The Quietus recently had the pleasure of sitting down with James Dean Bradfield and Nicky Wire for a chat about new album Journal For Plague Lovers.
While talking about the forthcoming Horrors remix of ‘Doors Closing Slowly’, Nicky Wire said that Primary Colours is "fucking great. I love it. It’ll be my album of the year."
Wire added that he felt the Horrors reminded him of The Manics at the time of The Holy Bible: "They just follow their own path. I mean I liked them initially because they were a bit like us and were portrayed as the cartoon band with spiky hair and eyeliner, which I always love anyway," he told us. "Now they’re a bit like us when we recorded The Holy Bible, they just locked themselves away, they haven’t listened to anyone and they’ve come out with this album which really stands out."
James Dean Bradfield’s praise was similarly fulsome, as he proclaimed Primary Colours to be "the gothic Screamadelica."
In the interview, the full version of which you can read here, the Manics revealed all about their forthcoming Roundhouse gig. "We’ve not had much time to think about it yet. It was another of my ideas that I’ll probably live to regret," Nicky Wire said. "We’ll play the [new] album in full then there’ll be an interval. Time for oxygen and a massage and
then back to do older material. There’ll be some hits but there’ll be some proper curios as well. One song we have worked on is a cover of ‘Primitive Painters’ by Felt, which is one of the best songs ever recorded. We had to do it for the Japanese version of the album because they need an extra track."
Speaking about the other remixes that the band have commissioned, Wire said "Andrew Weatherall has done an amazing version of ‘Peeled Apples’ which he described as being like Charlie Watts playing with PiL. British Sea Power have done ‘Me And Stephen Hawking’ which is a Joe Meek kind of thing. Four Tet have really used and abused Albini’s sounds."
