The Long Play Sessions: Keith Cameron discusses 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure

Mojo Book of the Year

A Rough Trade Book of the Year

Shortlisted for The Penderyn Music Book Prize

Join us for a special evening with renowned music journalist and critic Keith Cameron, discussing his celebrated book 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure: A History of Manic Street Preachers, with Will Hodgkinson.

The book is a sharp, obsessive and deeply personal exploration of outsider music, artistic obsession and beautiful musical misfires.

This event is part of The Long Play Sessions, ICMP’s curated series celebrating some of the most influential and distinctive voices writing about music today. Each session goes beyond the page, offering live conversation, cultural context and rare insight into the ideas and stories that shape music history.

Keith Cameron is one of the UK’s most respected music writers, with a career spanning NME, Mojo, The Guardian and beyond. In this author talk, he explores the Manics story through the force that ultimately saved them: the music itself. Drawing on hours of new interviews and the band’s full cooperation, Cameron journeys through 168 songs — from 1988’s debut single Suicide Alley to the late-career heights of 2025’s Critical Thinking. The book is both a love letter to flawed brilliance and a manifesto for embracing music that exists outside commercial success.

Few bands in pop history have lived a story as intense, contradictory, and emotionally charged as Manic Street Preachers. Emerging from the shattered mining communities of south Wales in the late 1980s, they were bound by friendship, family, and a combustible “geometry of contempt” — with James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore delivering the incendiary ideas of lyricists Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire. Fiercely intellectual, confrontational, and uncompromising, the Manics seemed destined for cult legend rather than mainstream success — until history intervened.

The disappearance of Richey Edwards in 1995 remains one of the most haunting moments in British music. What followed, against all expectations, was an extraordinary rebirth. From the defiant working-class anthem A Design For Life to the towering, multi-million-selling Everything Must Go, the band transformed grief into one of the most powerful and resonant albums of its era — a soundtrack to loss, survival, and renewal.

Within five years, Manic Street Preachers were headlining the Welsh national stadium, playing to 60,000 people, and scoring their second UK Number One single. Since then, their career has stood as proof of relentless creativity — a band that doesn’t merely reflect culture but actively interrogates it.

This is the definitive account of Manic Street Preachers: a band, a philosophy, and what Nicky Wire calls “the fabulous disaster.” A must-see talk for music lovers, cultural obsessives, and anyone drawn to stories of art forged in defiance, tragedy, and belief.