Oasis are not noted for their love of literature. Liam Gallagher once claimed the only book he had read is The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis. Meanwhile, Noel blasted reading fiction as “a waste of f**king time”.
In direct contrast, Welsh firebrands Manic Street Preachers, who could probably survive several pandemics and a nuclear war, have always been vociferous readers, sprinkling a multitude of literary and socio-political references and allusions throughout their work. On the chorus of their ferocious 1994 single, Faster, James Dean Bradfield barks a declaration by lyricist Richey Edwards: “I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer, I spat out Plath and Pinter.” They remain the only act to write a number one UK single about the Spanish Civil War, If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next.
In his preface to a 2009 edition of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, Manics bassist Nicky Wire acknowledges the profound influence the seminal Greil Marcus book had on him and his band. “Some people say a record or film changed their life,” Wire writes. “In my case it was a book … I genuinely believe that Lipstick Traces and England’s Dreaming (Jon Savages’ classic text on the Sex Pistols and punk) should be taught in school. They are alternate histories; both books elevate rock’n’roll to the level of intellectual importance that it deserves.”
In 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure: A History of Manic Street Preachers MOJO contributing editor Keith Cameron rewrites their colourful and tragic history through telling the stories behind 168 songs cherry-picked from 319 officially released tracks. Focusing on this remarkable body of work rather than the usual half-baked Manics mythology makes it probably the finest book ever written on the band. The number 168 has particular significance because the lyrics of their third single (and first to have any impact) Motown Junk, claim that 168 seconds is the precise length of time a love song “stops your heart beating and your brain thinking”.
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In pursuing an episodic song-based narrative, somewhere along the lines of Ian McDonald’s excellent Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, Cameron has crafted a well-rounded account of one of the most resilient bands of the turn of the millennium. Their complex and nuanced story has far too often been reduced to the disappearance of Richey Edwards in 1994. Rather than shy away from this tragedy, in telling Edwards’s story through the songs and lyrics he and his bandmates wrote, Cameron succeeds in making their story much more human, real and intimate.
Unless you’ve just woken up from a coma, it has been absolutely impossible to avoid Oasis in recent months as their expensive greatest hits roadshow rolled into stadiums and propelled them back to 1990s levels of omnipresence without conducting a single interview. In the subsequent rush to fill this vacuum with books, Ted Kessler and Hamish McBain have penned one of the more memorable ones in A Sound So Very Loud: The Inside Story of Every Song Oasis Ever Recorded.
[ Noel Gallagher left ‘shaky’ after Oasis after-party in DublinOpens in new window ]
Unsurprisingly, it is at its best when examining their imperial mid-90s phase, which is essentially their first two era-defining albums and a B-sides compilation, The Masterplan. Kessler and McBain make a strong case for some of their later material, which admittedly contains some gems such as The Shock of the Lightning and The Importance of Being Idle. However, it becomes a little laborious and tedious at this point, lightened by Kessler and McBain’s adventures with the band. Tellingly, this is a period that their current setlist almost completely airbrushes, apart from the 2002 single Little By Little, which prompted Paul McCartney to whip out his phone to record it for posterity at a recent Oasis concert in Pasadena.
Oasis and Manic Street Preachers have more in common than you’d think. The Manics tentatively reacquainted themselves with playing live about a year after Edwards’s disappearance by playing low-key support slots to Oasis, including landmark shows in Dublin’s Point Theatre in March 1996.
Both bands exceeded the expectations of their Welsh and Irish Mancunian working-class backgrounds, possibly providing two of the last great examples of social mobility that pop and rock music used to enable. Also, they euphorically celebrate life in their own unique ways, albeit often tempered by melancholy in the case of the Manics. The infectious optimism of Live Forever was an antidote to Kurt Cobain’s nihilism and the psychological scars of domestic violence in the Gallaghers’ Burnage childhood. Oasis and the Manics capture similar feelings of defiance and resilience, but in radically different ways.
[ Oasis weekend in pictures: Liam and Noel Gallagher gave fans two joyous gigsOpens in new window ]
In their track-by-track examinations, Keith Cameron, Hamish McBain and Ted Kessler prove that when you strip away all the tawdry tabloid soap operas, the continued existence and popularity of both bands rests squarely on the sheer power of their songs.
In a series of extensive interviews that enlivens 168 Songs, Nicky Wire notes that the key lyric of their 1996 post-Richey reinvention album, Everything Must Go, isn’t the oft-quoted “Libraries gave us power” from A Design for Life, which is literally inscribed on to a library building in Cardiff, but “All I want to do is live no matter how miserable it is” from Enola/Alone. For Wire and his bandmates, the song’s overarching comfort is straightforward: “Just thinking the moments of isolation will pass. Because they do.”
