-Kats and pasties.”
So, if anyone had wondered, somewhere in there you’ll find the answer to the question: did Nicky Wire tune in to the finale of the Great British Bake Off this week? Probably not, the same answer that the question “has anyone ever cooked beans in the way Nicky Wire describes above?” also provides.
