James Dean Bradfield (Birmingham Barfly, 11th October 2006)

JAMES DEAN BRADFIELD

Birmingham Barfly, Wednesday 11^th October 2006

  

A strange band, Manic Street Preachers. One minute, they’re an acquired taste, playing seedy punk dives to hordes of devotees, and the next they’re filling arenas across the country, leaving a vapour trail of accepted Britrock standards. It was a perverse way to achieve it as well; it took the disappearance of talismanic guitarist Richey Edwards in 1995 for the media to love them.

So it’s equally strange to see frontman James Dean Bradfield holding the fort on his own, promoting debut solo release The Great Western without his usual sidekicks Sean Moore and the irrepressible Nicky Wire. The album itself is a nice mix of thoughtful lyrics and powerful melody, enough to snare floating voters, but would it be enough to attract the die-hard Manics fan still in a thrall to leopard-print blouses and vitriol.

The opening salvo of ‘Émigré’ soon convinces the sweating masses inside the tiny Barfly that they’ve nothing to be concerned about. There’s nothing workmanlike about Bradfield’s way with a tune, even if his powerful build and brusque persona suggest otherwise. He segues easily into singles ‘That’s No Way To Tell A Lie’ and ‘An English Gentleman,’ either one sounding like they could have lain dormant for many years beneath many a Manics showtune. Bradfield looks hungry for respect, not adoration, and even though his native Wales successfully dispatched the Cypriot football team before the gig kicked off, he’s got plenty in his own arsenal to crow about.

In fact, the first seven songs tonight are composed entirely of self-written material, and despite the people shouting for songs belonging to his mother band, the audience get enough of a kick out of what he has to offer to suggest that one solo album might not be enough.

Then it’s on to the crowd-pleasers. A sweaty cover of The Clash’s ‘Clampdown’ gets us all intrigued, then he strips down to the bare bones and offers up three acoustic Manics classics, namely ‘This Is Yesterday,’ chart hit ‘Kevin Carter’ and a sublime version of ‘Motorcycle Emptiness.’ If the die-hards weren’t sure about JDB yet, this had them eating out of the palm of his enormous hand.

The band come back on, which is usually a signal to wind it down, but the four songs in lieu of an encore are enough to make people wish he could play all night. Two nice ballads from the solo album sandwich a breathless ‘From Despair to Where,’ the sweat raining from the ceiling and dripping from everyone’s bodies. There’s a final flourish with an emotional ‘No Surface All Feeling,’ pregnant with the absent Richey if not absent friends, and all too soon James Dean Bradfield is heading off to the tiny backstage area, to toast the latest victory of the night.

An oddity of tonight’s gig is that Manic Street Preachers have scaled down their gigs from arenas to small clubs in the past couple of years, before a hopefully triumphant return next year. Tonight, Birmingham saw the lead singer of that band back in his preferred habitat, spilling soul and fire across the tiny stage. If he were a new artist, we’d be saying that he won’t be playing a venue like that for long. But James Dean Bradfield looks as comfortable as you like.