"The first ever crossword I ever did was on 29 March, a David Bowie crossword for my wife because David Bowie is her Mastermind specialist subject. Heโs a very rich seam is our David. I included his films, his theatre performances, soundtrack collaborations; itโs quite comprehensive. I just really enjoyed it. I enjoyed setting the questions up first, then drawing a grid of 25 by 25 โ all by hand by the way, no pre-made grids here.
"I put the answers criss-crossing each other on the grid until Iโd used up every answer, then I redrew the grid and colour-coded the box with oaks and sepia tones, a faded tapioca yellow and charcoal greys, and bam, I was there! Then, I suppose itโs like running a marathon or doing a bungee jump, or learning a language, once youโve done one you want to do another one straight away, especially when someone aces the crossword immediately.
"My second crossword was Scottish chart music and that was for a Scottish mate, simple as that. I did an AOR/MOR one for Dave Eringa our producer because the first time I met him he had a Kiss buckle belt and hair down to his arse like Sebastian Bach from Skid Row. He aced that one. The Scottish music one is my favourite, itโs hard to compete with the length and breadth of what they had at their fingertips. Iโm finding out things about songs I never knew before, filling in gaps Iโd never have filled otherwise. Youโve got to stay to subjects you feel relatively comfortable in, so theyโre mostly musical at the moment."
An incorrect clue can unravel a personโs psyche
"I had to re-do the first clue sheet three times because I kept making mistakes, I became obsessed with making it perfect โ which is strange for me because I have no predilection towards any kind of perfection, whether it be in music, cooking or constructing a sentence. I donโt mind โwarts and allโ, and I always think perfection is a dangerous task, that the pursuit of perfection is destructive. But with crosswords Iโve become quite finickity with it because if you fuck up a clue or you havenโt put enough blocks of letters in the crossword youโve made them utterly face their own lack of knowledge, they doubt the capabilities of the pathways in their brain, they have a frontal lobe malfunction. โIt must be ‘Sweet Child Oโ Mine’, but itโs not enough words!โ Then you find out that the idiot that compiled it didnโt put enough letters in.
"When I was about ten or 11 years old I used to play battleships with Sean [Moore, Manics drummer and Bradfieldโs cousin]. He must have won over 20 games in a row and I actually started thinking โI am just thick, I am a twat, I am a cretin,โ full on self-loathing was settling in. Already my mum had gone to the school to talk to the teachers because I was quite mute when I was a child and I looked like a bloodhound who couldnโt look up. I had a patch on under a pair of National Health specs because of a crossed eye, a target on me saying โdestroy this kid,โ so I was already worried about myself, and then came this run of bad losses in Battleships. Sean beat me 20 times, and in a flash I figured it out: we always played it in the same space, where there was a mirror on the wall just behind me. I didnโt like him for about six months after that. I was already a torn and frayed sweater but it nearly unravelled me. So I wouldnโt want to do something like that to somebody with a crossword."
The rest of the Manics arenโt so interested
"I was always a Guardian Quick Crossword man, I canโt stand the cryptic. Cryptic crosswords are for people that use Latin in the middle of a sentence to prove theyโve been to Oxford. Itโs already hard enough. But then thatโs a double-edged sword because when you donโt finish the Guardian Quick Crossword itโs not good for your self-esteem again. If youโre on the train and someone can see you struggling with the quick crossword you start filling it in just to pretend youโve finished it, โdone thatโ. You think someoneโs gonna tweet โIโve just seen that guy from that Welsh band in the restaurant, canโt even finish a crossword.โ
"Richey Edwards had a higher functioning brain than mine. The few times I visited him in Swansea University youโd go to his room on Sundays and heโd have The Times and The Observer spread on the floor and heโd be having a go at the heftier crosswords. And then Seanโs got a really wide knowledge of weird things, the process of the vulcanisation of rubber and all that, heโs my phone a friend. Iโve not sent any crosswords to the rest of the band since I started setting them. Sean would do it in no time at all, itโd be quite dispiriting, and Nick has told me many times he hates crosswords. โWhat would I want to do a crossword for when I can read? Why have a wrap when you can have a sandwich? Why have a Lion bar when you can have a Picnic?โ"
Crosswords can open up wormholes
"When I was young, wormholes would lead you to places you didnโt know you were ever going. When I was reading about The Theโs Infected in the NME, you could see that Matt Johnson had a copy of Jean-Paul Sartreโs Nausea in his pocket. I went and bought it a week later. One of McCarthyโs albums I Am A Wallet had a song on it about Frans Hals the Dutch painter, so I went and found out about him. Those references are endless for me being a music fan all my life, and I think Iโve rediscovered that in lockdown through the crosswords, as trite as that sounds. With the Scottish music one I went back and listened to a lot of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and itโs just much better than I ever realised. Iโve listened to lots of Sutherland Brothers stuff now and I really like it!
"Iโve just done an album thatโs very based in 1970s Chilean history and reading around that has been amazing, I found out about Violetta Parra through looking into Vรญctor Jara, and then ended up reading a book by Sara Wheeler called Thin Long Country, about Chile, and thatโs led me on to reading about the Atacama Desert. And then I had a real suspicion that I had an Aguaturbia album in these boxes of vinyl I have, this Chilean psychedelic rock band from the 70s, and Iโd had it in my collection for 25 years. The wormhole that led me to Vรญctor Jara was The Clashโs Sandinista!, and I think the crosswords have become like that a tiny bit. The Manics have never been ashamed of quoting what our inspirations are. People always though โoh god, here you go again, brought your thesaurus with you?โ But it was more like, no, we brought our reference point with us. โThis is good, do you like it too?โ There was always a lot more humility in doing that than people realise."
Crosswords can help you cope
"I feel like I was reading too much, reading as a reflex and a lot of it wasnโt going in. I realised the books I was reading were getting a bit too unfit for purpose. I was reading Emil Cioranโs A Short History Of Decay and that took me down a wormhole that I just didnโt enjoy. I started reading a lot of Japanese novels and I began to feel like I was lost in this strange 1970s psychedelic flat screen experience. I got back into Yลซko Tsushima who wrote a book called Territory Of Light about a single parent mother living in Tokyo. I loved the book before lockdown because it was about a little unit this woman had created for herself, and for better or worse it was what she and her daughter could exist in. I started reading a follow-on book called Child Of Fortune, and reading that in lockdown had a terrible effect on me. It was like reading a book about a prisoner while youโre in jail.
"I think what the crossword did was it had no narrative. It was about finding out about stuff, about concentrating on getting the clues right, getting the spelling right, simple stuff like, when I was doing the Scottish music one I made the fatal mistake of writing the Average White Band single as โLetโs Go Around Again, when the real title is โLetโs Go Round Againโ. My Scottish mate picked up on it: โThatโs no fuckinโ good man, itโs Round Again!โโ I really, really concentrate on every crossword I do now. It became almost a day at the office, I didnโt have to worry about the narrative, I just had to worry about things looking good, the clues being perfectly correct, and choosing the right colours. Just getting the bits and pieces and putting them all in place was nice, then at the end sending them all off in envelopes or for people to print off. The narratives in books were really fucking me up a bit in lockdown."
James Dean Bradfield’s new album Even In Exile is out on August 14. You can have a go at his specially compiled 1980s indie crossword below!
