Endless Plain of Fortune

It’s gold that eats the heart away and leaves the bones to dry

John Cale‘s wonderful “Endless Plain of Fortune” has travelled a long and strange way with the Manics. It made its first appearance during a radio session in 2004 where James performed an intimate acoustic cover of it (together with a version of “Red Sleeping Beauty” which the band would then record properly a couple of years later). It resurfaced in 2011 when it was performed as part of BBC Radio Wales’ special set of concerts, this time with the full band in town and a set of strings behind them to replicate the orchestral backdrop of Cale’s version. A studio version (or a more polished version of the Radio Wales performance, it’s hard to tell) finally appeared later in 2011… on Q Magazine’s exclusive promo 12″ version of National Treasures. The cover wouldn’t make a proper, wider release until 2022 and the Sleeping in Plastic digital covers collection, finally making it available for wider consumption after its years of wilderness – and allowing people to hear one of the Manics’ finest covers.

Now, a lot of that strength is down to the original. “Endless Plain of Fortune” is a beautiful, wistful song and it’s actually thanks to James’ 2004 version that I became familiar with it, as other fans shared a copy of the original for those who hadn’t heard it. I fell in love with it, and I also fell in love with Manics’ eventual full band version because they are practically the same thing. The Manics treat Cale’s original with utmost respect and care and dare not deviate from it, with even the cadence of the string ensemble resembling the original version. The only real difference here is that it’s James singing it, and while that’s normally something I consider a little bit of a flaw for the Manics in terms of how they typically cover songs, here it’s really hard to argue with the end results. It’s a gorgeous song, now sung by one of my all-time favourite singers – so what’s not to love? So this is a case where I have to acknowledge my hypocrisy, and I’m honestly fine with it.

Unfortunately the version most of us now can hear isn’t exactly pristine. Sleeping with Plastic was a haphazard by-product of the band’s PR team finding success with making themed playlists for the Manics on streaming services: a playlist of covers was released in 2022 and as part of that process, the band’s team put together a slapdash compilation to sweep up all the covers that hadn’t been made available in streaming already. It did mean that we finally got to see the proper release of a number of obscure and since-lost covers, but a number of little cracks in the armour hint at its rushed nature. “Endless Plain of Fortune” among the most, because in its current widely available state it has been compressed to hell and has a number of odd sound quirks throughout. In fact, it sounds like a cleaned up vinyl rip and I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be that in lieu of actually releasing the original song, they simply ripped it out of a copy of National Treasures and tried to clean the vinyl noise out of it. It hasn’t been entirely successful, and it’s a real shame because the song sounds off. Given how lovely this cover is, it ends up doing a really big disservice to it.

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This Is the Day

This is the day your life will surely change

National Treasures was a perfunctory release: cash in on the legacy, round off the hits for public consumption and symbolically wave goodbye to their time as hitmakers after Postcards from a Young Man failed to make a splash, setting the stage for the band to take a break and wonder what to do next. It was a compilation that rested entirely on the laurels of a long and fruitful career, and so the token new song was seemingly approached with the attitude that no one was ever going to pay attention to it anyway. I.e., they chucked in a quick cover.

The The‘s “This Is the Day” is so befitting to end a career-spanning compilation that it feels like a cliché from the start, given it’s a song about looking back and reflecting on your past. Of course it’s not quite as simple as that – there’s an undertone of troubles that shade the narrator’s past and the titular day is the moment of reflection when you vow to make the changes you need in your life – but the actual meaning is lost in the easy underlining of the most context-appropriate parts. All the focus is on the chorus, and furthermore the Manics’ version and its big Bradfieldian strings and joyful guitar walls removes all of the hinted bittersweetness in the muted synth pop arrangement of the original. Any ambiguity in the original has been done away with in the name of a grand anthem to cap off a hits collection.

As far as Manics’ covers go this isn’t actually anywhere near the bottom of the pack. Whilst the arrangement has become a very stereotypically Manics-like, it’s a big shift from the original and I do appreciate artists covering songs distinctly through their own filter (I do also love the little preset drum machine which opens the song so innocently). It also makes sense perfect sense as a Manics song of that caliber and James performs it like it was their own to begin with, with gusto and resonance. In comparison to many of their other covers you can hear the effort put into this one, and at least you can’t entirely dismiss this as a lazy this’ll-do throwaway. But you can’t shake off the feeling that this is nothing more than a token gesture recorded out of necessity rather than desire; certainly if you compare it to the last hits compilation single “There By the Grace of God” which saw the band looking forward to the next chapter, rather than squint at the recent past. Even the arrangement is all very Send Away the Tigers / Postcards from a Young Man as if to sate only the hunger of the people who’d buy the compilation while only knowing the recent hits and maybe “A Design for Life”. And if you want some tangential proof of whether this meant much for the band, just take a look at their other covers which had been released in prominent places or as singles and how they still rotate those on tour, while this disappeared as soon as the National Treasures gigs (the best thing to come out of this era, by the way, and it’s a crime a real live album was never released out of them) ended – even their version of “Umbrella” has had random revisits along the years. “This Is the Day” is a thoroughly functional release, but nothing more than a faint footnote in the Manics’ singles discography.

The single was only released digitally and as a HMV-exclusive promotional CD, and this marks the end of the band’s long-standing tradition of single sleeve quotes. The official video does start off with a quote from J.G. Ballard though (“Memory is the greatest gallery in the world and I can play an endless archive of images”), which leads onto – to absolutely no one’s surprise – a clip show of past videos and DVD footage.

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Rock n Roll Genius

Oh my god, I’m being serious

“This Is the Day” had two b-sides, and they both represent the flipsides of the Manics at their most speed-dialled. “We Were Never Told” was James’ acoustic solo spot, and so appropriately “Rock n Roll Genius” is Wire’s equivalent: a scruffy lo-fi singer/songwriter affair that he probably banged together in the studio one lonely evening (and maybe asked Sean to spare a couple of minutes to lay out a quick drum track).

Much like its Bradfield counterpart, “Rock n Roll Genius” is a pleasant jingle that doesn’t really offer anything we haven’t heard before, and comes with the air of even Wire realising that – why would he waste a genuinely good song as the 7″ b-side of a single they knew they were going to forget the moment the campaign finished? “Rock and Roll Genius” does elicit a bit of a smile though because of its entertainingly self-deprecating lyrics, and though a little bit of introspection creeps up in them occasionally, Wire’s tongue does feel fairly firmly lodged in his cheek. The jauntily strolling tune helps carry the feeling too, and there’s generally some nifty detail running through the song that gives it a little bit of personality: the organ in the chorus is a real stand-out, and the guitar? hyper-speed piano? (the vinyl rip isn’t making this very clear) after the chorus is delightfully perky. They’re begging for a stronger song to be in, but it’s nice that they’re there to begin with.

[edited 14/12/22]

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We Were Never Told

If there’s blood in your tracks then let it lead you back

As if to underline that not much thought or effort went into National Treasures, the couple of b-sides that came with it had the kind of “this’ll do” energy that always indicates when the Manics are at the end of the road and ready to move on. Case in point, “We Were Never Told” is an acoustic solo song from James – the tried and tested quick single filler format. And this time it really does have the air of actual filler: everyone knows by now that Bradfield and an acoustic guitar can be an incredibly strong combination and there’s many great b-sides to attest to that, but “We Were Never Told” acts like a quick first sketch of a song. A pleasant one, and with a reasonably catchy chorus melody for what it’s worth, but nonetheless a demo waiting for the blanks to be filled. James tries to make it more engaging by pushing his performance, but the bolsterous vocals are mismatched in intensity to the gentle strum of the song (and end up causing some audio distortion). Not that I think he even thought it through, given how much this smacks of one-take wonder.

If there’s one specific thing I do appreciate in this song it’s its tone: a bittersweet, maybe slightly hopeless optimism that comes from the heart nonetheless, a little reminiscent of “Ain’t Goin’ Down” as far as James’ former acoustic spots are concerned. The lyrics (which are just a set of repeated verses and choruses, as if to underline the unfinished state of the song) paint a picture of trying to turn adversities into something that matters and finding the beauty in the darkness, and the melody Bradfield’s come up with for the song does carry that tone successfully. There’s a seed of something genuinely worth mentioning here, but in its released state I imagine Bradfield grabbed something from Wire’s lyrics folder and knocked out a song in ten minutes after the label told him that they need a b-side.

[edited 13/12/22]

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Inky Fingers

Sometimes justice can be sweet and so pure

The writing on “Inky Fingers” might not be particularly interesting – sticks enough that you remember the vague outline of it when looking at the track title but both musically and lyrically this is clearly b-roll material – but the way it sounds is wonderful. The creepy-crawly verses that nudge forward little by little like it’s up to no good (I love the simple back-and-forth bass riff in its restlessness), the metallic guitar strums, the pre-set drum machine beat and Sean’s drums switching places throughout: it’s like it should be accompanying a cartoon villain setting up traps in the middle of the night. It’s a wicked l’il gremlin of a song, all sly and serpentine, and James’ tonal flips throughout sound like someone on the border of snapping out of their mind. Where did this even come from?

“Inky Fingers” is atypically quirky for the Manics, and that’s why I’ve come to really like it despite its obviously underbaked parts, i.e. like how the chorus seems like a complete afterthought, for one. It’s reminiscent of the band’s 90s b-sides in that you could never be quite sure what you were going to wander into; very anecdotal, but hearing this for the first time gave me the same surprise that I felt when hunting down random b-sides in the early 00s through P2P networks (shhh, I own the singles now) and finding all these oddball cuts the band had hidden from plain sight. It’s why it hits a particular soft spot for me, particularly when considering that the during the late 2000s the Manics were generally shying away from anything weird or experimental. But this strange little thing, sneaking by with its tip-toe bass riff and processed filters? This turns out to be really fun in how out of context it sounds.

It is certainly nothing more than an interesting b-side, keyword being the “interesting” part, but for a curio it certainly lingers around: it doesn’t sound quite like anything else the Manics have pulled out, and that’s always fun.

[edited 05/12/22]

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The Passing Show

I won’t cheer those sad refrains anymore

Another humble Wire solo piece in vein of I Killed the Zeitgeist, i.e. a simple rock ballad guided by an acoustic guitar and with a worn-out, bittersweet tone primarily thanks to Wire’s voice. If you’ve heard any of his other b-sides in the past, you know where this is heading from the moment Wire’s voice appears from the speakers. This was described by Wire as a tribute to Ronnie Lane of the Small Faces and takes its name from a 2006 documentary about Lane, though not knowing anything about the documentary or Small Faces myself I can’t really draw parallels between the lyrics and the topic – on their own, outside any context, it at first looks like a quietly defiant can’t-stop-us fight song in vein of much of Manics’ early boastings, though the final couplet about believing in the power of higher taxes is an interesting turn of Wire’s usual political flair.

Beyond its topic and its lyrics there’s otherwise little here that would distinguish it from any other Wire b-side, and the songwriting or melodies aren’t strong enough to set it apart either. It’s the kind of quaint bonus track you’d ideally bury as the flipside of a 7″ single if you wanted to release one to begin with: a curious treat for the most obsessed fans but nothing anyone would ever miss. Wire’s proven himself as a great songwriter in his own right by this stage, but “The Passing Show” is his equivalent of the kind of acoustic campfire song that James could knock out in his sleep to fill a b-side slot.

[edited 11/12/22]

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Kiss My Eyes for Eternity

The hardest thing to do is to forgive yourself

Following Nicky’s atonal noise excursion of “Engage With Your Shadow,” James comes right behind with a song where all of the melodic richness of the Manics comes to full flourish, frolicing freely and dominating the proceedings. There’s no hard edges, no distorted guitars, no big anthem urges – just gentle, sweet  and above all lush melodies layered on top of one another and set to a mid-tempo shuffle. It sounds sublime: the piano which acts as the headliner star of the song is one of the most elegant piano parts in the Manics history and it propels the whole song forward with class and grace. The (somewhat clunky) lyrics are full of references to classic Motown and soul songs and acts, and rather than use them as a direct reference point for a Manics-goes-Motown moment, they’ve extracted the melodic core so deeply associated with those songs and made it work within the realm of the Manics.

It’s another short song as well, as are most of the b-sides of this era, but “Kiss My Eyes for Eternity” sounds complete: there’s even both an instrumental break and a bridge with lyrics. The final half-length chorus does give the impression that the band panicked when they saw the three-minute barrier approaching, but the song comes to a fairly natural close rather than awkwardly stopping on its tracks like many other b-sides of a similar length. That cohesiveness is lovely to hear on its own and in all honesty makes this stand out among its immediate peers.

You’d love for it to continue going on, though. “Kiss My Eyes for Eternity” is so delightful, a soft warm breeze of fresh air that showcases Bradfield’s wonderful ear for melody and has a pop-like openness to it that comes across fresh for the Manics. It’s one of the best b-sides of its era – imagine an album in thevein of this and “I’m Leaving You for Solitude”.

[edited 08/12/22]

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Engage With Your Shadow

Unlocking your true potential

Failure Bound 2: Fail Boundier. During a period where the Manics revisited their former glories (in form, if not in spirit), Wire took a detour to his own selection of contributions to the wider canon and found that it wasn’t enough to have one strange spoken word song in the discography, it was time for another and make it weirder.

Not many Manics songs leave me completely baffled. “Engage With Your Shadow” does. It finds Wire going on an incoherent anti-technology/anti-internet tangent littered with off-context buzzwords (“media streams! Bluetooth zones! Pixelisation!”), gratuitous German and repetitive mantras. The abrasive electronic noise background has no hint of melody and barely a rhythm, coming across almost incidental. Wire, himself, abandons all melody as well and retreats back into his early-00s croaking. Everything about “Engage With Your Shadow” sounds like a challenge to endure, an off-kilter experimental track to cut through the easy comfort of the main album.

Except it’s actually just sort of hilarious? “Engage With Your Shadow” is by no means a good song, because even though the ideas are perhaps promising the execution is a complete mess. But, it’s gone so far it becomes entertaining in its own right. It’s really hard not to pull a little smile when Wire angrily repeats “unlocking your true potential” over and over again like a mantra of hidden wisdom, or when the German countdowns appear like he’s trying to pump himself up. The combination of Wire’s characteristic voice and the complete tonelessness of the song is so on the nose that it’s more aw bless than WTF. The more self-mocking lines like “I’m so out of date I’ve been disconnected” and “I feel as useless as a VHS” are endearing among the non-sequitur technology jargon.

This isn’t backhanded complimenting, an attempt to talk myself into liking the song or trying to paint a pretty picture as a fan. “Engage With Your Shadow” is a terrible song, but I feel like even Wire realises it and that was never the point either: this was the result of a weird stroke of whim and for some reason James and Sean allowed it to be released. Or it could be entirely sincere, which is perhaps the more frightening option and one I can’t quite believe to be true.

As a final note, the sequencing on the “Postcards From the Young Man” single issue this can be found is genuinely really well done, because the transition from this to the extremely melodic “Kiss My Eyes for Eternity” is a stroke of genius.

[edited 07/12/22]

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Midnight Sun

Time keeps us beneath while autumn sheds its leaves

The Manics were obviously keen to revisit the Know Your Enemy sessions long before the eventual 20th (ish) anniversary edition, or they were already preparing ahead for a 10th anniversary revisit that never arrived – regardless, they were already digging through the archives in 2011. “Midnight Sun” may have been released as a b-side for “Postcards from a Young Man” but it dates a decade earlier: exiled from the Know Your Enemy sessions and for some reason completely forgotten afterwards. The version included on the single isn’t re-recorded apart from perhaps some incidental tweaks: the liner notes indicate it was recorded in 2001, the producer is listed as Greg Haver who was more heavily involved in the various early-00s sessions and most audibly James sounds considerably younger. While it’s a little strange that this stuck around forgotten for so long despite how gratuitous the Manics are with the amount of b-sides they have, it makes a bit more sense when you consider how the eventual Know Your Enemy re-release featured even more completely forgotten songs – though amusingly “Midnight Sun” wasn’t featured anywhere.

It’s somewhat obvious why this never made the cut for the main album. Whilst a decent song with plenty of classic Manics features from the guitar sounds to the way the organ is used and even James’ mannerisms (which stand out even more after it’s been so long since the band operated on this wavelength), it lacks that special something that would really hook it for the listener. The Know Your Enemy sessions were characterised by their wild anything-goes mentality, and in that ocean the somewhat more conservative mid-tempo approach of “Midnight Sun” likely felt out of place – and while there was an entire set of more contemplative songs which carried through the sessions, “Midnight Sun” doesn’t hold a candle to them. That it never saw the sunlight even as a b-side is likely because the band never truly finished it: it doesn’t sound like it’s 100% there, either in its production (though acknowledging the rougher aesthetic of its parent sessions) or in its writing. It’s about 90% there but the take used sounds like a final run-through before committing the song properly to tape, only that final piece of the puzzle was never placed.

That said, it still has an element of the magic of its era. The overall tone is looser, James’ vocal delivery and his guitar style is pleasantly reminiscent of the ‘good old days’ and in its chorus it becomes dangerously close to something a little resonant. The worldweary atmosphere and the wonderful organ of the chorus carries quite a bit of the weight, and the rest is a vague kind of nostalgia for this particular period. But as a song it’s not got one of James’ stronger melodies nor one of Wire’s more memorable lyrics, and while there’s an attempt at slowly building the song section by section into something more widescreen, it largely remains in the same drawl it starts with. It’s nonetheless an interesting look at the archives and in hindsight, a bit of a cunning foreshadowing that there was more to come from this era than anyone expected.

[edited 11/12/22]

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Broken Up Again

The pictures on my wall are fading

The pounding snare beat instantly links this to “Empty Souls” and the genesis of “Broken Up Again” may well have something to do with the Lifeblood classic, after the band caved in to fan wishes for more representation for that album and played the song a few times during the Postcards tour. Given the band’s ever-changing and oft-contentious feelings about that album, “Broken Up Again” sounds like a recontextualisation of the ideas of “Empty Souls”: not just the same beat but the general production elements like the atmospheric keyboards and the guitar sound which is immediately reminiscent of many of their turn-of-millennium works. And, I guess, the repetitive lyrics too where the first verse is copy/pasted to the second – which is once again a shame because while Wire describing the downs of his mental health is a topic he’s been through many times already, “Broken Up Again” looks at from yet another angle and is rather sad in how acknowledgingly defeated it is.

“Broken Up Again” is never going to get close to its probable ancestor but outside the verses it builds more of an identify for itself and it’s almost exciting. It breaks away from the rigidity of its parent album and harks back to their former stature as a b-sides band, where these bonus tracks would act as extensions of ideas that wouldn’t have worked in a full album context – rather than simply being outcasts that weren’t deemed good enough. I may say that only because there’s something rather classic in James’ voice and guitarwork that makes me think of many of late-90s, early-00s b-sides. Postcards is an album built around nostalgia and it’s quite a fun coincidence that the constant mining of the band’s recent past across it also marks the return of b-sides with a unique flair of their own, in the most Manics-esque way possible.

Really, the only flaw here is that it’s impossible not to see this as an “Empty Souls” retread and that’s immediately down to how similar that beat is – it’s not a unique drum pattern but it’s one that every band only really gets a single shot at using it in their back catalogue thanks to how distinguishable it is. Otherwise this is a song built around some solid melody and nice guitarwork, the pre-chorus is a wistful twist that shakes the form a little loose and brings a little surprise to the proceedings, and even when they’re in the shadow of their own song they still manage to create something upliftingly anthemic from the ingredients. There’s a level of “that’ll do” in it that casts it into the bonus track files, but it’s always far better than you perhaps remember it being.

[edited 04/12/22]

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