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  • 1 day ago
In part one of our documentary, James Dean Bradfield and Nicky Wire recall their first memories of each other at school. Guess which one was nicknamed Shirley?
Transcript
00:12I remember seeing Nick for the first time when we were four or five years old and he always stuck
00:19out because he was always like the tallest in the class.
00:22Well me and James were best friends pretty much so obviously I knew him really well and he was a
00:28mixture of shy kind of awkwardness. Eccentric shall we say.
00:33As now Nick was always really quite a strange mixture. You know he was brilliant at all sports except rugby
00:39perhaps.
00:40But also he had a nickname, he was always called Parrot or Shirley because he always took a lot of
00:48time over his hair and he was always very smartly dressed.
00:49So he was just kind of like a strange mixture of just being really kind of recognised as a good
00:55sportsman and really good academically but also slightly effeminate as well.
01:03So a really kind of strange mixture.
01:08My former memories of Sean are very different. Obviously James and Sean were cousins and living together at the time.
01:17In James' bunk bed. We were more like brothers than cousins. We were more like brothers in a very proper
01:22way.
01:23Because he was a year older than me and he was beating up and stuff.
01:27Sean and Richie were older than us, they were in the next year up. And they seemed more mysterious, much
01:33more weird to be honest.
01:35Because they were, they had much more of the kind of Ecklin Bunnymen sort of goth hair, you know, sugar
01:41and water and coke.
01:43To keep it really upright.
01:44But Sean was always kind of getting new wave haircuts all the time. He was always dying his hair blonde.
01:48The first to get his ear pierced and stuff like that.
01:50They were much more daring I think because the disc could be about a year older.
01:55So they were much more mysterious.
01:57Kind of, I guess we looked up to them as kind of school weirdos.
02:02And then Richie was perhaps the one person when I was young who I was a bit more detached from.
02:06And I always remember just actually being slightly nervous to say hello to him.
02:12Because he seemed kind of superior, but not in an aloof way.
02:19Just he seemed like he was cooler.
02:27My earliest memories of getting my first guitar and remembering how it felt are quite vivid really.
02:36Because I remember I bought the guitar on a Thursday.
02:39And then I just stayed in all Friday, all Saturday and all Sunday.
02:44It was the first thing I'd actually felt that I could naturally do.
02:48I had one chord book and I just taught myself all the chords.
02:52By the end of that weekend I was trying to play along to songs on London Calling.
02:59And I suppose my earliest memory of the guitar is that it was one of the first things that I
03:04didn't have any fear of.
03:05He picked up a guitar and he learnt Exile Main Street within a week.
03:09So obviously his talent had been waiting all this time.
03:12He was there lying dormant.
03:14And then he just found out he could play records and just copy everything.
03:17Which was amazing because I've been struggling away on D chords and God knows what for years.
03:21So that's when I decided to play the bass really.
03:29The first song we wrote together was a track called Aftermath which was specifically about the minor strike.
03:35What I remember about trying to write a song for the first time was Nick coming up into school.
03:43In the school yard and just giving me a lyric and then just running away quite quickly.
03:47Which was quite strange because we were really good mates and suddenly seemed really shy about something.
03:53I can remember that very vividly because I gave him my notebook with my selection of lyrics in there.
03:59I remember trying to take the lyric home and finding it really hard.
04:04Then the next day he gave me two more lyrics.
04:06He gave me a lyric called Anti-Social and Intellectual Monks.
04:13And so I took those lyrics on the next day and straight away I wrote music to those two lyrics.
04:20So the very first lyric he gave me I failed.
04:22And then the next day he gave me two more lyrics and it was just easy.
04:25The songs came straight away.
04:31That was dumbass, you should go into the Next Day.
04:32Anyway I hosted another verse of when I went to Little Lodge,
04:32And that's when I came to my thesis or something!
04:33And that was about zero.
04:33As for chucks made me know later.
04:34Yeah.Cs
04:34Oh dear to you to hear those formulas, You can hear the theories. So what
04:35Or am I will know yes? gen
04:35movie. Sort of the house burned
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