NO LAUGHING MATTER

Margaret entered James Dean Bradfield’s life just before lockdown. Named after its previous owner, the hundred-year-old piano arrived on his doorstep one day and was quickly installed in the music room. “I’d inherited it from this lovely old lady in Llandaff in Cardiff,” explains the Manic Street Preachers frontman. “She was a hundred and three at that point and had left to go into a care home, so she bequeathed it to us. I suppose I started to feel slightly over-romantic about it, thinking, ‘This has come here for a reason’.”

Bradfield duly set about putting it to good use. Forgoing his usual practice of composing on guitar, he instead began sketching some new ideas on the piano. This in turn gave them a different flavour.

“James stretched himself, as great musicians do,” says Manics lyricist/bassist Nicky Wire. “A lot of the initial songs were done as demos on piano. We were like: ‘This is something different.’ And it did lead to a kind of musicality when it came to lyrics as well. The words became really easy to digest and had a real flow.”

The upshot was , the Manics’ fourteenth studio album. It’s a record that doesn’t so much reinvent their sound as remind us that, beneath the din and roar, they’ve always been a classic pop band at heart. The album is warm, spacious and melodic, a bold and sophisticated work that nods to the past while pointing squarely into an undetermined future, made by three men negotiating the trials