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.
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.