Manic Street Preachers: why rock 'n' roll is dead
THERE’S a word in Welsh which doesn’t translatable into English, which every Welsh person knows: Hireath (pronounced Ee-a-reith). “It means a longing for your homeland,” says Welshman Kieran Evans, the Manic Street Preachers long-term video and film director. “It’s a pull, and I hear that pull in their music – that widescreen, Manics Melancholia.” It’s something he often visualises in their Welsh location videos, including latest single, the haunting, beautiful, terrace-chanting Hold Me Like A Heaven. “I think all Welsh men have that melancholy… cloud that hangs over us the whole time. Glass half empty.”
