In January 1995, the members of Manic Street Preachers entered House in the Woods, a studio in Surrey (on the outskirts of London), to begin work on their fourth record. It was early days for the follow-up to their bleak, brutal masterpiece The Holy Bible (1994), a chance to swap ideas about where to go next and run through the handful of new songs they’d already written. But in the coming days everything changed for the four best friends from Blackwood, Wales. Guitarist and co-lyricist Richey Edwards disappeared from a London hotel room ahead of a planned promotional trip to the US. He was never seen again, eventually declared presumed dead in 2008. At the heart of Everything Must Go is the story of how his former bandmates—singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield, bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire and drummer Sean Moore—put the pieces back together. It was a few months after Edwards’ disappearance that they decided to get in a room to see how—if—this could work. One song lit the way. In “A Design for Life”, the Manics had written a modern classic, a song that fused the rock dynamism of 1993’s Gold Against the Soul album with orchestral bombast and a lyric documenting the working-class struggle to form an irresistible, defiant sing-along. Their intellect and melodic talent had never been paired quite so explosively. Recorded with producer Mike Hedges in a French château—a world away from the dingy Cardiff studio that the Manics occupied for The Holy Bible—Everything Must Go was a record made up of anthem after sing-along anthem, but these songs had catharsis in their bones. On the surface, there were the subjects they were directly about: award-winning war photographers (the choppy indie rock of “Kevin Carter”); expressionist artists battling Alzheimer’s (the icy, New Order-ish groove of “Interiors (Song for Willem de Kooning)”); escapism (“Australia”’s heady, riffy rush); caged animals (the harp-assisted acoustic beauty of “Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky”). Dig a little deeper, though, and every song seemed to be holding up a mirror to something a little closer to home. Grief, loss, love, forward-motion, these are the elements running right through Everything Must Go. Five Edwards lyrics would make it onto the record, the deal being that the song had to have been started before he went missing. In that sense, Everything Must Go closed a chapter for the Manics, but another one opened. Released in May 1996, it went on to sell over two million copies and made the trio one of the biggest British bands of the ’90s, earning them Best British Group and Best Album at the 1997 BRIT Awards. A masterpiece record in a decade that wasn’t short of masterpiece records, Everything Must Go was never the sound of a band leaving everything behind. They took it all with them. This was Manic Street Preachers building a bridge to the future.

Send away the tigers

Manic Street Preachers & Nina Persson

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