The Manikins – Spend The Night Alone

SinglesGoingSteady#06: The Manikins – Spend The Night Alone [Plastic Idol Records; 2006]

Spend The Night Alone is picked from The Manikins’ third album Lie Cheat & Steal [P. Trash Records, 2005]. It’s a jet-powered power pop song squeezed into just under two minutes that makes you wish you had buckled up before you lowered the needle. To find out more about the context of the single, PopDiggers consulted Joakim Forsberg (guitar and vocals) who kindly shared the information below on behalf of The Manikins.

Joakim says that the reason it was released as a single after the Lie Cheat & Steal album came out was that The Manikins wanted to do more promotion for the album, rather than releasing some brand new unreleased songs. Since P. Trash had already released The World That Once Was Ours as a teaser for the album, we considered the option to release another single from it as something positive.

Plastic Idol Records was an American label run by a guy called Mario, if Joakim remembers correctly. That guy released a bunch of really good singles, including The Minds (check out Brain That Wouldn’t Die, 2005) and our Swedish friends in The Heartattacks (listen to Your Lies, 2006) so when he got in touch and wanted to release a single with us, we just had to say yes.

Joakim doesn’t remember exactly how the reasoning ended up selecting Spend The Night Alone. We had recorded a video for I Don’t Need Anyone which was another serious option as A-side. Either Plastic Idol Records chose which song they wanted to release, or maybe we thought we should show off the more power pop side of us because I Don’t Need Anyone was a quick smoker similar to The World That Once Was Ours. Plastic Idol Records released another single with us a few years later, The Start For Me (2009), which was recorded during the sessions for the Crocodiles album.

Spend The Night Alone is about a broken destructive relationship, says Joakim. Even though the song is quite pop, the lyrics are rather dark. We listened to a lot of power pop around both the Lie Cheat & Steal and Crocodiles albums, so even though many songs are very fast-paced, you can still hear clear power pop influences such as Paul Collins’ Beat, and Gentleman Jesse.

Joakim continues: Why we chose to record at The Dustward in Stockholm with Stefan Brändström was simply because we are all big fans of Henry Fiat’s Open Sore and that Kalle Jansson (one of the guitarists in The Manikins) knew Stefan from before. It was the first time we recorded in a professional studio. Our first two albums and early singles were recorded by ourselves, so Dustward was really like night and day compared to what we were used to. Stefan is absolutely amazing at coming up with ideas and adding or removing things from songs. He really felt like our fifth member during both the recordings of the Lie, Cheat & Steal and Crocodiles albums.

The cover was made by our friends Jonas Norway and Karin Andersson. Jonas is an amazing graphic designer. We have had him do several single covers, t-shirts and poster designs, always freehand. He always delivers awesome results – so check out his Instagram. Karin took the band photos for our first two albums. Some of her photos from these sessions were used for posters and online campaigns.

The two songs on the B-side (Still Afraid Of Girls and Take 5) of the single were probably recorded a little later than the A-side, so even though there’s not a lot of time between them, they don’t belong to the same session as Lie Cheat & Steal. I think we had a whole bunch of new songs ready by the time the album came out. Otherwise Still Afraid Of Girls would have easily qualified for the album. It’s a personal favorite that’s still on our set list when we perform live.

Joakim concludes: I hold Spend The Night Alone as a personal favorite along with I Want My Baby Dead among the many singles we’ve released. Both singles were recorded at Dustward by Stefan Brändström and both covers were designed by Jonas Norway. A winning concept!

Thanks to Joakim Forsberg for passionate commitment! If the soundbites above appealed to you, step up and try The Manikins’ latest album Swedish Woods, number nine on my list of albums 2023.

Previous posts in this series:

SinglesGoingSteady#01: Randells – Seven Inch

SinglesGoingSteady#02: The Fevers – Don’t Tell Me It’s Wrong

SinglesGoingSteady#03: Thee Cha Cha Chas – Rock’n’Roll Till I’m Dead

SinglesGoingSteady#04: The Gories – Cry Girl

SinglesGoingSteady#05: The Bobbyteens – I Wanna Go Home