THE Manic Street Preachers’ decision to take bright young shavers Razorlight on tour with them could easily have backfired. Presumably they saw in them something of their younger selves, but as fellow Parkinson guests Tom Cruise and Denise Lewis recently discovered to their surprise, in Johnny Borrell Razorlight have a frontman capable of stealing any show.

“Big stage...” the singer observed before even playing a note, as though sizing up the venue for future reference, and launching into a precocious performance that was almost like a dress rehearsal for an inevitable headlining return visit. Such has been their recent ubiquity that it felt as though Razorlight were performing a greatest-hits set although they only released their debut album, Up All Night, in the summer.

The Manic Street Preachers’ profile has declined of late, and Wembley was braced, if not for an upset, then at the very least for an upstaging.

Never ones to conform to type, though, the Welshmen instead turned in their best performance that this correspondent has seen for the best part of a decade. It’s no coincidence that the band finally seem to have come to terms with their past. The most recent full-length album, Lifeblood, featured their first song to deal directly with the missing founder-member Richey Edwards, and for this tour the trio recruited a replacement guitarist — the Abbey Road studio engineer Guy Massey — for the first time since Edwards’s disappearance almost nine years ago.

Aside from the obvious benefits this brought to their live sound by allowing the frontman James Dean Bradfield to indulge his frequent flights of fretboard fancy, the appointment also alluded to what any American in the audience would doubtless have termed closure. Post-Richey, the Manics have never sounded so at ease, and songs such as No Surface All Feeling, Enola Alone and Yes that were once bogged down by baggage now soared.

The crowd-pleasingly lengthy set contained more of their effervescent early efforts than of their more lethargic later material. And while several of the songs from Lifeblood will clearly take longer to bed in than others, the stirring singalong to Design for Life that closed the show felt like a communal celebration of the band’s return to form.

Razorlight’s time will undoubtedly come, but this was one of the Manics’ finest hours.

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