Manic Street Preachers
The Royal Albert Hall, Thursday March 26, 2026
It’s almost exactly 10 years since Manic Street Preachers last played the Royal Albert Hall, during which the band have released three albums, each one a new phase in the band’s ongoing self-negotiation around the meaning of it all. Like, how can you even still be a Manic Street Preacher 40 years on from your first gig, at an age when life’s heavy imperatives invariably take precedence? After an emotive mid-set A Design For Life, James Dean Bradfield thanks the audience for contributing to this Teenage Cancer Trust benefit, “a cause which affects everyone in this building”. For the Manics, a band collectively and individually touched by loss, taking part in the 26th year of Teenage Cancer Trust benefit concerts has a profoundly personal aspect, yet the band recognise this as part of a collective experience. Fittingly, then, their performance tonight is one for the ages.
That 2016 gig was to honour the 20th anniversary of Everything Must Go, a creative and commercial landmark inescapably haunted by the departed Richey Edwards. This evening begins with Edwards’ image projected on giant screens alongside his bandmates’ 1992 version as the video for Motorcycle Emptiness accompanies the current era band detonating this still-definitive celebration of existential doom. They scrub up well confronted by this daunting vision of their younger selves, led from the back as ever by Sean Moore’s ascetic precision rolls, Nicky Wire’s bass rumbling resplendent in black ruff-cuffed hand-embroidered jacket over a Bauhaus shirt, and Bradfield the front and centre orchestrator, ripping out signature cascading riffs. Come the final chorus he’s read the mood of the vertiginous hall’s packed terraces and decides he can safely hand over singing duties to the audience, whose dedication is immediately tested/rewarded by Futurology, the arrowhead title track from the Manics’s sleekly modernist 2014 meisterwerk, with its Wire-sung refrain – “We’ll come back one day, we never really went away” – loaded with equal measures of reassurance and threat.
It’s one of several lesser-spotted specimens let loose for this special occasion. Wire pays tribute to the Albert Hall’s magical qualities with a solo excerpt of Bring On The Dancing Horses, an acknowledgement that Echo And The Bunnymen played this august venue before it became de rigeur. Bradfield, meanwhile, pays tribute to “the great Robert Smith” for being the Teenage Cancer Trust’s patron. At the Smith-‘Cureated’ Meltdown festival in 2018, the Manics had paid tribute with a cover of Inbetween Days, and now they reaffirm The Head On The Door as their favourite Cure album with a spicily sharp Close To Me, featuring saxophone by Sean Read. The erstwhile MSP and Dexys sideman had already displayed his horn prowess with a trumpet solo on Ocean Spray, emphasising the Manics’ magpie eye for auxiliary talent. Cases in point: Lana McDonagh’s honeyed harmonising on Wire’s lead vocal showcase Hiding In Plain Sight (extra kudos for Nicky chucking handfuls of confetti over the front rows) and tour guitarist Wayne Murray expanding his repertoire to duetting with Bradfield on Roses In The Hospital and The Secret We Had Missed, the latter conspicuously decorated by the ABBA-honorific skills of Nick Nasmyth, the band’s long-serving “sponge and rusty spanner” man now happily restored following illness.
Bradfield’s mid-set solo acoustic spot features a tender This Sullen Welsh heart, a vehement Everything Must Go, and an adroitly rearranged The Everlasting, dedicated to Cure/Manics producer Mike Hedges, where the full band join James for the song’s exultant finale. Now resplendent in a full white ensemble, Wire assumes the role of a gleefully truculent giraffe, grinning broadly through the set’s peak rarity: Condemned To Rock’n’Roll, onanistic climax to Generation Terrorists, performed live for only the second time ever. Yesterday’s Mogwai gig had been introduced by Teenage Cancer Trust’s previous star patron Roger Daltrey, and one can only imagine his reaction to this song’s Frankensteinian vision of Rush fighting The Who. It’s followed by the more emollient yaggerdang of Your Love Alone Is Not Enough, and thence The The’s This Is The Day, a song whose bittersweet youthful invocation of time slipping away taps many already moist-eyes on the now swaying RAH floor.
Noting that it’s “53 fucking years” since he walked into Pontllanfraith primary school and met “my guitar hero” James Dean Bradfield, it’s soon time for Nicky to don his most abundantly purple feather boa and pay tribute to the “rock’n’roll genius Richard Edwards” – cue You Love Us, and one last scissor-kicking session for the road, before the industrial scale confetti finale of If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next.
The last words belong to Bradfield, who thanks the audience for bringing “your voices and your love”. A little earlier, Wire had more saltily observed, “We are 50-fucking-7, y’know – this isn’t easy.” A good point, well made. And so the process of self-negotiation continues. To paraphrase the famous Le Corbusier maxim, Manic Street Preachers have become their very own machine for living. On nights like this, it’s a privilege to witness.
Manic Street Preachers, The Royal Albert Hall, Thursday March 26, 2026, Setlist:
Motorcycle Emptiness
Futurology
Roses In The Hospital
You Stole The Sun From My Heart
Decline And Fall
Ocean Spray
Close To Me
La Tristesse Durera (Scream To Sigh)
This Is Yesterday
Bring On The Dancing Horses
Hiding In Plain Sight
The Secret He Had Missed
A Design For Life
This Sullen Welsh Heart
Everything Must Go
The Everlasting
Condemned To Rock’n’Roll
Your Love Alone Is Not Enough
This Is The Day
From Despair To Where
My Little Empire
You Love Us
If You Tolerate This Your Children Will be Next
Photos: John Stead
