It's an 'end of the rainbow' sort of deal

 The 12 letter prompt of 'housewarming' today brings me to 'm'. After hesitating for half a week I've decided to go for 'me' and essentially update my 'intro' post from 3 years ago.

I am [about to turn] 36. I work in a 'prestigious' university in the south of England. I put prestigious in inverted commas because I am deeply critical of the system of university rankings, and things like 'Russell Group' which ensure money and resources flow around a ring fenced group of already over-funded institutions who select students from selective schools and...it's a pyramid scheme. I have worked at less prestigious universities which do better, more exciting research with less money, and make an objectively bigger impact in the lives of their non-elite students than this one does. I work here because they hired me for a permanent role and the lookout for careers in academia right now is terrible. I like my colleagues, I like many of my students, I work hard (sometimes too hard) for the community I am part of but I am never going to toe the party line on being 'world-leading' simply because of what some dodgy metrics say about the institution as a whole.

I am a cis woman. I think gender is a trap. I have always, as long as I can remember asking questions, been baffled by binary conceptualisations of gender and I have never easily fit either 'girl' or 'woman'. Woman, right now, is a word I choose. But more often I like to roll my descriptors of gender and sexuality into one and use 'queer'. I like the indeterminacy of queer. I like the history of that word and how it still needles at the norm, how it says 'I am against and across and strange and uncomfortable and making you uncomfortable'. I find it fascinating how and when I get misgendered and I find it fascinating when I get called "lady". The latter makes me more unhappy than the former.

I also use bisexual to describe my sexuality. A word which I painfully tore out of me and presented to the world when I was about 15 and which I clung to in the face of all the horribleness that can attend coming out. For a number of years I dropped bisexual because I had internalised too many negative stereotypes and associations with that word. Recently, after an inspiring keynote address entitled 'lesbian nation' by Campbell X at a conference, I claimed 'lesbian' as a word I had a right to. I mix my words all the time. Did I mention I like indeterminacy? I don't owe anyone a box to put me in. The words I use are expression, not definition.

My work mixes my life. I do research about LGBTQ people, families, childhood, gender, relationships. I don't write about that in much detail as I try to maintain some division of my professional and personal online existence.

One of the roles I have in my job involves supporting students who encounter a range of difficulties during their studies; I am determined to do all I can to kick open the door to Higher Education and use my entire body to stop it slamming shut on people. On some occasions this is harder to acheive than at others. I am continually learning about doors I didn't even know existed and how they exclude people.

I have a long term mental health issue. I write about it in more detail on my wordpress blog. I write about it here too, but typically in less detail. It's a useful background piece of information to have if you're coming to read. I am, as mentioned above, hitting my late 30s. I've been told that this stage of life often includes a worsening of bipolar spectrum disorders, that's something I've been wrestling for a while now. I've also been told that it kind of shakes out by the time you're 40 and you can just get on with it - whatever level you end up at. I hope that's true. I work hard to be well. My success on this front is, predictably, variable.

I am fortunate to have a huge range of people in my life. I have a biological family who live far away and who I have limited contact with, this includes three brothers, and two parents. I have a chosen family of friends who live much closer and who fill me up with love and kindess and sometimes beer. I am [recently] poly after being single for a decade. I got to poly through a lot of reflection on what I can and can't do in relationships and how I want to be able to build relationships with people. I am finding the space, communication, and conscious choice of commitment which poly centres incredibly positive and freeing. At the time of writing, I am in one relationship of note and that's with 'Teddy'. They are on dreamwidth as well and next-to-no-sleuthing will reveal their dw username to anyone who wishes to put together such a puzzle.

I am a nerd for pop culture and a deep love of sci-fi (especially Star Trek) has been a constant in my life. I am a lifer fan of Manic Street Preachers, even though I haven't liked any music they've released for nearly a decade. I have a soul deep love for David Bowie and our bond will never be broken. 

I read the journal of everyone I subscribe to but I am an inconsistent commenter. 

Some time ago, I wrote this after hearing the person who made the documentary Crazy About One Direction speak (in an academic context). I've had it set to private for ages but in the context of my continuing participation in Manics fandom, and all that it has given me, I wanted to post it now. 

I watched Crazy About One Direction when it aired last year.  I also watched the enormous twitter fall out where the girls who were interviewed were attacked by other fans and expressed their regret.  I watched the film maker apparently bait fans on twitter to greater response and outcry.  I talked to two of the girls who appeared in the documentary on twitter about their responses to seeing the finished film and the twitter response they endured.

My conclusion was that the documentary was about exotisizing and laughing at the 'obsessive' fan performances of devotion. I felt the girls who contributed were hung out to dry.

I asked her today about a comment she made in her presentation that all the girls were happy with the film and pleased to be in it given my interaction with one contributor which was to the contrary - I suggested that perhaps we could understand it within a framework where outrage was a performative act of belonging to the fandom.  She suggested the girls who said they were angry about their portrayal were not being entirely honest because of the pressure they felt to hate the film.  I think that's a neat and plausible explanation but I don't feel it completely deals with the ethical issues raised by the film's airing and the backlash online.

She spoke about how she felt she had made an affectionate portrait of the fans and admired and enjoyed the culture they created and their experience of being in a fandom. She felt she could never win at making a film about the fans that they would enjoy.

Here's the issue, as it stands for me: if you haven't lived a fandom from the inside you can't talk about it.  If you 'admire' the cultural practices and creation of a fandom then you already miss the point.  If you think being inside a fandom would be wonderful and wish you could be - but aren't - then you are never going to represent that experience correctly because you cannot understand it.  There were a lot of shitty documentaries made about Manics fans, a lot of shit articles written about how we were obsessive and insane and impenetrable.  None of them understood why we were those things, none of them acknowledged how and why we came together and why we protected our borders so vigorously.

Manics fans got to understand the media, we got to understand you have to check credentials if someone wants to interview you.  We got to understand we needed to laugh at ourselves and doing so would help us, as well as take the venom out of the bite of the media when they tried to make those same jokes.  Most music press articles on Manics fans these days have a begrudging respect -  we stayed the course, we learnt to be media savvy, we made the jokes first, but we never sacrificed our passion for the band and our protection of one another. 

I tried telling the One Direction film maker I believed that a lot of the anger the One Direction fans felt was experienced by Manics fans in the past and that we had learnt to negotiate the stereotypes about what a Manics fan is - and that One Direction fans were too young a fandom to have got there yet.  She seemed to understand - but then she made comments that suggested she didn't understand at all.  She linked the threats of suicide and murder One Direction fans levelled at themselves and her respectively after the documentary aired to Manics fans cutting themselves as a performance of belonging.  I explained to her that she was confusing cause and effect - that, yes, perhaps belonging was coded in the Manics fandom by performance of self hatred, but perhaps - more likely -  it was that the Manics provided a space to talk, an outlet, and a siren call to those who were already hating themselves.  Perhaps, I told her, One Direction fans were not expressing self hate and feelings of ugliness because One Direction had a song on that topic (as she suggested), but rather because they felt that way and suddenly, finally, had a channel to express that.

She nodded with interest - this seemed to be the first time an alternative reading of that action was offered to her.  'But!' she countered, 'Manics fans are a very different demographic to One Direction fans.' I nodded in agreement.  'One Direction fans are working class' she said.  I hesitated - Manics fans are almost universally from working class families in my experience -  as conversation around us interrupted I lost the opportunity to correct her on the ways in which I felt they were different demographics.  'There's more than shared music for Manics fans though,' I said 'we have a shared political position'.  She nodded; 'yeah, suicide'.  I boggled.  'Suicide is not a political position', I said.  Conversation of people around us overtook us again and I never got a response from her beyond a laugh.  I was talking about socialism and political leftism.  She was talking about performance of emotional trauma.  She doesn't understand my fandom - she sees only the sensational in a fandom which has negotiated a new media relationship away from sensational representations of our fandom.  For that reason it's perhaps inevitable it was only the sensational, the disembodied, the abstract that was represented in what she believed was an 'affectionate' portrait of One Direction fans

I got talking, later on this evening, to a friend about my experience of being in the Manics fandom.  We talked about what it meant to me and what I understood the fandom as.  Family.  Family is what it is.  Manics fans understand me deep down and I understand them, we share a common cultural knowledge, a social and political position, and, perhaps sadly, a shared trauma in relation to family or mental health or society, or all three.  We skip the basics, the introductions, and we go straight to acceptance and understanding and compassion.  And we sustain one another, look after one another, forgive one another.  We offer each other all the things my friend gets from her family or origin.

I wouldn't dream of making a documentary about what it means to be in my friend's family.  But the cultural availability of fandom, the public construction of it, the apparent accessibility of it, means people feel able to talk, with authority, about what it is we are doing and why.  The jokes we make about what being a manics fan means - about self harm and self loathing and suicide and disappearance - they are funny because we live them.  They aren't funny because they are abstract or because they are excessive.  But those are the reasons people outside the fandom, including this filmmaker, laugh.  We laugh together, they laugh at us.  We laugh or we'd cry, they laugh because it seems strange and incomprehensible, because it is Other.

Ethically though? Nightmare.  I maintain her documentary was fundamentally unethical because of how it offered up her representation of those girls to a hostile and paranoid fandom.  And after speaking to her I strongly believe it fell down ethically because she was sure she understood their fannish experience and refused to listen to them telling her what it felt like from the inside.  She fetishised the experience of being inside fandom and that creates an insurmountable distance in story telling. My family is the Manics fandom, I find it hard to articulate what that feels like - but I don't want someone else to tell my story for me, to judge me by their standards, to point and say "isn't this weird, how they communicate and organise and live?! Isn't it novel and different?! Let's all look and stare!"

And that, I think, remains the fundamental misunderstanding of the filmmaker which means she can't quite see how inevitable the response to that documentary was.  And it made me feel misunderstood, as I tried to illustrate my point with my own experience of fandom because she got side tracked with what she thought she knew about Manics fans and stopped listening to me.

Film

I don't think I ever found the time to write about going to Manchester to see No Manifesto: A film about Manic Street Preachers. It was a documentary that was largely recorded 9 years ago and has been stuck in post-production for several years for want of funding to get a cinematic release. This year it finally came together and in January and February this year it had a limited theatrical release. I was interviewed for the documentary in 2006 and suspected I'd made the final cut as I'd been in the theatrical trailer they'd released several months earlier. Sure enough, I appeared in the 'cast photos' the film makers put on Facebook and I can be spotted a couple of times - although if you blink/close your ears you miss me.



On a personal note, I adore No Manifesto. It's all the things I, as a contributor and fan, hoped it would be. It has a light touch, a wry look at the band and the fans that come with it.  I sat with snapdragon_666 and we laughed and giggled and cringed and had a thoroughly wonderful time watching it - and in our day together either side of it. 

No Manifesto has a wonderful line from Nicky Wire where he says "sometimes the fans hate us, and sometimes we hate them, and that's ok." And it really is.


TV

Yesterday I attended the Manics Cardiff Castle gig which I had been so excited about since it was announced in December.  Unexpectedly, it was broadcast on BBC 2 Wales and, for the non-Welsh, on BBC red button.  It's available for the next 29 days on iPlayer too.

Even more unexpectedly - as I resolved to queue for no more than a couple of hours and decided I'd be quite happy not to be on the barrier - I ended up on the barrier.  And, taking my place on Nicky [Wire]'s side of the stage as I always do, found myself in front of the crowd camera.  I sent my parents a text to let them know they might spot me on tv.  I didn't expect to find myself featured quite so heavily and got home to my hostel last night to a pile of twitter notifications from friends telling me they'd seen me (and our other mutual friends with whom I was standing) on the live feed.

I travelled home from Cardiff today, still feeling the afterglow of a thoroughly massive, energetic, energising gig, and as I was getting the photos off my camera, I watched the first half of the gig on iPlayer.  And yep, there I am! Singing, dancing and generally having the sort of time I only enjoy when I'm crushed against barrier and bodies, screaming at Nicky Wire, without another care in the world.




This was one of the times we didn't hate each other. It was one of the times we bloody loved one another.  Fans and band, running off one another's energy.

A Day Like This a Year

So yes, my last entry was rather melancholy.  But, predictably, that doesn't reflect all of life.

And it's moments like these - laughing until I cry at a documentary in a cinema in Manchester with what felt like a room-full of friends, singing and dancing and cheering amid a mass of 10,000 bodies at a castle in Wales - that really make life.  These are the moments that last.  These are the moments that see me through.  These are the moments - especially the moments yesterday and this morning with friends - that really matter.

If you're not interested in gig reports and/or the Manics then scroll on by...

Last night I went to my 14th Manics gig at the Shepherd's Bush Empire which is one of the few 'classic' London venues I haven't been to before.  I arrived about 5pm and got lost trying to get from the tube station to the venue which was quite serendipitous as a woman approached me and asked if I was trying to find the Empire, I said I was and then a passer by who overheard us pointed us in the right direction.  We chatted on the way and it turned out she was on holiday in London for a week and quite by chance had googled the Manics earlier that day and discovered they were playing and decided to come down and see if she could get a ticket.  Once we got to the venue I joined the (fairly small) queue and she went to talk to the touts.   

She got a ticket for £70 (face value; £32.50, ouch!) and we stood listening to the soundcheck through the fire escape.  We got talking and it turns out she's from Thailand and had been trying to see the Manics for years - back in 2008 they were due to play a couple of days after all the protests and the airport being closed/occupied so they cancelled, rescheduled twice and then cancelled entirely so she was beside herself with excitement.  Then a chap came over and started to talking to us, he was 52, from Italy and had decided to buy a ticket from an online tout (£85) and fly in from Italy that morning and was going straight to Stansted after the gig to catch a flight back again!  Manics fans are nothing if not dedicated!

After that I began talking to the guy ahead of me in the queue who was wearing a pair of leopard print converse that I had been eyeing up for some time.  He had been to every date on the tour so far (see: dedicated!) and at the Bristol gig the night before, had got back to his hotel to discover his ears were bleeding! We chatted and joined forces in our plan to get a good spot on Nicky's side of the stage.

Much laughter and chatter later we were in the venue.

I have a few negatives about the actual gig and I'm going to get them out all at once so I can move on and talk about the good things.

Bad things

There was a hugely aggressive atmosphere. Some lager totting-Ben Sherman shirt wearing knob pushed in front of me as soon as the support act finished and proceeding to completely obscure my view and slam into me as he danced. When he left after a few songs, there was space for three people to move forward, two women from my right moved into the space and aggressively prevented me from moving forward for no reason I could comprehend.

Later, two women who looked rough as all hell (i.e. people I would not mess with) started having a go at the nice guy standing next to me because he was pushed up against them; newsflash ladies, if you are in the 4th row at a standing gig and there have been multiple crowd surges people will be pushed up against you.  I intervened after I heard him repeat for the 3rd time that he couldn't move backwards because he was squashed/there was no space.  I told them there was nowhere for him to move and that we were all squashed, they were basically suggesting he was a pervert because he was pushed up against her back - poor guy was nothing of the sort.

Another woman who I had seen hanging around outside the venue (but not queuing) forced her way to the front, screamed in my ear repeatedly and completely obscured my view of Nicky by holding her massive Galaxy Note phone up to photograph him for the full length of 3 three songs - a lot of people were shouting at her, and she kept leaning on the shoulders and heads of the people in front of her which I'm sure was even more annoying than what I suffered - but she ignored everyone and just kept forcing her way forward.

Towards the final third of the gig the mosh pit which usually happens in the centre and off to the left moved right and into the area in front of Nicky where I was standing - I got smacked in the back repeatedly and about 4 blokey laddy types forced their way in front of me.  I have been knocked over, shoved, kicked, fallen on by crowd surfers, squashed, lifted off the floor by the force of the crowd, and generally abused in gigs - and at Manics gigs - but I have never been so persistently and deliberately attacked and punched as I was last night.  The type of men who were smashing their way to the front exclusively danced and sang to the hits and simply were not the sort of people who have been at gigs in the last few years.  By the penultimate song I had been shoved halfway to the back (from my original position 2 people from the barrier this is a considerable distance) and into an area of calm.  I decided to move out of the centre entirely for the final song and found myself in a group of people dancing, singing, smiling and shouting which made me really regret not moving there sooner.


So, that's out.

Good things

Despite the aggression, there was a lot of positive energy.  The crowd singing on the very first track - Motorcycle Emptiness - was HUGE.  One of the loudest responses I've ever heard and from a relatively small crowd/venue.  Nicky and James seemed to really thrive on the volume and energy of the crowd, there was a lot of interaction (although relatively little talking from them between songs)

The acoustic set in the middle - just James - was spectacular.  One of the best I've seen him do.  He completely fucked up both the lyrics and chords for The Everlasting but we sang him through.  All the new tracks - of which they did many more than usual in an album tour - sounded fantastic.  Richard Hawley came on to do his guest spot on Rewind the Film but it's still just not a winner for me.  That was really the only song I didn't enjoy.

Nicky also did an acoustic bit - he sang the first verse of Marlon JD (much to my unconfined joy, delight and surprise) and then went into [new track] As Holy as the Soil (which made me tear up) but he was tremendous.  His voice was an open joke amongst fans when he started singing but it has definitely improved over the past few years.  That was a really special moment for me.

Motorcycle Emptiness and Design for Life were the first and last song respectively and were the purest moments for me with regard to immersive, unifying energy from crowd and band.  I feel I missed the enjoyment of a number of songs as I was forced to concentrate on avoiding fists in the latter section of the set but overall it was really solid.

Home

I said goodbye to my new Thai friend (who, by the way, spotted my Thai language tattoo and translated it - I did get it right! - and then gave me a lesson on correct pronunciation!) and sent twitter messages to the guy to say goodbye.  We both waved off a smiling Italian man too.  I headed for the tube and got talking to a guy from Yorkshire who told me the last time he'd been to see the Manics was the final night at the Astoria back in 1994.  Manics fans saying they were at the last night at the Astoria (Richey's last gig) is a bit like people saying they were at Woodstock - the number who claim it and the number who were documented to be there simply don't tally - but I am inclined to believe he was telling the truth.

Made the final-ish train to Brighton at midnight and walked home in the deserted streets of 1:30am.  I bade good morning to a fox taking an amble down the road (he paused at the zebra crossing, apparently contemplated where he wanted to go and then resolved to carry on down the pavement on the side of the road he was on) and fell into bed - aching but basically content.

"You can't expect to be happy all the time. A few minutes everyday is all I expect" - Nicky Wire

Richard James Edwards, 44 today.

I half love imagining he's gone the James Dean Bradfield-ageing route* and become decidedly rotund but there's every chance he, like Sean Moore, is blessed with Peter Pan genes and looks as though he hasn't aged a day.

Without Richey, the Manics would not be in the world right now.  His furious energy and attacks upon the media propelled them into the public eye and then he, and Nicky, captivated the country and indeed the world with their beauty and words, whilst James and Sean made sure we listened. 

His unflinching, uncompromising intellect created a brand that young, beautiful sluts flocked to.  He wrote a lyric about group sex in the Kremlin. He scared the bejesus out of SteveLSteve with the now infamous 4REAL moment. He made bad, contradictory, stupid decisions. And he made beauty, in many, many ways; he understood the power of an image, and he understood the weight words can carry.

Would the O2 gig I attended on Saturday have happened if he were around for his 44th birthday? Maybe, maybe not.  But would I have got wasted on vodka beforehand were it not for Richey?! Would I have chuckled as I heard 16,000 people chant/sing "we are the useless sluts that they mould" had Richey (and indeed Nicky) not simultaneously brought such humour and gravitas to those lines? Would I read Camus and Nietzsche were it not for Richey? Would I always feel safe to wear short sleeves in the company of Manics fans were it not for Richey's articulate honesty on the subject of self harm and depression - would I have the words I do to describe and process those times in my life? It's a simple 'nope' in answer to all of those.

We 'young' fans feel the loss of Richey through Nicky, James and Sean.  We feel it in the absence of the dense lyrics that were his trademark. We feel it in the lightness and intensity of every moment of Manics fandom.  

And it is with that sense of melancholy I hope and wish with all my heart that wherever he is today, he is enjoying his birthday, with humour and happiness and intelligence.




* For reference, see impossibly beautiful young James and impossibly middle-aged current James.

You know how I bang on about the Manics all.the.fucking.time? Well, it's coming up to the release of the boxset of the last 21 years of singles and there's lots of publicity in various music magazines from various journalists and celebs.  Below is a memory of a track which, all in all, pretty much sums up everything I feel about them.  I particularly like "heroically ridiculous, serious/not serious/deadly seriousnessness" description of band and fans.

Thanks to the unspeakable, inexplicable, wondrous generosity of forthwritten I have some paid time, I thought it was only right to celebrate with a post.

The other night, much like tonight really, I drank a heroic amount of vodka, and finished reading Albert Camus' The Fall. The book I finished a day before that was Martin Power's Nailed to History: the story of Manic Street Preachers. Being a massive CoR, I cried as much as I laughed at the story of the Valley boys and found myself obsessed/intrigued with Richey all over again. In that sense, The Fall couldn't have been a better 'next read' - the protagonist's words and Richey's lyrics are a marriage made in heaven/plagiarism made in hell.

The combination of the tail end of mania, vodka and Camus resulted in me being able to 'understand' some of the lyrics on The Holy Bible in what I felt was a new way. Before I passed out into a semi-paralytic sleep, I recorded my thoughts on Open Office on my phone. I record them below for 'posterity' (aka 'what the fuck?).

Much needed explanations can be found for some of this in '[]' brackets.

( Dead eyed...fish? )

It's a lot like when I watched The Man Who Fell to Earth when I was drunk on rum to the point I couldn't remember my own name, but for the first time that film made sense.  Or when I go really stoned and understood 'Motown Junk' in a way no person ever had before and insisted everyone I knew listen to it *right now*.  A week of fucked up sleeping habits and a night of heavy drinking with a bit of mania thrown in for good measure makes for some entertaining reading.

I hope to contribute something intelligent to Dreamwidth in the next two weeks. although don't hold your breath as I'm currently reading 1984 and the last 249839 times I read that it gave me paranoia-based nightmares....

 ".....as we are told that this is the end..." Then the freaking confetti canons went off and the air was thick with red, white and green confetti.

And I felt something inside me go 'click' and I knew that it was the end.  Of what, I don't know; I just know I felt the most acute sense of loss in that moment.  I stood, singing, staring alternately at Nicky's exuberant final strut and the impossibly thick rain of confetti and mourning the end of I know not what.

When it finished, and we turned and laughed and exclaimed what an incredible gig it had been, I noticed I was shaking.  I was still shaking as we made our way out of the doors and into a frantic Cardiff evening.

It feels like a dream somehow, over 130 miles away and nearly 24 hours since the event, it very nearly is.  Except I'm still suffering a real, hard sense of loss.  I've heard that song a thousand times and at 11 gigs, what was different this time?

I still have questions/photo requests to answer for day 15 but I'll come back to it as it's causing me a block when 30 days is supposed to relieve the same....

Share a song that represents your mood.

Inevitably, this is a Manics song. Today's choice is Love Torn Us Under.

( Lyrics below cut )

I've just had a week or so of not really sleeping, leaping out of bed full of beans in the morning, talking 10 to the dozen all day at work and generally bombing about.  Yesterday I felt a change creeping in; I'd been woken by nightmares all night, physically I was aching and exhausted. Suddenly imbued with fear of loud noises and anxiety that makes you crawl into a ball; 'there's nothing nice in my head/the adult world took it all away'.

Last night the nightmares returned once more and I awoke with the absolute knowledge spending any time with people would ruin me; unfortunately I'm still living with my parents so whilst 'not seeing people' just meant staying in the flat with my phone turned off in Brighton, it now means staying in my bedroom and fending off shouted-through-the-door questions ("do want a tea?" "your washing is dry, are you going to fetch it in?" "do you want some of the pudding I made?") as politely and monosyllabically as is humanly possible to avoid raising any concerns which would lead to more interaction.  How I long for a place of my own.

This week, I can tell you now, is going to be hell.

Have been trying to write more about how I feel and what I hope in terms of getting through it today/this week - and in the future - but after more than an hour of writing and deleting, I have to admit defeat.  Thinking is - as I said on twitter earlier - like wading through treacle at the minute. 

I need a job where I work on flexi-time so I can actually manage this stuff without being completely useless at work half the fucking time.

I just want to say 'help me!' but who that would be directed to, and what they would do about it is beyond me.  Moreover, in a week or so, this will be over and I'll be back to 'normal'.  Although how you define normal when normal usually means common and not one of my three states exists longer than another, I don't know.

I went to see the Manics last night with Becky and Harley.

It was SPECTACULAR.

One of the best performances I've seen them give.  James was in spectacular voice and hitting notes hitherto unheard by human ears.

Drank vodka in the queue - as is the Manics fans way - and talked to some people who had flown from continental Europe for the gig.  

In an unexpected turn of events, Tolerate made me cry.  The first bar was played and I knew with the absolute physical certainty you have the moment before you throw up that I was going to burst into tears - completely involuntary, somehow more than mere emotions - and pow! I was sobbing my heart out, alternately sobbing and smiling so broadly I thought my ears would crack.   Tolerate has never made me cry before, I wonder if it is an expression of my sublimated fears regarding the political instability and social reorganisation this country is currently experiencing.  Whatever it was, that song is epic and it absolutely overcame me last night.

Currently nursing a back and legs covered in bruises from various crowd surges but overall the Nicky pit was as stable as it ever is.

I just can't put into words how seeing them live - when they are on form as they were last night - is a transformative experience.  Body and soul altered and shaken.  I came away alternately smiling and feeling as though I was going to cry again.  Harley and I were both on that adrenaline high that only the Manics provide and both of us only managed 6 hours sleep last night - finally coming down around 1pm today while we were having lunch.    I woke up with a great big smile on my face and laid back just letting it all come back to me.

Becky has never really been into the Manics but I asked her to come with me in the hopes of converting her.  I don't know that she was converted, or that she enjoyed it - although she tells me she enjoyed some parts of the set.  She asked me why people were so obsessed with them and expressed shock at the fact that at one point during the set she looked around her and found that everyone was crying.  I'm not sure I have a sufficiently large vocabulary to put into words why that happens - but I know with absolute certainty what those other fans were feeling who surrounded Becky. 

The Manics are, and were last night, greater than the sum of their parts - quite literally when they play live given Richey's absence - and that really is as much explanation as I can give as to why I, and many many others like me, find ourselves in tears in front of the stage, mid gig, singing every line as though it is our last.


I'll leave you with a couple of links to blazzingly short video clips....
Nicky's unfeasibly long legs from 00:21
May your gods be with you

And the set list;




ETA: Review from the Independent.