Manic Street Preachers - Shepherd's Bush Empire, 24 Sep

Yes hello, I’m not dead or anything. I was going to apologise for not posting for a while, but apparently us bloggers aren’t supposed to do that, so I suggest you accept what you’re given and be grateful that I can be arsed to write anything at all. (There’s a really good article somewhere that collates such “sorry, I was busy!” posts which I can’t find, but I’m not going to apologise for that either.)

Anyway, we got to our seats in time to catch the end of Public Service Broadcasting. Stock footage on a projector screen is accompanied by surprisingly direct and jaunty instrumental rock, as played by one man on guitar-slash-laptop dressed as Matt Smith from Doctor Who, and a drummer who seems to have gone for an IT Crowd-era Richard Ayoade vibe. They talk to the audience through a Stephen Hawking style voice machine. The carefully assembled blend of vintage and modern is all very now, or at least is trying awfully hard to be.

This may be a crap photo, but at least it's my crap photo

Which is something that could rarely be said of the Manic Street Preachers. If their eventfully bumpy career has taught them anything, it’s not to give a monkey’s about prevailing trends or public expectations and to concentrate on making the music that interests them. If it’s good enough, the people will come.

Playing at the Empire suggests that fewer are doing so than in the past, but having shed those original fans who couldn’t forgive the post-Richie dive into the mainstream, and the subsequent glut of hangers-on who lost interest during their post-Everything Must Go slump, they are now left with a hardcore of true devotees happy to indulge their musical sidesteps.

Such a varied body of work allows the band to pick and choose songs to suit a mood. New album Rewind the Film was made without electric guitars in a deliberate attempt at a more mellow, folk-influenced sound, so it’s logical that This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, which shares much of RTF’s more sombre sounds, is well-represented in this set - although the dirgey Ready for Drowning is a reminder of how much of a slog the bulk of that album was.

By contrast, RTF’s songs are far more light-footed despite some equally weighty themes. This Sullen Welsh Heart opens with “I don’t want my children to grow up like me”, but it skips along on a lovely acoustic strum. 30 Year War couches an anti-Tory diatribe in the musical equivalent of a jaunty hat - a far cry from the snarling likes of You Love Us and Motown Junk, songs which are still performed with gusto but are clearly the product of much younger hearts and minds.

No, not a fireball. I wasn't going to spend half the gig trying to take a perfect pic though.

Of the many guest vocalists on RTF (James Dean Bradfield has freely admitted that his voice isn’t the best fit for all the new songs), only Richard Hawley makes an appearance here, his lugubrious croon a perfect fit for the wistful title track. Bradfield has never had any qualms assuming all live vocal duties though (Your Love Alone is a highlight as ever), and still manages to command the stage with a bouncy energy. To his left, as ever, Nicky Wire throws a few shapes and several bon mots but mostly leaves James to do his thing.

As they get older, Wire and Bradfield look progressively more different to each other onstage (wry old Ted and menopausal lesbian respectively), to the point where if you didn’t know any better you wouldn’t put them in the same band. This makes it all the more touching to hear the “guitar hero” and “country’s greatest lyricist” publicly affirming their lifelong bromance. A long career is bound to have its ups and downs, but for the Manics to be thriving at this point suggests that the friendships at the band's core have helped it to power through those fallow periods.

Way back in 1998, amidst the general wailing and gnashing of teeth that MSP had “sold out” by going mainstream or by carrying on at all post-Richie, a line like The Everlasting’s “I don’t believe in it anymore/Pathetic acts for a worthless cause” was the equivalent of lobbing a hand grenade at the more rabid sections of their fanbase. Now those words are bellowed back at the band, the song being one of the warmest-received of the evening. How times change. If any of those lost fans were to return, they might be surprised to see a band who seem perfectly suited to their own middle-age.