“It feels like our last punk single, this mad little blip on the radar”: the story behind the Manics’ 2000 hit The Masses Against The Classes

The Manics, circa 2000. — (Image credit: Paul Bergen/Redferns)

The Manics ended the 20^th century in celebratory fashion, playing a momentous show at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium and signing off a decade that they’d ended as one of the UK’s biggest and most important rock bands in triumph. But James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire and Sean Moore were determined not to rest on their laurels and the trio began the new millennium with a song as spiky and snarling as anything they’d done in a while. It’s 25 years next week since the release of their one-off single The Masses Against The Classes, a curio that feels like a song-apart from anything else in the Manics catalogue (and one that rolls off the tongue a lot easier if you’re not a Southerner: The Masses Against The “Clarsses” doesn’t really cut it). It was a release that showed they weren’t ready to settle into a life of being comfy Radio 2 big-hitters just yet.

Built around a barbed wire riff, a pummelling groove and some larynx-shredding hollering from Bradfield, the single was deleted on the day of release but the ploy didn’t harm its chart prospects – The Masses Against The Classes went straight to Number One in the UK single charts, the group’s second chart-topper after 1998’s If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next.

“It feels like our last punk single, this mad little blip on the radar where we couldn’t stop ourselves,” Bradfield said of the song’s creation in an interview with The Times a few years ago. “When I listen back to The Masses Against The Classes now, I hear delusion, I hear folly, I hear needless aggression, all the kinds of things I love in my music basically.”

Bradfield explained that he originally wrote the music to the song whilst visiting his parents in Portllanfraith in the valleys, where he grew up. “I was writing it in my mum and dad’s house,” he said. “My mum was ill at the time and she subsequently passed away shortly after unfortunately and I remember being cowed by the domestic situation and what was going on at that point, so I remember being slightly respectful when I was writing and playing the song in the bedroom, singing in a much more hushed tone. For a long time, the song was much more lower case in the verses and then the chorus would explode, it was much more of a quiet-loud song.”

Everything about the song, from its raucous bite to the decision to delete it on the day of release, was a reaction to the huge success they’d experienced, Bradfield said. “It feels like this mad little blip on the radar where we couldn’t stop ourselves, our old reflexes started working again and this happened,” he recalled. “I like to think it’s still a vital part of our map that shows where we came from, it shows the origins of what we were initially trying to do and what shaped us.”

The song remains out of print but featured on the reconfigured tracklisting to Know Your Enemy when that record was reissued in 2022. Watch the video, filmed at their iconic Millennium Stadium show, below:

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Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, Champions Journal, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleague Ted Kessler. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he's interviewed some of the world's biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Radiohead, Liam and Noel Gallagher, Florence + The Machine, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more.