The bands I missed the first time around

There are bands you fall for instantly, the ones that feel like they have always belonged to you from the first note. And then there are the others. The ones who were loud, loved and absolutely everywhere at the time, while you were elsewhere entirely.

For me, two such bands have recently wandered back into my life and I feel huge nostalgia and a lot of how did I miss this at the time: Manic Street Preachers and The Libertines. I didn't dislike them back in the day. I knew the songs through cars, shops, pubs and other people’s houses. They were simply there. But they never became mine, not properly.

The Libertines

I had just moved to the US around the time the Libertines were making their first real impact. That Atlantic leap dulled the noise of what they were building in Britain. Their chaos and Camden mythology barely carried across.

The stories I did read about them were all chaos, eyeliner and poetry in leather jackets. Their reputation reached me before their music, which is never a great start. Pete and Carl felt less like musicians and more like characters in a story I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to follow. So I filed them under “not for me” and carried on.

Except now I hear them properly and Time for Heroes has become one of those songs I can play repeatedly without ever tiring of it.

It was written in the shadow of the London May Day riots and speaks directly to working class frustration and political anger at the turn of the millennium. But what comes through now is not the politics so much as the feeling of youth itself. That sense of urgency. Of wanting the world to hurry up and change. Of believing that something meaningful is just about to happen, even if you are not quite sure what it will look like when it arrives.

Manic Street Preachers

The Manics always felt like someone else’s important band, notably a lady I worked with while temping at Unipart who was obsessed with them. Politically charged, emotionally enormous, critically adored. I admired them from a polite distance without ever properly leaning in. Going back now, they feel completely different. The bombast suddenly makes sense. The seriousness no longer feels heavy handed. The melancholy, the anger, the ambition all play like a band who cared too much in the best possible way.

If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next has to be one of the best songs ever written. I somehow managed to miss its emotional force the first time around, despite it being embedded in the DNA of a generation. It is now, without question, one of my all time favourite songs. Not just for how it sounds, but for what it carries.

The track was inspired by the Spanish Civil War and the volunteers of the International Brigades who travelled to Spain to resist fascism in the 1930s. Its title comes from a wartime propaganda poster, showing the body of a child beneath approaching bombers with a devastating warning beneath it. The song is not nostalgic. It is moral. A quiet howl about what happens when good people remain silent. And it hits harder when you are older, particularly when you have children of your own. It stops being history and starts feeling like obligation.

I sometimes wonder how many other bands I unfairly left behind simply because I was busy listening to something else at the time. I guess music hits when it is ready. Some albums belong to your twenties and others wait for later.

So this is a small thank you to the bands who waited patiently until I was ready. You don't always meet the right music at the right age.

Now, what else did I miss?