‘KNOW YOUR ENEMY’ REMIXED, RECONSTRUCTED AND RE-ISSUED AS TWO SEPARATE ALBUMS AS ORIGINALLY INTENDED: ‘SOLIDARITY’ AND ‘DOOR TO THE RIVER’
Following the success of 1998’s’ This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours’, Manic Street Preachers planned an ambitious follow-up to be released as two distinct albums: an aggressive, rapid fire return to their roots called ‘Solidarity’ and ‘Door To The River’, a more conciliatory, reflective collection. During the recording sessions, the band got cold feet and settled on a single album that forced often conflicting ideas to sit side by side on the same record.
Whilst going through the band’s archive to put together an anniversary version of ‘Know Your Enemy’, Nicky Wire found the original tapes of ‘Solidarity’ and ‘Door To The River’ that he’d made up in the studio during recording. When he put forward the idea of recreating those records, James Dean Bradfield agreed on the condition that he could remix the entire record with the band’s longtime studio partner Dave Eringaz
Author and long-term band collaborator Robin Turner explains in his expansive sleeve notes that this release is “the Director’s Cut of ‘Know Your Enemy’. The picture has been painstakingly restored, cleaned up, brightened. Although it doesn’t aim to replace the original, it most certainly enhances it.”
This 3CD Bookset features both intended records in full, plus demos, outtakes, unused mixes by Tom Lord-Alge and tracks featured on the original ‘Know Your Enemy’, plus previously unseen photos from the recording sessions taken by regular collaborator Mitch Ikeda.
