AT the time of writing this, the release of a brand new Manic Street Preachers track, titled Decline and Fall is hours away from being released, and as a Manics fan since being aged in single digits, it’s got our founder excited. He’s heard the 20 second teaser, probably multiple times and while time is not on our side to review it for this week’s column, we’re absolutely certain he’ll be raving about it soon.

If you had asked us a week ago what his column would be about, it would have been a 500 word diatribe about an album of remixes by Cilla Black he’d come across and threatened to do an entire show based around. So, we have a lot for the Manic Street Preachers to be thankful for. Not just us, but you, the listeners and everyone else. While we can accept a club remix of John Lennon’s Imagine covered by Cilla Black is probably bizarre, there’s only so many lorra lorra laughs you can take.

Anyway, the news of the new Manics album has kept him distracted and instead this week he’s decided to rave about one of the lesser loved albums of the vast discography of the Manic Street Preachers.

It had been intended as a two-album spectacle, but upon original release in 2001, it was merged into one mega album of 18 tracks which had a varying acclaim, not least as it came on the back of the colossally commercially successful and elegiac This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours.

So when it came to revisiting it 20 years later, the band agreed they would do it on the condition it was released as it was originally intended, as two albums within one. One part, which was the more accessible by commercial standards was to be called Door to the River and the second, the more rabble rousing prosaic was to be called Solidarity.

To complete the record as originally intended, the archives were raided for some B-sides which were never fully released but long loved by the fan base, and some rarities in the form of the tremendous ‘Rosebud’ and ‘Studies in Paralysis’ which had never seen the light of day.

The existing tracks were also stripped back and remastered by producer Dave Eringa and the lead singer, James Dean Bradfield. Where traditional remasters mostly focus on the minor pieces, in some instances, the tracks were entirely reworked. For example, Door to the River was stripped of its strings and sounds like a totally different song, while Dead Martyrs had extensive reworking – with the ending now a real tub thumping, glorious guitar and drum solo.

The decision to transform Know Your Enemy into the vision originally envisaged by the band was a definite success. It transformed one of the band’s lesser loved pieces of work into a body of material which is eminently enjoyable and effectively, a new album made from the pieces of two decades ago.