The Tate Modern was curating a retrospective on a German artist called Martin Kippenberger and The Australian had decided to pilfer an article on this from its sister paper The Times, just in case anyone was thinking of popping over to London for the weekend.
Upon seeing this painting I immediately realised that I was aware of three of Martin Kippenberger's pieces. These are the paintings of Kippenberger's as I recognise them
These are the three singles from the Manic Street Preachers album The Holy Bible. Faster/PCP, Revol and She Is Suffering.
On this Saturday just past I was sitting on my bed reading The Globe And Mail when on the front page of the "Globe Focus" section, accompanying a piece on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, was this image (apologies of the "branding" across the image, it's the best the web could provide me)
Once again I was very familiar with this image. However, in the version of it that I first saw the girl had a speech bubble coming from her mouth exclaiming "This is the only answer to rape". This was from the sleeve of the Manic Street Preachers Little Baby Nothing single.
The Manic Street Preachers are one band that I can't seem to shake. I've tried very hard to purge them, I've paid no active attention to them since the turn of the century and the only track of theirs I have on my iTunes is a Stereolab remix. Yet they have a persistent omnipresence. The subject lines of two of my previous three posts are lines from songs of theirs (Repeat and First Republic), regardless of my attempts to ignore them they refuse to leave my consciousness. Although the band are extremely uncool, currently an embarrassment, have no musical appeal to me whatsoever and only have one decent album anyway, the fact remains, and I'm not shy to admit this, they are still the greatest band that has ever existed.
The Manic Street Preachers are the only band that one can appreciate without caring about the music they played (I use the past-tense because the present doesn't count). They were a band who could be simultaneously over-earnest and frivolous, a band who were completely ridiculous yet were never ironic. They had a cross-dressing bass player who would dedicate awards to the leader of the Miners Union. They wrote music aimed at Middle America and then made homoerotic videos (with Camus quotes) and couldn't figure out why Middle America didn't like them. They had a guitarist who couldn't play guitar yet carved "4 Real" into his arm when his seriousness was questioned. They claimed British shoegaze band Slowdive were "worse than Hitler" and wished death upon Michael Stipe. They wrote songs from the perspective of war veterans, about AIDS being a purposely invented disease, frank working class anthems and songs about the holocaust. They had a number one single in the UK with a song about the Spanish Civil War, and then had another one with a song that began with a sampled a Chomsky quote. They have a song with a chorus that is a list of mass murders, which is followed by a song about the sexual exploits of Russian Presidents. And they even wrote a song claiming their superiority to both Henry Miller and Norman Mailer as well as the entire membership of Mensa. The BBC received their most complaints ever when the band's singer performed on Top Of The Pops wearing an IRA-style balaclava (albeit with his name written across the top; not a noted IRA tactic). Oh and on the 1st of February 1995 one of them disappeared and hasn't been seen since.
The band were quite frankly the most entertaining, interesting and educational of artists that a teenager could hope for. And as much as I try to run from them there's no denying the influence they had on my life and the affection I still hold for them.
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