3:AM Magazine

Richey himself was a big thinker in regards to conspiracy theories. For instance, the meaning of “I laughed when Lennon got shot”. It’s s about him knowing it was a CIA thing with Mark Chapman and that’s why in the lyric he laughed. There are notes in which he thinks it’s hilarious no one can see it and they’re thinking he wrote “I laughed” because he somehow thought Lennon getting shot was funny. With regards to esoteric ideas. To the point where all he was left in was his doubt. Someone got in touch and told us that Richey had hired a hitman to kill him and part of the difficulty is that you find yourself questioning the out-there scenarios because the whole narrative is quite out-there.

Guy Mankowski interviews Sara Hawys Roberts about Withdrawn Traces: Searching for the Truth About Richey Manic.

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Jerry was very clear that he wanted a movement which would offer youth an alternative to the National Front. As Cathyl from Madness argues, you can’t lance a boil from a 100 yards away. The power for change was in the songs and the joy of a thousand other rude boys and girls skanking to the irresistible rhythms of ska and reggae. The NF were crushed and humiliated in the 1979 General Election. But Margaret Thatcher had as much claim to that outcome, as music and the cultural opposition of Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League.

Andrew Stevens talks to Daniel Rachel about the music and politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge.

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I was a mod 1980-1986, I then got into Acid Jazz, I took my first E in ‘88, 89 and I kind of thought, as I’d always been interested in mods in the sixties getting into acid, that mods had gone two ways, they’d either become skinheads or took acid. And I thought that in the eighties that was our acid period, that was our Haight-Ashbury, our summer of love and I was a year or so late to it, but I remember thinking that ‘This is it! Ecstasy will unite the world!’, it’ll whatever.

Andrew Stevens talks subcultures and pulp fiction with Paul Hallam.

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Obviously by managing the Damned and Generation X/Chelsea for a little while they all form, split, reform etc. and so that created more but in those days everyone was devout, every Wednesday morning they got their NME, so even though it was a slow printing process it was relatively fast in that you could get reviews in quickly and a couple of days after each review of the club we started getting all these tapes coming in saying ‘We’re a punk band from Sheffield, we’re punk band from Manchester, we’re a punk band from Scotland etc.’

Andrew Stevens talks to Andrew Czezowski and Susan Carrington about their new duography.

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Strangely, I sometimes found myself looking at or for authors that weren’t explicitly there in the album’s references, but I nonetheless felt cast their shadows over it: T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Philip Larkin. I’d always put off reading Yukio Mishima before, and diving into his works, I felt a strong influence on Richey, especially the concepts of political purity, intransigence, eroticized pain and masochism, self-sacrifice in the name of a higher virtue, discipline.

Daniel Lukes and Guy Mankowski in conversation on the legacy of the Manic Street Preachers.

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I think I look at time as more of a circle than a straight line. Some people are very fixed, section their lives off, but I have never been that way. I do find it interesting how things change, but also how they repeat. People’s problems remain the same. I’ve always liked social history, listening to stories. That’s a big part of our education, really. What shapes us. So it feeds into what I do, makes the experience of writing exciting.

Andrew Stevens interviews John King for 3:AM.

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I was writing from a certain outsider’s perspective of Memphis, an artificial experience conjured by and sustained for the consumption of the tourist. Sometimes I think there is too much emphasis on the value of authenticity when it comes to narratives of the South. The farmer hero, sons of the soil, the courtly gentleman, the religious zealot. But a city like Memphis, as an idea or as a narrative, is as indebted to the tourist attraction or fantasy as it is to the populist’s history. A history from the street can be as much a projection of desires, fantasies and connivances as it is a ‘real’ description of the past.

Andrew Stevens gets deep fried with Erik Morse.

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