Lyric discussion by LittleBabyNothing 

Cover art for Fragments lyrics by Manic Street Preachers

This is a fairly personal song - I'm not really surprised no-one else ahs commented; it's fairly difficult to get any definite meanings for it. I've made a few guesses, but that's all they are, so please don't beat me up if I get something wrong!

First of all, from what I've heard, this is basically "another Richey song". If I've got that wrong, then anything from here on is wrong as well.

Strung out eyes as cold as worship I spent ages trying to understand this (which makes me a bit of a geek, I know). The best I came up with (which I quite liked actually) was a sort of comparason of the coldness of Richey's eyes towards the end, and the coldness of the worship from the fans who maybe didn't really know him as a person. They said they loved him, but they didn't really know anything more about him than what he let them see. That's not very well worded. And also, I know I'm gonna get attacked for saying that - it's not a generalisation - I'm not saying that all of the fans didn't know anything about him - just that some of them might have been seen like that. (Please don't kill me - this is my first post on here, and I'm quite a nice person really!)

This song seems less hopeful than the previous "Richey" songs - there's almost a sense of dispair, of giving up hope. The fragments fail to hold me in particular, has this feeling - that maybe the memories aren't strong enough any more to keep up the hope that he's still around, or that the fragments of evidence that he's still alive somewhere aren't relly enough any more. The effects will fail to desert me though seems almost contradictory - that he'll remember the past, and Richey in particular.

But there's still the sense of the amazing friendship between Nicky and Richey - emphatic lonely soul in particular is a beautiful description of Richey, and Skin against skin and blood against blood really shows the closeness of the relationship between the two of them.

I'm stuck on Two minutes silence in a century of screams though - it feels either a bit irrelevent, or simply too personal for me to be able to understand.

Once again, just to remind you, these are just guesses! I've not got any proof - if you've seen it different anywhere else, then that's probably right!