Mojo - The Music Magazine

Manic Street Preachers opened this year's run of MOJO Honours List shows last night, delivering an electrifying 90-minute cavalcade of new songs and hits to a frenzied audience at London's HMV Forum.

British acoustic explorer Adem opened proceedings with a spectral set of low-fi ballads and rustic anthems that managed to fill the 2300-capacity venue while still retaining their intimate, bedroom-recording feel. A master of understated, homegrown melodies, the songs - tonight taken from his last five years of Domino releases - were pushed to new limits with the help of his backing band who, with their mantric drums and squawking fiddle ensured that Adem left the stage with a host of new converts in tow.

New Young Pony Club - London's pulsing new wave resurrectionists and recent remixers of the Manics' Marlon JD - brought their razor sharp electro cuts to the stage next as singer Tahita Bulmer - all attitude and '80s chic - led the band through a series of tracks taken from their 2007 debut Fantastic Playroom.

Still riding high after the rapturous response garnered by their ninth studio LP, the Steve Albini-produced/Richey Edwards-penned Journal For Plague Lovers, the Manics took the stage under a huge backdrop of the album's haunting Jenny Saville cover art. Four songs from the new record were quickly unleashed, each a cauterising, post-punk 'smash 'n' grab' that quickly realigned the band with the grimy sounds of 1992 debut Generation Terrorists and the angry-as-all-hell Holy Bible. It's these two albums that provided the real highlights of the evening, with Little Baby Nothing and a blistering Faster both turning the band's devotees into a sea of barging bodies. And if that wasn't enough for the diehard contingent, Sorrow 16 - the B-side to early calling-card Motown Junk and a song that, according to bassist Nicky Wire, was "first played next door in the Bull & Gate" - ensured that this was a Manics show that will not be forgotten anytime soon. But perhaps best of all was No Surface All Feeling. A fitting close to 1996's Everything Must Go, in a live setting the song transformed into a planet-sized anthem that, with its melancholic edge, echoing choruses and needling guitar, seemed to drive straight to the very heart of the Manics sound.

After a brief acoustic sojourn from James Dean Bradfield, Wire arrived back on stage sporting a fetching leopard print skirt, his recent problems with a prolapsed disc undetected and, joined by Bradfield and drummer Sean Moore, barrelled into a joyous double-whammy of You Love Us and the anthemic A Design For Life. Triumphant to the very end, Wire finished the show by holding up two signs, one reading "THIS IS THE END" the other stating "KNOWLEDGE IS POWER". Twenty years into their crusade, the Manics remain glam-punk heroes to their very core.

The Manics played:

Peeled Apples
Jackie Collins Existential Question Time
Me and Stephen Hawking
This Joke Sport Severed
Motorcycle Emptiness
Your Love Alone Is Not Enough
No Surface All Feeling
Sorrow 16
Tsunami
Faster
If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next
Little Baby Nothing
Ocean Spray
From Despair To Where (Acoustic)
Facing Page (Acoustic)
You Stole The Sun From My Heart
Motown Junk
Autumnsong
You Love Us
A Design For Life

The MOJO Honours List Shows continue this week with Dinosaur Jr, Clinic and Hush Arbors (June 9) and Buzzcocks, The Fall and John Cooper Clarke (June 10) all playing the HMV Forum.

Photographs courtesy of Simon Fernandez