Manic Street Preachers bassist Nicky Wire has admitted that he would rather “fucking stab my eyes out with a pencil” than accept a knighthood or OBE.
Speaking in a new interview with MOJO magazine, Wire criticised “left-leaning actors and pop stars” for “queuing up” to accept honours from the monarchy.
“I’m so riddled with doubts and contradictions now, even though I still kept to those principles,” he said.
“My kids have been through comprehensive education, I still believe in high taxation and all those kind of things, I stay close to my roots … I haven’t abandoned any of those things at all. But I don’t know if they’re relevant to modern life.
“You see supposedly left-leaning actors and pop star queuing up to get MBEs and OBEs – and I’d rather fucking stab my eyes out with a pencil than do that. What was it, [Paul] Weller and David Bowie turned down knighthoods? That’s good enough for me.”
The band recently shared their new single ‘The Secret He Had Missed’, featuring Sunflower Bean‘s Julia Cumming.
“It’s probably the most Abba-influenced track on the album, the piano track especially,” Wire told NME. “It all came out really naturally. It’s what we would call pop in our world – that glacial kind of controlled energy that comes out in something melancholic, but uplifting.”
Speaking about their forthcoming 14th album ‘The Ultra Vivid Lament’, Wire said the record would find a home with fans of the band’s more esoteric and experimental but “controlled” work.
“I think it’s got traces of ‘Lifeblood’ [2004] and ‘Futurology’ [2014], but I think it is a step into a new dimension,” he explained. “It’s got the high modernism of ‘Futurology’ and the underplayed, glacial power of ‘Lifeblood’. It’s very much framed within Abba’s ‘Waterloo’ and Echo & The Bunnymen’s ‘Bring On The Dancing Horses’.”
