Manic Street Preachers: ‘The band feels like something you can go into battle with against the world’

As they release their 15th album, the Manic Street Preachers are as fired up as ever. They talk about tech bros, stealing hotel shampoo and four decades of combining friendship with being in a band

In the video for the Manic Street Preachers’ latest single, Hiding in Plain Sight, we see bassist Nicky Wire getting ready to do his job. He sits in front of a lightbulb mirror, applies glittery eyeshadow, black eyeliner, then stands to add a feather boa, a sailor cap, a jacket covered in badges and home-sewn patches. The other two members of the Manics, guitarist James Dean Bradfield and drummer Sean Moore, along with backing singer Lana McDonagh, guitarist Wayne Murray and keyboardist Nick Nasmyth (who play in the Manics live shows) are playing their instruments. Also, because it’s the Manics, everyone’s reading books: Camus’ The Plague, Cynan Jones’s The Dig, Angharad Price’s The Life of Rebecca Jones. “The mirror is a trap that saves/Or a debt that makes you pay,” sings Wire, surrounded by Polaroids of the band when they were young: skinny, obstreperous, beautiful. “I wanna be in love /With the man I used to be/In a decade I felt free”.

It’s curiously defiant, the video. “Yeah, it’s got a bit of resistance to it,” says Wire. “It’s a warped nostalgia. It’s not pretending I can go back.”

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