Manics Top 50 –
version 2, 2015
So here's my updated top 50, post-Rewind the Film, post-Futurology, post-The Holy Bible live gigs. This is so hard to do, because you realise how much you love them, and how it's a complete outrage that you can't get everything in that you want to get in, and how there's some tracks you really know shouldn't be in there, but you can't let them go without sobbing. Anyway, the only real changes are, 3 Futurology tracks and one RTF sneak in between 40 and 50, and for some reason Peeled Apples has rocketed up, because hell, that album has lasted, and the opening track is like having the electric paddles applied direct to your sluggish but still twitching disaffected rocker's heart, and realising you're still alive.
1-10: Absolute classics
1. Faster
2. Design for Life
3. Motorcycle emptiness
4. La Tristesse Durera
5. 4st 7lb
6. Yes
7. You love us
8. PCP
9. No surface, all feeling
10. All is vanity
11-20: The ones that just get you
11. Prologue to History
12. The Girl Who Wanted to Be God
13. Enola/alone
14. Further Away
15. Socialist serenade
16. Motown Junk
17. If you tolerate this
18. Sepia
19. Bored out of my mind
20. Just a kid
21-30: The strange, slightly perverse ones
21. Donkeys
22. Mr Carbohydrate
23. Peeled apples
24. Spectators of Suicide
25. Sleepflower
26. Intravenous agnostic
27. Wattsville Blues
28. Take the skinheads bowling
29. Found that soul
30. Raindrops keep falling on my head
31-40: Late-flowering lovelies
31. Glasnost
32. Solitude Sometimes Is
33. Me and Stephen Hawking
34. This joke sport severed
35. Facing page top left
36. Epicentre
37. Journal for Plague Lovers
38. There by the grace of God
39. William’s last words
40. 1985
41-50: No surrender
41. Freedom of speech won’t feed my children
42. Let’s go to war
43. Ready for drowning
44. This is yesterday
45. Futurology
46. Black Square
47. Australia
48. Tsunami
49. Show me the wonder
50. Stay beautiful