Manic Street Preachers: O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London – Live Review

Manic Street Preachers | The Anchoress
O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London
19th April 2025

Manic Street Preachers give it their all at the second of two intimate Shepherd’s Bush Empire shows. Their take-no-prisoners performance and careful song selection show off all sides of a band that clearly still really care — about the purity of their live shows and about connecting with their audience.

Nobody’s getting any younger. Even the Manics have accepted this; three decades removed from A Design For Life’s ubiquity, their 15th album (and tonight’s show) opens with a song called Decline & Fall. “I know our time has come and gone,” reflects James Dean Bradfield over glistening keyboards and disco-style drumming, “But at least we blazed a trail and shone”. Later, on the new LP’s title track, Critical Thinking, Nicky Wire repeatedly admonishes himself: “What happened to your critical thinking?” At one point a rueful Bradfield even admits to feeling like an injured second division football player after bunging up his knee during last night’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire gig.

But the passage of time has done nothing to dilute the intensity and heart-on-the-sleeve passion of their live performances. Plus, it’s given them the benefit of diversity: like their original heroes, The Clash, Manic Street Preachers have never been scared to try something different. And, in this 2000-capacity venue, their take-no-prisoners performance and careful song selection show off all sides of a band that clearly still really care — about the purity of their live shows and about connecting with their audience.

So, we get the big radio hits: a yearning Australia; urgent You Stole The Sun From My Heart, vibrant Autumnsong; always-rousing Design For Life (dropped in mid-set in a move of supreme confidence); lung-busting Your Love Alone Is Not Enough; and incomparable If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next, probably still the only UK #1 about the Spanish Civil War thanks to the Manics’ biggest chorus and inspired lines like “The future teaches you to be alone/ The present to be afraid and cold”.

We get the live favourites: a crunching Enola/Alone; towering La Tristesse Durera (Scream To A Sigh), with monster fills from drummer Sean Moore; effusive paean to loneliness Motorcycle Emptiness; the six-string heroics of Sleepflower, which, to quote Fidel Castro, still sounds “louder than war”; the effortless International Blue, with a sleek guitar part sorely downplayed on the album version; and the ragged Motown Junk, lovingly dedicated to Richey Edwards.

We get the new songs: the stoic optimism (and bright synthy sheen) of Decline & Fall; the motorik Critical Thinking, a strident spiritual sequel to PCP that makes its live debut with Wire sneering lines from an oversized lyric sheet; the positively folky Hiding In Plain Sight, which has the bass player on vocals again, this time duetting with Lana McDonagh; the gentle plea of Dear Stephen that urges Morrissey to “please come back to us”; and beautifully contradictory People Ruin Paintings, which expertly pairs effervescent music with lyrics like “people destroy the truth”.

We get some minimalism: support act The Anchoress (Catherine Ann Davies) joins Bradfield in on a tender but haunting acoustic rendition of This Sullen Welsh Heart, before leaving the singer-guitarist alone on stage to perform the fragile Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky with all the distraught intimacy it demands; eternally melancholy The Everlasting gets a similarly stripped-back reinterpretation — emphasising its poignancy — before the full band join in.

And we get some real grit. Without touring guitarist Wayne Murray and guest keyboard player/longtime producer Dave Eringa, the trio sound intentionally urgent and visceral on two songs from their edgiest albums. The Holy Bible’s despairing She Is Suffering is fittingly raw and immediate; Journal For Plague Lovers’ bitter Peeled Apples is all fury and aggression undiminished by time — and only amplified by the intimacy of Shepherd’s Bush Empire, a venue with strong ties to the band. Bradfield and Wire both share memories of living nearby in the early ’90s, of eating at St. Elmo Fish Bar, of a time long before Westfield shopping centre. But, like the rest of tonight, their history isn’t looked on with a sense of nostalgia.

The Manics aren’t about forgetting their past. Everything plays out against a backdrop of Kieran Evans films that sometimes incorporate archival footage, song lyrics, and, in Manics tradition, quotations (including Anthony Burgess’ “We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it”). And Wire is perfectly on brand: the leopard-print gilet, the feather boa, the mention of both hoovering and tuna melt, unexpectedly throwing confetti over himself.

With a new album and this vital new show, it’s clear the Manics just don’t want to be defined by their past. Only fitting then that, as the band leave the stage, this Mary Oliver quote flashes up on the screen: “The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees to learn something by being nothing.”

Then again, these are words that wouldn’t seem out of place on a track by The Anchoress. Davies, a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and frequent Manics collaborator crafts the kind of songs that mesh perfectly with tonight’s headliners’: articulate, intelligent, and propulsive. Flanked by keyboards on either side of her microphone, she leads her three-piece band through a sterling set big on highlights from her breakout album, 2021’s The Art of Losing. The driving Show Your Face throbs with a synth line Davies plays one-handed to the side while singing; the bounding title track’s chorus (“And I know we’re ill at ease with questions of need/ Absolving ourselves in situations like these”) really shows off her vocal and lyric abilities; the more ethereal Unravel is all about building and releasing tension.

The immediacy of Once Upon A Lie, from back in 2014, is further ramped up by her guitarist and drummer, while the not-yet-released Damsels is an altogether more hypnotic prospect featuring a loping groove, sizzling guitar solo, and a lot of lyrics. Even swampier is Long Year, from 2016’s debut Confessions Of A Romance Novelist, with its psychedelic slide guitar motif and overall proggy vibe. The sweeping My Confessor, with Davies now on guitar, rises and falls in volume and intensity throughout, her soaring voice matched only by the rhythm section’s dexterity, before a sublime The Exchange concludes The Anchoress’ set with all the majesty tonight deserves.

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Words by Nils van der Linden. You can visit his author profile for Louder Than War here and his website here.

All photos © Paul Grace. For more of Paul’s writing and photos go to his archive. Paul is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and his websites are www.paulgrace-eventphotos.co.uk & www.pgrace.co.uk.

• Source: NEWHD MEDIA