THE 1992 DEBUT FROM MANIC STREET PREACHERS HAS BEEN RE-RELEASED AS AN EXPANDED BOX SET, DRAWING TOGETHER A REMASTERING OF THE ORIGINAL RECORDING WITH A PLETHORA OF DEMOS, LIVE AND REHEARSAL ODDITIES PLUS A COMPLETE RUN OF B-SIDES FROM THE ALBUM’S ACCOMPANYING SINGLES.

As a signifier for where the band might be at in their relationship with their work 20 years from this opening salvo, it’s difficult to know whether to laugh or cry. Or just enjoy the music…
In some ways the issuing of an aesthetically beautiful coffee-table objet like this seems to be a bit of an admission of defeat – something of a betrayal, even – of the band’s early-1990s flag in the soil and brick through the window spirit… …though, in many ways, the rigorous volume of stuff  contained herein has the package feeling perfectly on message with the overload of information which was stencilled on the note that was tied to that brick.
The point of this recent trend for carefully curated (and occasionally bloated) individual album box sets – other than the commercial incentive for failing record companies and cash-flow starved diminishing returns acts, of course – is clearly an artistic one: immersion. In the case of GENERATION TERRORISTS, it’s actually quite exciting to feel as close to being subsumed by the original manifesto as it’s possible to be 20 years on, to poke through demos and rehearsals to find some behind-the-scenes context and discover fresh slants on the angry young men urgency. So, equally, it becomes quite sad and somewhat distancing, once the six-or-so hours are spent, to close the lid and neatly shut in something that once seemed both glamorously dangerous and riddled with uncontainable intelligence.
Lyricist Richey Edwards had a fierce gift for spitting intense, dogmatic and grandiose soundbites which has not often been paralleled. A less arch, and occasionally far clumsier, version of Morrissey before him, it’s as if he studiously consumed influences, then coughed out chunks of phraseology, twisting them around his own to try and cook up some new meaning, some new design for life. Regardless of the album’s contradictions, it’s a roughly coherent statement being made and a definite position being taken. Despite the fact it was released on a major label, the album feels uncensored in its verbose and literate anti-establishment anger. On a handful of radio friendly singles the most unlikely positioned poetry abounds. During LITTLE BABY NOTHING Edwards takes on the exploitation of women through the use of their sexuality, and on MOTORCYCLE EMPTINESS tackles the post-war cultural slide into hollow consumerism. Both have enough sharpened blade about them to leave a wound.

Sometimes, the words are less deliberate and considered, more cut-up than cut you up. REPEAT, which hangs off little more than the refrain “Repeat after me: Fuck Queen and Country”, is a stadium-stomp clarion call, while NATWEST, BARCLAYS, MIDLANDS, LLOYDS attempts to pour acidic vitriol on the UK financial system but, through a lyrical vagueness, does little more than wag a finger in the general direction of those explicit in its title. And then put on lipstick and throw guitar hero shapes at the cashpoint.
On this album, the pose and the politics often mix to great heroic effect but sometimes, hilariously, they don’t. All part of the magic that was the Richey Edwards-era Manic Street Preachers. Any era, in fact, of this particular group. They were a band who, at the precise moment of this album’s release, meant something and nothing. To those who still had ears turned to the remaining detritus of baggy, or were shuffling under a fringe and shoegazing in the corner, or who had been brought to their dirty knees by an influx of American grunge, Manic Street Preachers – if they registered on the radar at all – were no more than an irritating anomalous blip. To those who had cottoned on early to their first couple of singles, they meant everything – the mid-70s US underground influenced, punk-regurgitating, agit-rock (think Crass hippies playing Clash songs with Johnny Thunders) was the sound of imminent salvation.

Realistically, the album is often over-the-top, as if the band took everything  “up to 11” regardless of any connotations, and it remains as it was in 1992 – too long at 18 tracks. There are also big concessions to airplay – the AOR piano which prettifies LITTLE BABY NOTHING and the smooth drivetime chug of MOTORCYCLE EMPTINESS, for instance.
GENERATION TERRORISTS, heavy on scattergun ideas, light on subtlety, sure-footed in intent, often posturing – and absolutely preposterous – couldn’t really have been presented any other way for a band so clearly screaming to be heard. Artistic finesse – broader range, use of textures, the ability to sculpt rather than chisel – would come later, though Manic Street Preachers became, as Scroobius Pip might have it, “just a band” from the moment anything from EVERYTHING MUST GO arrived as a fixture on Jo Whiley’s turntable. GENERATION TERRORISTS, despite being the much lesser record, artistically, than their huge-selling career-changer, is superior for capturing that beautiful moment in time when – unencumbered by the demands of success, driven by the compulsion to say everything – the band put down their marker and looked up to the limitless and unpredictable possibilities a whole life ahead of them offered.