Close My Eyes

Great song - I think it's about waking up in the night after a dream, and realising that you've still got a boring job in the morning.

To me, this is about being a slightly disillusioned Nicky Wire circa 2000. Shaking hands with people (fans?), signing autographs, a vision that's slipped away, putting on make-up that makes his skin ache, forgetting his parts in front of a crowd...it's just a job he gets 'well-paid for' and it's about the machine that the Manics had become - 'it's not about us anymore'.

Then they released Know Your Enemy as a kind of f**k you to the Mondeo-man fans that they'd acculmulated between 1996 and 2000...

Actually, I don't think it's based on Nicky's personal experiences in that way - especially seeing as the band as a whole seemed fairly upbeat and confident about themselves in the KYE/Masses era, at least a lot more so than a few years later while promoting Lifeblood.

So, my guess would be that it's more of an in-character sort of thing, with Nicky writing from the perspective of someone in a similar position who doesn't appreciate it in the same way.

Or I might be wrong, it might actually be about the Manics circa '00 being a bunch of miserable bastards.

I was listening to this and thinking it just sounds like the chore of being in a band. It was exciting when they were young, and rebellious and wanted to change their surroundings, but now "Shake some hands and then I feel ashamed", is as though he feels like being in a band and having a public persona has made him guilty.

"Count to ten and then pretend Im home Just a job I get well-paid for Its not about us anymore Its not about us, bout us anymore"

Basically, being in a band has become more of a chore and is becoming alot less enjoyable as when they first started out. Reminds me of a Mansun lyric, "Life is a series of compromises anyway", compromises with the record label, producers, etc, it isn't really about what the band stand for, it's about selling records and the pressure of being nice and "shaking hands" with the fans.

It is certainly written by Nicky in the first person about life in the band, but I don't think anyone writing from this perspective has ever quite got the tone as precise as this about the unique situation it is. Clearly when you make music and put it in front of people and then repeat to fade, you enter a kind of limbo where you're invested in the music but also you lose grip on it and it becomes something else. I'd say there's an added bittersweetness to how their history has informed where they've ended up, which the "back to memory, back to the start" line nods to. This wasn't new ground for Nicky, he'd touched on it before: "in the beginning, when we were winning, when our smiles were genuine". I don't think it's anti-fan. It's a very subjective point of view on what it's like on a human level to kind of front something like the Manic Street Preachers. You're constantly torn between the responsibility of it and the chore it becomes. "It's not about us anymore" really sums it up - it's resigned, and the overall tone of the song is kind of a lament to the glory days of their story, and how you are ultimately a prisoner to time, to change, to memory.