Nicky Wire, Manic Street Preachers – Wolverhampton Civic Hall (Photo: Gary Mather for Live4ever Media)
Manic Street Preachers have teamed up with Gwenno for the reworking of one of their earliest tracks.
The Missing People UK and Trussell Trust charities are both being supported by Manic Street Preachers via the Bandcamp release of a re-recording of their Spectators Of Suicide track.
As well as the charity work, this new version takes the Manics back to their formative days with Heavenly Recordings, the hugely influential UK label whose history is being remembered right now with Robin Turner’s book Believe In Magic.
“When the book was originally going to come out, there was this idea of doing launch parties,” Turner has told NME. “I asked James to play a couple of acoustic songs for us at The Social, but that’s all gone out of the window this year so I asked him to do an acoustic version of Spectators that we could use on the radio or something.”
“He gave it a go and called back and said, ‘I’ve done it with the band, but I want a female voice on it – how do you feel about me getting Gwenno?’. He hadn’t connected the idea that it was an artist from the label 30 years ago with an artist on the label now.”
