James Dean Bradfield on the Manic Street Preachers and his new solo album inspired by Victor Jara.

James Dean Bradfield

for example, or in an album dedication by Simple Minds.

 

“Subsequently, lots of people start writing about him,” Bradfield recalls. “I bought a Calexico album and they had written a song about Victor Jara. I had some records by Dafydd Iwan, who was a Plaid Cymru MP and a folk singer in Wales, and he wrote a song about Victor Jara. It was an echo that kept coming back and back.”

 

Now Bradfield has added his own. Even in Exile, Bradfield’s second solo record is a concept album, by turns impassioned (The Boy from the Plantation) and delicate (Under the Mimosa Tree), based on the life and music of the Chilean protest singer who was tortured and killed in 1973 in the wake of the coup led by General Pinochet against the Salvador Allende government.

Jara was a poet, a teacher, a communist and a protest singer. After the coup he was arrested and detained in the Estadio Chile. When soldiers realised who he was, they smashed his hands and told him he would never play guitar again. They then shot him more than 40 times. His body was then put on display outside the stadium.

 

Jara, then, was one of the earliest victims of a coup that would see the murder and torture of thousands. But his name lives on.

 

Bradfield’s album is the latest proof of that. Currently at home in Cardiff with his family, Bradfield has, like all of us these days, been in lockdown in recent months. “I’ve got two young kids, four and eight, so it’s mostly been centred around that,” he says.

 

This afternoon, though, he is here to talk about Jara, Fidel Castro, the future of the Manics and the death of the music press.

Around about two-and-a-half years ago myself Nick and Sean decided that there was going to be quite a big gap between the last Manic Street Preachers album and the next one. And when I realised that the gap was going to be about three years – now it’s going to be longer, for obvious reasons – subconsciously I panicked. ‘I’ve got to do something. What will I do?’

 

I’m a musician and I’m an institutionalised Manic Street Preacher, and when that’s taken away from me I just meltdown, slowly but surely. So, I’m walking around in a bit of a daze thinking, ‘I need something to do.’

 

I’ve got a routine. I live quite close to where I was born. There’s this one day a week I go and see my father. And on the way back I see Patrick Jones, Nicky Wire’s older brother. He was always the older, cooler kid.

 

He’s a published poet and playwright, so I’m always interested in what he’s doing. And he said, ‘Oh I’m just writing about Victor Jara, do you remember him?’

 

He just showed me a file. A little lightbulb went on in my head and I said to him, ‘Do you think we could turn some of this into music?’

 

He was very sceptical. This was stuff that was never intended to see the light of day. And, also, it was an emotional exercise for him because he had just lost his mother and his father was now very ill.

When you first listen to his records, the music floats over you and it’s so beautiful. It’s so ethereal. Some of it is as beautiful as Tim Buckley wanted to be. It’s absolutely amazing. But then you start hearing references to Ho Chi Minh.

 

It is ideological, but the form doesn’t ram it down your throat. It’s very gentle. The music to him is just as important a vehicle as the words. The music must soothe. It must heal. So, he is a protest singer like no other I’ve ever heard. And I think that’s attractive.

 

He looks like a dude. And then, of course, he was murdered. He hasn’t become a myth because he is the real thing, someone who embodies conviction and unfortunate tragedy. It shows what can happen if you let that political conviction guide your life and guide your art, I suppose.

There was definitely a prog element that started coming into the record. I don’t know where it came from, but I didn’t question it. Perhaps because everything I was writing about was so stuck in the 1970s, I started referencing the prog references that were in my head, whether it be Man, who were an old Welsh prog band, or whether it be Rush, or whether it be early Pink Floyd. I just went with it.

 

There’s a nylon string guitar that I write on, but I never record with. I decided to record that nylon string guitar because it’s so much in Victor’s music.

 

And I learned how to play double bass for the record. In a prog bed I needed to bring out the richness of that bass, I needed to bring out the acoustic nature of the bass, so I learned to play an instrument that was way taller than me.