Manic Street Preachers

Heineken Green Energy, Smithfield, Dublin

There was a time that being a Manic Street Preachers fan meant something. It was a badge of (dis)honour, a passion. You were either with them and if you weren’t with them, you were most definitely against them. Ten years on and, while they still get up some people’s noses, it really is possible to view them in a “yeah, they’re OK” sort of way.

For much of the gig in Dublin’s newest outdoor stop off, the problem is that nothing much happens. There’s no sparkle, no bite and a tall bloke wearing a dress really isn’t enough to make up for it. For a band who so emphatically talk the talk, we could have expected a little more walk.

The first four songs promise much, much more. Evidently, road testing a crowd pleasing summer festival set they rip into ‘Found That Soul’ before tossing off ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ second song in (proof that, even in their slash and burn early days, there was a streamlined rock band fighting to get out) and countering in with ‘You Stole The Sun From My Heart’ and ‘Everything Must Go’.

Then for some reason the whole thing falls flat.

The new songs fail to connect and their filled out, lush live sound begins to grate. Odd moments break through – they repeat the Cuban trick of bringing on a local trumpet player for ‘Kevin Carter’ and ‘Masses Against The Classes’ rages in a Beach Boys meets the Clash sort of way – but they’re generally something that you would never have associated with the Manics of old, boring.

Then someone turns on the huge flares in the square, a genuinely magical moment and, for the last twenty minutes or so, the gig rallies. ‘Mowtown Junk’ is prefaced with the guitar riff from ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ and a snatch of the Supremes’ ‘Baby Love’, a self-consciously knowing trick but effective all the same.

‘Australia’ may sound like Bon Jovi but is carried by James Bradfield’s conviction, while ‘You Love Us’ hints at the old passion and the much derided ‘If You Tolerate This…’ is, in contrast, genuinely quite lovely.

They leave us with ‘Design For Life’, that remarkable calling card for the post-Richey world – and in that moment that they are perhaps as great a band as they aspire to be.