The news has broken at last, and Cardiff is in raptures. Nicky Wire is set to become the new manager of the Welsh national football team, according to Manic Street Preachers frontman James Dean Bradfield , who makes the declaration part way through the first of two nights headlining Cardiff Castle. If the contracts have been drawn up and an announcement video scheduled for social media, though, it seems Wire still has some reservations.
“I don’t think Ribena, Kit Kats, and chips would be good for the Welsh football team,” he quips back. Somewhere near the back of the crowd, Craig Bellamy can be heard breathing a sigh of relief. This has been the Manics’ trademark sense of humour for several decades now.
After the unrelenting toil and trauma of their 1994 masterpiece ‘The Holy Bible’ – which, remarkably, remains wholly unrepresented in the setlist tonight – more of Wire’s kitchen-sink melodrama started to creep into the band’s lyrics and interviews, arguably coming into full view for the first time on 1996’s ‘Everything Must Go’-era b-side ‘Mr Carbohydrate’. The candy-pink nihilism of their salad days began to soften into existentialism, with jokes about cricket and vacuum cleaners arriving to offset the horrors. It’s a high glamour vs.
low domesticity dynamic that the Welsh band share with this tour’s co-headliners, Suede , who tonight take the support slot. Like the Manics, Brett Anderson and co. came to fame in John Major’s ‘90s as a lu.
