100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #22 Manic Street Preachers – Your Love Alone is Not Enough

Released: 2007

The process of losing and finding your mojo doesn’t come with any sort of handbook: of course it doesn’t, because if you knew how to find it again then you’d never be worried about losing it in the first place. It’s also a subjective state both outside and in, so whilst the Manic Street Preachers might’ve been happy to defend the two albums which followed This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours – 2001’s Know Your Enemy and Lifeblood, released three years later – as explorative, they were still hard records to love, whichever way you cut it.

The band had of course experienced the loss of their spiritual core, a process which by Send Away The Tigers was still to be completed, even if whisper it quietly it was a record that signalled a return to the splay-footed, orthodox rock of Gold Against The Soul. It’s title was adapted from a phrase coined by radio maverick Tony Hancock used to describe the process of loading up with alcohol to wipe the conscious mind’s slate clean, even if the ghosts would always latterly return – and in that it was a fitting metaphor.

Your Love Alone is Not Enough took it’s solemn title from the last line of a suicide note written by someone close to the band, a significance only magnified by the continued presence of Richey Edwards in both hearts and minds. The tune itself though was a sparkling call and reponse, sing it in the bath number, with the role of significant other taken up with style by The Cardigans Nina Persson. Finally here was a band who had rekindled a desire to be sung in bus stops and bars, to reconnect and embrace a public confused by the aloofness of the last half decade. So there it was all along: Mojos, eh?