Manic Street Preachers - Motorcycle Emptiness (Glastonbury 1999)

Motorcycle Emptiness is a single by the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers, released on 1 June 1992. It was the fifth single to be lifted from their debut album Generation Terrorists. The track is slower paced than most others on the album. Its lyrics are inspired by S.E. Hinton's book Rumble Fish, about biker gang culture. The lyrics have been interpreted by the band as an attack on the hollowness of the consumer lifestyle offered by capitalism, describing how society expects young people to conform.
The song reached number seventeen in the UK Singles Chart on 13 June 1992. It remained there for another week and spent a total of six weeks in the top 75, two weeks longer than any other Generation Terrorists single, and a record not surpassed by the Manics until 1996's "A Design for Life".
Some of the lyrics are taken from the poem "Neon Loneliness" (the first line of the chorus, "Under neon loneliness," is a direct lift) by Welsh poet Patrick Jones, the brother of MSP bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire. "Motorcycle Emptiness" was also included on Forever Delayed, the Manics' greatest hits album, in October 2002, and released as a reissued single from the compilation in February 2003.
The song was remixed by Apollo-440 under their alternative name Stealth Sonic Orchestra as a piece of classical-style music. This remix was available as a track on the single "Australia" (taken from their seminal 1996 album Everything Must Go); and was also used by T-Mobile for an advertising campaign in 2003, much to the derision of some fans.
The song was derived from the early Manics songs "Go, Buzz Baby, Go" (with which it shares the chord structure and the phrase "Motorcycle Emptiness" late in the song over the verse chords), and "Behave Yourself Baby", a rough demo with a similar structure, that has the lines "All we want from you is the skin you live within", similar to "All we want from you are the kicks you've given us" in this song.
In 2006, Q magazine readers voted the song as the 88th best song ever.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• manic
• street
• preachers
• generation
• terrorists
• britpop
• nicky
• wire
• james
• dean
• bradfield
• richey
• edwards
• glastonbury
• festival
• this
• is
• my
• truth

[Golfclub02]

Hi also Do you have You're Tender and you're Tired from this gig. I have never seen that song live before and was played at this gig. Thank you very much

[staybeautiful33]

@Golfclub02 unfortunately not... :(

[Golfclub02]

@staybeautiful33 Do you no if they ever showed you're tender and you're tired on tv

[Golfclub02]

@staybeautiful33 Thats a shame!! I have heard that they had to stop the song YES 30 seconds in because of the crowd.

[Golfclub02]

Thank you so much for this upload. Thats one of the best versions of that song I have seen.