My name’s Flint – it’s not my real name but it’s the identity I traverse the internet with. I hail from the cosy Nordic wilds of Finland but I’ve been based in the UK for a good chunk of my life now, and music happens to be one of my very favourite things in the world. I love to ramble about it as well, which is why you’re now seeing this blog.
In respect of Manics and I, much like many millennial Europeans I first encountered the Manics in 1998, as “If You Tolerate This” conquered the charts all across the continent, including Finland. That lead me to listen to This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours and my time spent with it got me to grab a copy of Everything Must Go from a bargain bin some time later. I liked both albums but at the time they didn’t spark a proper fire within me – but I was a very different kind of music listener back then and both of those records shaped how I heard music and what I loved in it, even if I didn’t realise it actively at the time. In 2001, on a rather ordinary and boring trip to visit distant relatives, I made the random decision to buy Know Your Enemy right before the holiday to tide over the journey. That was what did the trick: I spent the entire trip entranced by the album and the absurdly wide spread of sounds it contained. Soon afterwards I had obtained all of the band’s albums to date, hunted down as many b-sides as possible and generally became obsessed about the group in every single way possible. They were my band: my teenage obsession, my musical crush who felt like they belonged to just me and no one else. I doubt I’d be as much in love with music as an art form if it weren’t for the Welsh boys. Over the following years and decades I’ve been going through ups and downs with the Manics, but they’ve stubbornly kept their place in my heart: I have gained other favourite acts that I’m as deeply and madly in love with, but the Manics still sound the most personally resonant to me. It’s why you’re reading this blog rather than one dedicated to a wholly different act.
Outside the Manics, the basic beat summary of my tastes is that they revolve around what’s conventionally called indie and alternative rock. My other favourite bands and artists include R.E.M., The National, Bright Eyes, Radiohead, Kent, Guillemots, Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie, Moby and many others. I’m on both Last.FM and RateYourMusic if you want to spy my activities in real time, and I also have a separate site for music reviews where I go through my collection artist-by-artist, offering my thoughts on their discographies – you can find for example reviews for all the Manics albums there, if the song-by-song breakdowns aren’t enough.
If you want to contact me, do so at flintgf at gmail dot com. Please no “can you send me this and this b-side please” emails.