Song of the Day -- Australia by Manic Street Preachers

Today's song (and note that there won't necessarily be a song every day, but hopefully more often than not) is Australia by Manic Street Preachers.

The song was a single from the 1996 album Everything Must Go. There are two stories about this album. One of them is personal and one relates to the context of the song. I'll try to keep both brief.

The first story is how I acquired the album. We were on the fourth day of our Wales trip, which I promise I will eventually get around to blogging about, and we stopped in Hay-On-Wye. Hay-on-Wye is a small town that is mainly known for having a huge population of bookstores. As we got off the bus, most of the group headed towards a couple of bookstores. Now, these stores are SMALL, so when 10 people mob one, it's literally impossible to so much as turn around. For that reason, Dan and I headed in the opposite direction and ended up popping into a small record store. I don't mean record store as a store that sells music, generally. He actually sold mostly records. However, he did have some CDs, which I perused. Finally, I saw something that caught my eye. It was Everything Must Go. I had heard of the Manics before and strongly liked their singles "Your Love Alone is Not Enough" and "Autumnsong" from their recent album, Send Away the Tigers. Also, I had heard that Everything Must Go was their masterpiece. At 5 pounds, it was a steal, so I picked it up.

I wasn't sorry. Top to bottom, it's a fantastic album and "Australia" is just one standout song from an album full of them. Not only that, but I'll always remember it for finding it in that out of the way record store in small-town Wales. Incidentally, the Manic Street Preachers (and I didn't know this at the time) are from Blackwood, Caerphilly in Wales, which is about 25 miles from Hay-on-Wye, so I was practically in their backyard.

The story surrounding the context of the song is that Richey James, who had been the lyricist and guitarist for the band, disappeared after their commercially unsuccessful but critically acclaimed album The Holy Bible. The Holy Bible was noted for its dark musical and lyrical content, which was largely driven by James' fragile mental state. To this day, it reminds undetermined what happened to James (and some maintain hope he is still alive) but it is generally assumed that he committed suicide. The rest of the band, now reduced to a four-piece, was left to finish the album. Bassist Nicky Wire wrote the rest of the songs and finished some that James had started. What results is a fascinating album. It's essentially half written by the suicidal James and half by the grieving Wire, who had lost his close friend and bandmate. Lyrically, it is often startingly bleak and/or angry, but musically it is suprisingly optimistic. They are, by and large, triumphant songs of despair.

"Australia" fits this description perfectly. Written by Wire it is often considered to be a statement of Wire's grief over the loss of his friend and his desire to escape Wales. The concept is that Australia is about as far as one can get from South Wales. The chorus says it all: "I want to fly and run till it hurts/Sleep for a while and speak no words in Australia/In Australia". Despite that somewhat depressed sentiment, the music is powerful and quite honestly uplifting.

Sometimes, I just have days where I don't feel like dealing with people, when I don't feel like facing the day. Sometimes, I'm just tired or frustrated or fed up or all of the above. On those times, the chorus of Australia plays in my head, and somehow just by hearing the song it makes things just a little more bearable.

What a TUNE! Here's a youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP390yQ36wY

By the way, this reached #7 on the UK singles chart.