"True Art Takes Time": A Conversation With Producer Greg Haver About The 20th Anniversary Edition Of Lifeblood By Manic Street Preachers

Last year, when I was ostensibly interviewing producer Greg Haver about his work on the breathtaking new edition of Brave Words by The Chills, I was getting ready to spring on him a dozen questions about his work on one of my favorite albums by Manic Street Preachers. And while he was kind enough to indulge that discussion, at the time we weren't 100% sure that a 20th Anniversary Edition of Lifeblood was going to happen, or if so, when.

That version of the Welsh band's most misunderstood record is now here. I raved about it not so long ago, and so wanted to follow up with Greg Haver about his work with the band, and the complicated legacy of Lifeblood.

Greg Haver's involvement with the Manics goes all the way back to Everything Must Go, the group's first after Richey's disappearance.

Kenixfan: How did you first come to work with the band?

Greg Haver: There was a studio called Sound Space in Cardiff where most of The Holy Bible was recorded. Ceri Collier and I bought the studio in 1996 and took it over. The band came back in to finish up some stuff on Everything Must Go. To do some work on "No Surface All Feeling". I had played some percussion on some of the last sessions with Richey, the "House in the Woods" sessions. They were working with Mike Hedges later on what became This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours and James [Dean Bradfield] asked if I'd engineer so I did a few tracks. Some of the demoed songs ended up on record -- "You Stole the Sun from My Heart" -- and I worked on some B-sides. Then I did some work with James on Nicky Wire's brother's record [1999's Commemoration and Amnesia by Patrick Jones], and then Know Your Enemy.

Kenixfan: And how did the work on Lifeblood start?

Greg Haver: We did the "There by the Grace of God" after Know Your Enemy and that kind of sets up where they were going to go on Lifeblood. The band was doing songs which would end up as B-sides for singles from Lifeblood later -- "Antarctic", "No Jubilees", "Askew Road" -- but mostly it was me doing all those B-sides. We did those at Monnow Valley studios while they were looking for a single to put on the "Greatest Hits" [2002's Forever Delayed]. They did "There By The Grace of God", "Door to the River", and "Forever Delayed" (which didn't end up on the "Greatest Hits", of course).

Kenixfan: What was the process like for the band on Lifeblood? And for you?

Greg Haver: The process is always pretty much the same on a Manics record. Nick comes in with a lyric sheet -- a work of art in itself, really -- with press cuttings, photos, collage, and so on. James could take one look at it and get the vibe of what the whole thing was about. On Lifeblood they were obviously channeling Bowie in Berlin, Martin Hannett stuff, Manchester bands, lots of Joy Division records. It was meant as a kind of amalgam of late Seventies/early Eighties post-punk. The idea was coldness and elegiac pop. Something a bit colder and less-in-your-face and more introspective.

My thinking was I had started experimenting with morphing sounds as I had bought a lot of weird guitar pedals. This was the early days of Pro Tools. You'd record sound down to tape, or down to Pro Tools. Not a lot of processing power to do things in post-production. All the guitar sounds we did on Lifeblood were done onto tape, essentially. So I said, "Let's find a way to morph these guitar sounds!" I used a phaser, harmonizer; I was using a lot of harmonizing on a lot of the drums because I read an article with Tony Visconti where he described using those on drums and I knew that was what the band wanted, having come back to these demos after working with Tony in NYC. [Three Visconti productions are on the album proper: "Emily", "Solitude Sometimes Is", and "Cardiff Afterlife".] I had to come up with the coldness and found a Roland Echo for 75 pounds from a friend. But I ruined it by mucking around with the motor. In fact, at the end of "To Repel Ghosts", you can hear the motor dying at the end of the track. The sound would speed up and slow up, and that would be changing the modulation speed while James was playing.

Any record I work on is a sonic image. James said that defined what a record will be, and we work within, and toward that sonic image. I developed sonic templates on how to get that sound they wanted, to match that idea. Every sound you hear on there was how it was done. That was not done in post-production, but all pretty much done to tape.

Kenixfan: How did you adapt to their usual process?

Greg Haver: One unusual thing about Lifeblood was that all the vocals were done with a hand mic. All done with a Shure SM58, with James using a hand mic with no headphones. And those vocals are amazing! He was in such a good place ,vocally. He would sit there with a cigarette and a Shure SM58 mic and sing the song. We would put the speakers out of phase [to avoid catching any sonic bleed]. Clip the wires on one of the speakers so the noise going down the mic would get cancelled out. That's an old Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox trick I had read about and I wanted to see if it worked. All those backing vocals on Lifeblood were done with an SM58. You'd never know that listening to it. James Dean Bradfield didn't want to wear headphones so it was my job to find a way to do it.

Kenixfan: Two specific tracks really stand out in this new edition of Lifeblood. What memories can you share about recording "Always/Never" and "Glasnost"?

Greg Haver: "Always/Never" was probably the song that got me the gig. I was channeling "Golden Years" and "Fame", and I said to myself, "I know how to do this. I know exactly what they want." I did the harmonizer on the drums. It works great, and then we've got that descending keyboard solo. That song was one of the earliest ones we did for Lifeblood. That was the key to what they were after on the album. They'd read about how those records in Hansa Studios were made. That was me putting my foot down and saying, "Okay we're going to make a record this way." And it worked out pretty well. Nick's bass playing is amazing on that track. He really came into his own [as a bass player] on that record. Really stepped up his own playing on Lifeblood, and the solo record after. I played drums on both Nick's and James' solo records (I Killed the Zeitgeist and The Great Western, respectively.]

On the other hand, the circumstances of recording "Glasnost" were awful. We had just had a really bad evening in discussion with the label, and it was like a dark evening while we were recording in Ireland. James' way to get out of that sort of mood was to record something. He had that riff and said, "Let's record something!" So it was maybe 10 or 11 at night and we just started working on that song to lift the cloud hanging over the studio. I've always associated that song with that. Now, 20 years later and all that has washed away. It sounds great! Lots of the songs we brought to work on in Ireland had come from work in their studio in Wales, but that was one which was built from the ground up in Ireland.

Kenixfan: How did you approach the task of producing Lifeblood?

Greg Haver: I did all the demos for the songs which ended on Lifeblood. I'd sit with James and go over CD's and those would show the vibe of the intended record. Bowie's Berlin period -- Lodger, Hansa Studios stuff, etc. I said, "I know these records." So I studied how they were made, and I knew what the band wanted. So that's what I started doing -- ripping off Tony Visconti records from that period!. The band went to work with Tony in New York. I get a call from James, "Want to come to New York and do some playing on the record?" I had toured on the greatest hits record already and played percussion, so yeah it was a great opportunity. I thought, "Great! I can sit and pick Tony's brain on all the records I loved!"

James said kinda what I was doing on the demos is kind of what they wanted to achieve on the record. By forming a pastiche of Tony in that period I'd given them something closer to what they wanted then. Tony Visconti did three tracks -- "Emily", "Solitude Sometimes Is", and "Cardiff Afterlife" -- which are still there. I love the "Solitude Sometimes Is" demo I did which is subtly different from the Visconti one. That and the "Always/Never" demo are what got me that gig. Tony was nice. He gave me a lot of cool records. Then I took the record over from him which was weird. But you have to take the weirdness when you have a chance to work with some great musicians.

Kenixfan: Was Lifeblood a conscious decision by the Manic Street Preachers to present a more uniform sound than what they had then recently offered on the original edition of Know Your Enemy? Was Lifeblood meant to be a whole new direction for the Manics?

[Note: Know Your Enemy was reissued in a new version in 2022. My review is here.]

Greg Haver: It was a really interesting period for the band. After Everything Must Go and This is My Truth Tell Me Yours, which did huge numbers, Know Your Enemy didn't do as well. Part of that was just a downturn in the industry and part was down to changes in the way people consumed music. I mean, This is My Truth Tell Me Yours sold something like a million copies in Wales alone and there are only 3 million people in Wales! And this is where problems with Lifeblood started. You expect the same level of sales and it doesn't take much to derail that. The fact that it wasn't a Top 10 record was a disappointment. And the idea took hold that Lifeblood wasn't a successful record. It's timeless and people hear that now. It doesn't sound like a 2004 record. I think that the very things that made it problematic then are what have given it longevity.

Last September, I was at Hansa Studios, and James Dean Bradfield phoned and said they were remastering Lifeblood, and something like, "It's a brilliant record and we didn't really realise it at the time." That was really quite moving to be told that all those years later because for years I thought, "Did I fuck it up? Did I screw it up?"

It's only been the last 10 years or so, where I've gotten messages on social media about how much the record meant to people. I kind of knew, but for the band to cross the Rubicon and embrace it themselves was very satisfying. The album was a victim of its time. They tried to do something different. And later, on Send Away The Tigers, they made a sort of big rock record. Which to some in the Manics community may have seemed too obvious, whereas Lifeblood had a sort of quirkiness about it.

I love the fact that James went in and in this process of remastering Lifeblood got a chance to review what his feelings were about the record. It deserved an extra bit of love, without the baggage from 2004. It can just be a record like any other record now. I felt it was unfairly excluded, almost disowned, from their lexicon and now it feels more like a part of it than some that came out after. Now I know that it's appreciated and that's deeply satisfying.

Kenixfan: Can you expand on what you mean by "disowned" there? I never think of the Manic Street Preachers as being that fragile.

Greg Haver: Not fragility but where they were in their journey. On the greatest hits tour, I'd heard of James Dean Bradfield saying something to the effect of "Obviously we're coming off the mountain, but we've got to come down gracefully." And even in 2004, they had got nothing left to prove. They'd surpassed everyone's expectations of what the band would achieve in terms of sales, popularity, and so on. Careers ebb and flow, so why not just get drastic and do some interesting things? These were just my personal perceptions at the time as a kind of outsider who was in the inner circle at the time. I've often thought how different my career would have been, for instance, had Lifeblood been very successful. Had it been, maybe I would have done more records with band.

I remember a conversation in the studio in 2004 where Nicky Wire just said -- and this was never mentioned again -- "Why don't we just announce we're splitting up and then just put the record out?" Wow. They've come down from massive records, but expressing such an idea was no different really from when they said early on that they'd make one album, sell six million copies of it, and split up.

So the reaction to the reviews and reception of Lifeblood was not so much fragility, but where they were in their journey.

I think everyone agrees now that "The Love of Richard Nixon" was a bad choice of first single to put out from Lifeblood. It was just too much of a departure. Too quirky. "1985" should have been the first single. It had resonance with their earlier careers. And it still sounds great that track.

The Q Magazine review of Lifeblood was the one that felt a bit of a kick in the teeth. And sales numbers. Lifeblood didn't make the Top 10. Sales had been down with Know Your Enemy already. This is why the band went back to a more conventional sound for Send Away the Tigers and Postcards from a Young Man. Until you get to Rewind the Film and Futurology, they stuck to this kind of big epic Manics thing. To me, Futurology always felt like the second cousin of Lifeblood. And that sound continues even through to The Ultra Vivid Lament. Those three records sit for me in a very similar place, lyrically and emotionally. And Lifeblood is a very deep record. There's lots of stuff about Richey in there.

But I used to think, "Shit was it my fault the record wasn't successful?" It's taken 20 years to realise it was just a result of the time and it's a fine record. And I've gotten bombarded with positive comments about the album. I thought, "Wow, people really love this record! Holy shit, things have really changed in 20 years!" True art takes time. It's not a Van Gogh situation, as I'm still alive. [Laughing] I get to appreciate that people really love Lifeblood. Lots of messages from folks in uni or doing degrees about how some of their first memories of albums to get them through exams involved Lifeblood, that kind of thing.

Yeah, it's been really deeply satisfying.

Kenixfan: How much involvement did you have in the final running order of Lifeblood?

Greg Haver: Not really much involvement in the running order. That is Nick's domain. He is the guardian of the running order, artwork, and so on. The first time I knew what was on Lifeblood was when I saw the record. Because there were songs we recorded that didn't make the record. There were a lot of B-sides hanging out, leftovers from the greatest hits era. "Firefight", for example, didn't make cut at all and ended up on the God Save the Manics EP in 2005. "The Soulmates" was another one. That was one of the last songs I ever recorded to tape. We did that at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth Valley, Wales. "Askew Road" was done at Stir Studios in Cardiff which became Faster Studios when they bought it. I remember how emotional Terri Hall [of Hall or Nothing management] was about that one. That track, with the Richey sample, takes them back to the beginnings of their relationship with the Halls, and the late Philip Hall, their manager. And of course, "Cardiff Afterlife" is about Richey. There's a lot of introspection and a lot of darkness about Lifeblood. For a record that is shiny, that is the legitimacy of the album, that depth.

Kenixfan: How does it feel to be hearing this record again after 20 years?

Greg Haver: It's hard to believe it's been 20 years ago; I was a young man of 42 in 2004, even though I felt ancient back then. It was still early on in my career. The fact that they gave me a chance as a fairly unknown producer was huge, especially in the shadow of Tony Visconti. Looking back, I was pretty brave taking it on. Those chances don't come around very often. "Well done younger me for sticking with it," I think. The Manics really are a challenging set of musicians. They really push you. I really started out at that point on my career on what was a harder record.

The Manic Street Preachers have an amazing legacy of music and I love the fact that they are still doing it. They have surpassed the age I was when I was working with them. They are about 10 years younger me and we're still friends. I catch up with James when I'm back in Cardiff.

Lifeblood never had a 10th anniversary edition so there's an extra 10 years of perspective. Nicky Wire was putting some things together for this and messaged. Luckily, I had cataloged things at the time so I have CD's of different versions, so I sent Nick a Dropbox full of different versions. Thankfully 42-year-old-me was very anal and meticulous at the time, so thankfully I knew where everything was from the time. There was stuff I had forgotten about -- a crazy version of "The Love of Richard Nixon" with tremolo all through it -- and things I can't ever remember there being. "Yes, I must have done that." I had forgotten about that completely. Such a different version. Sounds nothing like the version that came out.

Lifeblood stood the test of time maybe more than Send Away the Tigers. I have a mixed feeling about it in some ways because if this reaction had come in 2004, things would have been different for me. It's taken this long for people to admit their love for the record.

It's really satisfying at my age. Yes, I feel vindicated. I made some right decisions on that record. The band made the right decisions. We were trying to do something sonically -- yes, nodding to certain influences -- but it was never going to be Lodger. But with Lifeblood it's got weird sounds -- can't picture where or when it was recorded.

It's a really beautiful record which is timeless. All great records are sort of timeless.

Kenixfan: Thanks so much Greg. I've waited 20 years to learn this much about one of my three favorite Manics albums.

More details on the work of Greg Haver here.

More details on Manic Street Preachers via the official website.

[Photos: Greg Haver courtesty Greg Haver; Manic Street Preachers by Mitch Ikeda; CD by Manic Street Preachers]