Manic Street Preachers
If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next (1998)
A pro-war song? Technically, yes, in that Nicky Wire’s lyric pays tribute to the International Brigades who fought against Franco in the Spanish civil war. But its real subject is the modern-day narrator, a pacifist who wonders what, if push came to shove, he might be prepared to fight for. A self-searching protest song on a par with the Clash’s “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”, it was taken to No 1 by its yearning, elegiac melody
(Live on Jools Holland here)
Comments