Manic Street Preachers

Manic Street Preachers will play a concert as an alternative to Britain’s Diamond Royal Jubilee next year.

The Welsh ‘A Design for Life’ group were initially planning a year off in 2012, but bass player Nicky Wire now says they will play as a show to avoid celebrations marking Queen Elizabeth’s 60th year on the throne.

Speaking at the iTunes festival in London, Nicky said: ‘We were going to take a year off from touring altogether next year but we are going to do one gig just to avoid the Diamond Jubilee.”

Referring to the Queen’s husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, he added: “I mean, how f***ing saturated have we been with the Royal Family this year? So there’ll be one gig, just to avoid having to listen to Prince Philip for an hour.’

Jubilee celebrations are set to run from June 2 to 5 next year. In 2011 a bank holiday was declared in April for the day Prince William married Catherine Middleton, a televised event which dominated the media for weeks.

Manic Street Preachers are not the only band to protest a royal celebration, as punk band The Sex Pistols released their single ‘God Save the Queen’ in May 1979 – a month before the monarch celebrated her Silver Jubilee. The controversial and provocative track has been interpreted as an attack on the monarchy and was banned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Manic Street Preachers bassist to release band history picture book

Manic Street Preachers bassist Nicky Wire is releasing a picture book of the group’s history. The bass player has been taking Polaroid photos throughout the band’s 25-year-career which have been collected into two volumes, the first of which will be called ‘Death of The Polaroid: A Manics Family Album’. The shots trace the band from making their first album, ‘Generation Terrorists’, to their most recent record, ‘Postcards From a Young Man’, which came out last year. Speaking of the book, he said: “You see the unfolding and unraveling, really, of four kids that kind of grew up in a bedroom, dreaming of taking over the world. I’m hoping it will be really engaging and really tactile.”

The photos were selected from around 3,000 which Nicky has taken of the band – which also includes James Dean Bradfield, Sean Collins and former member Richey Edwards, who disappeared in 1995 – and they are accompanied by text written by the star.

Nicky added: “Obviously the amount of travelling you see in the book – from Blackwood to Japan and back, is pretty amazing.

“I think the genius of Polaroid is you can pinpoint a memory really easily, and our fans are just as dedicated as we are in that sense, so I think they’ll just look at the book and be able to associate a memory with it as well.”

‘Death Of The Polaroid: A Manics Family Album’ will be published in November.