Quite often when working from home, I like to stick on documentaries and podcasts to listen to while working and this week, I found myself watching the three documentaries about the band that changed my life, the Manic Street Preachers.

These documentaries were made by the excellent Welsh filmmaker and long-time collaborator of the band, Kieran Evans.

Two of them, I’d seen before; Escape from History, featuring interviews with the band and others about the time from the 1995 disappearance of Richey Edwards up to the release and subsequent commercial success of Everything Must Go, and ‘Truth and Memory’, featuring archive home video clips documenting the recording of their first number one album, This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours.

Both videos are a time capsule into a different era– as a child of the early 90’s, while the Manic Street Preachers were referencing everything from Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell to the life of South African photojournalist Kevin Carter, I was busy being a child – I first really discovered the band aged nine when I commandeered Dad’s tape of Everything Must Go.

The third I’ve just watched for the first time – documenting the genesis of the band and their debut album ‘Generation Terrorists’, released in 1992. The documentary is called ‘Culture, Alienation, Boredom and Despair’, the title taken from a line in ‘Little Baby Nothing’, a duet with Traci Lords, a former porn star. It had originally intended to feature Kylie Minogue, who was at the time signed to Stock Aitken and Waterman, but allegedly they didn’t want their ‘massive popstar’ artist on a song by a ‘bunch of scumbags’.

The irony being that Kylie would, several years later after breaking from Stock Aitken and Waterman, collaborate with the Manics on her Impossible Princess album from 1997, with the tracks ‘Some Kind of Bliss’ and ‘I Don’t Need Anyone’.

If the previous two documentaries were a time capsule, the era from which Generation Terrorists hails is something even further from that. This was a time when four intelligent, bellicose Welshmen appeared on a music scene dominated by the rather simplistic, red-top tabloid happy fluff that was the Madchester scene. Little did they know that that same city would later produce the monstrosity known as Oasis.

And yet, it could have been so different. In an article detailing the mayhem of the time, Rob Stringer, who signed them for Columbia records said: “They played a ball in Cambridge and I took the sales director and marketing director. They played three songs, Nicky called the audience posh t**ts, James punched someone, they smashed the place up, it was chaos – we were escorted off the site. The senior people from the company were horrified. This is just weeks after Richey carved his arm up. God knows how we got through that first month.”

A far cry from the band who are currently finishing their 15th album, pre-faced by the excellent single Decline and Fall. See, I told you I’d remark on that song.