Manic Street Preachers Diss Radiohead Member at Club Gig

The Manic Street Preachers may keep their skinny white jeans and leopard print blouses in the wardrobe these days, but that doesn't mean the former glam punkers are not still above making confrontational, rival baiting public statements.

Nicky Wire, the group's longtime unofficial mouthpiece, whose previous greatest hits have included suggesting to a 1994 Glastonbury audience t "build some more bypasses over this f------ s---hole" and intimating in 1992 that he hoped Michael Stipe might die of AIDS, has apparently called Radiohead's Ed O'Brien 'a c---'.

Wire was reportedly responding to the guitarist's suggestion that his views on file-sharing were "bollocks", and told the audience at Glasgow's King Tut's Wah Wah Hut on Thursday night (Feb. 18) that "Apparently Ed O'Brien called me a w----, I'm really f------ scared, go back to your boarding school you c---!"

The Manics were playing the legendary, 300-capacity venue for the first time since 1991 as part of the club's 20th birthday celebrations. It seems appropriate that they would return to their leery, insult-slinging roots in honour of one of the institutions that helped them get their start in rock, but we can't help notice that Mr Wire reserves his shots for groups at the less threatening end of the musical spectrum.