I've been thinking a lot recently about where I came from, what has inspired me, what's made me who I am both musically and personally, though the two things are a bit intertwined I suppose, reflecting on key moments that make us who we are and perhaps set us on certain paths.  This reflection began after being invited on to a local radio show a couple of weeks ago to talk about my influences and play a few songs, and then a trip to a gig in Glasgow two weeks ago to see a band that has been part of my life, and changed my life a number of years ago:  Manic Street Preachers.

I vividly recall the time and the place where I was first introduced to them.  I was sitting on the floor of my grandmothers house in Monifeith, watching Top of the Pops as I did religiously every Thursday.  I was already an avid music fan, I had started learning bass and guitar, was playing in my first band.  I loved The Beatles, and with two older siblings I had followed their influences quite a lot and developed a love for the likes of The Cure, REM, Nirvana amongst others, but this was the first time I was stunned.  When I think back, when I watch the footage of it, I can still feel the crackles of energy and electricity, the shaking and moving of the universe laying out new paths for me, shifting synapses in my brain.  Which sounds dramatic but….look at them!

James with bleach blonde hair and sunglasses, looking like some kind of film star but singing with a voice that seemed to come from another place: falsetto, softness, grit, soaring vocals. Nicky Wire wearing a dress and bouncing about, playing the coolest bass known to man: the Rickenbacker 4001.  Richey James pouting and spasming as he thrashed his guitar.  Sean, coolly laying down a deceptively complex and actually quite funky drumbeat.  As a bass player, as a tall bass player, I fell in love with Wire instantly, I wanted to be him, I wanted a bass like that so badly - this came to pass 6 years later.  The riff, the solo, the bass line, the melody.  A chorus that was IN FRENCH - that seemed incredibly sophisticated and intelligent to my teenage brain.  This is a song about the mistreatment of war veterans, with lines like ‘I retreat into self pity, it’s so easy/Where they patronise my misery', showing on prime time BBC.  As someone who felt a little on the margins, a shy introvert, this combination of soft rock (hello Bon Jovi), smart sounding lyrics, and punk rock attitude (hello Nirvana) was a heady one.  In those three minutes the world collapsed into that tiny little point, that little moment, just me and the TV, and my life changed.

And I truly mean that.  Possibly I would have ended up in the direction I headed anyway, but I don't think that's a given.  After witnessing this, I immediately went out and bought the single, on cassette.  I am not sure how mu mum put up with me playing it literally on repeat all the way up on her drive home, especially given the B-side (Patrick Bateman) is about a serial killer and has a section with pretty graphic language - I don't think I realised fully what James was singing so I assume my mum missed it too. Somewhere around Inverness I think she asked if we could listen to the radio.  From these seeds a devotion to this band grew that has never been replicated in quite the same way, because there is no other band quite like the Manics.  I somehow felt we were cut from the same cloth, for a mixed up teen from the far north of Scotland, who sometimes felt quite isolated geographically as well as figuratively, they helped me make sense of the world in some way.  I devoured their music, pored over the lyrics, read their interviews, followed up on references they made to literature or art or other things.  I bought their first album and fell in love even more with the imagery and the lyrics and the style.  They spoke to me somewhere almost primal, somewhere right in the heart and soul.  There are a few other artists that have done that, Springsteen being one, but none to the same extent, none that have engaged mind and emotion quite the same, because there is no other band quite like the Manics.

And I've followed them ever since, through the intensity of The Holy Bible - another core memory is waiting by the radio to hear the play of their new single ‘Faster’ on the Evening Session and being simultaneously confused and exhilarated by what felt like this angular, almost atonal, cauldron of anger coming out of the speakers.  I saw them at T In The Park when they first played as a trio because Richey had been hospitalised, through the sometimes chaotic feeling interviews, his disappearance, which left me strangely numb. Their return with Everything Must Go and the elegiac ‘A Design For Life’, and onwards through to their most recent, and still angry, passionate and…funny?…album ‘Critical Thinking’. My passion has probably waxed and waned, and there are albums I listen to more than others, but there has always been something about them that has engaged and inspired me and sent me on another voyage of discovery, there are gems of beauty and wonder on every single record they have released.  I owe much of my interest in literature and art to the Manics, poetry and writers and philosophers discovered off the back of their nods.  I owe them for getting me through many dark personal moments too.

But then, here I am, an acoustic folky singer songwritery artist.  I've played in my fair share of bands, the punk pop band I was in for many years owed, initially at least, a lot to their legacy; to begin with we homaged the glam style of early Manics - it was the only way I felt I could be in a band, the only band I wanted to be in, eyeliner and leopard print.  And now, years later, a little quieter and a little wiser, my love of the Manics still burns strong - I travelled down to Glasgow and back in one night to see them no mean feat in an electric car that requires charging.  I've seen them many times live, and every time they've blown me away, every time I've been in tears at least once during their set.  Because there is no other band quite like the Manics.

One thing I take from them, then, is a commitment to the performance.  A feeling that if you are playing live, you should give it everything, whether that's blasting from the stage at Edinburgh castle (them) or playing to a bunch of folk at an intimate venue above a pub in Glasgow (me).  I was also reflecting on how they have influenced my songwriting.  On the face of it they haven't: they write often complex rock songs, James is a guitarist of consummate skill, Nicky and Richey wrote/write lyrics of extraordinary complexity and intelligence, lyrics that had meaning and depth, and I think that's where their biggest influence on me is.  In a time when most bands were writing love songs, or songs about getting drunk, or songs about…nothing…these guys were writing things that had depth and meaning on a different level.  Not to say nobody else was or does, of course they do, but there's something in those lyrics that's different for me, that is unlike anything else; even their song about getting drunk (sort of), A Design for Life is about the working class struggle.  I can never really hope to replicate the machine gun like quality of some of their earlier work, I'll never capture the references, the anger, that is contained in there, but I feel there's something maybe of the approach or attitude towards lyrics that I have absorbed, around finding subject matter a bit bigger than the personal, or at least maybe personal wrapped within something bigger. 

There are plenty of other artists that have probably had a more direct influence on me musically and lyrically, as in singers and bands that I occupy the same genre space as far more than the Manics on the face of it.  I might even write about some of them, but the Manics were the first band that were 'mine'; I didn't discover them through anyone else, my journey of discovery and development as a teenager moving towards adulthood was resolutely shaped by them, for better or for worse.  I've seen them perform that first song so many times, I've listened to it so many times, and every time there is still that little thrill, a beat of my heart skips and for a moment I am a teenager again. Because there is no other band quite like the Manics.