Journal For Plague Lovers - An Underrated Album

Released a decade and a half after the disappearance of Richey Edwards, Journal For Plague Lovers is a compendium of punchy art-punk songs using words he had written before he left his life behind forever. Richey handed a file of songs, sketches, poems and haikus to Nicky Wire a few months before his disappearance. Some of those came out on Everything Must Go, spawning several beloved Manic Street Preachers songs, and in the case of Kevin Carter, one of their biggest singles. Evidently there was much more to come from such a prolific writer, so Journal, in that sense, seemed inevitable. 

The band’s career post-Everything Must Go had been topsy-turvy, style-wise. Their next release, This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, was a softened, glacial album, one that spawned some of the band’s biggest hits but was a departure from their previous work. After that came Know Your Enemy, an esoteric stab at covering all the bases of  their output to date - More of a collection of songs than anything else. They changed tack again with Lifeblood, another slow, contemplative collection of songs. After that came Send Away The Tigers, a generally well-received album with a traditional rock sound and a back-to-basics feel. It seemed as if the Manics kept apologising for the last album with each release, and never settled on one style to carry them through the decade.

Journal is an anomaly in this sense, because upon listening to this righteous, effervescent post-punk statement, there’s the feeling that after multiple releases trying to hit the jackpot, the Manics were once again comfortable in their own skin. Many casual listeners will have switched off in the mid-00s and missed this rough diamond in their back catalogue. But I’d implore anyone who gave up on the Manics after their commercial peak to give this album consideration. In my opinion, it’s only bettered by Everything Must Go and The Holy Bible.

After an initial positive critical reception, Journal has been poorly treated by fans and the band alike. Aside from the promotional tour, during which the band played the entire album to excited crowds, Journal has been virtually non-existent in setlists for the past 10 years. For a band famous for their eclecticism and playing random songs during gigs, this is a little strange. Perhaps they intended Journal to be a studio-only effort, which will stand as a monument, rather than a “normal” album to draw a couple of songs from each tour. In any case, going to a Manic Street Preachers show and hearing any song from this album has been a rare pleasure in the last decade.

Richey Edwards, during the Generation Terrorists era - Better days.

Posthumous releases usually raise ire from audiences - Even the most rabid Nirvana fans will agree the asset-stripping and liquidation of all Kurt Cobain’s unused music has been merciless. There’s a balance that should be struck with this sort of thing. Of course it’s worth putting out material after a legendary artist has died, but how much is enough, and how far is too far?

I’d offer Journal as the perfect spot between such unclassifiable points. Aside from the fact that they were sparing with the material, it’s clear that this album was crafted with the respect that only Richey’s three dearest friends could give it. It is because the Manic Street Preachers are so close, that they share so much love for one another and their music, that they are able to pull this off. Journal is their final present to Richey, a farewell tour for his ideas and beliefs.

There are many familiar cues on Journal which pique the 90s Manics receptors in your brain, dog whistles that key you in to the world of the band as they were, in the hot young space of their early years. Journal then, though a 2009 release, is firmly in the aural landscape of the 90s Manics Street Preachers sound. The film snippets before songs, the interview clips in the mid sections, the lo-fi production, the big solos that last eight bars. It’s all familiar. Take the artistic direction, too - An album sleeve from the same artist who provided cover art for The Holy Bible, which caused some controversy on release. The long, obscure song titles, and the niche intellectualism that underpinned all of Richey’s work. The band forgot the last 14 years and made the kind of music we all thought had slowly expired after their peak. The result is a wonderfully listenable slice of artistic triumph. Call it nostalgia if you will, but it contains some of the band’s finest work.

Marlon JD is Richey Edwards 101. It’s about a specific period in Marlon Brando’s life, when he retreated to an island and attempted to live simplistically. Edwards read and watched movies voraciously, and he often obsessed about people he learned about, and how they dealt with life and the pain of existence. For this bloated Hollywood star to want to divest himself of luxury and retreat to obscurity fascinated Richey. The lyrics borrow from a couple of Brando’s films, centring on the humiliation Brando put himself through, and the fact that this young handsome man turned in to what he did, a middle aged slob fulfilling his carnal pleasures with no limits. The guitarwork is fresh, shattering through the air with simple parts that add up to a headrush of noise. James Dean Bradfield’s voice skims over the top, playfully melodic, but with a grinding edge. It’s an instant, urgent Manics track, that begs to be spun repeatedly.

Journal For Plague Lovers recreates the energy of the early Manics years 

One of Richey’s chief songwriting moods on Journal is the anarchic delirium he offers on Peeled Apples, Jackie Collins Existential Question Time and Virginia State Epileptic Colony. At times the lyrics can be impenetrable, but it’s richly rewarding to see the landscapes he painted. The best cut in this vein is Me And Stephen Hawking. Opening with an immortal line “Herman the bull, and Tracy the sheep/Transgenic milk containing human protein”, it’s a high energy riff-rampage that flies out the speakers, but isn’t too intense. What makes these harsher songs shine is the ease in which the band roll back the years and cut away the bullshit. It’s instant vintage Manics. Lines with outdated terminology like ”100,000 watch Giant Haystacks in a Bombay fight” betray the specific part of history these songs came from; it feels like a time capsule of Richey’s final few months.

Richey had been in and out of hospital running up to his disappearance. She Bathed Herself In A Bath Of Bleach is about someone he met during these difficult times. A roaring 4-on-floor banger, this song holds that uneasy marriage between the troubling words and crunchy rock guitar sound that became the Manics’ calling card in the latter years of Richey’s life. The chorus might as well have been ripped from a Holy Bible session, with James spitting out four lines of simple vocals across eight bars of power chords; the closest to a hook this song could yield. Richey-era Manics were always so good at expressing the darker side of mental health with such vitality. She Bathed sits alongside such bleak cuts as 4st 7lb and Roses In The Hospital as prime examples of Richey’s writing about his desperate mental state.

The quieter songs on Journal are what give depth to this album. There are two straight-up acoustic numbers alongside William’s Last Words, the album closer sung by Nicky. The lyrics read like a suicide note, something the band have been keen to play down, but with the final lines being “I'm really tired, I'd love to go to sleep and wake up happy” alongside words about saying goodbye and talking about love for his family, it’s hard to see what else Richey would have been thinking about when writing this song. The strings are understated as they rise towards climax, ending the album with an uncharacteristic level of calmness; a denouement which allows genuine closure. 

Facing Page: Top Left is a starkly beautiful song. Mainly just James and an acoustic guitar, with the addition of a simple harp melody sweeping along in the background, it’s a worthy sequel to Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky. Richey often took feelings of hopelessness (Way down, of course I smile) and the relentless consumerism he saw in his daily life (Here is hospitality, skin care tones/Clean fresh and lines, tinted UV protection) to express the despair and self inflicted duplicity of living in the modern world. He could write big emotional acoustic numbers just as well as the angry harder songs he was famous for. This part of his range as a lyricist cannot be downplayed. He really was the full package, and one of the exceptional songwriters of his generation. 

The band in their early peak. Young, angry and very much a four piece!  

It’s easy to talk about Richey Edwards when discussing Journal, but the other three members show a good turn on this album. James Dean Bradfield, though versatile in the other forms the Manics have explored, is right at home with the more classic elements of guitar music he wades through on Journal. His riffwork and soloing is resplendent, hearing him layer melodies as effortlessly as he does is a breath of fresh air after the restraint of previous releases. Sean Moore, the unsung hero of the Manics, has a lot to say on this record as well. His composition and vision brought in the piano mid-sections, the atmospheric outros, the vocal effects, all the extra bits that make the songs last longer than they should. Even Nicky Wire enjoyed himself on this record, writing choruses and the music for key sections in several songs. Nicky made sure his fingerprints were all over Journal, along with his friends. In this way, the rest of the band show their commitment to honouring Richey. This is a group effort.

Something happens when Richey and the rest of the Manics come together in a song, something that’s been missing from their sound since he left. The creative duality he maintained with the music is irreplaceable, and entirely unique. For the first three Manics records, they formed and developed their sound between releases, but it had indelible roots in rock and punk, the DIY aesthetic taking precedence over the polished sound the band would bring to the fore after Richey’s disappearance. His influence on those early years was pivotal. The chemistry between the four young friends made them the irresistible draw they are, but it was all a vessel for Richey’s lyrical poetry.

Great success came in the wake of Richey's disappearance, but they always remembered their musical brother.

This is what appeals so much about Journal. It is a call back to their beginnings, to the brassiness of the 90s that made the band such a force, with Richey Edwards front and centre. He was the pulsing core of the Manic Street Preachers. 14 years after his disappearance, he lived again, channelled through James Dean Bradfield for one last waltz, his old friend doing stern duty to his words. In his absence, Richey Edwards fueled one of the finest records the band has put out. In the end, it was all so easy - The Manics open the book on Richey’s lyrics as if he’d just left the room. 

Of course their career reached unimaginable heights in the years following Richey’s disappearance, and they are more popularly known from Wire-penned classics such as Design For Life, If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next and Masses Against The Classes. Post-Edwards, the Manics have become an institution, they are quintessential 90s/00s British rock and will always have a place in that era’s pantheon of artists. But Richey Edwards was the essence of the band before all that, and he was the reason they were able to build such a solid base of material and catapult themselves into success. Journal is the Manics’ loving thank you note to Richey. It is an honest tribute to their bandmate, their friend, and their brother. History will remember their bigger releases, but this one is very special indeed.