“I won the Brit Awards and I was living in a miner’s house.”
Manic Street Preachers songwriter Nicky Wire has recalled how the 1984 miners’ strike helped shape the band’s global hits.
His brother, Patrick Jones, went on to forge a successful career as a poet and playwright.
Both men said those early years instilled in them a “working class rage” that continues to fuel their art.
Nicky and Patrick spoke to BBC Wales around Blackwood and Oakdale, where they grew up in Caerphilly county, as part of a series marking 40 years since the strike.
Nicky said he remembers writing Manic’s 1996 hit A Design for Life when living in Blackwood – a song he said was “rooted in the south Wales valleys”.
“The rage and despair of those times is the main artery that stays with me,” he said.
The miners’ strike loomed large in the brothers’ early years. “It’s a scar really that still remains,” Nicky said.
Both men credit their politics-filled, working class upbringing with their success.
The Manics formed in Oakdale Comprehensive School in 1986 – winning best British group at the Brit Awards just over a decade later in 1997.
“The first lyric I ever wrote with James Dean Bradfield was a track called Aftermath, it was about the miners’ strike, that’s the first song we ever wrote together”, Nicky said.
“It was kind of unavoidable and inescapable.”
Nicky said the Manic’s 1998 album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours was dedicated to the last pit before it closed.
Patrick wrote the hit play Everything Must Go about a hero set in a working class south Wales valleys community.
“Growing up we had a really simple working class upbringing – never went on a foreign holiday,” Patrick said.
In the early ’90s, as mines were starting to close across the UK, the Manics recorded their first album, Generation Terrorists. It was the sound of revolution – strike music.
“Our first album was pure rage and destruction,” Nicky said.
“There’s a certain working class rage that’s deeply embedded. It’s in our DNA.”
Nicky said the band took inspiration from the miners themselves – the institutes and libraries they built.
“We thought, we’re actually not going to rely on anyone, there’s just the four of us in a bedroom, writing letters”, Nicky said.
“That was inspirational, the idea that you could build your own monuments.”
Nicky said he remembers Patrick noticing the “gnarled hands of ex-miners” in the job centres now filling in forms for benefits.
“It did seem that dignity had been ripped from our surroundings,” Nicky said.
Music and speeches galvanised communities during the strike.
Brass bands accompanied columns of miners marching back to work.
On pickets, speeches captured the dark but defiant mood.
Patrick said: “It made me create my own inner spirit – I’ll speak my truth.
“I wasn’t going to be a union organiser, I couldn’t do that, but I could write – so that became my pathway,” he said.
It was this scene, more than any other that shaped Nicky and Patrick’s work.
“It felt like something was very broken, very broken, which has taken a long time to fix, if at all,” said Nicky.
“I felt as if something had changed forever… communities have been changed forever.
“It was them and us, and they did try and divide and conquer – if you look at housing, education, workers rights, it’s all been chipped away.”
Nicky said he believed there had been a lack of vision for former mining communities, which he said is down to the decisions of governments current and past.
“I’m lucky, I’m insulated, for the last twenty, thirty years I haven’t had to deal with the worries a lot of people have to deal with every single minute,” he said.
“I’m not one to judge other people’s circumstances because I’ve been lucky enough to avoid a lot of the bad ones.
“The legacy is even more important – if we look at the protest movements of today, the miners were doing that and speaking up and challenging things which they felt to be wrong 40 years ago.”
By BBC
