Manic Street Preachers attack Radiohead at tiny Glasgow show

Band celebrate King Tut's Wah Wah Hut's 20th birthday

Manic Street Preachers helped celebrate the 20th birthday of Glasgow‘s King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut last night (February 18), playing a career-spanning set of favourites and obscurities in the 300-capacity venue.

During the show bassist Nicky Wire attacked Radiohead‘s Ed O’Brien, calling him a “cunt” as part of an ongoing dispute between the two.

“Apparently Ed O’Brien called me a wanker, I’m really fucking scared, go back to your boarding school you cunt!” he exclaimed near the end of the set. The bassist was referring to comments from the Radiohead guitarist, who had said Wire was talking “bollocks” about file-sharing, the bassist having accused the band of only caring about it after they had earned millions.

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The Welsh band – taking time out from recording a new album – opened with little-known 1990 EP track ‘Strip It Down’ because they played it during their last gig at the venue back in 1991.

Bassist Nicky Wire joked with the crowd after the song that: “19 years on and I actually play it worse than I did back then,” before adding to a chorus of cheers that “we still look as good though.”

The band then tore through ‘Your Love Alone Is Not Enough’, ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ and ‘From Despair To Where’ before frontman James Dean Bradfield paid homage to departed guitarist Richey Edwards on ‘Peeled Apples’ “The last time we played here we were of course a four-piece, and this is a song from an album written in the spirit of Richey,” he said.

Before ‘This Is Yesterday’ Bradfield commented on the band’s bare-bones line-up for the night, joking with the audience that, “As you can see it’s just the three of us tonight, so when you hear the songs that are supposed to have strings and keyboards on them, you’ll just have to imagine them.” “And when you hear the songs with backing vocals,” deadpanned Wire, “You’ll hear my God-awful out of tune attempt.”

The crowd chanted throughout the gig for ‘Faster’, which went unplayed. In its place, however, were the crowd-pleasing likes of ‘Kevin Carter’ and Bradfield‘s solo acoustic rendition of ‘The Everlasting’, after which Wire re-emerged having undergone an outfit change from a grey suit to black miniskirt and peaked sailor’s cap.

The band squeezed in an impromptu cover of The Small Faces ‘All Or Nothing’. Finally, after hailing his bandmate Bradfield as, “The spiritual heir to Stuart Adamson (The Skids/Big Country guitarist)”, Wire made his O’Brien rant.

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Manic Street Preachers played:

‘Strip It Down’
‘Your Love Alone Is Not Enough’
‘Motorcycle Emptiness’
‘From Despair To Where’
‘Peeled Apples’
‘This Is Yesterday’
‘Kevin Carter’
‘Tsunami’
‘Found That Soul’
‘Little Baby Nothing’
‘Jackie Collins Existential Question Time’
‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’
‘Donkeys’
‘The Everlasting’
‘You Love Us’
‘No Surface All Feeling’
‘Masses Against The Classes’
‘All Or Nothing’
‘Motown Junk’
‘A Design For Life’

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