Nicky Wire

Nicky Wire (born 20 January 1969) is a Welsh musician. He is best known as the lyricist, bassist and secondary vocalist of the Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers. Wire is notorious for his outspoken attitude and has been known to cause controversy in the press.

Quotes

Nicky Wire performing on stage with the Manic Street Preachers

• I wanted to ring everyone and tell them I was number one but then I realised I didn’t have any friends.
  • Wire's reaction to If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next becoming UK number one in 1998

• My daughter just delights in telling me that Ed Sheeran beats me all the time. She just keeps saying that if I was as good as Ed Sheeran I'd be happier.

• I’m not pretending the past was any good — I'm just saying the present is worse.

• God definitely created humans as the dregs, we have all the greed and the despicable acts. Humanity, worldwide, is now at its lowest ebb. Depressing, isn’t it, so let’s not get started on THAT.
  • Smash Hits Magazine, 1993

• I often fantasise about going into the jungle. I’d like to go in there and be as miserable as possible and refuse to do any of the tasks and we’d all starve to death. And everyone would despise me. So on that level I quite fancy it."
  • Discussing reality TV shows such as I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!, 2006

• Throughout the first year of the band I was only drinking Babycham; it’s so un-rock & roll! Then, as we were driving over the Yorkshire Dales or the Lancashire Moors, I just turned into a blubbing heap, I just wanted to go home and see my mum. I still feel like that a lot now, really."

• There’s no problem mixing style with socialism - Fidel Castro was stylish!"
  • Interview with Uncut Magazine, 2006

• A journalist in one of the Sunday papers called us ‘little trolls’, because we’re Welsh. Well, I’m 6ft 3in and I’m the sexiest rock star in the world.

• I could never write something like (Radiohead's) 'I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo'. I'd write something like 'I’m a cricketer, I’m boring, I’m a gardener, I'm a hoovering housewife'.

• The internet is the grandest illusion ever created. It makes people think they’re popular, they have loads of friends, they’re part of a community. And they actually have a voice. They don’t actually realise that like all of us, they’re completely fucked and powerless.

• One of the biggest corporate lies in history, up there with selling terrible mortgages.
  • On the idea that people would still pay for music available for free on streaming sites.

• Not that I'd ever want one, and I fucking despise it. But why has he got a knighthood? It's Sir Nick Clegg, Head of Facebook Foreign Affairs. Can you think of a worse sentence at the moment than that?
  • On people accepting titles and honours

Glastonbury

• Someone should build a bypass over this shithole.
  • During a performance at the 1994 Glastonbury festival.

• It was supposed to be a joke. As I was saying it I thought ‘This is going to be really funny’. Then this deathly silence descended on the place.
  • Reflecting on the Glastonbury controversy in 2007

About Richey Edwards

Richey Edwards, performing in Japan in May 1992

• Me and Richey can’t write music but we can write lyrics and look pretty tarty.

• It seemed a marriage made in heaven really. I found someone who believed in the same ideas as me, and was even worse musically.
  • Nicky on Richey Edwards

• I still think they're really relevant and I still think as a kind of physical and internalised hatred and dissection of humanity, it's pretty untouchable.
  • On the ability of Richey Edwards as a writer of lyrics