Spectators Of Suicide- how's that for a typically early Manic Street Preachers song title?- was on the You Love Us EP in 1991, the last thing the band released on Heavenly before they moved to Columbia. The EP's sleeve is also typically Manics with Beatrice Dalle as Betty Blue, Karl Marx, Robert Johnson and Travis Bickle all jostling for attention among brightly coloured cut and paste newspaper headline lettering. The title track is Manic's punk, huge anthemic choruses, massive guitars and an arrogance that outweighed their then sales.
Spectators Of Suicide could be by a completely different band- slowed down, ringing guitars, a sample of Black Panther Bobby Seale saying he's gonna go down 'to the whole damn government and say ''stick em up motherfuckers we've come for what's ours''. The rippling guitar chords and notes and restrained vocals shimmer rather than slash and burn, the drums are in the room, the production is all about feel and tone. They sound like they're feeling their way into something.
Richie's lyrics take in democracy as a lie, obedience, choice (or lack of it), smoking as a lifestyle choice, advertising... concluding with James singing over the coda, 'You gonna shoot us dead/ With decadence'.
The band re- recorded it for Generation Terrorists, an amped up, glam rock version in line with the rest of the album (although you can hear some of Motorcycle Emptiness's wasted beauty in the original version I think). In 2020 they did it again with Gwenno sharing the vocals, two versions (one sung in English and one in Welsh) in aid of two charities, Missing People and the Trussell Trust. You can get both of those here. Bigger, older and wiser- but I still prefer the first version and its demo quality.
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