Artist: James Dean Bradfield
Genre(s):
ROck: Alternative
Discography:
The Great Western
Year: 2006
Tracks: 10
Although rhythm guitar player and lyricist Richey James Edwards' assaultive public persona garnered virtually of the band's headlines in their early years, the heart of Manic Street Preachers was always isaac Bashevis Singer and lead guitarist James Dean Bradfield. With his short, compact build and hard-man bravado, Bradfield had an Everyman anti-mystique that stock-still the band's often incipient political posturing and served as an anchorperson for Edwards' substantially flightier proto-Pete Doherty antics. Together, Bradfield and Edwards made Manic Street Preachers THE bombilate ring of the early days of Brit-pop, earlier the reconfigured ring became universal stars after Edwards' manifest self-destruction in 1995.Natural in the little Welsh industrial metropolis of Pontypool on February 21, 1969, James Dean Bradfield claims that his father named him afterwards the doomed American film histrion. Early exposure to the first wave of punk bands, peculiarly the Clash, lED Bradfield to form a band with his cousin-german Sean Moore on drums and puerility friend Nicholas Jones (shortly renamed Nicky Wire) on bass in 1986. Wire shortly confident his university quaker Edwards to conjoin the band, and the fresh rechristened Manic Street Preachers released their first D.I.Y. single in 1988. A long series of singles and EPs, along with the band's maturation live buzz and a notorious incident where Edwards carven the idiomatic expression "4 Real" into his arm in figurehead of a journalist from New Musical Express, lED to the Manics signing to Sony in 1991. Three albums -- 1992's Generation Terrorists, 1993's Gold Against the Soul, and 1994's The Holy Bible -- followed, just Edwards' increasingly aberrant conduct eclipsed the band's medicine regular in the eyes of many fans. When Edwards disappeared in February 1995 (his abandoned cable car ground on a bridge deck near Bristol), many fictive that would be the end of the Manic Street Preachers.Instead, Bradfield reasserted his position as the focal point of the Manic Street Preachers both onstage and in interviews (although Wire took up the job of writing the lyrics) and the modern threesome lineup released 1996's reflective Everything Must Go, a crisply commercial pop album more or less at odds with the glam-infused punk of their other years. Released in 1998, This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours was equally commercially successful, although 2001's Know Your Enemy and 2004's slick, Tony Visconti-produced Lifeblood saw diminishing returns, including the red ink of the band's American distribution.During this period, Bradfield took on production and remixing jobs for the likes of Massive Attack, Kylie Minogue, and fellow Welshman Tom Jones, ahead finally cathartic his first solo album, The Great Western, in July 2006. Featuring the single "That's No Way to Tell a Lie" and "An English Gentleman," an affecting tribute to the Manic Street Preachers' late managing director Philip Hall, The Great Western is a return to the mainstream guitar rock'n'roll of Everything Must Go.
