“If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” by Manic Street Preachers

"If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next" was the opening shot from This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours in 1998, Manic Street Preachers digging into history to talk about now. Nicky Wire wrote the words in Barcelona, and they go back to the Spanish Civil War and the Welsh volunteers who joined the International Brigades to fight Franco; the title comes off a Republican poster that set a dead child beneath a sky full of bombers.

Dave Eringa produced and mixed it, and the music is all restraint: James Dean Bradfield's 12-string and acoustic guitars, Sean Moore's clipped drumming, Nick Nasmyth's Wurlitzer and Mellotron drifting in like fog. It shot to number one in Britain on the strength of 156,000 copies in seven days, and it remains the band's lone single to show up on a North American chart.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.