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The singer tells of how Wales informed his contribution
Manic Street Preachers’ singer-guitarist James Dean Bradfield has spoken of working with Public Service Broadcasting on their new album, Every Valley, and how coming from Wales helped inform his contribution to the record.
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Every Valley, Public Service Broadcasting’s third album and set for releas next month, tells the story of the mining in South Wales and its development, eventual demise and aftermath. The band’s mainman, J Willgoose Esq., has described the album as a metaphor for today’s "abandoned and neglected communities across the western world", which have led to a "malignant, cynical and calculating brand of politics."
The album was recorded in the former steelworks town of Ebbw Vale, in south Wales.
Speaking to Louder Than War, Bradfield said: “Obviously I’m really connected to the subject matter on this record – socio-geographically - but John’s just a brilliant chap.”
He continued: “If he’d have been around in the ’20s or ’30s he’d have been one of those classic English gentlemen with the wherewithal to go to the South Pole. He just gets on with it. He sets up a studio in improbable locations, writes an album about improbable subjects. I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeonly old codger, but he never moans, he just fucking does it and there should be more people like that.”
He added: “I have the realisation that I may have been in the band and the band may have had some success, I may be older, I may have a family now, I may live in Cardiff now, but I’ll always kinda be a Valley Boy – not in a romantic way, but you can’t escape it really. I never really escaped it. I can act as if I’ve escaped it. If you’ve achieved some kind of balance in your life, you kind of owe a debt to the places that have made you because places do make you, for better or for worse.”
Photo: Press
