The Manic Street Preachers, known colloquially as the Manics, have announced their new book called ‘Little Baby Nothings’ containing unseen photographs by Valerie Phillips. The book features over 200 never seen before images of the band from 1991 until 1992, the same time as they released their debut album ‘Generation Terrorists’.
The book is being released on June 28th via Long Moon Farther, and you can pre-order it here. The band are only releasing 200 copies of the book, and the first 100 will be a special signed copy.
Nicky Wire, a member of the band, took to social media and thanked Valerie Phillips who has found these images that had long been deemed lost, and has captured the “ragged glory of Manic Street Preachers and more importantly captured our little bit of history”.
The time in which the photographs were taken, was when the band were rocketing through the charts and breaking through into mainstream music, and when they released their first album ‘Generation Terrorists’ that featured hit songs such as ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ and ‘You Love Us’.
Whilst being a rock band, that helped to define the sound of the 90s, the band are also extremely proud of their Welsh roots, and during the 1990s, they played a key part of the Welsh Cool Cymru cultural movement that helped to bring Welsh culture, such as the Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics and independent Welsh films to mainstream culture. The band were pioneers of this era for Welsh music, and made it just as iconic as Britpop. The Manics formed in 1986 in the Welsh town of Blackwood at school in 1986, and from there found immense success.
Phillips, the photographer for the new book, was with the band for an extended period of time, spanning over twenty months, and her photos were loved by the band, and by fans, with her images being used for their album cover of ‘Send Away The Tigers’ in 2007. Phillips told NME how she was “asked to get a train to a small town in Wales to take pictures of Manic Street Preachers” and how from there, their “starting-out all-consuming little worlds… collided”.
Over thirty years on, the band are still finding success and are soon to start their UK and Ireland tour, that begins on June 28th in Llangollen, in the band’s home country, and takes them across the UK, with performances in Cardiff, Manchester, and London and any remaining tickets can be found here. Later this year, the now three piece are performing at BBC Radio 2 in the Park in Preston, and you can find tickets here.
