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JAMES DEAN BRADFIELD
The Great Western July 24th 2006 (Columbia Records)
You have to understand that it was never James Dean Bradfield's intention to make a solo record. It's just that, 15 years on from breaking his first promise as a rockstar (the Manic Street Preachers' bloody-minded early declaration to split up after one million selling album), he, Nicky Wire and Sean Moore decided to finally keep a promise; the one made that April night at Hammersmith Apollo when, at the end of a tour that reinstated their position as the past decades definitive UK rock band, he declared 'you wont see us for two years.
After almost two decades of noise, confusion, dreams both gloriously realised and set down in flames; of inspiration, dedication, victory, loss, tragedy and comedy, the Manic Street Preachers decided, albeit briefly, to have a rest. "After 'Lifeblood' we decided that people deserved a rest from us, and we're not the best kind of people to actually get distance from it ourselves. Contrary to people actually saying 'Manics split' over the years, we never actually talk about that. It still feels like a youth club band, regardless of our age."
But James, always the bands down-to-earth workaholic was never the type to spend 18 months on a golf course. "We kept wanting to go back in the studio to do a Manics album, he admits, but we really tried to stick to it for the first time. It sounds horribly sincere and earnest but I really just missed having music in my life."
Though James was at the helm musically, the bands unique division of labour meant that nobody has ever known much of what makes James Dean Bradfield the human being tick.
The Great Western' is his belated statement of intent, a heroic pop-rock memoir statement that combines the sweeping flourishes of Everything Must Go; the airtight punk of The Holy Bible and Generation Terroristss wide-eyed lust for life, and vacuum packs it all into 11 raw, unfussed and passionate modern rock tracks. I deliberately did most of it in The Square Studio in Hoxton and Stir Studios in Cardiff (where the band famously made The Holy Bible), and theyre really small studios; when youre actually playing in there they dont sound like big rooms. I like the idea of stuff being a bit more cloaked; more murky and '70s-esque
The lyrics, too, see Bradfield stripping back and laying himself bare like never before. Hed had a go at writing on his own before, of course, on the well-received 'Know Your Enemy' single 'Ocean Spray'; a deeply personal meditation on his Mothers death. And after such a wrenching experience, he hadn't been keen to do it again. "I'm not saying it was self conscious or remotely Jungian or Freudian or it was like therapy," he remembers, "I'm not saying that. It came out of death that lyric, and I couldn't see myself writing another one for a long time after it."
In fact, it was a happier reconnection with his past that set James off on this new path of creativity, when the time off from the Manics saw him regularly making the same journey between Cardiff and Paddington that had marked the four teenagers first tentative steps to domination. I noticed that a lot of my writing was happening on that train journey, and I began to realise it wasnt an accident, says James.
So James wrote to understand, starting with the man who had first given them the keys to the big city. 'An English Gentleman' pays moving tribute to the benevolence of the late Philip Hall; their publicist, close friend and mentor who went so far beyond the call of duty as to move the young Manics into his home as they took their first crucial steps. "I remember Philip coming to meet our parents for the first time, and he turned up and he wasn't the flash Londoner that they thought he was gonna be. I just remember that, the never the twain shall meet, our parents and this supposedly big, fat-cat, cigar-in-his-mouth London manager, and when they actually met, there wasn't that much difference between them in a strange kind of way. Even though he was very comfortable with my parents, there was something quite swashbuckling about him."
The tense duality between James the West London rock musician and James the working-class boy from Blackwood is the backbone of The Great Western. Never more so than on 'Which Way To Kyffin', a tribute of sorts to Kyffin Williams, the Anglesey-based painter widely regarded as Britain's greatest living landscape painter. "I was in West Wales last year, says James, and I had this feeling where I didn't want to go back to London and was really fighting not to go back. I just felt like driving up to Anglesey to find Kyffin Williams. Just drive up to North Wales on the spot, make the three-hour journey and paint myself into a corner and never have to leave again. Almost in a metaphorical way, like the chorus says, I was trying to paint myself a different life so you can be captured in the painting and don't have to leave it."
But thats not to say James has left the old sloganeering way behind; the hyperactive lead single Thats No Way To Tell A Lie takes a pop-stained swipe at the way organised religion has kept AIDS rife throughout Africa, and the records one cover, a gorgeous rendition of Jacques Brels To See A Friend In Tears carries a message that resonates far further than the subject about which it was written. "I just liked the way it seemed to pre-date the debate that's going on post the Iraq war. This comes from a war that's much more firm in its moral judgements, it was written in the '60s about the Second World War but it comes to the same conclusion.
Of course, any Manics follower will instantly recognize the lyrics to frenetic Spector-pop highlight 'Bad Boys and Painkillers' as being from the pen of Mr Nicholas Wire. "It's got shades of Richey and Pete (Doherty); and I don't know whether anybody's made that comparison more than once you know, and there's a massive difference between them but it all ends on the same road. It says the same thing; Pete Doherty always says that he's found something perfect in this mirage of Albion, and so once and forever Libertine. Whereas Richey never came close to finding anything perfect and he was always looking for something perfect, whether it be a girl or whether it be a nation or a country or a place. Perhaps he only ever found his perfection in something more bleak and nihilistic."
James freely admits that making music on his own felt like infidelity at first. Completely."
The plan was always for Sean Moore to contribute some drums; he is spending the hiatus on an altogether different kind of collaborative project, as a new father. James played all the guitars and bass, and some of the keyboards himself, while Super Furry Animals' Daf Ieuan contributes drums to 'Run Romeo Run'.
But going it alone has re-affirmed the band's closeness in a surprising fashion: "After the very first session I did which wasn't too successful in my mind; it's corny but I realised that that telepathy you have with people you've grown up with and played music with since you were 15 I will never ever take it for granted again. I realised that you couldn't ever put a price on it."
Though most musicians will balk when quizzed about their influences, James is candid about his two inspirations; both Welshmen, both leading figures in seminal bands who chanced their arm at going it alone. First was Velvet Underground pioneer John Cales Paris 1919, which James calls one of his favourite albums ever. His songs are quite confusing and you can actually get lost in them. I just like the sombre quality to a lot of what he does and I like the fact that he's always writing about disparate people and places but always remains sounding Welsh; no matter how he's trying to escape it he never will.
And secondly, 7 Park Avenue, the album of demos that Badfinger frontman Pete Ham recorded in the eponymous house in Golders Green. I just liked the fact that he never seemed embarrassed about what he wrote; he always seemed comfortable. There's just something undeniably so
melancholic about the music. I took those two things as inspiration, because they seemed individual in their esoteric landscape."
The album reconnects with his Welsh identity for sure; coming to terms with and moving on with the triumphs and tragedies of his past - yes; but while 'The Great Western' is as grown-up and profound as that sounds; it's shot through with the same primal zeal for melody, urge for power chords and lust for life that have kept James Dean Bradfield at the summit of Britrock for 15 years.
And has this tentative solo flight given James the appetite to work on his own again any time soon? "I only mastered it last night," he sighs, "but I've just realised that I actually really enjoyed it a lot. Seeing 'Words and Music by James Dean Bradfield' written down actually made me feel happy. For once I've lost a bit of my insecurity."
