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The Manics on the miners' strike
Last updated: 18 May 2009
Fuelled by the anger left by the defeat of the miners' strike and devouring books of philosophy and literature, four young boys from Blackwood in South Wales rebelled and formed The Manic Street Preachers, an alternative rock band which mixed the gender bending of glam rock with 70s punk.
"The Welsh miners were the last to give in - there's no doubt when they lost that people's heads kind of dropped a little bit - we were defeated." - Nicky Wire
"The way the miners' strike ended had a massive effect on us. At that point we hated words like sincerity, passion, ideology and belief and wanted to turn those words into something else. We didn't want to rely on the passion of a true heart - we wanted to be so intelligent that we were never going to get bludgeoned as our history was bludgeoned." - James Dean Bradfield
