Formed in 1988, and with 14 albums to their name, Manic Street Preachers are an established feature of British rock landscape. So much so, that it's easy to mistake the band's ongoing presence as an inevitability. Long before their narrative's traumatic fissure - the disappearance of Richey Edwards in February 1995 - the Manics seemed destined for merely ephemeral notoriety: early gigs were 20-minute exercises in "hate-noise", while their first records scrambled art and politics with punk's Situationist rhetoric, culminating in the rock'n'roll culturecide of Motown Junk ("Stops your brain thinking for 168 seconds"). They promised to make a multi-million-selling debut album and then break up. Inevitably, real life got in the way.

History and loss are intrinsic to the Manics' psyche. So too an oft-overlooked sense of mischief. Each record has been a real-time cultural barometer, an intersection point for politics, philosophy, art, even sport, and featuring a diverse cast of characters: Friedrich Nietzsche, John Lennon, Sylvia Plath, Shaun Ryder, Stephen Hawking, Michel Foucault, Jackie Collins, Neil Kinnock, Yves Klein, Harold Pinter, Richard Nixon, Noam Chomsky, Paul Robeson, Giant Haystacks, Picasso, Steve Ovett, George Orwell and many, many more... plus, of course, the Manic Street Preachers themselves.

This book will tell the whole story, from 1988's Suicide Alley to the present day, via 168 songs chosen by the author and Nicky Wire to illuminate the dynamic evolution of the Manics' music.