You could almost blame it on seasonal soppiness, if they were that kind of band. For starters, the backdrop projection heralding the arrival of three black-clad Manics reads not just “You love us” – ah, the favourite taunt of our cruel-youth provocateurs of old - but “You love us and we love you.” For closers, some 100 soul wringingly-sung minutes later, James Dean Bradfield tells us he loves us all over again, with a gruff four-letter expletive for good measure.
So far, so festive. Admittedly, holiday specials don’t usually include film projections of eyeless families apparently hatched by Jake and Dinos Chapman, as we get during a shivery, rippling “If You Tolerate This…”, and Bing Crosby was, as a rule, lighter on Nietzsche references. If you had to hazard a guess, it isn’t sherry and sentimentality, but a set-list dominated by the Manics’ wise, humane new album “Lifeblood”, fuelling the compassionate tone.
Of course we’re served the hits, from the brilliantly obvious (“Australia”, “Tsunami”, “A Design For Life”) to the brilliantly implausible (“The Masses Against The Classes”, “La Tristesse Durera”) to the transcendently reductive (“Motorcycle Emptiness”). Whatever on the cut of your jib – eye-linered nihilist or stolid rock bloke – it’s doubtless what you came for, done up arena-sized with a star-jumping, stack-standing Nicky Wire, a flotilla of badges on his chest like some doughty general from the art-rock wars.
Must-haves aside, however, tonight’s real highlights lie in the way “Lifeblood” expands on the weary tenderness of earlier songs like “The Everlasting”. Decked-out with tugged heartstrings and gorgeous fairy-light keyboards in place of the gristliness and barks of “Faster”-era affairs, the result may be sonically smoother, but the warmth is human, not fluff, induced. And when “1985” kicks off the proceedings, it signals the start of the goosebumps and throat-lumps, too. Carried along on chilly, heart-tugging synths, it hits an emotional peak that most bands would gladly close a gig with. Factor in the accompanying footage of bleak-faced striking miners and a witch-faced Thatcher, Torvill & Dean and a boyish Morrissey, and it’s devastatingly affecting.
Nor is it alone. There’s the Depeche Mode-ish swoop of a half-regretful, half-anguished “The Love Of Richard Nixon”, a bright, starlit “Empty Souls”, a piano-led “I Live To Fall Asleep” paused and re-started when James self-effacingly sorts out some bother down the front and a sad, stately “Solitude Sometimes Is” made magical by a half-pause before a crashing-headlong middle eight. Even more unexpectedly, the melancholy undertow of “A Song For Departure” sounds, for all the world, like “Hazy Shade Of Winter” reborn.
“Time to go to bed,” James says at last, smiling fondly out into the crowd. You might never have chosen them for your Christmas lullabies, but “Lifeblood” – and tonight – suggests you reconsider. God bless ‘em, every one.
