“The band is getting better and better. The lyrics are, too. I’ve found better ways to express myself. Though I don’t need to know if my words have become more acceptable than before, I hope they have. Some songs on The Holy Bible are pretty clear. I don’t think I’ve changed what I say, but maybe I’m saying it in a different way.” – Richey Edwards

‘The mysteriousness of a miscellany… draws the observer in, stimulating her to look at individual things with new interest as well as to look, if she will, at the “unintentional portrait” of a mind – a mind hidden to the casual observer by the protective shield of things.’ – Linda Leavell

Photographs of Richey Edwards from 1994 record a dramatic change in physical appearance – increasingly drawn, revealing new scars and with a sense of detachment from the promotional matters in hand. The lyricist didn’t hide the facts of his illness. He discussed where things had gone wrong when asked by journalists after leaving The Priory, and the ways in which simple everyday tasks had become difficult. But one thing remained constant: even as Edwards underwent hospital treatment in the summer, as a three-piece Manic Street Preachers continued to promote The Holy Bible (finally released in August 1994) without him, and as he struggled to reintegrate into touring life for the autumn dates leading to his final shows in December, the writing continued.

Two images from that year stand out tellingly, overlooked among the more familiar shots of the band – in the searing heat of Bangkok, among the catacombs and gravestones of Paris, huddled on a windy beach in Wales, or laying ruin to thousands of pounds’ worth of equipment on the last night at the Astoria. They illustrate Edwards’s commitment to his work. One of these, taken by Pennie Smith, finds him somewhere on the road, on the band’s tour bus, pen in hand, diligently transcribing from a book – continuing to find new inspiration in the thoughts of other writers. In the second, the band’s long-time photographer Mitch Ikeda captures Edwards seated at his writing table in his new flat in Cardiff, sunlight flooding in through the window as he taps away at the typewriter keys, eyes focused on the page.

Far from being the final word, the lyrics that Edwards contributed to The Holy Bible were only a dozen among the many that he worked on in the year prior to his disappearance. Some of those other lyrics were already in the process of being put to music at the time of Edwards’s last rehearsal with Manic Street Preachers, at the House in the Woods studio in January 1995. Some would not appear until more than a decade later, with the release of Journal For Plague Lovers.¹

Before 2009, the band had spoken memorably about the musical direction not taken, that Edwards suggested for the follow-up to The Holy Bible: ‘Pantera meets Nine Inch Nails meets Screamadelica’. Where Edwards was heading lyrically could be gleaned in part from the handful of his songs used on Everything Must Go (some co-written by Wire), as well as a few passing remarks by his bandmates. But there was much more. According to Nicky Wire, Edwards’s creative output was unceasing throughout 1994, his mind unable to switch off and constantly fed on a wide array of media. Edwards’s writing process was entirely analogue, though the stream of images, expressions and fragments he left are equally reflective of an accelerated digital culture of hyperlinking and newsfeeds. Describing the last binder full of songs that was presented to the band, Wire told the NME’s Emily Mackay: “Richey wrote it on a typewriter, he never had a computer. An Olivetti portable typewriter, which wasn’t portable at all, it was fucking huge, he carried it away with him everywhere.” Wire added: “[H]e loved writing as well, physically, with pen and paper. Me and him always used to say as a running joke, when people asked ‘what instrument do you play’ […] he’d play the pen and I’d play the paper.”²

Even while he was undergoing treatment at The Priory, Edwards would keep handwritten notes, copying down lines and quotes, documenting his emotions and aspects of his recovery, all the while co-ordinating the final stages of the art design of The Holy Bible. At the same time as he was trying to recover mentally and physically from alcoholism, anorexia and depression, he was determined to improve as a lyricist, always researching, always looking ahead to the next song. Much as he intended The Holy Bible to be a meaningful statement in rock music, Edwards went on seeking what he saw as the perfect lyric and this took his writing in new directions, which became more clear to see when the remaining band decided to put a selection of his last words to music.

†††

As always, the writing that followed The Holy Bible was shaped in large part by the dizzying rate of Edwards’s reading and viewing, and shows the influence of diverse forms of media. The many words and images that he took from elsewhere are charged with new effects and possible meanings in the context of Manic Street Preachers’ music. Edwards nods to favourite writers, cites historical figures and events in unique ways, and the ephemeral is given a degree of artistic permanence through his writing. The interest in modernist and other subversive art, that the band had immersed themselves in since their teenage years, persisted. Edwards favoured the use of collage, miscellaneous fragments, multiple voices, images of extremity and absurdity, and formal inventiveness, to create impressions of an interconnected, conflicted Western society dealing with the aftermath of Christianity, capitalism, consumerism, scientific advancement, fascism and war – and the individual’s place in a world with seemingly little left to place faith in.

On The Holy Bible the band addressed specific atrocities from the twentieth century (largely influenced by visits to Dachau, Belsen and Hiroshima in 1993) and Edwards spoke of the value he found in continuing to study history, which had been the focus of his degree studies at Swansea University. In his last television interview, for ZTV in Sweden, he explained:

“Every day of my life I feel I’m… not as good a writer as I could be, I’m not as intelligent as I could be. I try and constantly read and improve my mind, and get a better perspective on, you know, world history. And nobody’s ever gonna get good enough to know everything, but you know, I think I try, which is more than a lot of people do.”³

When in London, journalist Keith Cameron reported, ‘Edwards would frequent the hallowed Reading Room of the British Museum, following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, George Orwell and Virginia Woolf.’ The independent bookshop Compendium was also a favourite haunt, as Bradfield explained: “Richey must have bought well over 150 books from there… They also sold academic research papers. He’d have a suitcase on the road, just filled with books. I don’t mean this in a flippant way, but when Compendium went under [in 2000] I remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s probably because Richey’s not around!’ He absolutely loved that bookshop.”⁴

Even more so than books – when it came to lyric writing – magazine articles, newspaper reports, comics, television programmes and videos were constant sources of material for imaginative repurposing. Some of the images, phrases and ideas that would emerge in Edwards’s last lyrics would first surface in interviews given following his hospitalisation, as if using the opportunity to try and articulate their relevance to the thoughts that preoccupied him. A Latin quote, ‘Virescit vulnere virtus’ (strength is restored through wounding), that Edwards found in Tim Willocks’s prison novel Green River Rising and which he shared with Peter Paphides in a Time Out interview in December 1994, would be used in the original lyric for ‘Peeled Apples’, the opening track of Journal For Plague Lovers. In the same interview, Edwards elaborated on the subject of self-discipline and punishment of the body as a coping mechanism, saying:

“It’s really quite traditional in terms of flagellance [sic], and, like, just go back through history. Caged zoo animals do it quite well. Baboons chew their own tails, but then that’s an artificial environment. They also fix an imaginary point on the wall and constantly walk up to it, stop and then wander back. But they never cross that line. I do see an enormous amount of dignity in self-determination and self-discipline.”

The song that would become ‘Small Black Flowers that Grown in the Sky’ was emerging. Work, it seemed, was always in progress.⁵

While there may be prominent recurring themes in Edwards’s lyrics, they are nothing but wide-ranging in their scope and subject matter. This only continues beyond The Holy Bible, Edwards’s words containing references to contentious scientific developments, Hollywood melodrama, punk memorabilia, art history and British wrestling. The original lyric sheet for ‘Peeled Apples’ alone compresses a bewildering array of images and largely impenetrable allusions, encompassing Noam Chomsky, the Birdman of Alcatraz, Heinrich Himmler, the Sistine Chapel, the films The Deer Hunter and Tetsuo: The Iron Man amongst flashes of violence, animality and physical and psychological responses to an aggressive world. Various contemporary source materials helped Edwards depict the modern age with a sharpness of detail and he was unhesitant in expressing his own misgivings and painful experiences through this visceral imagery. It was the typically trite subject matter of the majority of pop songs that, as Edwards saw it, reflected the kind of aberration of mind so readily ascribed to his own words:

“Whatever kind of writer you are, it obviously expresses something about how you feel. I mean, if you spend your whole life writing, you know, love songs, you probably are psychologically damaged. If you’re that obsessed, that everything you put down on paper is always about relationships, then you must have some kind of deep-rooted flaw.

“I mean, I think somebody like Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston now are more ruined in the mind than I could ever possibly be, you know, because that’s all they seem to sing about. You know, I think they’ve got bigger problems than they could ever dream about. I think it’s perfectly natural to have an interest in the things that actually go along around you. You know, if I wrote lyrics constantly about relationships, I would think I was walking around with like a plastic bag over my head, like ignoring everything that goes on, you know, pretending things don’t exist.”⁶

The things that attracted Edwards typically reflected his own critical, bleak outlook on humanity, yet he showed a continual fascination with thinkers, artists and individuals, both fictional and real, living at the edges of experience; anti-heroes; those attempting to achieve new forms of expression themselves, or else trapped in circumstances in which they struggle to assert control.

On one occasion, Edwards called Nicky Wire to discuss a television documentary about zoo animals they had both seen. His enthusiasm soon manifested itself in a new lyric called ‘Stalemates’. Wire told Vox: “Richey phoned me up one night, around Christmas ’94. We’d been watching the same TV programme. It was like a QED show. He said, I’ve just seen this brilliant programme. It was about animals going mad in their cages.”⁷

It was not just the startling imagery and provocative subject matter that developed in new ways in Edwards’s writing after The Holy Bible. He was as mindful of its rhetorical aspects, seeking an improved sense of form. Although by all accounts he lacked any musical skill, he spoke about the rhythmic quality he was searching for. ‘Facing Page: Top Left’ well illustrates Edwards’s attention to repetition, variation and contrast to create poetic impact. Its two verses show first the surface appearance and then the depressing reality of a life in treatment, using contrasting lines of almost identical construction and rhythm.

Edwards knew that he was often placing great demands on James Dean Bradfield, but trusted that the singer and guitarist would push the band’s music further. He told ZTV:

“I’ve always had an idea in my mind about how I want to express myself. And I think the first album was slightly too naïve… I’ve got a rhythm and a melody in my mind that I know James has also got and he’s trying to get them to match perfectly. And I think early on we were so inexperienced, it was hard to get them working properly, and now when I write, I can almost hear James’s music and I know what works and what doesn’t work.”

Edwards added:

“When I see a lot of bands’ lyric sheets, before I hear the record, I know what they’re gonna sound like, because the metre and the text is like, da da da / da da da / da da da, and I think when I see my lyrics written down, even though I know what the song’s gonna be like, I can’t really imagine how James can possibly sing the words. But I think that’s the best thing about us. I think that’s the one thing we do that’s quite different from most bands…”

Bradfield too began to notice changes in the pair’s compatibility as songwriters following the extreme challenges in composing The Holy Bible:

“I’m not being rude to Richey, I’m really not, but his lyrics would often be off-kilter and wouldn’t scan, and I’d have to make it fit. And that was fine, because something good would come from that. I’d have to stretch, and it would lead to a different time signature or something. And the words were always just brilliant, but sometimes he was a bit more freeform. But I remember when he gave me ‘Small Black Flowers’, which was originally called ‘Stalemates’, I think. And it scanned! Boof, boof, boof.”⁸

The combination of Edwards’s often esoteric, subversive cultural references, his brutal emotional insight and Bradfield’s musical adeptness always pointed to new possibilities, reaching beyond barriers. The ‘Opulence’ material would direct Bradfield and Sean Moore in musical directions that differed from The Holy Bible, too. The singer told Kerrang: “There’s less rage and hatred, more philosophy and doubt; there’s a sense of humour and surrealism to the lyrics. This dictated that the music palette would be broader. It was the logical progression of The Holy Bible; there’s still elements of it but it’s more of a rock record. It’s less new wave, or post-punk.”⁹

Figure studies

Beyond Wire’s recollection of the documentary that spurred the writing of ‘Small Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky’, the evidence of Edwards’s continual immersion in a broad range of media until the time of his disappearance is substantial, even from the limited material that has been made publicly available. And the uses to which this material was put for lyrics was manifold. From the scribbled notes and unedited typewritten drafts published in the special edition of Journal For Plague Lovers, it is possible to trace a considerable amount of references – many of these firmly locate Edwards’s lyrics in the culture and events of 1994. And Edwards’s attention was focused at all levels – from headlines to sidebars, from epigraphs to endnotes.

From one page of the reproduced ‘Opulence’ binder, stuck to the back cover, we can see some of the results of Edwards’s note-taking. The references would seem to date back as far as January 1994 and include an issue of Vanity Fair in which the popular children’s author Roald Dahl and the bestselling novelist and filmmaker Michael Crichton were both featured. Many of the words and references that fans might assume are examples of Edwards’s own poetic invention, or else the impenetrable, telegraphed thoughts of a troubled mind, are in fact paraphrases and transcriptions from these magazine features, with some miscellaneous interpolations:

Richey Edwards’s notes

1. ‘SRENDNI VASHTAR (a polecat kept by an affection starved boy) but he is eaten when in ‘SAKI’ by HH MUNRO polecat escapes’
2. ‘Going to bed at 2, waking up at 2.30. He lives the life of an eremite.’
3. ‘PHYSICS. DRUGS. KEYS. EPIPHANY. CACTI. AS FRIEND. WONT HURT YOU. SEE INTO MAN. BECOME MAN. DIMINISH MAN. EXPECTATIONS INCREASE. EAT BIRTHDAY CAKE EVERYDAY. LEARN THAT REWARDS ARE BULLSHIT. DISCIPLINE IS JUSTIFIED AS LONG AS IT’S YR DISCIPLINE, and all around agree your discipline.’

Original article sections

1. From ‘The Grimmest Tales’ by Christopher Hitchens, a feature on the author Roald Dahl: ‘Sredni Vashtar, is still read with shudders by parents and guardians with bad consciences. It concerns a beautiful and vicious polecat of that name, kept as a pet by an affection-starved boy named Conradin.’
2. From ‘The Admirable Crichton’ by Zoë Heller, a feature on the author Michael Crichton: ‘As the book proceeds, he will get up earlier and earlier. “It’s five, then it’s four, then it’s three,” he says. “Eventually, I’m going to bed at 10 and getting up at 2…For the duration of that draft, he lives the life of an eremite.’
3. Also from ‘The Admirable Crichton’: ‘In search of answers, Crichton spent several years in the 80s traveling in remote areas of the world and trying out some of the more unconventional routes to enlightenment. He visited psychics…he went to the desert and enjoyed very moving conversations with a cactus… What was the epiphany? “Everything was helpful,” he says. “It’s paradoxical, but diminished expectations seem to make for more happiness,” he says. “You don’t expect to eat birthday cake every night…. Sean [Connery] once said something to me that I’ve never forgotten. He said, ‘Discipline is always worthwhile.’ That’s absolutely right. But this is a society that thinks discipline is for drones or for people who don’t know any better.”’

None of these lines appear in any of the finished songs on Journal For Plague Lovers, but suggest that Edwards was ever in the midst of collecting and shaping images for possible future lyrics, drawn to profile pieces, and the insights of other writers. On another page, reprinted opposite the words to ‘All is Vanity’ there are a series of notes that make mention of Shakespeare’s King Lear, 12-step psychology, biology, art history, feminism and philosophy. More artists and intellectuals are named: Robert Rauschenberg, Camille Paglia and Kate Figes, along with Baruch Spinoza. Again, the notes are likely taken from newspaper stories, documentaries and reviews from the time. The material on Spinoza was almost certainly jotted down while watching Spinoza: Apostle of Reason, a documentary broadcast on Channel 4 on 13 July – as some of the dialogue is transcribed verbatim. Maybe it was simply a matter of Edwards’s academic curiosity. Maybe it was intended as the basis of a lyric along the lines of ‘Marlon JD’.

Edwards and Wire had previously used characters from literature and film as their lyrical subjects – as on the B-sides ‘RP McMurphy’ and ‘Patrick Bateman’, highlighting the behaviours and motivations of disruptive, even morally repugnant characters as a way of underlining the flaws and hypocrisies of the culture in which they act. ‘Marlon JD’ is somewhat more curious. The lyrics comprise descriptions of scenes that appear in John Huston’s film Reflections in a Golden Eye, with some of the character dialogue included. The title refers us not to the character focused upon, Major Penderton, but rather to the actor who portrays him. Bradfield has commented: “He loved him because he was the idealisation in his mind of what the ideal man could be, but also because he turned to shit as well.”¹⁰

‘Marlon JD’ is strikingly succinct as compared with many of the lyrics Edwards had written for The Holy Bible. In one sense, it is as if in keeping with the aspirations of Brando’s character in the film – a method writing of a kind: ‘no luxury, no ornamentation, utter simplicity, and it’s also clean, clean as a rifle’. Edwards described what he imagined as the perfect song: 15-20 lines, summing up a lifetime of feelings and observations. He spoke of his desire to condense his ideas, and to write free of all external distractions:

“The reason I’m doing this is for the two months we get off, when I can just be alone in my flat and write. That’s what I do, I do nine months of touring so I can get time to write words, that’s what I care about. This is very nice, travelling, it’s nice staying in hotels, it’s nice doing concerts but it’s not as satisfying as maybe getting two or three lines in a lyric that you really think encapsulates how you feel, you know? That’s what’s really important to me.

“If I can look back on a lyric and think, you know, I’ve done it, that’s a good song, I think that’s as good as maybe other works that I really respect. That’s what I’m in a band for.”¹¹

‘Kevin Carter’ was one of the first leftover lyrics used by the band for Everything Must Go, producing a top 10 single in 1996. Here (as with the Spinoza song that could have been), the focus of the entire lyric is on a real-life figure – Edwards providing a template that Nicky Wire would use both soon after (with the companion song ‘Interiors (Song for Willem De Kooning)’ on the same album) and across the band’s catalogue (as on ‘Tsunami’, ‘Let Robeson Sing’, ‘International Blue, ‘Vivian’, ‘Dylan and Caitlin’ and more recently ‘The Secret He Had Missed’). Drawing on magazine articles about Carter, the song refers not only to the photographer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The vulture and the little girl, but also the circumstances of his troubled life and suicide. As with ‘Marlon JD’, the listener will decide to what extent Edwards is comparing his own psychology with that of his subject. When asked about this aspect of his lyric writing process, he told Simon Price simply: “If I use ‘we’ or ‘you’ or ‘they’, it doesn’t necessarily mean what it says. But I think most lyric writers would say that.”¹²

While shining the spotlight on a particular real-life figure for the length of a lyric was new, there have always been namechecks by the band from the start. But in Edwards’s late lyrics public figures also begin to appear as characters, as if in absurdist or satirical moral plays of his own invention. This had already begun on the Holy Bible B-side ‘Sculpture of Man’ with a description of the young princes William and Harry, ‘dressed in drag standing over the sodomised body of their mother’, Lady Diana the Princess of Wales – the scene imagined as a poster sold in the then well-known British retailer, Athena. It continued on ‘Revol’, juxtaposing political figures from Lenin to Napoleon with imagery of sex and romantic disillusionment, and is a prominent stylistic element of Journal For Plague Lovers.

On one track, another famous sibling pair, Jackie and Joan Collins, are placed on the panel of the popular BBC current affairs programme Question Time, in a discussion about Catholicism and marital issues; juxtaposing ethical provocation and the everyday insecurities found in an Agony Aunt column. It is one among many of Edwards’s withering judgements about love, sex and relationships in these late lyrics. In another song, Stephen Hawking is brought into a riff about the possible limits of human scientific experimentation, health and prowess – with another sardonic reference to lack of sexual prowess.

In several cases, Edwards’s bandmates have been as daunted, puzzled and inspired by the words and references as any of the band’s fans. ‘Pretension/Repulsion’ is a particularly cryptic example, especially in the verses – a series of past participles, with no apparent semantic connection; only sharing a visual pattern of elided letters, word endings and with some sense of opposition – between words like ‘spurn’d’/’call’d’, ‘perturb’d/’unhinder’d, or ‘lock’d/unclasp’d – that create a sense of confusion, vaguely evoking ideas of suffering, self-fulfilment, allure and manipulation. At the chorus, Edwards breaks the title words into their syllabic constituents on the page and makes a point of widening the spaces between them. Pulling language apart to see where it might take him and the band.

Against Edwards’s precise, underlined separation of song parts on the page – verse, bridge, chorus – reminding us that these were always intended as lyrics, not poems, there is a larger degree of ambiguity and inscrutability to the writing. The full lyrics to ‘Pretension/Repulsion’ appear to deal with the theme of artistic controversy as a way of examining exploitation, taking in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ Grande Odalisque, the heavily criticised Benetton adverts of the 1990s, and pornography. Describing his initial thoughts on seeing the lyric, Bradfield said: “Just rising to the bloody-minded challenge of looking at some of the lyrics… the words in ‘Pretension/Repulsion’, in the verse… it is just a list of words! Purposefully after each word there is a full stop though. ‘Explored’ – full stop. ‘Enclosed’ – full stop. And just seeing somebody laying down the gauntlet, the challenge. It did remind me of some of my experiences on The Holy Bible. ‘Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit’sworldwouldfallapart’ – it was nice to revisit that kind of challenge.”¹³

But there were limit points, as he told NME: “[I]n a song like ‘Me and Stephen Hawking’, or what’s another one, perhaps ‘Peeled Apples’, there are some verses where the intent or meaning behind the words were actually… I couldn’t unlock it. I couldn’t understand it at all. And that might be a bit shocking, because there might appear to be some lyrics on the record already which are quite hard to understand. But there were some stuff which actually seemed like the key had just been chucked away to the meaning of them.”¹⁴

Anatomy of a lyric

Speaking of ‘Me and Stephen Hawking’ in particular, Wire has said: “I’d love to know if Giant Haystacks fought in a Bombay fight and was watched by 100,000 people. Because if that’s true… no, I don’t know what the fuck it’s about. Cos then, like you said the genetic stuff, the scientific angle, seems to… I don’t know, it’s just that amazing mixture, Richey was never afraid of really low art and really high art. And that’s why it’s never elitist really, it’s just knowledge, it’s just taking something from everything.”¹⁵

Particular sources of inspiration do turn up again and again, however. Sources that themselves already carried within them a breadth of images, voices and facts. Many of the disparate, surreal lines that appear in the original lyric sheet for ‘Me and Stephen Hawking’ can be traced back to British newspaper articles from a narrow time period, July and August 1994 – and often from the same publication.

We can compare Edwards’s technique here to that of ‘Yes’, ‘Ifwhiteamerica…’ and ‘PCP’, for which he took selected phrases from a Mail on Sunday article and Living Marxism editorials from around the time of writing. As baffling as ‘Me and Stephen Hawking’ first appears, it is possible to reconstruct much of the lyric writing process with the help of newspaper archives. While this does not finally ‘explain’ the song, pin down any meaning, or diminish its lyrical and musical idiosyncrasy, the added context does allow us to gain a clearer sense of the sorts of themes Edwards was drawn to, and helps us appreciate more aspects of his creative approach. It also suggests that Edwards expected his listeners to be as engaged with the week’s news as he was.

The memorable reference to Giant Haystacks was inspired by Jessamy Calkin’s feature on the wrestler, ‘Lores of the Ring’, which appeared in The Independent Magazine on Saturday 30 July 1994 – the same newspaper in which, at the start of that year, Wire and Edwards had first seen the art of Jenny Saville that would be central in shaping the design of both The Holy Bible and Journal For Plague Lovers. Edwards does not turn Calkin’s piece into the basis of a rock song, as he did with the zoo documentary that became ‘Stalemates’, or Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye. The following day, the Independent on Sunday ran a report by West Europe Editor, Leonard Doyle, with the headline ‘Guard on bull with human genes’, describing a trial in the Netherlands for a new type of baby formula, and the protests that this had aroused. Almost all of the first verse lines of the recorded version of ‘Me and Stephen Hawking’ were lifted or adapted from Doyle’s dispatch. Many of the other lines from Edwards’s unedited lyrics also appear to have been sourced from contemporaneous reports, a few more even lifted from the same 31 July edition of the Independent on Sunday.

If much of Edwards’s inspiration came from national newspapers, television documentaries, magazines and comics, the uses to which he put his chosen fragments is more varied on the songs on Everything Must Go and Journal For Plague Lovers; ranging from a concentrated distillation born out of one source – a television documentary, a little-known film – to fragments from a number of news stories, or books compressed into a nightmarish lyrical collage, blending journalistic observation and Edwards’s singular form of depressive introspection. In the case of the unedited ‘Me and Stephen Hawking’ we get the closest thing to a modern-day newsfeed. While Nicky Wire has stressed the analogue nature of Edwards’s research and writing process, it certainly still resonates in the fractured, confounding contemporary media and social landscape.

The imaginative introduction of Stephen Hawking, as with the Collins sisters, makes ‘Me and Stephen Hawking’ more than a simple cut-up piece. Not only does it imbue Edwards’s lyrics with a wonderful, and too seldom seen, black humour that is striking after the moral fury of The Holy Bible, but it achieves something of a concise commentary on an entire culture in thrall to perfection – athletic, scientific and economic – that cannot but render the individual worthless, left with only an unsettling spectacle to witness. The ways in which source materials are used here almost reflects the lyrical associations with gene splicing and colliding bodies too. The text, as body, is a result of a process of literary tearing, stitching, scarring and healing.

For Edwards, the body was always a focus of writing, coping, and responding to the world. All three combined in one unforgettable incident, when he was interviewed by Steve Lamacq after a gig in Norwich in May 1991 and was frustrated by the journalist’s scepticism about the group’s seriousness and intent, leading Edwards to cut the words ‘4 Real’ deeply into his arm with a razor. Physical exploitation and attempts at self-control through bodily autonomy are the subject of two remarkable first-person songs on The Holy Bible, dealing with prostitution and anorexia. They are among Edwards’s most accomplished lyrics, on an album where extreme politics and psychology are mirrored in extreme bodily proportions and conditions. The struggle to assert mental and physical vitality in a culture intent on power, judgment and obliteration is at the heart of that album’s signature song, ‘Faster’. His later lyrics similarly depict a world dominated by suffering and doubt, in which pain is registered vividly, and hopelessly covered over with consumer cosmetics, hollow philosophy and ineffective therapies and drugs – a world more closely informed by Edwards’s experiences in the summer of 1994.

The epigraph by Hawking that Edwards uses at the head of the ‘Me and Stephen Hawking’ page remarks upon the destructiveness of humankind, the same kind of sentiment that shaped The Holy Bible. The song’s reference to the eminent physicist and the pair’s shared perspective is a comedown of sorts from ‘Faster’, a revision of Edwards’s claimed superiority on the earlier song. There is something of Philip Larkin’s morbid, self-lacerating wit running through Edwards’s words here too, as if he is updating the older poet’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’ in which he explained: ‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me)’.

Any awareness of the genesis of these lyrics can hardly subtract from any of the interest in how a limited, unusual choice of elements have been placed side by side with no immediate sense of what Edwards is getting at. Not taking a dogmatic stance on a guiding ethical question, as in ‘Archives of Pain’ or ‘PCP’, but instead wryly observing the ways in which political, scientific and public interests clash in endlessly mutating ways.

‘But I tried, didn’t I? Goddamnit, at least I did that’

As much as he kept his eyes on world events and a rapidly changing culture, and even as he described other people (real and fictional) in his last lyrics, Edwards began to explore his own recent experiences in various ways as well. It is hard to avoid the internal questions that were clearly preoccupying him as he compiled the material for the ‘Opulence’ binder.

The lyrics to The Holy Bible were not initially interpreted by the other band members as being expressive of an unfolding personal crisis for Edwards, with Wire having described a “self-fulfilling prophecy” only from the time of the Thailand shows in April 1994, after most of the album was written. Looking back nowadays, they more readily acknowledge the “gathering storm” amid the generally productive and positive experiences of recording their third album.¹⁶ In the lyrics left behind, by contrast, the bandmates saw Edwards’s hospital experiences and bleak conclusions about personal relationships articulated in an unavoidably personal way. On songs such as ‘This Joke Sport, Severed’, ‘Facing Page: Top Left’ and ‘Doors Closing, Slowly’, the common thread seems to be that of trying to find strength, purpose and resolution in the face of unhelpful treatment, romantic disillusionment and belief systems that cannot ultimately console.

A series of quotes from The Promise of a New Day, a book of daily meditations for those undergoing the Twelve-step programme, featured on Edwards’s setlists towards the end of 1994. Excerpts from Hephzibah Menuhin, Andrea Dworkin, Ecclesiastes, Mao Tse-Tung, Henry Fielding, Epictetus and Simone Beauvoir were all lifted by Edwards from the book. But what in the original context are intended as prompts to reflection, hope and making positive changes, are isolated and left couched in a tone of negativity; focusing on nightmares, failings, disease, burdens and the inability to conceive infinity. They were interspersed with other setlist reminders of the prevailing destructiveness and absurdity of humankind, as expressed in the writing of RD Laing, Peter Milligan, JG Ballard and Eugène Ionesco.

The emphasis on a Higher Power that came with the Twelve-step recovery programme Edwards underwent at The Priory means that the religious evocations of The Holy Bible are developed further in his writing. Having taken the Christian holy book as a conceptual basis on which to present the band’s commandments for a fallen world, Edwards was now writing alone, reading biblical texts, reflecting on his own doubts and considering the suffering and sacrifices that he feared, or accepted, as a way of continuing to live. In doing so he makes numerous references to the Old and New Testaments. But Edwards’s engagement with these ideas and images was never anything less than critical. His philosophical interest in Nietzsche, author of The Anti-Christ, in particular shows through in the lyric ‘Judge Yr’self’, which was written by the four-piece Manic Street Preachers for the soundtrack of Judge Dredd. On ‘Doors Closing, Slowly’ there is an abundance of biblical allusions that twist the redemptive and consolatory intent of the original verses. ‘Remove the lamb from your thoughts’, writes Edwards; and subverting the moral imperative ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’, he says ‘Who threw the first stone/If the stone is you’. Crucifixion imagery emerges in stunning ways: from the ‘bruises on my hands from digging my nails out’ on ‘Peeled Apples’ – suggesting that there is no final redemption to be had in the act – to announcing on ‘Doors Closing, Slowly’ that ‘crucifixion is the easy life’ – as if the death of Christ was a cop-out.

‘All is Vanity’ takes its title from Ecclesiastes, and adapts that book’s encouragement to take pleasure in simple things in a way that further reflects Edwards’s forthright views on capitalism, body image and relationships. It cleverly transforms the book’s reference to ‘nothing new under the sun’, into a blunt English colloquialism: ‘It’s the facts o’ life sunshine’. Most strikingly, in trying to reach the truth about the world – the guiding principle for Edwards of writing The Holy Bible – the lyricist finally admits, ‘I really don’t mind being lied to’ and that all his attempts to convey his experiences through speaking and writing have made him ’feel like I’m talking a foreign language sometimes’.

The band have been cautious in speculating about the subject of ‘She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach’, another unflinching comment on the damage people risk doing to themselves through pursuing romantic relationships, possibly referring to one of Edwards’s own hospital encounters; while in the case of ‘Virginia State Epileptic Colony’ it is uncertain whether Edwards is describing things learned from obscure academic research, or that he experienced first-hand.¹⁷ Edwards may have become aware of the facility referred to in the song title through the documentary The Lynchburg Story, but unlike other songs based upon films and television broadcasts, this one does not describe any specific scenes shown. Edwards seems to use the reference instead as a warning that what he had gone through was as sinister as that despicable intervention in the lives of the ‘feeble-minded’ in the United States had been. There is a satirical play here on the idea of ‘seeing the light’, replacing divine revelation with ‘strobes and half-circled light’. The scene he sets is again one of scepticism towards clinical treatment; with personal responsibility, health and a sense of meaning giving way to simple dayroom activities, the gaze of doctors, and drugs.

Edwards had emphasised this personal dimension to his writing, and even the likelihood of its obliqueness, when describing what the perfect lyric meant for him:

“I have a dream of writing a lyric which I think is, um, flawless really. That I think has got no, um, broken edges. That makes sense, to me, not anybody else but just makes sense to me, that I think in 15-20 lines I’ve written a lyric that sums up exactly how I feel about everything. Not just how I feel today – how I’ve felt all my life. Everything I’ve read, everything I’ve seen, everything I believe – that in those 15 lines you can just say it all, you know?”¹⁸

Despite his unceasing attention to the unfolding news, the flawed icons and outsider figures of popular culture that intrigued him, and the academic history that he had studied since his student days, there is a sense also of Edwards increasingly trying to break free of the world of culture, of politics, of religion, of relationships – and of all impossible ideals. ‘I endeavoured to find a place where I became untethered’ he writes on ‘This Joke Sport, Severed’, as if continuing on the movement towards a ‘higher plateau’ described in ‘4st 7lb’. This seems to go hand in hand with the break from traditional language structures – of semantics and syntax – in Edwards’s final lyrics. In ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ there was already a recognition that words cannot always match experience: compared to the physical and mental ravages of the Holocaust, ‘hunger’s a word’. In ‘4st 7lb’, Edwards writes, ‘the problem is diet’s not a big enough word’. The body of course remains central to these attempts to act so as to radically transform one’s relation to the world. But even after Edwards’s apparent physical recovery, after he stopped drinking and took up weights and other fitness exercises, his images are devoid of healthy bodies. As with The Holy Bible, his descriptions on Everything Must Go and Journal for Plague Lovers encompass only suffering and violence – wounded, whipped, bruised, nailed and burned bodies. The writing is steeped in the language of flagellation, sacrifice, branding. There is, then, a sense of ultimate futility, of weight, of guilt, of oppression, that underscores such energetic artistic creation.

Once he’d articulated the “truth… about the way the world is” on The Holy Bible, it seems Edwards struggled to see a place for himself in it. As he admitted in interviews, he felt unable to commit himself to a long-term relationship, to cope without alcohol and sleep following his treatment at The Priory, and according to Wire found it difficult to digest its “pseudo-God and religious bollocks”. The bassist and lyricist explained: “You can’t expect someone to come around to something like that. Sometimes, I think that one of the positive things he’s done is that wherever he is, he knew he’d never become the person the Priory wanted him to be. Deep down, he knew it was just crap.”¹⁹ What’s more, as Edwards will have known from the writings of the anti-psychiatry movement, and appeared to find himself through his own hospital stays, there is always the danger that a new kind of language will only be perceived as so many signs of more psychological instability. For all the brilliance of Edwards’s words, he leaves listeners with one unforgettable image above all others, of an action that finally says more than words ever could, an expression of ultimate detachment and haunting purity: ‘I wanna walk in the snow and not leave a footprint’.

Remainders

There are still lyrics from this period just after The Holy Bible written by Richey Edwards that fans are unlikely ever to read or hear. In 1996 Nicky Wire was already describing some of the leftover material, offering a glimpse into an agitated mind. He told Select magazine: “I know you can’t get much bleaker than The Holy Bible… but after that we didn’t think people were ready for songs about cutting the feet off ballerinas,” Wire here referring to a lyric that does not appear on Journal For Plague Lovers.²⁰

With the band still processing the recent loss of their bandmate, there is no sense of the humour or the calm resignation to be found at times in Edwards’s writing, and that would only emerge once the band shared more of his words years later. With ‘William’s Last Words’ we find something altogether new for Edwards: an extended farewell in prose that evokes the heyday of the music hall, and wartime, with references to songs from the period, all weaved together with an inebriate’s warmth and sense of nostalgia. Some of the unused lines underscore the doubts and the sense of failure that run through many of these late lyrics but here they are expressed in a touching, poignant way: ‘I’m not a clever chap, I made a balls up again’, the character of William admits as he longs for sleep and starts to forget the words he is meant to sing.

Nicky Wire has said of the remainders: “Some of them are little haikus, four lines. ‘Dolphin-Friendly Tuna Wars’, that’s one, ‘Alien Orders/Invisible Armies’, that’s one. ‘Young Men’, which is quite Joy Division-y.”²¹ Although Wire and Bradfield are agreed that the best lyrics were used for Journal For Plague Lovers, one that Edwards himself thought was standout is absent. In an author’s note included at the front of the ‘Opulence’ folder, Edwards explains that the lyrics are ‘in no particular order of preference, although some lyrics are obviously better than others’. The first he gives as an example is ‘Infancy Speech’. One song did not go unreleased but it is otherwise hidden. ‘Bag Lady’ has been described by the band as too close in style to The Holy Bible to suit Journal For Plague Lovers. Even though they aimed for a certain kind of symmetry with their third album, in terms of track number and art design, they immediately recognised the different moods suggested by the words. As such ‘Bag Lady’ ended up as a secret track on the standard UK edition of Journal For Plague Lovers.

Buried away as it is after the close of ‘William’s Last Words’, it is somehow appropriate that the song should take as its chorus an endnote, sourced by Edwards from a collection of William Blake’s poetry – the note itself referring to an unfinished poem found in fragments. The way that Bradfield sings the line almost obscures the clarity of the sentiment:

Original endnote to the William Blake poem ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ by editor Peter Butter which refers to the line ‘To be Good only is to be / A Devil, or else a Pharisee’ : ‘To be morally good only rather than to love is to be a devil pretending to be a god.’²²

‘Bag Lady’: ‘To be morally good, only rather to love / a devil pretending to be a god’

Blake’s visionary force seems to have been illuminating for Edwards. He adapted a line from Blake’s proverbs of Hell, ‘The cut worm dies in peace’ in one of his final conversations with the British press, and one can well imagine the lyricist of The Holy Bible and Journal For Plague Lovers responding to lines like ‘For Adam, a mouldering skeleton, / Lay bleach’d on the garden of Eden’. For Bradfield, however, the draft that Edwards left to the band suggested too painful an emotion: “This is the only lyric that really weighed me down, I wouldn’t wanna inhabit that lyric too much… the push and pull between pretension and repulsion, between being vain and rejecting any notion of what is ugly or beauty, must have been exhausting at this point…”²³

It seems that Edwards was striving constantly to overcome his own vanity, to rationalise his feelings and views, to understand his illness, in a culture that would replace honest reflection with spurious philosophies and diagnoses, power plays, and laws with no permanence. There is ever a tension in Richey Edwards’s late lyrics between being compelled by the world – its figures, its history, its contemporary culture and politics – and rejecting it, striking out alone, undaunted, aiming to overcome all its illusions and its traps. Nicky Wire told NME: “I think that line from ‘4st 7lbs’ really counts on here. On this album he really does reach that plateau of… the disgust has perhaps turned to ultimate realisation. Kind of got over the disgust and [quietly] just reached a new level.”

(Without whom: LC)

Notes:

[1] In 2005, the band gave away an EP, God Save the Manics, containing the song ‘Picturesque’, which uses portions of ‘All is Vanity’ and ‘Doors Closing Slowly’. They did not announce at the time that these lyrics were written by Richey Edwards.

[2] Mackay, Emily ‘In A Movie About Us, Christian Bale Would Play Richey’, NME, 13 May 2009. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=%27In_A_Movie_About_Us,_Christian_Bale_Would_Play_Richey%27_-_NME_Blog,_13th_May_2009 (7 August 2022). See also Mackay ‘Religion, Richey’s Fitness Regime, and Why Typewriters Are ‘Erotic’’, NME, 15 May 2009. Accessed at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Religion,_Richey%27s_Fitness_Regime,_and_Why_Typewriters_Are_%27Erotic%27_-_NME_Blog,_15th_May_2009 (7 August 2022)

[3] Manic Street Preachers – ZTV – Artistspecial – 06/02/1995. Accessed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYkJQ6hQ7g8 (8 August 2022)

[4] Cameron, Keith ‘Classic Album: The Holy Bible by Manic Street Preachers’, Q, 404 (November 2019)

[5] See full transcript of the Peter Paphides interview published in Price, Simon Everything (Virgin Books, 1999)

[6] Manic Street Preachers – ZTV – Artistspecial – 06/02/1995

[7] Bailie, Stuart ‘Courage Against the Machine’, Vox, July 1996. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Courage_Against_The_Machine_-_Vox,_July_1996 (8 August 2022)

[8] Price, Simon ‘And If You Need An Explanation’, The Quietus, 2 June 2016. Accessed online at https://thequietus.com/articles/20332-manic-street-preachers-everything-must-go-interview-simon-price  (8 August 2022)

[9] Guest, Loz ‘I Am… Manic Street Preachers’, Kerrang, 2009. Accessed online at https://www.repeatfanzine.co.uk/interviews/msp%20kerrang.htm (29 August 2022)

[10] Mackay, ‘Religion, Richey’s Fitness Regime, and Why Typewriters Are ‘Erotic’’

[11] Manic Street Preachers – ZTV – Artistspecial – 06/02/1995

[12] Price, Everything

[13] Doran, John ‘New Testament: Manic Street Preachers On Journal For Plague Lovers’, The Quietus, 30 April 2009. Accessed online at https://thequietus.com/articles/01583-new-testament-manic-street-preachers-interviewed-about-journal-for-plague-lovers-richey-edwards-and-the-holy-bible  (30 August 2022)

[14] Mackay, Emily ‘In A Movie About Us, Christian Bale Would Play Richey’

[15] Mackay, Emily ‘Therapy Is Bullshit, Talking Never Makes You Feel Good’, NME, 14 May 2009. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=%27Therapy_Is_Bullshit,_Talking_Never_Makes_You_Feel_Good%27_-_NME_Blog,_14th_May_2009  (8 August 2022)

[16] See Shadows and Words (dir. Douglas Hart, Channel 4, 17 May 2009) and Cummins, Kevin Assassinated Beauty (Faber & Faber, 2014)

[17] See Mackay ‘Therapy Is Bullshit, Talking Never Makes You Feel Good’ and ‘Manic Street Preachers – Track by Track’, NME, 26 May 2009. Accessed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seL8m84KyNw (11 September 2009)

[18] Manic Street Preachers – ZTV – Artistspecial – 06/02/1995

[19] See Mackay, Emily ‘Therapy Is Bullshit, Talking Never Makes You Feel Good’   and Bailie, Stuart ‘Everything Must Go…On’, NME, 11 May 1996. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Everything_Must_Go…On_-_NME,_11th_May_1996 (11 September 2022)

[20] Maconie, Stuart ‘We Shall Overcome’, Select, July 1996. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=We_Shall_Overcome_-_Select,_July_1996 (8 August 2022)

[21] Mackay, ‘In A Movie About Us, Christian Bale Would Play Richey’

[22] Butter, Peter (ed) William Blake: Selected Poems (Everyman, 1993)

[23] Mackay, Emily ‘This Record Is More Personal Than ‘The Holy Bible’’, NME, 18 May 2009. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=%22This_Record_Is_More_Personal_Than_%27The_Holy_Bible%27%22_-_NME_Blog,_18th_May_2009  (8 August 2022)

‘Would you like to live those long-lost days again … can we go back? Can we go back? Oh, no! no! It’s too late now. Time has raced past us like a train. It has left its lines in our skin.’ – Eugène Ionesco

“I was very young, but writing from an older point of view, thinking about ‘reading some old letters’, ‘memories that hold your life together, like glue’ and family members. It’s looking back and forward – melancholy but with a hope that things are going to change for the better.” – Matt Johnson

‘It was an odd thing about my life: whenever I was happy, I would think my happiness could not last; as soon as I thought that, it would indeed go up in smoke. Not because the external conditions creating it had ceased to exist, but because I was conscious that in due course those external conditions would cease to exist, inevitably.’ – M Ageyev

Manic Street Preachers have always made the past a central part of their music; whether taking historical events and figures as their lyrical subjects, or engaging with their own history, evoking earlier songs and personal experiences. While promoting their debut album Generation Terrorists, Richey Edwards, in his typically provocative manner, was frequently seen wearing a T-shirt with the printed slogan ‘Bomb the Past’, broadcasting the band’s desire to blaze a new trail that would avoid the previous dead ends of culture and politics. And not long after making the The Holy Bible, the band would, understandably, sing of their wish to ‘escape from our history’. But as writer Larissa Wodtke says: ‘For better, and sometimes worse, memory and the archive came to define Manic Street Preachers.’ [1] On two back-to-back songs on the album, this reflection on the past and its bearing on the present takes on that more obviously personal quality, making reference to childhood and ageing, and more specifically Nicky Wire and Richey Edwards’s feelings when looking back.

‘This is Yesterday’ stands out in two obvious ways. It features the only lyric on The Holy Bible written almost entirely by Wire. The focus is once again shifted, from journalistic social and political analysis, towards introspection – but without the descriptions of bodily abuse, or the voyeuristic approach taken on Edwards’s first-person songs. James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore’s musical composition meanwhile is unusually based around chords and arpeggios played in open G. The alternate guitar tuning would have been familiar to Bradfield from his earliest days as a player (it was used by The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards on Exile on Main Street, the first album Bradfield learned as a teen) but it had not been typical of his songwriting on the band’s first two albums. The overall effect in the context of The Holy Bible is immediately apparent; the tuning produces a more harmonious whole, the entire structure being built upon a major chord. Already a contrast to the aggressive attack and chromatic solo runs of the preceding track, ‘Faster’, the pacing and the more softly intoned vocals of ‘This is Yesterday’ also make it more resigned and fragile sounding – though it climaxes with one of James Dean Bradfield’s finest, emotionally raw, fuzz-drenched guitar solos.

The song is generally seen as an interlude, a rare moment of relative quiet on a work of unrelenting urgency and fury. That is certainly how it was intended, according to Bradfield. He told Keith Cameron: “I realised there’s not one moment of oxygen on the album, where you can flourish in this calm moment, flourish in this boredom, flourish in this regret… our basic melancholia default position. It just needs to be there.” [2] That ‘default’ melancholia suggests a reversion to type which, lyrically, can be traced through some of the band’s most well-known songs up to that point, from ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ to ‘From Despair to Where’. But it is also possible to see ‘This is Yesterday’ as looking forward; one template for the band’s music in the years after 1994. In the same way that the B-side ‘Comfort Comes’ marks a fulcrum point, when the sound of The Holy Bible became more determined, following the slickly produced, commercial rock sound of Gold Against the Soul, there is (almost paradoxically) a sense of things to come with ‘This is Yesterday’. While its modulated instrumentation and vocal lines, treated with tremolo, phase and distortion effects, are in keeping with the band’s post-punk aesthetic in 1994, the song’s musical and lyrical mood is closer to the songs that would appear on their next album, Everything Must Go, and many of those that would follow after that – with Wire left as the sole lyricist.

The band’s first album after the disappearance of Richey Edwards is to a certain degree misrepresented by its most famous singles – the string-laden working-class anthem ‘Design For Life’ and the propulsive, yearning melodic splendour of ‘Australia’ – as being a total break with the preoccupations and style of The Holy Bible. This despite it including some of Edwards’s most haunting and idiosyncratic lyrics; one song that, lyrically and musically, might easily have been a Holy Bible outtake or B-side (‘Removables’, in fact written three years earlier), and images of physical and psychological agitation that seem to have entered the UK singles chart and the BRIT Awards by stealth. ‘This is Yesterday’ was one of the final songs written for The Holy Bible (recorded in June 1994, along with ‘Revol’) and the same alternate guitar tuning would be used by Bradfield for ‘Kevin Carter’, one of the last songs sketched for the possible follow-up in early 1995 while Edwards was still with the group. Less a wholesale reinvention, more a reframing of the band in remarkable new colours.

Though it is easy to hear ‘This is Yesterday’ as somewhat out of place among the scathing moral judgements and the more harrowing snapshots of suffering across The Holy Bible, its sentiment is in keeping with much of the band’s catalogue – from the jaded perspective of post-adolescence on Generation Terrorists and Gold Against the Soul, to the autumnal melancholy of This is My Truth Tell Me Yours and the longing for familial care on ‘Rewind the Film’. The song provides the same kind of salve as ‘William’s Last Words’ does at the close of its post-punk companion album Journal For Plague Lovers (somewhat appropriately sung by Wire). But more interestingly, a closer look at the words reveals unrecognised overlaps with the images and topics addressed by Wire and Edwards in the more brutal and allusive songs on the same album. ‘The only way to gain approval is by exploiting the very thing that cheapens me’ may as well have been lifted from an early draft of ‘Yes’. There are biblical phrasings, too, in keeping with the entire concept of The Holy Bible, and its concern with guilt and degradation: ‘I repent, I’m sorry, everything is falling apart’ sings Bradfield, along with a couplet which echoes one version of Proverbs 24:31: ‘Houses as ruins and gardens as weeds’.

In writing the music, though, Bradfield reached beyond the most often discussed Holy Bible cornerstones, explaining to Keith Cameron that ‘This is Yesterday’ was shaped by a pair of songs by The Jam: ‘In the Crowd’ and ‘Ghosts’. [3] Whether intended as such or not at the time of recording, the song also seems to be closely linked with another band favourite – one that they would later cover. ‘This is the Day’ by The The not only shares a near-identical sounding title but also the overall theme of reflecting on a treasured past. Matt Johnson’s 1983 song employs parallel images of blinding, cheapness and hidden truths:

‘And the sun burns into your eyes’…
‘All the money in the world couldn’t buy back those days’…
‘But the side of you they’ll never see is when you’re left alone with your memories’.

A promotional video made to accompany the cover version performed by the Manics for their 2011 National Treasures singles collection leads with an onscreen quote about memory by that central voice of The Holy Bible, JG Ballard. It then runs through videos and pictures of the band, chronicling their history up to that point. The footage leans heavily on the pre-Everything Must Go era, with Edwards featuring prominently, before ending on a group photo from 1994, the four-piece band posing in their army-style clothing. There is a clear personal dimension to ‘This is Yesterday’ as well. An indication of the introspective writing style Nicky Wire would begin to use more on subsequent albums, it refers to the lyricist’s own childhood, and his doubts about the present. The music seems to reflect the sadness and despondency that was deepening as 1994 progressed, with Edwards’s increasing ill health coming so soon after the death of the band’s manager Philip Hall, to whom The Holy Bible is dedicated. Wire would later refer to the loss of these two friends on ‘Enola/Alone’.

In what is one of the most overlooked moments of the album, the song begins with a remarkable statement that threatens to undo the faith in language that drives The Holy Bible – when all other sources of faith in the modern world seem to have failed: ‘Do not listen to a word I say / Just listen to what I can keep silent’. The import is easily missed in its apparent simplicity. It introduces the idea of an unreliable narrator, acknowledging a sense of fallibility behind the album’s militant conviction. It asks the listener to forget what they are being told, suggesting that the band’s words, too, are suspect. It also resonates in a more obviously universal and poignant way, conveying how each of us might miss what is troubling those closest to us – that which remains unspoken.

Performing the song live at Cardiff Castle in 2015, Wire explained: “This song is about dreaming, it’s about melancholia, it’s about reading RS Thomas, Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Jennings. Kind of feeling comfort in coffee, chocolate and tea.” [4] While the first part rings true, there seems to be little comfort in ‘This is Yesterday’, despite looking back to happier times. It feels, rather, that it is pitched at a crisis point – one where there is little desire to indulge the mind and body at all: ‘Why do anything when you can forget everything?’. This is in no small part a result of Edwards’s lyrical contribution. Wire told the BBC’s Mastertapes radio programme: “Most of it’s mine, Richey did add four or five lines maybe – four lines, I think.” [5] The line about forgetting was the only one Edwards picked out for his tour programme note for the song, adding ‘Memory more comforting than future’.

The undeniable darkness that surrounded the band from late 1993 to early 1995 now complicates even more any simplistic nostalgia or sense of comfort ascribed to ‘This is Yesterday’. Larissa Wodtke has described the simultaneous ‘[d]erision of and desire for nostalgia’ that has always run through the band’s art. [6] In ‘No Surface All Feeling’ – a song rehearsed at a difficult point for the band, in June 1994, and one of the songs rehearsed at the House in the Woods studio in early 1995 (the last time that Edwards would play with the band) – the push and pull between reminiscence and regret is once again expressed: ‘What’s the point in always looking back / When all you see is more and more junk?’

Despite Wire and Edwards’s descriptions of generally happy childhoods, the band have always referred to that melancholia mentioned as being at the root of the song. Wire told Melody Maker in January 1994: “That’s been the truth since we were 15 years old… All I can remember is being melancholy. I’ve never said I was desperately unhappy. The truly unhappy people of this world are usually the ones who end up suicidal or living on the streets.” [7] Edwards elaborated: “It’s just our natural mood… We’ve always been like that. Where we come from, there’s a natural melancholy in the air. Everybody, ever since you could comprehend it, felt pretty much defeated. You’ve got the ruins of heavy industry all around you, you see your parents’ generation all out of work, nothing to do, being forced into the indignity of going on courses of relevance. Like a 50-year-old miner, worked in a pit all his life, there’s not much joy for him to go and learn how to type. It’s just pointless. And that is all around us, ever since we were born.”

The political background against which the band was forged is another focus of clashing feelings. The Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 in many ways destroyed the South Wales community in which the Manics grew up as much as it created a sense of unity and defiance. For all the misery it wrought at a wider social level, Bradfield has spoken quite positively of this period of political crisis in more recent years, specifically in terms of the clear-cut allegiances it reinforced, as compared with what he sees as the political confusion of more recent times (the same kind, incidentally, that he referred to while promoting The Holy Bible in 1994). [8] The ’80s for the Manics was a time when you could do something, a time that would never be forgotten. Nothing is as black and white as The Holy Bible often proclaims; idyllic suburban scenes in the work of Manic Street Preachers are cut through with raw cynicism (‘my idea of love comes from a childhood glimpse of pornography’) just as the sense of past crises can be imbued with a kind of fondness retrospectively – or ‘distant colours’, as Bradfield has described them on a later song.

Shortly after writing ‘This Is Yesterday’, Wire summed it up less cosily than he did in Cardiff in 2015; as if the present had little to offer, few dreams of what is ahead:

“It’s about how people always look back to their youth and look on it as a glorious period. No matter what walk of life you’re in, you always revert back to childhood and look at it as a beautiful time when, as the song says, ‘Someone, somewhere soon will take care of you’.” [9]

This chimes with a comment he made when promoting Gold Against the Soul a year earlier:

“[W]hen you’re a child, no matter what kind of background you come from, your pleasures are pretty simple. You go to bed and you fall asleep straight away. Nothing keeps you up, worrying. It’s a purer world. When you’re old enough to do or experience what you want and have access to all the things you thought about, it doesn’t make you any more happy.” [10]

The Manics’ songs move between finding strength in memories of the past and lamenting that it cannot be recovered; at other times wishing to forget everything altogether, or seek lost futures once more. Such sentiments are more acutely captured by Wire on ‘Everything Must Go’ and on 2013’s ‘Rewind the Film’: ‘turn back the pages of my past’… ‘I want to feel small / Lying in my mother’s arms’… ‘There is too much heartbreak in the nothing of the now’.

A sense of dissonance when looking back also comes through in the way the band have spoken about the process of making The Holy Bible. Bradfield told NME in 2014: “We were all getting on really well. It felt like we were taking the band seriously again. It was like a big monolithic slab of stone had just planted itself in the middle of the band, and we just had to follow every route. It was a good feeling again. It kind of felt like a restart.” But in recalling the era with photographer Kevin Cummins, he admitted: “I think back to those times and I think, ‘Why didn’t we see the gathering storm’?” [11]

†††

‘They’re amazing lyrics, but there’s that idea that nothing gives you any pleasure anymore; that, post-childhood, life has been utterly empty. I still find it chilling.’ – Nicky Wire

‘Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.’ – Philip Larkin

Despite James Dean Bradfield’s stated musical aim for ‘This is Yesterday’, as a breathing space, a respite of sorts, Nicky Wire’s writing – and crucially the limited involvement of Richey Edwards – nevertheless keeps it in line with the depressive mindset of the album as a whole, a mindset more starkly expressed on the following track, ‘Die in the Summertime’. In his short monograph on The Holy Bible, David Evans says the song ‘resembles a negative image of ‘This is Yesterday’, a darker development of the same tropes’ – I agree with the second part. [12] Writing about the album for the co-authored book Triptych, Rhian E Jones says, ‘“houses as ruins and gardens as weeds” seems more in keeping with the desolate imagery of ‘Die in the Summertime’, just as that song’s sunlit glimpse of ‘whole days throwing sticks into streams’ seems to belong with the melancholy memories of ‘This is Yesterday’.’ [13] In the accompanying booklet, the lyrics are illustrated with photographs of the band members as children that – although two of the pictures suggest summer holidays in the sun – might have been expected to sit alongside ‘This is Yesterday’ (not least because the use of the Sacred Heart detail for the latter does not seem to reflect anything of its lyrical theme). The visual effect is unsettling, Bradfield and Moore’s music imbuing the portraits of the young Manics with a sense of foreboding. [14]

Edwards’s commentary on the song is as unconvincingly neat as Wire’s 2015 introduction to ‘This is Yesterday’. The song (which may have taken inspiration for its title from Yukio Mishima’s short story collection Death in Midsummer and Other Stories) is purportedly sung from the perspective of an elderly man, as Edwards told Stuart Baillie in October 1994: “‘Die in the Summertime’ was written before anything had happened to me, that was basically an old man looking back over his life, over his favourite period of youth. His childhood, basically. Everybody’s got a perfect mental time of their life, and that’s what that song is about. And it was written last summer.” [15]

By this description we might understand the song as a parallel of sorts to ‘La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)’ and its depiction of a war veteran faced with seeing his heroic past diminished in a world of modern capitalism. The image of the narrator using hair dye, apparently in a futile attempt to cling to youth, might also be connected with one of Edwards’s final lyrics, ‘Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier’, describing a pathetic ‘out of date’ tribute act with a ‘dyed black quiff’. But given Edwards’s own history of transforming his appearance, his preoccupation with vanity as an adult, along with his self-harm, it is hard not to see this detail and the harrowing opening – ‘Scratch my leg with a rusty nail / sadly it heals’ – as autobiographical. One can choose to interpret the ‘ruining lines’ that are contrasted with the cleanliness and serenity of youth as the marks of aging, but that opening suggests that it is the evidence of wounding about which the narrator is self-conscious. ‘Die in the Summertime’ is comparable with another of Edwards’s defining late lyrics, ‘All Is Vanity’, in which he writes of ‘the luxury of one more dye’, as he (and it is clearly Edwards this time) searches for a way to live without crippling uncertainty. This extreme fixation on maintaining a personal ideal, striving for a sense of accomplishment, perfection even, of course finds its supreme expression on The Holy Bible with ‘4st 7lb’. Just as that song and ‘Yes’ are typically read as expressive of Edwards’s own feelings, so ‘Die in the Summertime’ seems to be thinly masked. As his sister Rachel Edwards has confirmed, Richey Edwards made a suicide attempt in the summer of 1994, which prompted his immediate hospitalisation. [16]

Richey Edwards’s repeated references in the press to the miseries experienced by those who are married, with a mortgage and a routine job, seem to reflect a commonplace anxiety – it was an ‘ordinary’ life he clearly struggled to countenance, or felt unable to live; worried about the disappointments, betrayals and other pain it might bring. He spoke as if it were impossible that anybody could feel more fulfilment and joy in later life. Edwards’s cynical perspective would certainly have been reinforced by some of his favourite writers; Philip Larkin in particular, in poems like ‘High Windows’, ‘The Old Fools’ and ‘Aubade’. It is there in the psychiatrist Dr Dysart’s explosive admission to the magistrate Hesther Salomon in Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play Equus (another favourite of Edwards’s), when he expresses his envy towards his young patient Alan Strang, and his own comparative inability to live as he imagines: ‘I shrank my own life. No one can do it for you. I settled for being pallid and provincial, out of my own eternal timidity. The old story of bluster, and do bugger-all…’ [17] One could hardly describe Edwards as timid, but how profoundly he felt his own loss of fulfilment is expressed here: ‘My heart shrinks to barely a pulse.’

This preoccupation continued as Edwards discussed the song with Music Life in Japan: “They say that as you get older, you become a child again. An ageing pensioner in their 60s or 70s, looks back at pictures of their childhood, reminiscing about those times, realising the last time they had fun was when they played on the side of the road. For the last 25 years they have been preoccupied with paying loans, and they weren’t happy at all. So, this person wishes to see the fallen leaves in autumn and the snow one last time before they die.” [18] In the 1994 tour book, he sums it up as follows: ‘Condition of old age – youth always remembered fondly. OAP wants to die with favourite memory month in mind. Adult memories tawdry, of little value.’ [19]

In keeping with The Holy Bible’s overarching approach – that it be a kind of holy book, speaking the truth of the world – ‘Die in the Summertime’ contains more of Edwards’s biblical imagery: ‘If you really care, wash the feet of a beggar’, he writes, laying down a strict standard of moral virtue; childhood pictures do not console here but ‘redeem’; and there is another, more subtle reference to a ‘nail’, a word used repeatedly on The Holy Bible and often suggesting, even if faintly, persecution. Just as the drama of the Passion has been transformed into a minor act of self-wounding, so the narrative of creation has left only ‘dim traces’. Always a characteristic of Edwards’s writing, this typically subversive religious imagery would intensify in his final lyrics – those later used on Journal For Plague Lovers – no doubt a result of the internal conflicts that grew out of his time spent undertaking a 12-step recovery process at The Priory in 1994 and his growing interest around that time in specific biblical texts, particularly Ecclesiastes. While The Holy Bible was intended to offer its own undeniable truths about a contemporary world in which religion had wrought much destruction, Edwards was increasingly drawn to traditional bible verses in search of consolation and meaning – though evidently sensing there was none to be found.

Nicky Wire also does not seem to have accepted that the lyric was as straightforward as Edwards made out, judging the song’s images to be especially haunting. On an album full of graphic and macabre lines, the lyricist and bassist has regularly singled out ‘Die in the Summertime’ for comment. Reflecting on the song for Melody Maker, following Edwards’s admission to Whitchurch hospital and then The Priory, Wire said: “It was one of the first songs we wrote for the album, and I found it pretty disturbing when Richey first showed it to me. Now, of course, it’s even more so, and I think this and ‘4st 7lb’ are pretty obviously about Richey’s state of mind, which I didn’t quite realise at the time. Even if you’re quite close to someone, you always try to deny thoughts like that.” [20]

Bradfield has likewise scrutinised the lyric for personal resonance, seeing it not as a generalised view of the dissatisfactions of old age, but an unnerving insight into Edwards’s own psychology: “This lyric actually does scare me. I didn’t bother asking Richey what this was about, I was like, ‘If you know, I don’t want to know…’ I remember seeing the title and thinking, ‘It’s that tension in the words: ‘Die – in – the – summertime.’ Like, Tropic – of – cancer. The tension of opposites, innocence versus the reality of the world.” [21] The tangled relationship between knowledge, remembrance and the wish to forget is brought out not only in these two songs but also in the reactions of the band to those same songs – both at the time of writing and subsequently.

For Bradfield the musical idea behind ‘Die in the Summertime’ again emerged out of the band’s post-punk listening, this time the more Gothic elements – perhaps naturally suggested by Edwards’s title: “There was something almost David Lynchian in the lyric. I remember writing the song, thinking, ‘This is a bit Kiss In The Dreamhouse by Siouxsie And The Banshees’ – well, that’s perfect. That shard of beauty that can almost be shattered with one gust of wind is perfect for this.” [22] Bradfield and Moore articulate the unease and sense of disconnection in the lyrics, moving in half-steps, with feedback and noise repeatedly cutting in and out. Bradfield’s high-pitched delivery of the verse line endings soars eerily above the caustic, distorted chords while the frenetic solo swirls wildly with vibrato, struggling to find harmonic resolution.

The song also seems to look to American grunge for its template, its ominous bassline, heavy guitar, and Sean Moore’s rhythmic groove suggesting something of the angst-driven sound of Alice in Chains, the undertow the listener is pulled into on their LP Dirt. The musical inspirations and connections behind the album do seem to be more wide-ranging than has so often been claimed – from the Penguin Café Orchestra giving Bradfield a cue for the unusual time patterns of ‘Yes’, to contemporaries Faith No More, Girls Against Boys and Therapy? just as responsible for the energy and tone of tracks like ‘Faster’ as the Sex Pistols. And then there is Nicky Wire hearing a Manic version of ‘Every Breath You Take’ (and a possible hit single) in ‘She Is Suffering’. As unexpected as it might seem, it is even possible that Edwards borrowed the phrase ‘hole in my life’ for ‘Die in the Summertime’ not from a cult novel, a newspaper article, or a Pete Milligan comic, as he often did, but rather from The Police song of the same name, itself a visceral lyrical expression of dissatisfaction and pain:

‘There’s something missing from my life
Cuts me open like a knife
It leaves me vulnerable
I have this disease
I shake like an incurable
God help me please’

In an extraordinary interview with Paul King for MTV’s 120 Minutes, live from the NME Brat Awards in February 1994, not long after Philip Hall’s death, Edwards gave what is basically a thematic summary of ‘Die in the Summertime’, while discussing the upset of ageing, losing loved ones, and running out of new culture to be inspired by. Clearly catching King off guard, the host soon tries to bring the conversation back to a lighter note, and Edwards is invited to select a favourite song for viewers. He might well have requested ‘Hole in My Life’, but instead opted for another track, ‘Roxanne’, off the same album, with a fragile smile, saying: “a long time ago”. [23]

Much of the sentiment and imagery on ‘Die in the Summertime’ seems to have been carried over from earlier songs, too. On ‘From Despair To Where’ Bradfield cries, ‘There’s nothing nice in my head / The adult world took it all away’. Being one of the earliest songs to be written for The Holy Bible, it seems to be more closely linked with the songs of Gold Against the Soul than the rest of those written and recorded in the first two months of 1994. On ‘Sleepflower’, memory ‘fades to a pale landscape’ and there are mirror images of self-harm on ‘Roses in the Hospital’ (‘try to pull my fingernails out’… ‘stub cigarettes out on my arm’) and narcissistic tendencies and self-loathing are explored on ‘Yourself’. Prompted to talk about the band’s second album ahead of its release, Edwards told Sky magazine in 1993:

“It’s about the loss of innocence. Childhood pleasures are more natural and real. When you’re a child, you always want to grow up and do adult things, but when you get those things, it doesn’t increase your enjoyment of life. Most people look back on their childhoods with more fondness than their early 20s or their teenage years, which are pretty horrendous. As a child, you put your head on your pillow and fall asleep with no worries. From being a teenager onwards, it’s pretty rare that you don’t end up staying awake half the night thinking about bullshit.” (Or as ‘Faster’ has it: ‘Sleep can’t hide the thoughts splitting through my mind’.) Edwards added: “I’m not nostalgic. It’s more a general statement of fact. I don’t wake up every morning and wish that I was 10 again. I just know that I was happier then.” [24]

Like memories that linger in the mind, phrases from ‘Die in the Summertime’ also return, slightly changed, in later songs penned by Nicky Wire. In ‘Cardiff Afterlife’, which refers directly to Edwards, he describes the ‘The paralysed future, the past sideways crawl’, a near echo of that devastating admission of having lost one’s way: ‘I have crawled so far sideways’. Wire has said there is no link between ‘Walk Me to the Bridge’ and his friend and bandmate, but still the resonance of its lines with Edwards’s time in the group is unavoidable; particularly ‘curled like an animal lying on the floor’ – evoking Edwards’s unforgettable ‘tiny animal curled into a quarter circle’. As another lyric of the same Futurology track tells us: ‘old songs leave long shadows’.

Even on the band’s most recent work, the imagery of seasons and scenes from the past predominate. ‘Still Snowing in Sapporo’ recalls with fondness the band’s 1993 tour of Japan, as documented in Kieran Evans’s film Pieces of Sleep. On ‘Quest For Ancient Colour’ Wire writes that his ‘scream had lost its source / Like a reservoir in a summer drought’, again using the sort of imagery found in the titles of ‘La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)’ and ‘Die in the Summertime’. Another line on The Ultra Vivid Lament recalls Edwards’s writing: ‘It leads me to a higher plane’, almost a variation on ‘4st 7lb’s assertion, ‘I’ve long since moved to a higher plateau’. Even the band’s earliest cultural references resurface; the final song ‘Afterending’ sees Wire reuse a quote from the poet ee cummings which appeared on the sleeve of Generation Terrorists – ‘Progress in a comfortable disease’.

For Wire, in the years after The Holy Bible, the history of the band has clearly served as a continual source of inspiration, albeit not without that uniquely Manic sense of melancholia and misgiving. Referring back has continued to propel Bradfield and Moore forward in newly capturing the character of the band musically. They have even recently remixed and reconstructed their sixth album Know Your Enemy as it was originally meant to be – the alternate past made reality. What marks Edwards’s words out, by contrast, frozen as they necessarily are in the summer of 1994, is the way in which pain overshadows remembrance and consolation – whether personal or historical. His writing depicts a modern world that can only traumatise, numb or disillusion the individual. Memories cannot ameliorate after all. Even childhood has been unchangeably corrupted somehow. But as grounded as his words are in the circumstances of their writing – in the sociopolitical landscape of Europe in the mid-1990s and the resurgence of the worst aspects of nostalgia, as well as the experiences of the band around that time – still they have a remarkable quality of never seeming outdated. The Holy Bible is a living archive of voices, sounds and images from the past that pulsate with meaning for us; simultaneously a work of history, an articulation of an immediate crisis that feels as urgent as ever, and a gripping prologue to what is about to come.

Images: stills from the 2011 promotional video for ‘This is the Day’ (Band History Version) and the documentary ‘From There to Here’ (BBC, 1998)

Notes:

[1] Wodtke, Larissa ‘Architecture of Memory: The Holy Bible and the Archive’ in Jones, Lukes, Wodtke Triptych (Repeater Books, 2017)

[2] Cameron, Keith ‘Chapter and verse. Track by track. 13 Reasons to believe in The Holy Bible’, liner notes in The Holy Bible 20 (2014)

[3] Cameron, ibid

[4] See ‘Manic Street Preachers – Cardiff Castle Live – 05/06/2015’. Accessed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqkG3xsq8_g (20 June 2022)

[5] See ‘Manic Street Preachers – BBC Radio 4 – Mastertapes – 17-18/11/2014’. Accessed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAjKt0IGuoE (20 June 2022)

[6] Wodtke, Triptych

[7] Bennun, David ‘All That Glitters’, Melody Maker, 29 January 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=All_That_Glitters_-_Melody_Maker,_29th_January_1994 (15 June 2022)

[8] In Elizabeth Marcus’ documentary No Manifesto (2015), Bradfield says: “You know, we were in the middle of the Miners’ Strike, round about ’84-85 period, and you know, a lot of our family had been coal mining. We had marches going past our house and it just felt as if everything that we’d grown up with was being systematically destroyed. The one thing I realise about those times now, when we were teenagers from ’84 to ’87, was that we grew up in an optimum time to be angry. It was a glorious, romantic time to be angry. You knew what your targets were and you knew what black was and you knew what white was. So it felt terrible to be there at the time, but now I look back on it and think – it sounds terrible – but I look back on it and think, ‘God we were lucky’…”

[9] ‘Manics’ New Testament’, Melody Maker, 27 August 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Manics%27_New_Testament_-_Melody_Maker,_27th_August_1994. (20 June 2022)

[10] ‘Manics Come of Age’, Melody Maker, 27 March 1993. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Manics_Come_Of_Age_-_Melody_Maker,_27th_March_1993 (1 July 2022)

[11] See Mackay, Emily ‘The Record That Changed Our Lives’, NME, 16 August 2014. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=The_Record_That_Changed_Our_Lives_-_NME,_16th_August_2014 (15 July 2022) and Cummins, Kevin Assassinated Beauty (Faber & Faber, 2014). Both of the these quotes also appear in an informative article on the musical production of the album: https://guitar.com/review/album/the-genius-of-the-holy-bible-by-manic-street-preachers/

[12] Evans, David The Holy Bible (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

[13] Jones, Rhian E ‘Unwritten Diaries: History, Politics and Experience through The Holy Bible’ in Triptych

[14] It seems, too, that the sample of Hubert Selby Jr speaking that appears at the beginning of ‘Of Walking Abortion’ might have easily been placed here instead, where a ‘fairground sample’ was at one point planned to be used.

[15] Bailie, Stuart ‘Manic’s Depressive’, NME, 1 October 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Manic%27s_Depressive_-_NME,_1st_October_1994 (20 June 2022)

[16] See Roberts and Noakes Withdrawn Traces: Searching for the Truth About Richey Manic (Virgin Books, 2019)

[17] Shaffer, Peter Equus (Penguin Books, 1977)

[18] Akao, Mika, ‘Richey James talks about The Holy Bible‘, Music Life, September 1994. English translation by M. Jun, accessed online at https://solitudegrey.wordpress.com/2020/12/01/richey-james-talks-about-the-holy-bible-music-life-sept-1994/ (15 June 2022)

[19] Edwards, Richey The Holy Bible tour programme, 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=The_Holy_Bible_Tour_Programme (15 June 2022)

[20] ‘Manics’ New Testament’, Melody Maker

[21] Cameron, ‘Chapter and Verse’

[22] Cameron, ibid

[23] See ‘Manic Street Preachers 120 minutes 6 feb 1994 Richey Edwards interview’. Accessed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUPi6TdBHyw (20 June 2022)

[24] Witter, Simon ‘Glam Rock’, Sky, July 1993. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Glam_Rock_-_Sky,_July_1993 (2 July 2022)

‘This was without doubt a new hell, brought to pass by precision craftsmanship. Here everything human had been obliterated…’ – Hara Tamiki

‘People encouraged me: of all people, a writer should go and have a look. And they may have been right. But I was unable to bring myself to go again just to gawk. It made me unhappy to see people going partly to sightsee; in some small way it was insulting to me.’ – Ota Yoko

“I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.” – Sylvia Plath

Invited to fill out a questionnaire during Manic Street Preachers’ tour of Japan in 1993, Richey Edwards responded in a characteristically blunt manner, reflecting a mind preoccupied with thoughts and questions beyond the workaday routine of gigging and promotional duties. Asked, ‘After finishing the Japanese tour, what is your feeling when you look back?’ Edwards wrote simply, ‘Hiroshima Memorial Park and Museum’. [1] The band had taken time to visit the sites, seeing first-hand the photos and other materials documenting the development and effects of the atomic bomb dropped on the city in August 1945. While in Germany that same year, they had seen the concentration camps at Belsen and Dachau, newly confronted with the inhumanity of the Nazi regime and the terrible silence left in its wake. These experiences would profoundly shape the writing of the band’s third album. As Nicky Wire told Melody Maker in January 1994: “The human capability to inflict pain on its own race. That’s what we would like to write about.” [2]

The impact of the nuclear age had resonated through the Manics’ words, music and imagery from the beginning. The sleeve of the 1991 Motown Junk single features a charred watch, recovered from the carnage, stopped at 8:15 – the moment of the first blast in Hiroshima. The Heavenly single version of ‘You Love Us’ begins with a sample of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’. And on the band’s debut album Generation Terrorists they sing of the H-bomb being ‘the only thing that will bring a freedom to life’ and depict ‘Nagasaki dolls… burning’. Likewise, no doubt inspired by their punk predecessors, the band fired off a provocative holocaust simile on ‘You Love Us’, and a reference to Buchenwald on B-side ‘We Her Majesty’s Prisoners’. These broadsides were part and parcel of the band’s angry musical reaction to what they saw as a destructive and brutalising modern world; to the complacent culture in which they lived, and in which they were determined to make their mark.

Such iconoclasm gave way to a more solemn engagement with those who had experienced the political violence of the twentieth century. For the back cover of Gold Against The Soul a poem by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi was reprinted in its entirety; while acts of remembrance described in a cynical manner on ‘La Tristesse Durera (Scream To A Sigh)’ – ‘wheeled out once a year, a cenotaph souvenir’ – belied Wire and Edwards’s concerns about historical memory and the loss of dignity among the younger generation. On The Holy Bible, this subject matter returns with a different sense of urgency and focus – though its treatment is no more hopeful.

Edwards in particular continued to study these past events through copious reading. For an October 1993 photoshoot in Tokyo, he was captured on his hotel bed with a copy of Japanese author Masuji Ibuse’s celebrated novel about Hiroshima, Black Rain, and an English language collection of survivor testimonies by Hara Tamiki, Ota Yoko and Toge Sankichi, published under the title Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, in plain view. [3] A year later, in October 1994, he explained to NME: “I guess I identify with victims, but that’s just the way I am. Everything I’ve ever studied in my life; at university I specialised in the Holocaust and Nazi/Soviet foreign policy. That’s what I did.” [4] Yet what resulted from this reading and from what the band had seen, in song terms, was both more oblique and ambivalent than might have been expected.

Poetry of Death

While ‘Mausoleum’ borrows one image from Ibuse’s story it is not one that the Japanese author used to convey the horrifying outcome of the atomic bomb. The ‘mass of dead insects’ refers to a rural tradition, a seasonal ritual of thanks performed by farmers, a reminder of life before the ravages of the war and the devastation of the bomb. [5] Nor is there much else within the song’s lyrical content to indicate to listeners that it is ‘about Hiroshima’. Indeed, its imagery largely overlaps with that of its ‘sister’ song, ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’. [6] The way in which Edwards repurposes Ibuse’s material creates not a picture of the fallout but rather a parallel of sorts with the description of ‘little people… like maggots, small, blind and worthless’ described in ‘Of Walking Abortion’ – two ways of distilling misanthropy, or dehumanisation, through language – while at the same time adding to the number of bleak biblical allusions around which the writing on the album coheres.

The working title for ‘Mausoleum’ was ‘No Birds’ – which was later changed, as Wire admitted, to avoid repeating a Public Image Ltd song title – and was described more often as a summation of the German camps rather than Hiroshima: “Dachau is such an evil, quiet place,” Wire told Melody Maker. “There’s no grass, and you don’t even see a worm, let alone any birds. All you can hear is this humming of nothing.” [7] So that the ‘swollen black’ sky Bradfield sings of in the song’s chorus might suggest either the dense smoke from the nuclear attack, the source of the ‘black rain’, or the belching chimneys of the Nazi extermination camps.

Even if Wire and Edwards were mindful to avoid any shared song titles, Bradfield was unapologetic in taking direct inspiration from his favourite post-punk albums. As well as lending the typographic basis for the sleeve of The Holy Bible, Simple Minds provided at least one of the musical cues. Speaking to journalist Keith Cameron in 2014 about ‘Mausoleum’, Bradfield explained:

“In my head was this Simple Minds song called 30 Frames A Second, where the riff is repetitive and Jim Kerr scats over the top. So I went for an updated version of that, more stripped back, more heavy. There’s more lyrics in the bridges than in some people’s entire songs. I remember thinking, ‘The only way I can do this is to try and be [Dead Kennedys singer] Jello Biafra!'” [8]

The song was demoed for manager Philip Hall in late 1993, shortly before his death, along with another new song, ‘Die in the Summertime’. According to Wire, he supported the band’s new direction, even while mocking the cheerless subject matter: “he said… ‘this sounds like you’re doing the right thing.'” [9] The early recording included on the tenth anniversary edition of the album, while lacking the key audio sample of the final version, certainly shows the strength of the album to come, and the stripped down, more aggressive turn of the band’s music.

The stuttering, tremolo-effected guitar intro is punctured by an insistent, repeated rhythm, building a sense of tension, over which Bradfield at first calmly intones Wire and Edwards’s bleak lines, reminding the listener of the inescapability of death: ‘Wherever you go I will be carcass / whatever you see will be rotting flesh.’ This sinister depiction of the world is followed by a fierce bridge section, which pushes Bradfield’s vocal abilities with a run of extraordinary, breathless lines in which individual words take over the rhythmic emphasis: ‘…LIFE is so silent / for the VICtims who have no speech / in THEIR shapeless guilty remorse / OBliterates your meaning…’ Larissa Wodtke hears in the phrasing a ‘liturgical rhythm’. [10] For Bradfield it was hardcore, Dead Kennedys style. While the barked accusation that closes ‘Of Walking Abortion’, and the rapid-fire political screed of ‘PCP’ similarly foreground Bradfield’s vocal power and dexterity, it is on ‘Mausoleum’, as much as ‘Faster, which follows immediately after it, that The Holy Bible reaches its peak of articulacy, dynamics, and shattering force – yet is all the more standout for the way in which the lyric avoids the encyclopaedic tendencies, historical or contemporary references, and quickly abandons the first-person testimonial style, which together characterise much of the album.

‘Mausoleum’ should also be seen as a centrepoint of the album for its inclusion of the voice of author JG Ballard, likely sourced from the Radio 4 series Cult Classics which Edwards recommended in a year-end list for Melody Maker in December 1993. [11] Ballard’s own working method for writing his acclaimed novel Crash doubles as Edwards’s own for The Holy Bible: “I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit,” Ballard recalls, “and force it to look in the mirror.” With its focus on bodily decay, despair, the struggle for self-control, and mindful of the murderous legacy of the past, while musically revitalising the frantic, aggressive pulse of the band’s post-punk influences, ‘Mausoleum’, too, is a summary statement of the whole album.

A lyric draft, written in Wire’s hand and included in the twentieth anniversary edition of the album, illustrates the development of the song, comparable with the collaborative effort of ‘Of Walking Abortion’ – and in contrast to lyrics such as ‘Yes’ and ‘4st 7lb’, written by Edwards and largely unedited by Bradfield:

‘No Birds’ lyric draft (Nicky Wire)

Wherever you go I will be your guardian
Whatever you see I will give you
Humanity it can’t recover
We must answer to some crimes

Come and walk down memory lane
Insidious hate nature feel some pain
Life can spring from grass and trees
But its preferred nature is sickness and disease

And life can be important as death
But its [sic] much more depressing
I want to make you crawl with me
Through feathers tar and honey

Regain your self-control
Become what you despise
Become what you analyse
Destroy what you hoped for
Obliterate the meaning
Obliterate the meaning

There is much here that appears in the finished song but the amendments are striking, especially those instances where an initially positive sounding line (even if intended to unnerve – say, as a voice speaking from a tomb) has been definitively transformed into its opposite: ‘Wherever you go I will be your guardian [carcass]’; ‘Life [eternal scorched] can spring from grass and trees’. The emphasis is ultimately placed on the negation of life.

Again, there is not a lot by which the casual listener might link the words with the band’s experiences at Hiroshima, Dachau and Belsen; it is more impressionistic, a vague invitation to share in a general malaise and disgust at humanity and nature, somewhat closer in style to ‘She Is Suffering’ than its companion song ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’. Only with the addition of references to ‘victims who have no speech’, ‘the sky… swollen black’ ‘prejudice’, ‘no birds’ and the ‘holy mass of dead insects’ does the backdrop to the song’s composition become more evident.

There is a sense of misgiving about memorialisation (as on ‘La Tristesse Durera’) and the value of museums when it comes to atrocities; the lines ‘Come and walk down memory lane / No one sees a thing but they can pretend’ seem born out of Wire and Edwards’s frustration of their tourist experiences as much as they convey something of the general futility of remembrance in the face of unceasing political violence – such as was still unfolding in Bosnia at the time. It is almost as if they had to prove the sentiment of the Sex Pistols’ ‘Holidays in the Sun’ to themselves: that in wishing to learn about history they were unwittingly taking a ‘cheap holiday in other people’s misery’. Edwards told the Japanese magazine Music Life:

“When I went to Hiroshima and visited the museum, it was forbidden to take photographs. A reasonable request [out] of respect for the dead. But there were American tourists there who kept saying things like “Hey, look at this dead child’s fingernails”… When I saw that, it made me so embarrassed, “Don’t you have any fucking respect?”, I thought. They had zero interest. I felt the same about the souvenir shops. Also photographing as proof they’ve been there.” [12]

The band seem to be twisting the idea of the museum, prompted by the sound of the word itself, to imagine what it would be like for the murderous past to really speak to the present – a ‘mausoleum’, where the listener might be shown round, guided through the galleries of natural and manmade destruction by the dead. A true ‘atrocity exhibition’.

The final version contains some of the most original and poetic lyrics ever written by the band, with phrases such as ‘humanity recovered glittering etiquette’, and ‘for your love nature has haemorrhaged’ being both effective for their percussive qualities and gothic evocations. The imagery is full of conflicts and inversions of ideals. There are repeated references to the sky on The Holy Bible and as might be expected they offer no expectation of comfort or salvation. There are only extreme contrasts – the ‘sunless afternoons’ of ‘Yes’, and the sky that ‘leaves me blind’ on ‘This Is Yesterday’; while the description in ‘Mausoleum’ presents the sky as if it too has become one of the many victims of Hiroshima, no longer a plane existing above the desolation, but itself physically harmed in the attack: ‘swollen black’. As one witness, writer Ota Yoko recalled: ‘The bomb had its effects not only on the ground but also in the sky.’ Similarly, in his memoir of Auschwitz, Primo Levi speaks of the ‘malevolent clouds’ and of ‘stumbling from one puddle to the other, between the black of the sky and the mud of the road.’ Edwards’s literary interests, as much as his historical knowledge, can continually be seen to feed into the style of The Holy Bible. [13]

The closing moments transcend everything in Wire’s original sketch: ‘prejudice burns brighter when it’s all we have to burn / the world lances youth’s lamblike winter’. Among the most powerful lines on the album, they are all the more impactful for the way that Bradfield cries, then howls them, raging against the hateful light and bringing the music to an abrupt halt on that repeated word of Shakespearean discontent. And they set the tone perfectly for what has come to be the album’s defining song, ‘Faster’, even foreshadowing its cadences, its metrical emphases, with a near-rhyme between ‘lances youth’s lamblike winter’ and ‘spat out Plath and Pinter’.

Personal←→History

Despite the triumphant rejection of Sylvia Plath on The Holy Bible, the acclaimed poet was an acknowledged touchstone for Edwards and Wire, and her engagement with the subject of the Holocaust and her own subversive takes on biblical imagery, notably in ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’, can be linked with the Manics’ own writing. [14] Matthew Boswell’s insightful analyses of both artists’ work draws out these parallels. Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film has been much referenced in critical studies of The Holy Bible for its single short chapter focusing on ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’, and the book remains a brilliantly articulated defence of the use of Holocaust references, stories and imagery in ways that ‘reject redemptory interpretations of genocide and claims of historical ineffability’. [15] It is Boswell’s entire argument, however (which also ranges across works by WD Snodgrass, the Sex Pistols, Joy Division and Alain Resnais among others), and not simply the several pages on the Manics, that bears on the Welsh band’s approach to the Holocaust on ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ – where their experiences at Belsen and Dachau come sharply into the foreground – and is worth weighing against those critics who have been more hesitant in their applause for the use of Holocaust in even the most innovative contemporary art.

The penultimate track on the album, ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ opens with an echoing rhythmic pounding and metallic noise, reminiscent of the stark industrial backdrops of Einstürzende Neubauten’s Kollaps (a favourite of the young Richey Edwards), or the resonant percussion experiments of Z’EV. This is soon overlaid with a sample from a 1946 Soviet documentary about the Nuremberg Trials, which features its own doleful orchestral accompaniment and English narration, describing the necessity of the postwar military tribunal. The atmosphere is simultaneously menacing and mournful, the melancholic string lines intertwining with the hard, regimented hammering and the disembodied voice soberly reciting the sufferings that have been inflicted, and which are to be addressed in a court of law. There are overlaps between the content of the speech and the language of The Holy Bible – ‘the butchers had no pity’ recalling ‘Of Walking Abortion’ and ‘Faster’, and ‘tear’ appearing both within the sample and in the song lyric, though significantly in conflicting ways – that also makes the intro a late focal point of the entire album and a condensation of its themes and overall atmosphere.

One of the many obscure audiovisual materials gathered for the album, the sample is again perfectly suited. The documentary itself (directed by S Svilov and produced by cameraman Roman Karmen) in some ways mirrors The Holy Bible‘s aesthetic and moral response to political tyranny, moving between graphic montages of horror and ruin – the emergence of fascism and ‘massacred innocents’ – and the deliberations of the trials. It pulls in different emotional and moral directions: the narrator explains early in the film that the criminals will be tried “not from motives of vengeance but that the great ends of justice may be served”, but the French prosecutor finishes by reminding the judges that they must: “Hearken to the blood of the innocent, crying for retribution!” There are echoes of ‘Archives of Pain’; there are also elisions that indicate the shortcomings in the narrative. As film scholar John J Michalczyk explains: ‘The Jewish element and genocidal plan of the Fascists have almost no place in the film. The Jewish witnesses in court do not appear in the film to offer their testimony against the Nazis.’ [16] It is such attempts to distort history that motivated Edwards’s writing on ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’.

Feedback pierces the sample, again linking the album sonically with the more extreme electronic and noise music of the 1980s and 90s, specifically that of Whitehouse, who used a myriad of references to atrocity and utilised atonality – pink noise and crude synthesised rhythms – to shape their unflinching, highly confrontational music; but were, unknown to most shocked listeners, in turn referencing a history of experimental sound linking back to John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley and Yoko Ono. That James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore should be working these typically ‘unwanted’ sounds into a major label, commercial rock record further underscores the album’s unique place in modern music and the band’s uncompromising intent – at variance with their own sense, as expressed on The Holy Bible‘s opening song ‘Yes’, that they were merely prostituting themselves to the music industry and press through their art.

Sean Moore’s drum pattern is, as Matthew Boswell and David Evans among others have pointed out, evocative of Joy Division’s ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, while James Dean Bradfield’s haunting opening guitar phrase is, Larissa Wodtke notes, reminiscent of The Birthday Party’s ‘Nick the Stripper’. [17] While these comparisons are accurate and in keeping with the collaging of musical, literary and visual references on The Holy Bible, Bradfield has mentioned a somewhat broader range of inspirations beyond the familiar post-punk precursors, brought forward in this case by Moore:

“I struggled with it, so I handed it over to Sean. He presented a verse and a bridge – it was really atonal. Sean is the only one of us who can read music at all, so I was surprised, thinking he would come up with something more florid. He started saying something about Penderecki and John Cage and minimalist delineation of modern song structures, to make more out of less. Of course, it made complete sense.” [18]  

The scene-setting on ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ was in part created with ‘a taped recording of screeching metal, which is looped through an old BEL BD80 hardware sampler’. [19] This relentless scraping continues behind the ratcheting, chromatic musical progression that slowly bears down on the listener as the song heads to its conclusion. Apart from the comparatively exuberant guitar solo, ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ is an unsettled and unsettling musical composition. Evans writes, ‘It’s an appropriate treatment for Richey’s words, the aversion to melodic resolution or harmony matching the lyric’s refusal to draw any redemptive meaning from the Holocaust.’

Edwards had been disturbed by the swelling body of academic literature that questioned the Holocaust, and shared his concerns with a number of journalists while promoting The Holy Bible. In conversation with Stuart Baillie he said:

“I find it… ‘interesting’ isn’t the right word … I find it compulsive that in such a short space of time that the Holocaust is rendered almost obsolete. I find it really frightening. We’ve actually been to places like Dachau. I spent all my life in education studying it, and when you actually go there it means nothing. It’s only when you come back and you realise that there are books by people like Arthur Buntz [sic] and the book [The] Hoax Of The 20th Century that suggest it’s all a lie; it’s somehow a Jewish Christian conspiracy.

“This is being seriously debated by intelligent people. They suggest that some of the death camps were built after the war by the Americans to basically put the blame on Germany, to make them feel bad, when nothing actually happened.

“That’s being debated in universities now, and I feel that really really frightening. Six million lives are worth nothing. If they’re that cheap, then what do you matter? That’s a more serious issue than [British National Party candidate] Derek Beackon getting in. It worries me more, because historically it is more dangerous.” [20]

Foregrounding the facts of history, Edwards selected archival images relating to the Holocaust to illustrate the lyrics to both ‘Mausoleum’ and ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ in the album booklet. The two pictures were taken from the same source, Dachau museum’s own exhibition catalogue Concentration Camp Dachau 1933-1945, a scholarly keepsake of the band’s visit. For ‘Mausoleum’, a plan for the crematorium built at Dachau in 1942, known as ‘Baracke X’, was reprinted; while for ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ a photograph of the entrance gates to the camp, with the phrase ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (which also appears in the song) was chosen. Many of the words and images found in the song lyrics to ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ stand out while reading through the publication, with its account of the ‘Invalid Transports’, of Hartheim Castle, the camp’s ‘malaria’ block and the experiments of Sigmund Rascher, as well as in the plans of Dachau showing the central ‘Lagerstrasse’. [21] But far from a simple, factual riposte to the Holocaust deniers, the lyrics suggest an uncertain perspective, and indicate that Edwards’s writing was becoming increasingly shaped by depression.

First the lyrics refer to the way in which the new arrivals to the concentration camps were misled by the Nazis. As Nicky Wire noted: “In the museum at Belsen, there’s the original sign which hung there. It says, ‘Welcome to Belsen Recreation Camp’.” [22] The Sex Pistols had blackly satirised the same on the inaccurately titled ‘Belsen Was a Gas’. Edwards’s words might be understood as written from the perspective of a survivor looking back with regret, or a perpetrator with a mocking tone. According to Bradfield, the ambiguities of the initial lyrics had caused him to challenge Edwards at an earlier stage in the songwriting process. As he recalled to Stuart Maconie:

“I didn’t think the first draft of Intense Humming of Evil was judgmental enough. It’s a song about the Holocaust and you can’t be ambivalent about a subject like that. Not even we are stupid enough to be contentious about that.” [23]

Bradfield’s comment would suggest that Edwards ultimately emphasised his condemnation of those responsible for the Final Solution. Yet the judgment does not come down on the criminals as in ‘Archives of Pain’. There is no rehash of Nuremberg, no naming of guilty parties. Instead the despair is directed at the victims in a damning way: ‘6 million screaming souls / maybe misery / maybe nothing at all / lives that wouldn’t have changed a thing / never counted / never mattered / never be.’ The repetitive sermon style at the end of this chorus also misleads, given the utter loss of faith in the value of human lives that is being expressed.

The second verse describes these lives in terms of disease. It uses the details of the medical experimentation in the Dachau camp, under the direction of Rascher, and a reference to Hartheim Castle, near Linz (where prisoners were gassed) to depict the victims themselves as a sort of pestilence – breathed in, ‘butcher bacteria’ ‘infected’ – the first-person perspective accepting of the despicable lies and propaganda of the Nazis against the Jews. Edwards will also have known from the Dachau documentation that Catholic clergymen in particular were selected for the experiments of another doctor, Claus Schilling, who infected the prisoners with malaria. And so the line ‘In block 5 we worship malaria’ both illuminates a dark moment in history and further develops the subversive religious imagery of The Holy Bible in a devastating way – or rather, reinforces the ‘the failure of biblical analogy’ [24] Bradfield said:

“The lyric was a massive part of Richey’s history degree. He hadn’t just watched one episode of World At War – he’d gone deeply into it, very obscure writing. I remember him talking about Holocaust deniers – of the battle between the reality versus the myth of history and how important it was to read as much about it as possible.” [25]

Hunger was also a crucial aspect of the experience of the victims of the Holocaust, as described by Primo Levi in his Auschwitz memoir If This Is A Man: ‘But how could one imagine not being hungry? The Lager is hunger: we ourselves are hunger, living hunger’. [26] It is alluded to, somewhat surprisingly, in an understated way on ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’. Described here as merely ‘a word’, as if to suggest that a threshold has been passed and language finally disconnected from experience, hunger is nevertheless central to The Holy Bible. Between ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ and ‘4st 7lb’, Richey Edwards’s writing evokes in the mind of the listener the emaciated human body as an index of both great suffering and attempted transcendence; a symbol of cruel victimisation and self-empowerment. This uneasy antithesis encompasses the crimes of the past and the struggles of contemporary experience. Through both personal testimony and historical survey, Manic Street Preachers return to the question of human life, value and meaning in the face of exploitative and prejudicial political and economic forces. And it is through the starved, wounded, vulnerable body that this is repeatedly expressed, and through which drastic solutions are attempted. Levi observed little different among his fellow prisoners. Recording one camp inmate’s insight, he writes: ‘The law of the Lager said: ‘eat you own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbour’.

While the dismissal of the millions of lives lost in the Holocaust in the chorus of ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ might be deemed by some as another act of artful provocation, later comments by Edwards suggest that his own mental ill-health was leading him to the most pessimistic conclusions about human life outside of his art. In an interview with Molotov Cocktails Fanzine in December 1994, the judgments of The Holy Bible seemed to have become gospel for him:

“That is the fucking tragedy about human life, that it means so fucking little. Unless you’re like Einstein or Newton, you are just fucking continuous raw cattle that has no control over what it does, that can’t affect its future and yet you live your life when you find some value in it. If a sixty-year-old man came up to me and said “I’ll give you all my experience,” why would I want to take it? What does his life mean? It means bollocks. Now he lived his life, he worked really hard, he struggled, he scrimped and saved, had a couple of children and for two weeks a year he had a good holiday and he fucking died. Big deal. The thought of a six-year-old kid getting smashed down by a car is sad, but it’s not a tragedy. An eighty-year-old man dying of ill health is a tragedy because their lives mean fucking nothing. That is the tragedy of human existence, that it I so fucking pointless… Everything falls apart, you can’t justify anything.” [27]

In writing about Plath’s Holocaust referencing poem ‘Daddy’, the critic George Steiner praised its effect in ‘translating a private, obviously intolerable hurt into a code of plain statement, of instantaneously public images which concern us all.’ [28] At the same time, Steiner questioned the ethics of that same poetry and the right of those unconnected with these events personally to use them to express their own psychological turmoil. The same can be asked of Edwards’s writing across The Holy Bible – as honest as it is about the flaws, hypocrisies and moral responsibilities of the author as it is desperate to remind the wider public of the importance of history. Steiner’s ambivalence towards Plath might well also capture many listeners’ responses to Edwards’s treatment of the Holocaust on ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’. Despite Edwards’s desire to write about ‘the truth’, Bradfield admitted the songs honestly reflected much confusion.

There are signs that Edwards was just as susceptible to the type of skewed historical writing that motivated the lyric in the first place. One of the song’s most discussed lines, one that seems to readily draw out the political sympathies of listeners and critics is ‘Churchill no different / wished the workers bled to a machine’. In her chapter on The Holy Bible in Triptych, Rhian E Jones affirms that Edwards here ‘displays a valid understanding of twentieth-century history, in which Churchill’s views on imperialism and white supremacy were seldom far away from those of many fascists’. [29] David Evans, on the other hand says that while the argument ‘is not a frivolous one’, ‘there clearly is a difference between the exploitation of the miners and the barbarity of the death camps’ – referring specifically to Churchill’s clashes with the working classes, most notably the 1910 Tonypandy Riots, where Welsh miners were confronted by police and Army forces under Churchill’s orders. [30] There is no disputing that aspects of Churchill’s personality, many of his reckless and deadly political actions and repellent beliefs about race are deserving of the harshest criticism – and were subject to such during his lifetime. But that last line is weakened by its simplicity and vagueness, closer to the iconoclasm of Generation Terrorists.

Critical of Hollywood director Steven Spielberg’s depiction of Oskar Schindler, as against the Oscar plaudits, and Arthur Butz’s disgraceful claims about the Holocaust, Edwards here ends up by suggesting that he accepted unquestioningly the assessments of Winston Churchill emerging in such books as Clive Ponting’s biography, that sought to challenge the ‘Churchill myth’, just as enthusiastically as he parroted lines from Living Marxism.

Nicky Wire shared the same one-dimensional view of the wartime leader’s politics when speaking with the press in 1994: “Britain always thinks that it has a superior attitude. But as soon as the war was over, the attitude was: ‘Let’s get back to normal and exploit as many people as we can again. Keep the proles happy, tie them to their machines, and send them out to war again to be killed when we need to'” [31] Yet he later drew on Churchill’s own name for his depressive moods in one of the band’s most affecting songs following Edwards’s disappearance, ‘Black Dog On My Shoulder’, which appeared on 1998’s This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. While that is an album that unequivocally sides with the working class against injustices perpetrated against them (on songs such as ‘Ready For Drowning’ and ‘S.Y.M.M’ – the latter being as uncharacteristic, musically, as ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’, but not all that far from it stylistically) it also finds a poignant, melodic way of framing another aspect of Winston Churchill’s experience that is altogether human. Differences and meanings and lives that cannot be so simply reduced.

†††

On ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ Manic Street Preachers are as far away from commercial rock music as they would ever be, engaging with lengthy song structures shorn of familiar harmonic progressions, and subject matter that most rock bands seeking popular success wouldn’t dare to take on. On these brother/sister songs they refer to a unique array of culture: Masuji Ibuse, John Cage, Simple Minds, JG Ballard and the Nuremberg Trials. At the same time they wanted to express their own physical, emotional and intellectual reactions to the places and documents they had seen first-hand.

There may be something incompatible between the function of songs – the typically positive emotional bonds and empathy created between musicians and their audience, through music and words – and the attempt to base this dynamic around accounts of mass murder and political tyranny. Or, as Matthew Boswell writes, ‘this self-abusive turn reflects a kind of battle emerging between events which destroyed lives and with them the possibility of meaning in life and a creative process that is inherently generative of meaning.’ [32] Still, this is the challenge the Manics, among other punk, post-punk and avant-garde musical artists, have taken on. To subvert such expectations, and nonetheless create art that retains the affective charge that inspired them to make music in the first place. And to claim popular music as a valid medium, alongside literature, visual art, film and theatre, for exploring controversial topics and questions. Before recording The Holy Bible, Edwards admitted: “I hate having the thought in the back of my head, that we can’t possibly print this in a lyric sheet, because people will misunderstand it.” [33] Whatever the intention, and despite the assertive tone of much of the record, there remains plenty that is open to interpretation, that might be misunderstood, but as a work of art it elicits continued engagement and shows itself to be on the side of learning.

As Boswell says of the many intelligent, provocative, heavily criticised, uses of Holocaust material across popular culture, ‘this unruliness seems to be born from an awareness that the inescapable imperative to remember the Holocaust has not translated into a cultural norm because most people are broadly unwilling to face the horrific content of what happened and the implications that knowledge of these events might have for our own self-understanding.’

In his brief tour notes for ‘Mausoleum’ and ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’, perhaps mindful of the Hollywoodisation of the Final Solution in Schindler’s List, Edwards made an unexpected reference that was certainly closer to a level of common understanding: ‘Visited Dachau and Hiroshima. What reflections should be for everyone. Otherwise we’re all Edward Scissorhands Avon Lady.’ [34] He seems to be speaking of the wish to paint over the terrible consequences of man’s attempt to play God; to smile and pretend everything is fine in an world of prejudice, suspicion and exploitation; to try to conceal deep scars that still show. The Holy Bible is positively at odds with such comfortable, grotesque illusions.

‘We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing.’ – Primo Levi

Notes:

[1] See Twitter post by Forever Delayed Forum, via aki_21jack on Instagram. Accessed online at https://twitter.com/FDForum/status/1362391672974409732/photo/3 (25 November 2021)

[2] Bennun, David ‘All That Glitters’, Melody Maker, 29 January 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=All_That_Glitters_-_Melody_Maker,_29th_January_1994 (15 November)

[3] See photos taken in Tokyo, 12-14 October by Ray Palmer, at https://iconicpix.photoshelter.com/gallery/Oct-12-13-1993-MANIC-STREET-PREACHERS-Shibuya-Tokyo-Japan/G0000XXCNQNWRV3g/C00004i30YRTc788

[4] Bailie, Stuart ‘Manic’s Depressive’, NME, 1 October 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Manic%27s_Depressive_-_NME,_1st_October_1994 (25 November 2021)

[5] Ibuse, Masuji Black Rain (Kodansha International, 1969)

[6] Edwards described ‘Mausoleum’ and ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ as ‘Brother/sister songs’. See The Holy Bible tour programme, 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=The_Holy_Bible_Tour_Programme (5 November 2021)

[7] ‘Manics’ New Testament’, Melody Maker, 27 August 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Manics%27_New_Testament_-_Melody_Maker,_27th_August_1994. (25 November 2021) For the song title revision see Cameron, Keith ‘Chapter and verse. Track by track. 13 Reasons to believe in The Holy Bible’, liner notes in The Holy Bible 20 (2014)

[8] Cameron, ibid

[9] Cameron, Keith ‘Classic Album: The Holy Bible by Manic Street Preachers’, Q, November 2019

[10] Wodtke, Larissa ‘Architecture of Memory: The Holy Bible and the Archive’ in Jones, Lukes, Wodtke Triptych (Repeater Books, 2017)

[11] Price, Simon ‘Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers chooses his Men of the Year’, Melody Maker, 25 December 1993. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Richey_Edwards_Of_Manic_Street_Preachers_Chooses_His_Men_Of_The_Year_-_Melody_Maker,_25th_December_1993 (15 November 2021)

[12] Akao, Mika, ‘Richey James talks about The Holy Bible‘, Music Life, September 1994. English translation by M. Jun, accessed online at https://solitudegrey.wordpress.com/2020/12/01/richey-james-talks-about-the-holy-bible-music-life-sept-1994/ (10 October 2021)

[13] See Yoko, Ota ‘City of Corpses’ in Minear, Richard H (ed) Hiroshima: Three Witnesses (Princeton University Press, 1990) and Levi, Primo If This Is A Man and The Truce (Abacus, 1987)

[14] ‘The Girl Who Wanted to Be God’, one of the last songs co-credited to Edwards and Wire, and which appears on Everything Must Go, takes its title from Plath. Wire told Loud and Quiet in 2018: ” Richey and I were addicted to the sadness and loneliness of poets like Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath and Phillip Larkin.” See Younis, Reef ‘Tell Me About’, 30 March 2018. Accessed online at https://www.loudandquiet.com/interview/manic-street-preachers-nicky-wire-discusses-the-most-non-manics-thing-his-band-has-done-get-older/ (25 November 2021)

[15] Boswell, Matthew Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

[16] Michalczyk, John J Filming the End of the Holocaust (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)

[17] See Evans, David The Holy Bible (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019); Boswell, Holocaust Impiety; Wodtke, Triptych

[18] Cameron, ‘Chapter and verse’

[19] Evans, The Holy Bible

[20] Bailie, ‘Manic’s Depressive’

[21] See Distel, Barbara and Jakusch, Ruth (eds) Concentration Camp Dachau 1933-1945 (Comité International de Dachau, Brussels; Lipp GmbH, Munich, 1978)

[22] ‘Manics’ New Testament’

[23] Maconie, Stuart ‘Smile, It Might Never Happen’, Q, December 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Smile,_It_Might_Never_Happen_-_Q_Magazine,_December_1994 (25 November 2021)

[24] The quoted phrase is taken from Boswell’s writing on Plath. Historical note: Block 5 was in fact the location for Sigmund Rascher’s hypothermia experiments, as mentioned in the testimony of Father Leo Miechalowski, who was subjected to both the malaria and aviation experiments at Dachau.

[25] Cameron, ‘Chapter and verse’

[26] Levi, If This Is A Man

[27] See ‘Interview: Richey Edwards’, Molotov Cocktails Fanzine, December 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Interview:_Richey_Edwards_-_Molotov_Cocktails_Fanzine,_December_1994 (20 October 2021)

[28] Steiner, George ‘Dying Is An Art’, Newman, Charles (ed) The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium (Indiana University Press, 1970)

[29] Jones, Rhian E ‘Unwritten Diaries: History, Politics and Experience through The Holy Bible’ in Triptych

[30] Evans, The Holy Bible

[31] ‘Manic’s New Testament’

[32] Boswell, Holocaust Impiety

[33] Bennun, ‘All That Glitters’

[34] Edwards, Richey The Holy Bible tour programme, 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=The_Holy_Bible_Tour_Programme (5 November 2021)

Warning: this article contains language some readers might find offensive. Derogatory references to race are contextualised and have not been edited as they are material to the subject under discussion.

‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ – George Orwell

‘Indeed, as I write, I can hear the thumbscrews being unpacked, the guillotine sharpened, the pages of the Dictionary of Political Correctness being shuffled, the tumbrils beginning to roll…’ – Stuart Hall

It is not controversial to say that The Holy Bible would be nothing without Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire’s words – the words themselves, of course, are often provocative and even shocking. ‘P.C.P.’ encapsulates the central role of language in the music of Manic Street Preachers, and the group’s desire to express unvarnished truths about the world through their songwriting. The final track on the album, it was also the first single to be released (forming a double A-side with ‘Faster’) and a regular opening salvo on the band’s autumn 1994 tour. Despite being one of the defining songs of the Holy Bible, this breathless critique of a society in thrall to political correctness has continued to raise eyebrows among critics and fans.

Mindful of the fact that being ‘anti-PC’ has often been seen to go hand in hand with conservative, bigoted views – and so likely to jar with the band’s iconoclastic image and their upbringing amid the Miners’ Strike in Wales – Edwards and Wire articulated their thinking behind ‘P.C.P.’ with a mixture of self-assurance and frustration. Speaking with Time Out in December 1994, Edwards said:

“That’s an important song in understanding what we do… It could be construed as quite a right-wing point of view, but then at the same time, every left-wing party seems to be advocating censorship of some kind. Which I [can’t] really agree with.” [1]

When NME journalist Barbara Ellen reported on the Manics’ trip to Bangkok in April that year, she described conversations with Edwards in which he shared his stance on ‘PC-ness’, and on censorship in any form, with a stark example. Referring to the far-right British National Party, which at that time had recently won its first elected representative in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Edwards told Ellen: “…shutting down the BNP could lead to so much. If you give any government the power to silence a political power, however dodgy, they will end up abusing that power.” [2] Far from ignoring the seriousness of the rising support for fascist politics, the band appeared on the bill at London’s Carnival Against the Nazis shortly after their return from Thailand, penning an equally foreboding statement for the concert programme: ‘Fascism is blindness, intolerance, ignorance – a refusal to believe or learn from history. Those who doubt this must realise concentration camps are the only conclusion fascism is capable of.’ Neither the electoral gains of such a party, nor the desire to silence them would do. In an interview for Melody Maker publicising the Brockwell Park event, Edwards refused any platitudes when explaining the Manics’ decision to play:

“The idea that rock bands can change anything has been defunct for about two decades now, but just for us personally, it’s important to show where we stand. We’re quite an apolitical band, in the sense that we’ve never been impressed by stuff like Red Wedge. But something like this is an issue which is much broader than politics.” [3]

While willing to join the chorus of protest against resurgent nationalism alongside other acts, the band were somewhat out of step on the question of political correctness, which is also widely understood to be broader in its implications – reaching beyond the wish to avoid derogatory or marginalising language towards minority groups, opening out onto questions of censorship and the limits of free speech. The Manics have never sounded so forthright in their views on the subject as on ‘P.C.P.’. While more recent songs lament the divisions that have been brought about by the misuse of words fuelled by online platforms, ‘P.C.P.’ indicts those who would curb the use of language at all, as if denouncing puritans of a new religious movement.

Although PC (rather than media censorship in the Mary Whitehouse mode) has long been seen as a result of concerted efforts on the liberal left, it was not through any inspiration from the right that the Manics were compelled to tackle the matter on The Holy Bible. In a 1994 book chapter, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall reflected on the way in which the concept of PC has mutated across the political spectrum: from being an in-joke among radical students of the 1960s, to a means of defending the American Constitution by the Moral Majority in the 1980s, to being a consequence of the spreading out of ‘the political’ into more and more aspects of the individual’s private life in the 1990s with the increased focus on ‘identity politics’. Hall remarks: ‘What seemed most characteristic of the PC issue was the way it cut across the traditional left/right divide, and divided some sections of the left from others.’ [4]

As with ‘Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit’sworldwouldfallapart’, at least one line of the lyrics to ‘P.C.P.’ was adapted from an article which appeared in Living Marxism, edited by Mick Hume. Titled ‘The right to be offensive’ and published in February 1994, the piece claims that ‘bans are for bigots and Big Brother’. It also argues:

‘The traditional puritans of the back-to-basics right and the new puritans of the politically correct left are both calling for more censorship.

‘And everywhere from the universities to the workplace, it seems that criticism and strong arguments are now condemned as unacceptably ‘offensive’ to one group or another…

‘The idea that we should not be offensive may sound like a call for sensitivity. In fact it is another demand for censorship. It is a not-in-front-of-the-children attitude towards public debate, which insists that we either say nothing controversial or nothing at all.’ [5]

The magazine represented a contrarian fringe element of left-wing politics: not only vehemently opposed to Western imperialism but also other Marxist organisations, promoting a libertarian attitude and publishing controversial opinion pieces on AIDS, Irish republicanism and the Yugoslav Wars. Richey Edwards appears never to have referred publicly to this influence on The Holy Bible and as such journalists and fans have overlooked the possibility of its inspiration for the title of the song ‘P.C.P.’ too: Living Marxism being the in-house magazine of the Revolutionary Communist Party, or ‘RCP’. [6] Edwards might have been playing with the idea, imagining instead a nightmarish ‘Political Correctness Party’. An alternative reference mentioned in the band’s 1994 tour programme, to the Portuguese Revolutionary Party (Partido Comunista Português), is not immediately explicable but it does serve as a reminder of the decades-long resistance to censorship by left-wing revolutionaries under the Salazar regime – not least the PCP’s Avante! magazine – and so underlining the association of anti-censorship and anti-authoritarianism. Edwards wrote:

‘Links PC + PCP + New Moral Certainty. Language aimed at the working class. Condemns the very people it aims to save. Self-censorship wrong…

Also PCP the Revolutionary Portuguese Communist [sic].’ [7]

Commenting on the song in an interview with Japan’s Music Life, Edwards also made the lyrical association with the mind-altering drug phencyclidine – commonly known as PCP or ‘angel dust’, and explained his concern about the effects of PC on the working-class in particular:

“Named after a drug and as well as ‘Political Correctness’. Both are related to the working class. PC is essentially the search for and censorship of politically incorrect words. Some people think they can attain power by censoring language. In fact, if you repeat certain controversial words 20 times, the words lose their impact. In England there’s Page 3… being cited as an example of gender inequality, but the biggest example in this country is actually the gender inequality in employment conditions, being male-dominated. Page 3 is merely a visual representation of this inequality. The nonsensical part of PC culture is the torture over insignificant words. What a boring, petty sense of values.” [8]

Given the explicit content that runs through The Holy Bible, and its preoccupation with extremes, the libertarian perspective of ‘P.C.P.’ should not be surprising. ‘The band that likes to say yes’ also wants to be able to say ‘cunt’ on a commercial rock record. Rather than revealing a tedious, chauvinistic streak, the band transcends predictable anti-PC sentiments achieving a wild, surrealistic poetry of their own. While the unswerving pro-free speech views of Living Marxism clearly shaped the lyric to some degree, it is hard to accept Edwards as an RCP acolyte. Sympathetic to certain arguments, captivated by some turns of phrase, yes – but the same issue which features Hume’s tract on political correctness also includes criticism of the Western media’s worried response to the rise of the Russian right-wing politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky – the same Zhirinovsky for whom the ultimate punishment is called on ‘Archives of Pain’. Long interested in subversive literature, music and films, the band had already written one of their most extreme lyrics, a precursor of sorts to the conceptual masterpiece to come, before work on The Holy Bible began: on the B-side ‘Patrick Bateman’, inspired by the novel American Psycho. In the chorus, Bradfield sings ‘I fucked God up the ass’.

In July 1993 Cutting Edge found Edwards in a particularly acerbic mood as he discussed the topic of censorship:

‘BBC2 lays a guilt trip every Newsnight. They say ‘ban Romper Stomper’ and think they’ve saved the fucking planet. Just scraps of words. Censorshit. All rooms are the same temperature these days. All air smells the same. I never hear about that on the Late Show. So the only difference between you and the multitude egg shell white and antiseptic seats is what’s playing in your head. You can’t even pretend to read anymore. Someone always finds Dennis Cooper or Easton Ellis offensive. Or scorns you for buying the [S]un – Liberals are so fun and free these days.’ [9]

Earlier in the same piece, he is more ambivalent, showing a general disillusionment that seems far from any hope of meaningful change:

‘Agree with stupidity. Be politically in-correct. Whatever it takes to shut them up. Or forever argue. No one likes each other anyway. Admit it. If you can’t respect yourself how can you respect a single living thing?’

There is a frustration that comes across here, that there is little true communication anyway, that the issue of political correctness might well be moot. Beyond simply falling back on the criticisms of PC associated with the ‘old left’, as described by Stuart Hall (‘that PC concerns itself with irrelevant and trivial issues as compared with the ‘real’ questions of poverty, unemployment and economic disadvantage…’) Edwards’ misanthropy sometimes took over. In June 1994, just as the Faster/P.C.P. single was released, Edwards reflected again on the problem of intentions and consequences:

“In principle, I think the idea of PC is actually okay… But where it might be good at qualifying the big things – racism is bad, prejudice of any kind is despicable, and so on – the so-called minorities it’s supposed to protect end up being victimised by these restraints to the point where they have no identity left at all. Not being able to say exactly what you mean, even if it’s hurtful to someone else’s feelings, is an important part of free speech. Without it, you’re not protecting anything, you’re censoring it! And that’s a whole different thing to think about.” [10]

Nicky Wire shared his thoughts on the matter when talking to Metal Hammer about the album, only running up against the problem of using highly offensive language to discuss the way that same language has been used by members of the group it is judged to be denigrating:

“A lot of people have got sort of warped minds about liberalism. They think liberalism means you can’t say certain words – you can’t describe a black person as a nigger and you can’t describe a gay person as a faggot. I think it’s interesting that Niggers With Attitude refer to themselves as niggers, that they’d have to be described as that because they’d been oppressed, you know? Enslaved for like 150 years, they got a definition. And to get rid of a word like that is quite dangerous, I think. It’s Orwellian.” [11]

The manipulation of language for political ends and its disastrous effects clearly continues to preoccupy the band. Though Wire is unlikely to use such slurs to articulate his ideas today, his last comment signals, twenty-seven years in advance, one of his most recent lyrics. On 2021’s ‘Orwellian’, Wire laments how ‘Words wage war, meanings being missed’ but ultimately claims, ‘It feels impossible to pick a side’. The uncharacteristic, racially charged language Wire introduces in the Metal Hammer interview and his references to the failings of ‘liberalism’ were clearly prompted by another key source for ‘P.C.P.’s lyrics. Both Edwards and Wire explained that they had taken inspiration from the film Lenny, Bob Fosse’s 1974 biopic of the US comedian Lenny Bruce, in particular an unflinching stand-up routine re-enacted by actor Dustin Hoffman in the film:

“The Dustin Hoffman film of the Lenny Bruce story was a big inspiration on that song. When he gets up and does that speech about “every spic in here, every nigger…” it’s just fantastic, because that’s what gives a word its power and its violence – when you supress it.” [12]

Wire is paraphrasing Bruce himself in his analysis of the scene. It is one of the comedian’s most famous lines on the question of free speech and obscenity. In another he compares the world to a hospital patient, with an ailing body: “…I’m not sick, the world is sick, and I’m a doctor, I’m a surgeon with a scalpel for false values.” In his foreword to Bruce’s autobiography, on the other hand, critic Kenneth Tynan saw the comedian as a necessary illness: ‘…Lenny Bruce is a disease of America. The very existence of comedy like his is evidence of unease in the body politic.’ [13] Likewise it is possible to interpret The Holy Bible in these opposing ways, only here music rather than comedy provides the context.

Richey Edwards spoke with an increasingly blunt tone as 1994 wore on, seeming to come down even more firmly on the side of free speech by the time that The Holy Bible was complete, again mentioning Bruce.

“Political correctness is more sinister than anything anyone can ever accuse us of… It’s all about language. It’s all aimed at the working class. I read the Guardian and the Times. I also read the Sun – it uses language which is accessible. Lenny Bruce said that being scared of words is also what gives them their power. The word ‘nigger’ is not frightening. You know, his famous quote where he just says, “Nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger”? PC just builds more walls.” [14]

Following the advent of social media it is easier for many more people to be targeted by unwanted, ugly epithets and, conversely, it is harder to avoid the pressure to apologise publicly for words deemed offensive or harmful by others. And so it is easy to say nothing at all. The boundaries between free speech and incitement have been tested in new ways as virtual spats and viral tweets threaten consequences offline. Decades after The Holy Bible, questions of blasphemy have repeatedly been brought back to the centre of politics – only with regard to Islam rather than Christianity. Those in favour of political correctness and those opposed to it have shown an equal sense of urgency, in reaffirming their points of view. The subject remains undeniably relevant.

†

An uptempo, galloping punk-metal spree, ‘P.C.P.’ presents a bleak satirical vision of a future England held in obeisance to political correctness. It describes restrictions placed on language under the pretences of purity and vigilance, as in Orwell’s Oceania; even Shakespeare is feared. [15] The interference of the state and legal system in matters of personal health, responsibility and sexual relationships is conveyed in a frenetic reportage style (‘doctors arrested for euthanasia’; ‘if you’re fat don’t get ill’; ‘lawyers before love, surrogate sex’). In the memorable chorus of the song, PC is equated with policing – its prevalence is deemed to be a victory at too great a cost:

‘PCP – a P.C. police victory

PCP – a P.C. pyrrhic victory

when I was young P.C. meant Police Constable

nowadays I can’t seem to tell the difference.’

In the lyric booklet, the words are printed alongside a detail from a photograph taken by David Savill on 13th March 1937, showing a gas drill for London bobbies at East Ham Police Station. It neatly illustrates the way ‘P.C.P.’ identifies political correctness with police constables from days gone by, and also the image of PC seeking to ‘bring fresh air’ – as against allowing for individual lifestyle choices such as smoking (again implying how the constraints on speech will extend unavoidably to personal freedom in general). But rather than portraying PC as an Orwellian Big Brother with his Thought Police, here political correctness is personified as a female authoritarian – and so extends the range of depictions of femininity on The Holy Bible: between the extremes of an anorexic girl, desperate to gain a sense of self-control through refusing to eat (‘4st 7lb’) and the repressive and even deadly power of ‘She Is Suffering’ and ‘P.C.P.’. Just as the sentiment ‘she is suffering’ is liable to give the wrong impression on a casual first listen, here the line ‘P.C. she speaks impotent, sterile…’ paradoxically suggests not that ‘she’ is powerless, but that ‘her’ power is that of spreading impotence and sterility through the language – comparable to the ‘virtue’, ‘purity’ and ‘goodness’ of ‘Faster’, so hated by Orwell’s Winston Smith.

The Holy Bible cuts against the historical depictions of women as seen in statuary and sculpted figures, on legal and governmental institutions across Europe, standing in for ‘Liberty’ or ‘Justice’; against the unrealistic standards of beauty found in magazines, on billboards, in movies. Instead it presents obese and skeletal, sick and grieving women and allows for the feminine to be representative of more than a stock of readymade ideals – ‘P.C.P.’ offers a monumental counterpoint to what Marina Warner describes as the ‘metal-bound bodies of the Britannias and Virtues who familiarly surround us’. [16] This subversion of cliched imagery is also partly inspired by another comic book strip that Edwards read. Nemesis the Warlock, written by Pat Mills with art by Kevin O’Neill, was first published in 2000AD in July 1980. Drawing on the history of the Spanish Inquisition, the supreme villain of the series is Torquemada, the leader of a savage and murderous human race. ‘P.C.P.’ envisions a ‘ten-foot sign in Oxford Street’ with Torquemada’s motto: ‘Be pure! Be vigilant! Behave!’

The music has a relentless, frantic energy shaped in large part, according to Bradfield, by Therapy?, who would tour with Manic Street Preachers in 1994. He told journalist Keith Cameron: “At this point, they were managing all these reference points that I liked – metal, some post-punk, and delivering it in a really tight, condensed pop way.” [17] It is another indication of the way that the band would engage with other music in analytical, sometimes contrary ways when writing The Holy Bible. The emphasis on the toms and rapid-fire snare hits in the drumming, and the heavily distorted, driving guitar playing on the Therapy? track ‘Trigger Inside’ shows the sort of sonic template that Bradfield speaks of. The song’s lyrics, however, were criticised by Wire, who saw ‘Archives of Pain’ as a reaction to its identification with serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Just as ‘Ifwhiteamerica…’ works as a response of sorts to one of the band’s foremost inspirations, McCarthy, and their song ‘Antiamericancretin’, so too ‘P.C.P.’ updates the 80s group’s ‘Keep An Open Mind Or Else’, which imagines a character who is in favour of the right to disagreement and seeing things from another’s perspective, yet flies between aggression and defensiveness when challenged: ‘Oh shut your trap/Or I’ll shut it up for you/Say anything/I will never be convinced’. ‘P.C.P.’ is reminiscent too – in its pace, its lyrical glut, its dizzying imagery and exuberant, melodic expression of gloom – of another unconventional 80s indie song: REM’s ‘It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)’. Not only does frontman Michael Stipe sing of Lenny Bruce’s fearlessness but there is also a passing mention of Leonid Brezhnev (mentioned on The Holy Bible, in ‘Revol’) and the agricultural policy of ‘Slash and burn’ that the Manics used as a critical metaphor on their debut album. Indeed, Generation Terrorists does at times prefigure the lyrical style of The Holy Bible in its use of extreme physical and biblical imagery to express contemporary concerns: ‘Christen me führer nazarene’ sings Bradfield on ‘Crucifix Kiss’, before warning ‘Censorship’ll stop your excess thought’.

‘P.C.P.’ begins with a metaphor that exemplifies The Holy Bible‘s preoccupation with the body, power and language: ‘Teacher starve your child, P.C. approved/as long as the right words are used/systemised atrocity ignored/as long as bi-lingual signs on view’. [18] As if in violent response to the efforts to reduce the force of words, what follows is a rush of imagery – which writer Larissa Wodtke describes as ‘a series of lyrics that are equivalent to a linguistic binge’. [19] Whereas the human body is literally depicted as starved on ‘4st 7lb’, here the sense is of intellectual starvation. Later in the song, though, still more descriptions of ill-health and injury are introduced – in keeping with the album’s gallery of ailing, exploited, wounded and dead bodies – as it rails against the extension of political control into private lives and individual choice.

The overarching sense is one of dystopia. The journalistic detail, personal reflections and historical judgements that dominate much of The Holy Bible give way to a more surreal vision of the future. The phrase ‘systemised atrocity’ calls to mind JG Ballard’s violent, pornographic predictions of the road ahead – while the opening track ‘Yes’ draws on journalist Nick Davies’ contemporary newspaper report of sexual exploitation in Nottingham, here Edwards projects a final image of a future London where alienation from the self and others is the dominant idea. One of the band’s most powerful early expressions of existential despair, ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, describes a culture that ‘sucks down words’ and the ‘neon loneliness’ of modern society. In ‘P.C.P.’ there is only ‘grey not neon, grey not real’. The Holy Bible‘s urgent attention to the recent past, post-war politics and infamous real-life personalities finally gives way to a feeling of unreality, a hallucinatory vision – a disconnect brought about, as the chorus makes clear, by an inability to speak or think freely.

If ‘P.C.P.’ can be linked politically with ‘Archives of Pain’, being the two unexpected, right-leaning statements on The Holy Bible, there seem to be subtle stylistic connections at the level of the lyrics already: ‘life bleeds, death is your birthright’ is almost a logical extension of the brutal axiom ‘the centre of humanity is cruelty’. [20] And as with the repeated reference to starvation, the idea of sterilisation appears for the second time on the album, following the command to ‘sterilise rapists’ on ‘Archives of Pain’. Again the sense is not literal on ‘P.C.P.’ – words are still used by Edwards and Wire for all their rhetorical and figurative possibilities, in resistance to the incursion of political correctness.

This play with the literal, figurative, satirical, demotic, melodic and rhythmic potential of language abounds on The Holy Bible and most appropriately in ‘P.C.P.’. The image of the ‘stiff upper lip’, which here caricatures the call for censorship among liberals using a phrase traditionally associated with English conservatism, returns later as grotesque: ‘liposuction for your bad mouth boy/cut out your tongue, effigies are sold’ – a line whose graphic violence also returns us to the mutilation of ‘Yes’ (‘he’s a boy, you want a girl so tear off his cock’). Elsewhere, ‘words discoloured, bow to the bland/heal yourself with sinner’s salt’ manages to convey succinctly the sense that PC, for all its focus on racism, empties language of all shade and richness; at the same time introducing a striking contrast, between ‘bland’ and ‘salt’, and introducing another religious reference, in keeping with the larger conceptual framework, at the close of the album.

A more explicit Christian reference soon follows: ‘read Liviticus’ [sic]. Edwards explained how particular verses of the holy book have been used by religious conservatives to denounce homosexuality. The bigot demands that behaviour and language be controlled according to their preferences as much as the liberal, to ‘protect’ society. Edwards’s tour book notes for the song offer this summary:

‘Liviticus [sic] used by homophobes to justify their hatred. To take one sentence from the bible to justify views very PC.’

Another provocative comparison between right and left-wing politics then: focusing morality around the strict adherence to a permitted set of words and views, whether that be scripture interpreted literally or the banning of specific phrases and terms in writing and speech – as if what is proscribed could offer no possible intelligent use, analysis or contextualization, such as Lenny Bruce had suggested even the most offensive words might. As if the right words might save us all.

When it comes to language, The Holy Bible portrays a world of absolute distrust – a conflict between what people say and what they think and experience: ‘all virgins are liars’ according to ‘Yes’; ‘any fool can regret yesterday’ claims ‘Archives of Pain’; and in ‘P.C.P.’ love is not possible without a pre-existing legal arrangement. But ultimately, language is what drives the music. The honesty of the words – Edwards and Wire’s untypical, eye-opening descriptions of personal failing and hypocrisy, and the destructive, hateful and murderous impulses of humankind – are what set the album apart.

Despite ‘P.C.P.’s initially bewildering blast of images and slogans; the disjointed snapshots, bizarre turns of phrase and carnivalesque scenes (‘king cigarette snuffed out by her midgets’), there is underneath it all a sense of the whole album coming together in these final moments – made possible by words, in all their violence, intelligence, humour and musicality. But the sense of tension never lessens: this most bravura attempt at a rock lyric speaks with a sense of defeat when it comes to language and freedom. ‘this land bows down to/ yours, unconditional love and hate’ sings Bradfield, the repeated use of the word ‘bow’ (along with ‘bow to the bland’) only intensifies that sense of defeat, of giving way, that has always been there from the beginning – a mirror image of sorts to the prostitute’s polite deferral in ‘Yes’, to ‘stand for old ladies’. And finally there is unconditional action and emotion, following all of the conditional statements that run through the record (‘Ifwhiteamerica…’, ‘If hospitals cure…’, ‘If you stand up…’, ‘If you really care…’, ‘If you’re fat…’). But it rings hollow.

‘P.C.P.’, and The Holy Bible, ends with another audio sample, this time from the 1983 film version of Ronald Harwood’s play The Dresser, directed by Peter Yates and starring Albert Finney as an aging Shakespearean actor, alongside Tom Courtenay as his faithful, put-upon dresser. Like the archival gas drill illustration, it sums up elements of the song’s lyrics. Finney, in his role as Sir, says: ‘227 Lears and I can’t remember the first line.’ When one considers that ‘P.C.P.’ has presaged a society which must ‘beware Shakespeare’, and ends resigned to a culture comfortably numbed by ‘designer amnesiac’, Sir’s forgetfulness of the Bard’s words, even after so many performances, leaves a sense of foreboding and melancholia hovering over the end of the track, and the record. A despair that has rarely sounded so invigorating, a cry of defiance in the face of inevitable catastrophe.

†

Richey Edwards’s writing would move away from such staunch positions on contemporary political issues. At least one later line appears to be vaguely connected to ‘P.C.P.’ thematically (‘PG certificate all cuts unfocused’) and ‘Me And Stephen Hawking’ attempts a subversive joke – as well as adopting the point of view of protesters against animal cloning – but the words on 2009’s Journal For Plague Lovers are often more inscrutable, or else more intensely personal, and in any case lack the commentary that Edwards so readily offered in interviews about the band’s music. Wire took the power of language, and public access to words, as a central theme of the first song written in Edwards’s absence – what has become Manic Street Preachers’ defining single, ‘A Design For Life’. Though the band forged a new identity as a three-piece, the song’s opening lines still carry within them traces of The Holy Bible‘s fascist imagery and ambiguities – ‘Then work came and made us free’ suggestive both of the gates of Dachau (‘Work makes you free’) pictured in the album booklet, and Orwell’s doublethink constructs (‘Freedom is Slavery’) – despite the celebratory, working-class spirit that spurred Wire’s writing. The subject of free speech also arises on the final track on Know Your Enemy, with Wire seeming to draw on some of ‘P.C.P.’s images – ‘Worship obesity as our birthright’, almost a contraction of ‘if you’re fat don’t get ill’ and ‘life bleeds, death is your birthright’ – at the same time as he seems to undermine the earlier song’s fundamentalist attitude as part of a more general critique of the United States, capitalism and the Free Tibet movement: ‘But freedom of speech won’t feed my children/Just brings heart disease and bootleg clothing’.

In February 1997, Living Marxism was restyled as LM and restated its aim of opposing ‘all censorship, bans and codes of conduct’. The first issue of the new magazine led with an article on the treatment of Muslims at the Trnopolje camp early in the Bosnian War. One particular image was the focus of the piece – an image that had made the front pages of newspapers in the UK, and Time magazine in 1992 – showing the appalling, emaciated appearance of one man, Fikret Alić among a crowd of fellow detainees, staring out at ITN news cameras from behind barbed wire. The Daily Mirror had originally printed a still with the headline ‘Belsen 92′, drawing readers’ attention to the horrors that were unfolding in Europe and comparing the situation to the treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust. But LM contributor Thomas Deichmann had an altogether different perspective. His article claimed that the television news team from ITN had misrepresented what they had seen in Bosnia, moreover that they had ‘fooled the world’ with their coverage. The publication of Deichmann’s article prompted ITN to take legal action and a libel trial was held in 2000. The representatives of LM, led by editor Mick Hume, had little evidence to back up their claims and failed to convince the court of the truth of their allegations. The camp doctor also submitted compelling evidence. The ITN reporters were awarded damages and LM ceased publication. Hume was unrepentant:

“The only thing this court case has proved ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ is that English libel law is a disgrace to democracy and a menace to a free press… we will not keep quiet about the concerns that led us to publish Thomas Deichmann’s article and, reluctantly, to fight this case: freedom of speech, journalistic standards, and the exploitation of the Holocaust.” [21]

At the same time, author David Irving appeared in court in pursuit of a separate libel case that he had brought against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, who claimed in her 1993 publication Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, that Irving’s writing on the subject amounted to Holocaust denial. Irving was found to have misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence in his work on Nazi Germany. The judge ruled ‘that [Irving] is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism’. As with the ITN vs LM trial, the case prompted debates around free speech, English libel laws and the potential cost to writers of engaging with difficult subjects in print. When Irving was arrested in 2006 and imprisoned in Austria for comments he had made publicly in 1989, Lipstadt commented: “I am not happy when censorship wins, and I don’t believe in winning battles via censorship… The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and with truth.” [22]

Richey Edwards would take up the subject of the Holocaust in a unique way himself on The Holy Bible. While he had conveyed to journalists his own dismay at the increasing prevalence of Holocaust denial amongst academic writers, and the profound effect that the band’s visits to Dachau and Belsen in 1993 had on him, he still chose to write about the event in a highly provocative manner.

James Dean Bradfield once tried to capture the band’s instinctual approach and conflicting ideas when it came to politics and art, telling the Belfast Telegraph about an occasion on which he and Nicky Wire attended a speech by Labour politician and Militant member Derek Hatton:

“I was buying Living Marxism at the time, which on reflection I’m a bit embarrassed by. We’d seen our Clash clips, and we knew exactly what kind of band we wanted to be. We sat listening to Hatton, but there was a stench of something we didn’t like. I remember Nick nudging me and saying: ‘Look, he’s wearing a Pringle top!’ That designer-label thing wouldn’t matter so much now, but it mattered to us then. We got up and left.” [23]

The Holy Bible sees Manic Street Preachers reaching extreme conclusions, admitting to contradictions, adopting stances that were soon left behind. The album has nevertheless remained a compelling artwork – a permanent, intensified environment in which the listener is forced to feel, to question, to react. This is only enhanced by the visceral sound – the barked commands, the insistent riffs, the martial roll of drums, and the harsh wash of noise across the album. The Holy Bible keeps alive the voices of victims, of those suffering, as much as it provokes – probing sensitive moral and historical questions, choosing vulgarity and vehemence – trying to establish its own commandments for the modern age. Though the band have since been the first to admit to their own misgivings, to explain how their perspective has shifted over time, The Holy Bible is a manifestation of a fierce instinct, an intellectual and musical confidence rarely matched in popular music. It is a snapshot of a conflicted world and the conflicting feelings that run through each of us. It pushes the limits of the medium, and the rock lyric in particular, in remarkable, poetic ways and says as much as it can while it can. It still speaks volumes.

Notes:

[1] Paphides, Peter ‘Cutting Edge’, Time Out, 7 December 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Cutting_Edge_-_Time_Out,_7th_December_1994 (23 April 2021)

[2] Ellen, Barbara ‘Siamese Animal Men’, NME, 28 May 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Siamese_Animal_Men_-_NME,_28th_May_1994 (14 May 2021)

[3] Watson, Ian ‘Standing Up to the Nazis’, Melody Maker, 28 May 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Standing_Up_To_The_Nazis_-_Melody_Maker,_28th_May_1994 (21 June 2021)

[4] Hall, Stuart ‘Some “politically incorrect” pathways’, in Dunant, Sarah (ed) The War on Words (Virago, 1994)

[5] Hume, Mick ‘The right to be offensive’, Living Marxism 64, February 1994. Accessed online at https://web.archive.org/web/20000610231640/http://www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM64/LM64_Offensive.html (15 April 2021)

[6] James Dean Bradfield has referred to the magazine on separate occasions. In Kevin Cummins’ photobook Assassinated Beauty (Faber & Faber, 2014), Bradfield comments: “‘Culture sucks down words, itemise loathing and feed yourself smiles’ just made complete sense to me after years of fucking reading Sartre and Living Marxism and stuff like that…”

[7] Edwards, Richey The Holy Bible tour programme, 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=The_Holy_Bible_Tour_Programme (23 April 2021)

[8] Akao, Mika, ‘Richey James talks about The Holy Bible‘, Music Life, September 1994. English translation by M. Jun, accessed online at https://solitudegrey.wordpress.com/2020/12/01/richey-james-talks-about-the-holy-bible-music-life-sept-1994/ (20 June 2021)

[9] Edwards, Richey ‘Obscure Objects of Desire’, Cutting Edge, July 1993. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Obscure_Objects_Of_Desire_-_Cutting_Edge,_July_1993 (20 May 2021). This text seems to contain within it an idea (‘All air smells the same’) that would later reappear in the lyrics to ‘Yes’ (‘May as well be heaven this hell smells the same’). ‘Censorshit’ is the title of a then recent song by punk band The Ramones. Its chorus, like the Manics’ ‘Ifwhiteamerica…’, namechecks Tipper Gore – whose censorship campaigns with the PMRC are contrasted with the social, economic and environmental destruction that is brought about by government policies. The track, which appeared on the US band’s 1992 album Mondo Bizarro, is strident in its opposition to artistic censorship:

‘You can stamp out the source

But you can’t stop creative thought…

Before you go preach to me

Your definition of obsenity.

Ah Tipper come on…’

[10] Wall, Mick ‘Rant for Cover’, Raw, 8 June 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Rant_For_Cover_-_RAW,_8th_June_1994

[11] Marlowe, Chris ‘The New Testament’, Metal Hammer, September 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=The_New_Testament_-_Metal_Hammer,_September_1994 (15 April 2021)

[12] ibid

[13] Tynan, Kenneth foreword in Bruce, Lenny How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (Playboy Enterprises, Inc 1965)

[14] Paphides, Peter ‘Cutting Edge’

[15] Another article on political correctness that featured in Living Marxism in 1994 mentions ‘the hapless Hackney headteacher who sent everyone mad by refusing to let her charges see ‘heterosexist’ Shakespeare’. See Heartfield, James ‘Why PC can damage your health’, Living Marxism 65, March 1994. Accessed online at https://web.archive.org/web/20000302125055/http://www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM65/LM65_PC.html (15 May 2021)

[16] Warner, Marina Monuments and Maidens (George Weidenfeld & Nicholson Ltd, 1985)

[17] Cameron, Keith ‘Chapter and verse. Track by track. 13 Reasons to believe in The Holy Bible’, liner notes in The Holy Bible 20 (2014)

[18] ‘bilingual signs on view’ is likely a reference to the ‘equality of treatment’ intended by the Welsh Language Act 1993: ‘An Act to establish a Board having the function of promoting and facilitating the use of the Welsh language, to provide for the preparation by public bodies of schemes giving effect to the principle that in the conduct of public business and the administration of justice in Wales the English and Welsh languages should be treated on a basis of equality, to make further provision relating to the Welsh language, to repeal certain spent enactments relating to Wales, and for connected purposes.’

[19] Wodtke, Larissa ‘Architecture of Memory: The Holy Bible and the Archive’ in Triptych (Repeater Books, 2017)

[20] ‘P.C.P.’ strikes a Beckettian note here too, recalling one striking pronouncement in Waiting For Godot – ‘They give birth astride of a grave’.

[21] Hume, Mick statement on the verdict of the ITN vs LM libel trial. Accessed online at http://www.informinc.co.uk/ITN-vs-LM/legal_battle/ (20 June 2021)

[22] Quoted in ‘Holocaust denier Irving is jailed’, BBC News, 20 February 2006. Accessed online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4733820.stm (20 June 2021)

[23] McNair, James ‘James Dean Bradfield: Everything must go’, Belfast Telegraph. Originally published 2006. Accessed online at https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/incoming/james-dean-bradfield-everything-must-go-28102207.html (15 June 2021)

Barry Kamen’s contribution to The Holy Bible is easy to overlook. A respected figure in the world of fashion, his involvement with Manic Street Preachers’ third album seems to be nothing more than a happy accident. A friend of the design house responsible for overseeing the sleeve and booklet design for the record, Kamen visited their offices during the production of The Holy Bible and painted over a photo of the band taken by Neil Cooper. The resulting image was used for the back cover of the album, which sees the Manics posing in military uniform, only now standing in a circle of fire, each member given a blue halo.

But despite this brief interaction with the group, and as with the work of Jenny Saville and Martin Kippenberger, Kamen’s own wide-ranging body of artwork reflects the imagery, themes and multimedia style of The Holy Bible in its own fascinating, coincidental ways that repay closer attention.

Kamen is best known for his involvement with the Buffalo collective. Led by stylist Ray Petri between 1984 and 1989, Buffalo influenced the fashion industry and popular youth culture in numerous ways. It was multi-ethnic and abandoned gender stereotypes. Inspiration was drawn from traditional African and Native American Indian dress as well as punk gestures and Parisian chic. Petri avoided modelling agencies, finding inspiration in local street life. Kamen said of Petri: ““He took these kids off the street and put them in front of the camera for the first time. A mixed-race boy is now the normal, quintessential, good-looking boy, but at the time it was shocking.” [1]

Kamen grew up in Harlow, Essex and described himself as “a total product of colonialism”, being of mixed Burmese, Irish, Dutch and English heritage. [2] As a model, he became a central figure in Petri’s style revolution, which was inspired as much by music as global clothing trends. The collective also included Kamen’s brother (and model and pop singer) Nick, stylist Mitzi Lorenz, and photographers Jamie Morgan, Marc Lebron and Cameron McVey among others.

Ten years before Manic Street Preachers’ notorious trip to Thailand was featured in The Face ahead of the release of The Holy Bible, the Kamen brothers were photographed together for the magazine, launching the Buffalo look. It was in The Face, i-D and Arena that Petri and the collective first made its mark. MA-1 flight jackets, Levi jeans, Dr Marten boots and pork pie hats became signature items. Sportswear was combined with sartorial elegance. Buffalo images reflected urban toughness, Hollywood beauty and androgyny. New silhouettes were formed from a collage of influences. Singer Neneh Cherry famously referenced the style on her 1988 single ‘Buffalo Stance’. Eventually, the Buffalo look was mimicked on catwalks the world over.

The influence of Buffalo would continue long after Petri’s death in 1989. Kamen said: “It wasn’t about the clothes; it was about the attitude. Everyone’s eyes, everybody’s thinking. You know it looks quite soulful, you know it was much more, you know Ray was a real romantic.” [3]

Kamen was also a prolific painter. As the selection of his work below shows, his artistic output involved the creative use of found materials and an interest in iconography and history that resonates with the music and art of Manic Street Preachers in the Holy Bible era. Religious symbolism, philosophical elements, an iconoclastic spirit, and the interaction of language, figuration and texture are all evident.

Barry Kamen died in 2015 at the age of 52.  

The use of found texts is widespread in Kamen’s art. Book pages are painted over in what appears to be an unconscious, expressionistic style. But there is typically a considered engagement with the specific material, whether through erasure, addition, or other gestures that prompts the viewer to reconsider the whole. In many examples, there is a clear use of religious source materials and/or symbolism.

The word ‘nothing’ is shown, somewhat paradoxically, to be rich with expressive potential. As in Shakespeare’s King Lear (‘Nothing will come of nothing.’) and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (‘Nothing to be done.’) It is crucial to The Holy Bible too, on which James Dean Bradfield sings, ‘I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing’. This series also considers the nature of God, desire and the soul using as its basis Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1896 collection of reflective essays, The Treasure of the Humble.

Evolution of England combines erasure and ink drawing, referring to photographic images of historical figures which have been recomposed by hand over another found text. Featuring Adolf Hitler on one page, and Andy Warhol showing the scars that resulted from his attempted assassination by Valerie Solanas on the other, this part of the artwork in particular resonates with the title and lyrics of ‘Of Walking Abortion’.

Certain figures from culture and politics feature in Kamen’s artworks repeatedly, often across a variety of media. Mao Zedong is represented in drawn, painted and collaged form. Incidentally, the Chinese communist leader’s image also features on the military jacket worn by Nicky Wire in the group portrait of Manic Street Preachers painted over by Kamen in 1994.

All artworks by Barry Kamen under copyright.

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/77445400@N08/

Notes:

[1] Graham, Mhairi ‘How Buffalo shaped the landscape of 80s fashion’, Dazed Digital, 24 August 2015. Accessed online at https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/26041/1/new-film-on-iconic-80s-buffalo-subculture-jamie-morgan-barry-kamen (3 March 2021)

[2] Stansfield, Ted ’80s style icon and Buffalo boy Barry Kamen dies aged 52′, Dazed Digital, 5 October 2015. Accessed online at https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/26850/1/80s-style-icon-and-buffalo-boy-barry-kamen-dies-aged-52 (3 March 2021)

[3] Smith, Zadrian ‘Ray Petri(e): The Man and His Legacy’, Volt Café, 2 September 2013. Accessed online at https://www.voltcafe.com/features/ray-petrie-the-man-and-his-legacy (3 March 2021)

“And you’ve organised the show around the polarities of love and revolution, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right, it’s a quotation by Che Guevara that goes, ‘A true revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love’. So you have this idea that to be a revolutionary you have to want to love something enough to want to fight for it or die for it. And I think artists are also revolutionaries or can be in the way that they’ve changed how we look at the world. So it’s that idea of political revolution and also personal revolution that I was interested in.” – Jeremy Deller, speaking at the opening of Unconvention, an exhibition inspired by Manic Street Preachers

“Thank God, something did begin! But everything that began was done wrongly. So what do you do? Celebrate or weep?” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Lenin’s tomb

In April 1994, the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction was awarded to David Remnick for Lenin’s Tomb. Based on four years of journalism written for the Washington Post, the book chronicles the last days of the Soviet Union. Explaining his choice of title, Remnick said:

“I think it’s an ironic image, symbolising – at first it was meant to symbolise the eternal god Lenin… the old saying in Soviet lore was, ‘Lenin lives, Lenin lives and Lenin will always live’. And now we find out that underneath Lenin there’s a gymnasium where the soldiers work out, and the tomb itself is run by the Russian Institute of Aromatic Plants… And there have been instances when the body has disintegrated when Lenin had to be shipped out to the Urals during the war, so it’s a fairly sad and pathetic story, symbolising a fairly sad and tragic history of the Soviet Union.” [1]

As if echoing the sentiment, an image of Lenin lying in state was selected by Richey Edwards to appear in the booklet of The Holy Bible alongside the lyrics for ‘Revol’, the second single to be released from the album. The revolutionary leader is the first of a number of political figures namechecked in the song, the first verse of which follows the arc of Communist rule after 1917. In his own unusual way, Edwards was commenting on the history of the Soviet Union, and revolution in general – expressing a pessimistic view of human relations and collective action. By comparison with songs like ‘Yes’ and ‘Ifwhiteamerica…’, ‘Revol’ foregoes a documentary approach to its subject, such that Remnick’s book might have inspired. It is not written with the same type of moral vehemence found in ‘Of Walking Abortion’ and ‘Archives of Pain’, either (though we do see the reappearance of Boris Yeltsin, and further traces of fascist themes). ‘Revol’ is among the most idiosyncratic lyrics on The Holy Bible, and in Manic Street Preachers’ entire discography.

In interviews, Edwards articulated his point of view plainly, but ‘Revol’ is nevertheless open to much interpretation. It appears to mark a shift in Edwards’s writing style that would be developed further in the lyrics later used for Journal For Plague Lovers – playing with formal structure, juxtaposition, metaphor and black humour, in ways distinct from the collaborative lines traded with Nicky Wire. But this is not to say that it does not share certain characteristics with earlier songs by the band, or even other tracks on The Holy Bible; that it might not seem an altogether revolutionary transformation in lyrical approach, once we pay attention to it in some detail. A closer look at ‘Revol’ is also necessary to get past the brief, puzzled responses offered by critics and writers – many of whom all too easily lapse into inaccurate summaries that present it as a kind of Cold War ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, with Stalin in place of ‘Little Joe’, overemphasising the references to sexuality in the lyrics, while ignoring the blander romantic sentiments and vaguer phrases Edwards associates with an array of political figures – and not only those from Soviet history.

According to Nicky Wire, the song came together at a late stage in the recording process and although Bradfield claims that it was ‘This Is Yesterday’ that finally helped him and Sean Moore bring the album together musically, he felt ‘Revol’ was another “lighter moment”. [2] Still, Bradfield delivers the lyric with that familiar combination of cold announcement and barked refrains heard across The Holy Bible. After the frenetic coda of ‘Archives of Pain’ slows to its ominous conclusion, ‘Revol’ soon revives the antic zeal. The heavy, distorted, swirling chord patterns that burst forth after the song’s intro blend the guitar styles of John McGeogh and contemporaries such as tour mates Therapy? and the US band Girls Against Boys, whom Bradfield claimed were a mainstay of his stereo while recording the album. [3] The modal approach, using tritone, semitone and minor intervals and the quickly shifting chord progression of the chorus creates a sense of sustained tension and unease throughout, while on the surface it remains a blazing post-punk anthem. Bradfield has also credited Stuart Adamson in particular, most likely through his work in The Skids, as a key inspiration for the track. On their 1979 track ‘Vanguard’s Crusade’, a B-side from the Days in Europa album – which is likely to have inspired Bradfield and Moore’s music for The Holy Bible with its propulsive, machinic rhythms and heavily modulated guitar sound, using chorus and phasing effects – singer Richard Jobson narrates the story of an old man looking back on the political struggles of his youth and the betrayals suffered, before the call to unite is repeated again.

†††

In early 1994 David Remnick travelled to Cavendish, Vermont to interview the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shortly before his return to Russia after twenty years, bringing some of the central historical matters of Lenin’s Tomb to the fore. The revolution which gave birth to a Communist empire had also brought about mass killing, impoverishment and fearful silence. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was great uncertainty about the future. Solzhenitsyn said of seeing the statue of the Bolshevik official Dzerzhinsky, or ‘Iron Felix’, come down outside the KGB building in 1991, after a failed coup d’etat against Mikhail Gorbachev:

“You know, I felt deep inside that this was not yet a victory. I knew how deeply Communism had penetrated into the fabric of life. Afterward, for two years, we tap-danced about, and what were we doing? What was Yeltsin doing? We forgot everything else and fought one another. The same is true now. All is in decay. It’s too early to celebrate.” [4]

By 1993, critical attitudes towards president Boris Yeltsin and his economic reform policies saw growing opposition in the Russian parliament, with increasing support for the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as well as the Communist party. Solzhenitsyn was hesitiant in offering hope, despite his determination to return home.

Away from Russian politics, in February 1994 The New York Times published an article on the mysterious life of the Cambodian political leader Pol Pot, who had overseen his own murderous Communist regime, the Khmer Rouge, from 1975 to 1979 and was now living comfortably, propped up by Thai money and armaments. In the same edition, the paper ran an opinion piece focusing on anti-Semitism within the Nation of Islam and the complicity of its leader, Louis Farrakhan. [5] No doubt aware of the history of all these political movements, all the ideological fervour which had led to slaughter, racism, economic disaster, Richey Edwards captured the sense of dismay in ‘Revol’.

Though its cast of historical figures means that the lyrics bear a surface resemblance to those of ‘Archives of Pain’, ‘Faster’, ‘Ifwhiteamerica…’ and ‘Of Walking Abortion’, adding to The Holy Bible‘s encyclopaedic quality, it is out of step with the album’s use of religious imagery and language, and its journalistic nature.

Visions of dead desire

In an early interview for Snub TV, Nicky Wire announced matter-of-factly: “We will never write a love song ever. Full stop.” As if to prove their aversion to ballads, serenades and those teenage confessions of sexual attraction and heartache that shaped early rock ‘n’ roll, so inspired as the Manics were by the confrontational, political music of The Clash and Public Enemy, the band recorded ‘You Love Us’ and ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’, songs of arrogance, disillusion and contempt, for their debut album Generation Terrorists. Remaining true to Wire’s words for the most part, The Holy Bible era does, somewhat surprisingly, see the theme arising across B-sides but again framed in a pessimistic way; from the bleak certainties of ‘Comfort Comes’ on the Life Becoming a Landslide EP, to the sparse, melancholic ‘Too Cold Here’ and finally ‘Love Torn Us Under’. ‘She Is Suffering’ speaks against desire altogether. ‘Revol’ is as close to a love song as one can find on The Holy Bible – and it too is characteristically cynical, with suggestions of celibacy, vanity and divorce.

According to Edwards, ‘Revol’ was meant as a palindrome, reading ‘Lover’ backwards. [6] While this might at first suggest an affinity with Che Guevara’s concept of the true revolutionary being ‘guided by a great feeling of love’, Edwards explained his own point of view bluntly in the band’s tour programme:

‘All adolescent leaders of men FAILED. All love FAILS. If men of the calibre of Lenin and Trotsky failed, then how can anyone expect anything to change. Won’t get fooled again.’ [7]

The passing reference to The Who is worth picking up on. It suggests that Edwards had in mind another, musical, reference point in writing about political disillusion and the impossibility of revolution, best captured in one immortal line, sung by Roger Daltrey: ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.’ There is a curious overlap here with the sentiments of ‘Revol’, at least in its ‘revolution’ aspect, as well as the idea of left and right mirroring one another that encompasses much of The Holy Bible, as we find when we look at the song’s lyrics:

There’s nothing in the streets

Looks any different to me

And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye

And the parting on the left

Is now parting on the right

Speaking with RAW magazine, Edwards expanded on his idea:

“Revolutionary leaders are very powerful icons when you’re young. They were all idealistic and ill-fated, ‘cos power corrupts, but they are a very extreme symbol. They offered something to believe in, something that went very sour. I linked that theme to the same theory with love. The words start off with love being all-consuming and fantastic and ends up falling apart with ‘alimony, alimony’ being repeated.” [8]

This is perhaps the clearest explanation of the lyric that Edwards gave to the press; a negative counterpoint to Marx and Engels’ stages of the proletarian revolution as outlined in their 1848 Communist Manifesto. Still it fails in its own way to account for the unexpected array of people named, and the vaguer poetic phrases that Edwards weds to certain of those people. It seems that it is easy, too, to be fooled into thinking the song is merely about the kinky private lives of communists.

Four lines in particular have shaped most of the critical interpretations of the song:

‘Mr Stalin – bisexual epoch

…

Brezhnev – married into group sex

Gorbachev – celibate self-importance

Yeltsin – failure is his own impotence’

In Triptych, a book which focuses in-depth on the lyrical themes and style of the album, the song is given reasonably little consideration by all three of its authors; all of whom misrepresent the lyrics in varying degrees. Rhian E Jones describes the song as ‘juxtaposing political figures with images of sexual and emotional dysfunction or debauchery’. Larissa Wodtke narrowly focuses on the first verse, referring to ‘Revol’ as ‘a track that places Russian leaders next to sexual acts with no apparent correlation to reality’. Meanwhile Daniel Lukes considers the song ‘a puerile joke, imagining the sex lives of politicians’ and compares Edwards’s approach with that of JG Ballard in his short story ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. [9] In another recent study of the album, writer David Evans arrives at a summary somewhere between all three, saying the song ‘matches twentieth-century politicians with various sexual acts’. [10]

There is precisely one sexual act mentioned in the song: ‘group sex’. Whether or not Leonid Brezhnev was ever involved orgies, the remaining lines contain no descriptions of sex, or ‘debauchery’ at all. The listener might imagine the naked figure serenaded in the second verse engaging in coitus before or after the passionate tribute (and might even imagine that it is Leon Trotsky singing if they so wish); the references to sexuality, however – ‘bisexual’, ‘celibate’, ‘impotence’ – are used in a vaguely metaphorical way.

But Lukes and Evans are alert to another key aspect of ‘Revol’: its psychoanalytic quality; seeing sexuality, the stages of sexual development and the dynamics of interpersonal relationships mirrored in politics, power and the revolutionary impulse. [11] Mathijs Peters also considers the effect of this approach in the lyrics:

‘It could also be argued that the song is driven by the attempt to de-mystify the leaders mentioned in its lyrics, embedding them in references to narcissism, group sex, impotence and bisexuality. These references reduce the often horrible role that these people played in history to a longing for power that, the lyrics suggest, is born in the pathology of their psychosexual self-formation.’  [12]

Edwards treats his subject matter, sex and power, in a way distinct from that of ‘Yes’ – but similarly hopeless. As with that song’s picture of prostitution and exploitation, Edwards seems to be promoting a view of liberated sexuality, love and revolution not as positively transformative but inevitably doomed. His way of doing so, however, is apt to confuse listeners. As compared with the judgmental, didactic style of much of The Holy Bible and the admissions of personal vulnerability in other songs such as ‘4st 7lb’ and ‘Die in the Summertime’, it is hard to square the lines with what Edwards deemed them to be saying.

The double thinkers

In his ‘Two Encyclopaedia Articles’ of 1922, Sigmund Freud explained the concept of free association:

‘The treatment is begun by the patient being required to put himself in the position of an attentive and dispassionate self-observer, merely to read off all the time the surface of his consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of the most complete honesty, while on the other not to hold back any idea from communication, even if (1) he feels that it is too disagreeable or if (2) he judges that it is nonsensical or (3) too unimportant or (4) irrelevant to what is being looked for.’

There is something of The Holy Bible in this; in its interweaving of the personal, the ephemeral, the oblique, the factual, the baffling and the brazen. It is at once dispassionate and searingly personal; cogent and conflicted. It is also opposed to censorship – the subject of the album’s final track, ‘PCP’.

There is a way of reading ‘Revol’ as if it is a product of the sort of repressive regime under which the Soviet populations lived; as if it is oddly in keeping with the Communist Party’s prose, as described by David Remnick, with its ‘great clots of language that had no purpose other than meaninglessness’; a language ‘of indirection and euphemism’. [13] Read the opposite way, Edwards’s words can be seen to be breaking free of any such deadening constraints, reaching for poetic constructions unhindered by influence and connecting names and concepts that would ordinarily remain far apart, unthinkable together. This, despite Solzhenitsyn’s condemnation of popular music and movies as culture.

In contrast to the generally dense lyrical content of the songs on The Holy Bible, the style is as simple as that of ‘Repeat’, from Generation Terrorists – and it contains within it a similar tension. [14] Just as ‘Repeat’ demands the listener to ‘Repeat after me’, while promoting the idea of overthrowing traditional power structures – the push and pull of the group and the individual – ‘Revol’s images of vanguard revolutionaries are punctuated by the orders of fascism – in German and Italian phrases: ‘raus raus, fila fila’. These also link the song with ‘Of Walking Abortion’ and ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’, and the album’s repeated warnings of the impulses towards authoritarianism – whether in spite of, or precisely as a consequence of, the type of political and romantic failure that Edwards judges to be unavoidable. Remnick described the pathetic reality beneath the memorial of Lenin, idolised and apparently calmly at rest – and the way in which one Moscow statue representing the Soviet space programme was commonly referred to as the ‘Impotent Man’s Dream’. ‘Revol’ speaks of what is rampant, self-delusional and futile behind romantic images; the band’s commanding and abrasive delivery sounding only the dissolution of youthful dreams. The middle eight section of the song has a melodic progression that suggests the sombre air of a Soviet symphony in a sped-up post-punk style – an atmosphere later echoed in the doleful orchestral music that opens ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’.

There is a surfeit of possible meanings or associations that present themselves when re-reading ‘Revol’. Given the focus on revolutionary communism throughout the song, what are we to make of the references to Napoleon and Chamberlain? Is the analogy broadened here, to connect the desire for political conquest and later appeasement, with the beginning and ending stages of a relationship? (How easily ‘childhood sweethearts’ might have been rendered as ‘love’s sweet exile’, in reference to both another Manics song and the French emperor’s fate. Thankfully not.) A draft of the lyrics reprinted in The Holy Bible 20 reveals that the opening line was at one point going to be: ‘Mr Lenin – descent of arousal’ while certain other non-English-language phrases were considered by Edwards for the chorus: ‘Via cessionis’ (referring to the Great Schism in the Catholic church in the 14th century); ‘Anschluss’ and ‘Festung Europa’. All suggestive of dissolution and dominance, of break-ups and land-grabs, that Edwards was obviously seeking to link with personal relationships – with ‘lebensraum’, or ‘living room’ being the most eye-opening way of comparing a shared domestic arrangement with a malign political project.

The critical shorthand descriptions that refer to the more overt references to sex and sexuality in the song rarely reflect the second verse, in which the quickly established pattern already begins to break down. As with the phrase ‘awaken the boy’, ‘childhood sweethearts’ and ‘honeymoon, serenade the naked’, rather than suggesting deviance in the Politburo, evoke the romantic poetry of an earlier century. Edwards mentioned Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ as a favourite poem, in which Larkin draws on a traditional poetic form, that of the morning song. [15] Typically an aubade is sung by a departing lover, but finds a despairing reinvention in Larkin’s verse. It is possible to look at ‘Revol’ as an attempt at something similar: Edwards’s description of a honeymoon serenade followed swiftly by ‘withdrawn traces’ and ‘alimony’, and their associations with separation and divorce.

We find similar experiments in form when we look to some of the later lyrics that Edwards wrote, that appeared on Journal For Plague Lovers in 2009. Rather than the recognisable splicing of quotes and statements gathered from an array of media and expressing Edwards’s and Wire’s own perspective on contemporary culture and politics, ‘Revol’ has a lyrical structure that is more schematic. The sentiments of the second part of each verse line seem to bear no relation to the lives of those historical figures mentioned. It is as if Edwards has gathered a group of phrases (and they might have been taken from an as yet unidentified source) and each one has been juxtaposed with a leader. There seems to be a similar approach at play in a lyric such as ‘Pretension/Repulsion’, which might have been a highly disciplined expression adopting the style of Blake’s or Shakespeare’s writing, with contractions within as well as Edwards’s absence of linkages between words – but which equally suggests that Edwards used a found text and isolated every word that contained a contraction, foregoing any readily interpretable meaning in favour of stretching the possibilities of the lyric and the creative use of existing material.

Following her brief, unilluminating overview of ‘Revol’, Larissa Wodtke nevertheless points to the temptation to read more into it, and the album as a whole:

‘The tension between leaving fragments unresolved and the desire to make connections for meaning is indicative of a struggle with confronting and learning from difficult knowledge, a fever to keep returning to the archive and make sense of it.’ [16]

Finally it is impossible to land on a definitive meaning behind ‘Revol’ beyond that suggested by Edwards himself but musically it is no less captivating for all the bewilderment it causes. Journalist Keith Cameron called it ‘Unexplainable’ in his liner notes for the 2014 reissue. As with ‘Faster’ it continues to throw up odd details and new perspectives years after it was written and recorded. Sticking with the simplest of interpretations, however, James Dean Bradfield recalled: “Talking about ‘Revol’ I said to him [Richey] ‘You’re just making a load of despots get together aren’t you?’ And he said that was pretty much it.” [17]

At the time of the album’s release, Nicky Wire described ‘Revol’ as a characteristically “Richey lyric”:

“All those lines like ‘Breshnev [sic] married into group sex’, are just analogies, really. It’s trying to say that relationships in politics, and relationships in general, are failures. It’s very much a Richey lyric, and some of it’s beyond my head. He’s saying that all of these revolutionary leaders were failures in relationships – probably because all his relationships have failed!” [18]

For several years following the release of The Holy Bible, Edwards’s writing about love and revolution seems only to have inspired the title of one otherwise unrelated song: ‘Enola/Alone’, from Everything Must Go, in which Wire uses a palindrome of his own. But the coupling of romantic themes with references to left-wing and even Soviet politics do in fact run through the rest of the band’s work. Wire took a similar approach on Lifeblood with ‘Glasnost’, which uses the drama of late Soviet history as a way of describing a desire for love and meaningful communication in the face of a complex, fraught present. The video for ‘(It’s Not War) Just the End of Love’ sees Cold War opponents united, in the passionate embrace of two chess players. ‘Golden Platitudes’, a companion song of sorts to ‘Glasnost’, again returns to Edwards’s metaphor: ‘Born to be a communist / but then the marriage failed.’ But it is Bradfield who has most recently carried on the theme, in his lyrics for ‘Distant Colours’, where a depiction of a romance in collapse is linked with images of banners falling to the ground, expressing a disillusion brought about by the way in which former political ideals have been betrayed, and the blurring of left- and right-wing politics that leaves only a ‘cold war for the mind’.

Revolution or its abortion?

‘And in the absence of any relevant politics they make false separations and throw around labels. Well, who are the saboteurs and the terrorists??? We are. All of us… who strike terror in the heart of the bourgeois honkies and all their armchair bookquoting jive-ass honky leftists/white collar radicals who are the VD of the revolution.’ – Up Against the Wall Motherfucker

One radical political movement of the post-war era that set out its stall with an acknowledgement of the failure of previous revolutionary groups, antipathy towards other leftist groups, and an emphasis on the body and sexuality was Black Mask. Between 1967 and 1968 the group, which was founded by Ben Morea, undertook countless actions and produced a series of ten magazines focusing on issues around US imperialism (specifically the war in Vietnam); the conditions of the working class, black and other minority ethnic citizens; police violence; high art culture and the peaceful protests of hippy movements, which they judged to be ineffective against the ‘racist pig oppressor’ and the bourgeoisie.

In a 2006 interview, Morea explained: “From my perspective and that of the people we worked with we saw a need to change everything from the way we lived to the way we thought to the way we even ate. Total Revolution was our way of saying that we weren’t going to settle for political or cultural change, but that we want it all, we want everything to change. Western society had reached a stalemate and needed a total overhaul. We knew that wasn’t going to happen, but that was our demand, what we were about.” [19]

Described as a “street gang with analysis” Black Mask were defiant in the face of what they saw as doctrinaire, weak, faux-revolutionary movements – with some members of the group rejected by the more well-known Situationists. When one friend, Valerie Solanas – from whose SCUM Manifesto the song title ‘Of Walking Abortion’ is derived – was arrested and widely vilified for shooting Andy Warhol, Morea rallied to her defence, saying: “Everybody I met was very negative about it, but, hey, I disliked Andy Warhol immensely and I loved Valerie. I felt she was right in her anger and that he was way more destructive than she was because he was helping to destroy the whole idea of creativity in art.” [20]

Black Mask writings explicitly draw upon the psychoanalytical theories of Freud as well as Wilhelm Reich, author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Sexual Revolution (original German title: Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf). In Issue 9 of the group’s magazine they examine the repression in daily life and the rise of egotism and fetishism that inhibits a successful revolution, and call for a liberation of sexuality. There is an emphasis on stultifying political structures and language forms and on the importance of using the body:

‘Thus, we must find our way back to the body; language must be made to destroy itself; we must find a way of communicating our feeling of our bodies, subverting all the scientific and historical categories that have so far only been agents of repression.’ [21]

As the group’s activities increasingly drew the involvement of law enforcement, leading to the dissolution of Black Mask, another movement grew outwards. The Family, commonly referred to as ‘Up Against the Wall Motherfucker’, was a larger collective interested in unconventional communal forms, the potential of psychedelics and disruptive activities at political and cultural centres. As with the Black Mask group, The Family produced many pamphlets mixing agitprop and Dadaist poetry. As if rejecting the pessimism of The Who in advance, one summed up the breakthroughs they saw as a possibility for their self-described ‘Armed-Love-Motherfucker’ tribe:

‘Those for whom the century old oppression has loosened cannot be fooled again… we challenge the total oppression of man of which until now the revolution has been part. We challenge the revolution itself. Power to no one. Life to everyone.’ [22]

The Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker writings clearly made an impact on Richey Edwards – whether before writing ‘Revol’ or afterwards is not clear but the link was made nonetheless. A selection of lines from the groups’ magazines and leaflets flash briefly in the promotional video for the song, three taken from a ‘Bulletin’ of June 1968, following a clash with members of the hippie community:

VIOLENCE EXISTS – WE DID NOT CREATE IT

GHETTOS EXIST – WE DO NOT PROFIT FROM THEM

MEN ARE SUPPRESSED – WE DO NOT SUPPRESS THEM

Other striking lines are taken from an array of Black Mask magazines, including Issue 9 – ‘The proletarian revolution is the sexual revolution’ – while Edwards repurposed one derisive turn of phrase, used in promos for the Revol single and in later editions of the album: ‘The white liberal is the VD of the revolution’, adapted from the text ‘Another Carnival of Left Politics’. [23] Though Edwards was expressly doubtful about the efficacy of such movements, the combination of ideas, themes, the creative art design and Dadaist poetry seems to have reflected his own interests such that he began to incorporate phrases into the presentation of The Holy Bible.

Celebrate or weep?

In April 1994, Manic Street Preachers were preparing for a series of concerts in Thailand. The trip was the subject of two remarkable feature articles, written for the NME and The Face, in which Edwards’s own sexual proclivities and forthright political perspectives were a source of fascination. In the same issue of The Face in which journalist Andrew Smith’s report was featured in June 1994, another news item was published, written by Lucie Young, which reported briefly on a current art movement in the US, known as F.I.R.E. [First Issue Reserved Edition] and based around subversive stamp art. A full-page illustration showed colourful examples. Edwards noticed the article, using it as the basis for artwork that would accompany the single release of ‘Revol’.

From the photographic reproductions of working materials that appear in The Holy Bible 20, we can see that Edwards has handwritten the Solzhenitsyn question – Celebrate or weep? – underneath one of the featured stamp artworks. Applying the same idea to a then recently issued set of D-Day commemorative stamps, Edwards extended his approach to collage, bringing yet another medium into the art of The Holy Bible, while also extending the lines of reference across history – political, musical (the stamp design also resembling the 7-inch sleeve for The Skids’ Working for the Yankee Dollar) and artistic. All given the band’s own hammer and sickle imprint, which, along with Martin Kippenberger’s painting Sympathetische Kommunistin used as the cover image, is liable to cause as much puzzlement as the song’s lyrics. The confusion would seem to be part of the point. A reflection of the situation; of the conflicting motives and emotions felt within the individual in Western society, as eloquently expressed by the French writer Octave Mirbeau on the back cover of The Holy Bible.

The quote on the insert is from that most penetrating commentator on the dangers of ideology and idolatry, of the evils of communism and fascism: George Orwell – who saw that it was possible to look in one direction and then another and see only the same thing, mirrored:

‘Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’

Notes:

[1] TV interview with Charlie Rose, 8 June 1993. Accessed online at https://charlierose.com/videos/3177# (23 February 2021)

[2] Cameron, Keith ‘Chapter and verse. Track by track. 13 Reasons to believe in The Holy Bible’, liner notes in The Holy Bible 20 (2014)

[3] ‘6 influences that have shaped Manic Street Preachers… in ways you wouldn’t expect’, BBC Radio 6 Music, 12 February 2018. Accessed online at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2k0HyJXs3bCX16T7JLGLzbP/6-influences-that-have-shaped-manic-street-preachers-in-ways-you-wouldn-t-expect (21 March 2021)

[4] Remnick, David ‘The Exile Returns’, The New Yorker, 14 February 1994. Accessed online at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/02/14/the-exile-returns (23 February 2021)

[5] See ‘The Stew of Hate’, The New York Times, 6 February 1994. Accessed online at https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/06/opinion/the-stew-of-hate.html (23 February 2021). And Shenon, Philip ‘Pol Pot, the Mass Murderer Who Is Still Alive and Well’, The New York Times, 6 February 1994. Accessed online at https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/06/weekinreview/pol-pot-the-mass-murderer-who-is-still-alive-and-well.html (23 February 2021).

[6] Akao, Mika, ‘Richey James talks about The Holy Bible’, Music Life, September 1994. English translation by M. Jun, accessed online at https://juritr.web.fc2.com/manics/94musiclife.html (20 February 2021). Sonic Youth had already used a similar play on words, with their 1986 album title Evol.

[7] Edwards, Richey The Holy Bible tour programme, 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=The_Holy_Bible_Tour_Programme (20 February 2021)

[8] Johnson, Howard ‘Sex, Scars and Revolution…’, RAW, 17 August 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Sex,_Scars_And_Revolution…_-_RAW,_17th_August_1994 (23 February 2021)

[9] Jones, Lukes, Wodtke Triptych (Repeater Books, 2017). The links with Ballard that Lukes makes are tenous – but comments on ‘Revol’ in general would seem more appropriate as descriptions of Ballard’s short story. Edwards does follow Ballard’s line of thinking on society’s ‘periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders’.

[10] Evans, David The Holy Bible (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

[11] The use of the term ‘self-love’ is associated with the German sociologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. Sex and power also preoccupied another writer closely linked with The Holy Bible: Michel Foucault.

[12] Peters, Mathijs Popular Music, Critique and Manic Street Preachers (Palgrave, 2020)

[13] Remnick, David Lenin’s Tomb (Viking, 1993)

[14] That song also makes reference indirectly to Pol Pot, with a passing mention of the Khmer Rouge.

[15] See Price, Simon ‘Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers chooses his Men of the Year’, Melody Maker, 25 December 1993. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Richey_Edwards_Of_Manic_Street_Preachers_Chooses_His_Men_Of_The_Year_-_Melody_Maker,_25th_December_1993 (12 March 2021)

[16] Wodtke, Larissa ‘Architecture of Memory: The Holy Bible and the Archive’ in Triptych

[17] Doran, John ‘New Testament: Manic Street Preachers on Journal for Plague Lovers’, The Quietus, 30 April 2009. Accessed online at https://thequietus.com/articles/01583-new-testament-manic-street-preachers-interviewed-about-journal-for-plague-lovers-richey-edwards-and-the-holy-bible (12 March 2021)

[18] ‘Manics’ New Testament’, Melody Maker, 27 August 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Manics%27_New_Testament_-_Melody_Maker,_27th_August_1994 (20 February 2021)

[19] Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: The Incomplete Works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask Group (PM Press, 2011)

[20] ibid.

[21] ibid.

[22] ibid.

[23] A photocopied detail from another leaflet, ‘Self-Defense’ can also be seen among the archival items reproduced in the twentieth anniversary edition of The Holy Bible.

“Art is, in fact, always viewed after the fact, from outside, seldom at the moment it’s created – I’d say twenty years after. After that, one finally determines what effect the work and the artist had. How people then will talk about me, or won’t talk about me, that’s what will count.” – Martin Kippenberger

For all three of the single releases that accompanied The Holy Bible, the band used artwork by Martin Kippenberger. Speaking about the German artist on the occasion of the opening of Jeremy Deller’s 1999 exhibition Unconvention, based around Manic Street Preachers’ cultural references, Nicky Wire explained:

“After The Holy Bible we were looking for a single cover for ‘Faster’ and ‘PCP’. If you remember, it was a Chinese or Japanese kid with a bottle of Coke, sucking on a straw. I’d only vaguely heard of Kippenberger before that, and I found it in a book. I thought it was perfect. And from then on, I really got into him. He’s not that famous. Obviously, in Germany, he is more. But he’s lived to the minute, the exact opposite to me, in every sense.” [1]

While Jenny Saville had only recently graduated from the Glasgow School of Art when her triptych Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) was chosen as the front cover image for the album, Kippenberger had been active within the art world since the 1970s. Despite his prodigious output in a wide variety of media, and the role he played in supporting other emerging artists, his imposing personality and hard-living lifestyle often overshadowed the work – and even that was treated with scepticism by many, including such close collaborators as one-time assistant Michael Krebber who admitted ‘he made me want throw up’ on first meeting Kippenberger, finding his art ‘bad, blunt, and insensitive’. [2] Kippenberger’s reputation has only grown since his death in 1997 at the age of 44. Often overlooked for prestigious exhibitions that showcased the works of his peers both in Europe and America during his lifetime – and seen by some as more of a prankster than someone to be taken seriously – his work is now part of museum collections worldwide and the subject of hugely successful retrospectives, notably The Problem Perspective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2009.

†††

Kippenberger’s childhood years were spent in the mining town of Essen-Frillendorf, in the Ruhr valley. While his family enjoyed a comfortable and highly sociable lifestyle, the surrounding industry, in which his father worked for a time as a mine director, was in decline – this would soon be replaced by the booming retail economy that would transform Germany. [3] Kippenberger’s disruptive behaviour and restlessness affected his school education but he saw himself as an artist from the start. After attending the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts for a number of semesters he moved to Berlin, setting up an office, hosting events and building friendships with countless other artists, collectors, bar workers and gallerists. Kippenberger’s antipathy to staying in one place saw him visit and live for varying periods of time in many cities across the world throughout his life; from Germany to Spain, LA and Vienna. Unceasing in his artistic creativity, highly demanding of others, unashamedly honest, even openly insulting, Kippenberger invested all of his energy and his resources into his work. As Nicky Wire suggested, far from nurturing the sort of bedroom introspection preferred by the young Manics, Kippenberger was an extrovert. He moved continually, always enjoyed a riotous night life and made many ‘families’. Somewhat unusually, though, for someone who was the happy subject of countless photographs, and a dominating presence at public events, there is little recorded footage of Kippenberger and he granted relatively few interviews.

Through his use of caustic humour, wordplay, historical references, idiosyncratic recurring motifs, autobiographical elements and an enthusiasm for repurposing a vast array of media and everyday objects, Kippenberger left an enormous body of work – much of which was made with the help of assistants, students and friends, regularly turning out several paintings, or multiples each day. Kippenberger was liable to turn any conversation into a performance, any sketch or found material into a new piece – he bartered with artworks, too, typically in exchange for a lifetime of free food and drink at his favourite restaurants. While the relationship between his titles and visual content is often oblique, or else seemingly nothing more than a flippant pun or slogan, Kippenberger devoted himself to his own strict artistic standards. He often depicted himself and his personal failings – accepting of humiliation, following a ‘principle of embarrassment’ – and was quick to puncture artistic pretensions and hijack the comforts of consumerism, ready to unsettle any onlookers. Playful with tropes from art history, Kippenberger was equally unafraid to confront historical guilt.

Just as he was openly critical of his peers, self-lacerating in his self-portraits and unhesitant in breaking taboos relating to Germany’s past, Kippenberger also presented religious imagery in new, shocking ways – most famously in his numerous works featuring a crucified frog, one of which was the subject of a highly publicised protest at the time of a posthumous exhibition in 2008. It is unlikely that the Fred the Frog pieces were considered by Nicky Wire and Richey Edwards for any of the Manics single sleeves, but it is apt that The Holy Bible would include as part of its overall design concept the work of an artist who fearlessly used Christian iconography in subversive ways.  

Kippenberger not only embraced an endless array of artistic media throughout his life – including photography, sculpture, posters, stickers, art books and paintings, as well as a remarkable series of drawings done on hotel stationery – but often transferred content from one medium to another, including images from newspapers, magazines and postcards. The linguist and art critic Martin Prinzhorn, who was a friend of Kippenberger’s, sees this as a fundamental aspect of his work:

‘One central motif in Kippenberger is the pretty radical way in which he made no difference between his own works and those of other artists. It was always easily possible that he would understand the work of others as though he’s made it himself.’ [4]

The cover of Manic Street Preachers’ Faster/PCP shows a detail from Kippenberger’s five-panel series Fliegender Tanga (1982-83), a painting of a young Chinese boy in a communist uniform drinking from a Coca-Cola tin through a straw. It was shown in his 1984 exhibition with Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner, Wahrheit ist Arbeit. The image ties in with the band’s long-running critique of capitalism, consumerism and revolutionary politics in general more so than the lyrical content of the single tracks in particular. It does however evoke wider themes on The Holy Bible, specifically the failure of left-wing ideals and the negative influence of American culture across the world. As one recent article on the history of ‘normalization’ between China and the US explains: ‘This idea – that the more Chinese citizens drank Coke, ate McDonald’s and watched basketball, the more they would embrace American values and the more liberal the Chinese Communist Party would become – has had a surprisingly long shelf life.’ [5]

As with the band’s tendency to quote lines and riffs, absorbing and collaging a huge volume of images, words and music, Kippenberger’s art is full of pop culture, historical references, and stylistic impersonation, which in no way undermines the striking individuality of his work as a whole. In 1991, he told the writer Jutta Koether: “I always had a way of appropriating things by others when I thought that they were good, and of incorporating them into my own work… Unconsciously I continue to quote from things that other people do…” [6] Years later, his youngest sister Susanne commented that another favoured analogy was that of detox: ‘he had to swallow something but then he spit it out along with something of his own – he always gave more than he got.’ [7]

The Fliegender Tanga panel is itself based on a photo by the French photographer James Andanson. Working for the Sygma agency at the time, Andanson was given a rare visa by his friend the baker Lionel Poilâne and travelled to China, shortly before diplomatic relations between the West and the PRC were established, as part of a delegation to study possible economic opportunities. The added power of the original image, taken in March 1979, comes from its backdrop, which is not immediately obvious from Kippenberger’s painting: the Great Wall of China. Although staged (the Coke tin having been given to the boy, nine-year-old Hei Jiantao, by Andanson) the photo was seen as symbolic of a significant political and cultural development in the postwar era. [8]

Looking over the wall

When Jeremy Deller organised his exhibition, taking cues from the artistic influences that run through Manic Street Preachers’ work, he included Kippenberger’s Vom Einfachsten nach Hause, which Wire admitted was his favourite work in the show, adding: “It’s the same idea [as] the cover to the Sex Pistols’ ‘Holidays In The Sun’ – A holiday in other people’s misery.”

Kippenberger is closely associated with the punk scene in Germany. He was involved with the Berlin club S.O.36, which hosted gigs by many punk and post-punk bands under his management in the late 1970s. Though Kippenberger was passionate about music, made record covers, and even played in a short-lived band Luxus, his wider musical taste was baffling to his peers, and he showed no evident natural ability as an instrumentalist. Moreover, Kippenberger’s proclivity for wearing expensive suits, his self-aggrandizement and his embrace of art-rock and free jazz bands, which S.O.36 would bill alongside punk groups, didn’t sit well with others. On one occasion he was targeted by the friends of a well-known figure of the punk scene, Ratten-Jenny. Severely beaten up by her gang, Kippenberger immediately transformed the incident into art – a photograph of his bandaged head later featuring on an exhibition invitation and also turned into paintings. Dialogue with Youth not only evokes such earlier masterpieces of unconventional portraiture as Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, and even Jenny Saville’s more recent depictions of wounded figures, but also the way in which Richey Edwards took the ‘4 Real’ incident from interview scenario to photo opportunity, raising Manic Street Preachers’ notoriety further in the music press (the same image of Edwards also now appearing on designer clothing items). Kippenberger likewise had an unerring talent for publicity and controversy, intent as he was on establishing his reputation through a self-aware manipulation of public events and the media environment.

One can imagine seeing phrases like ‘raus – raus’ and ‘fila – fila’ on a Kippenberger canvas, or that his brutal wit would have made much out of the connotations of ‘lebensraum’, given postwar Germany’s steadily increasing living standards. Kippenberger’s dark sense of humour is more in keeping with the Sex Pistols than the sombre response to the Holocaust found on The Holy Bible. ‘Belsen Was A Gas’ might easily have been the title of a painting or photograph by the same artist who purchased a gas station in Brazil for Tankstelle Martin Bormann – referencing Adolf Hitler’s deputy – so that he might install a telephone line and answer business calls with, ‘Bormann, Gas’.

Unafraid of bringing questions of Germany’s war guilt to the forefront, at a time when non-representational art was favoured and the crimes of the Second World War were passed over, Kippenberger also raised questions about abstraction, interpretation and controversy as applicable to visual art. With the best will in the world I can’t see a swastika… shows a jumbled arrangement of beams painted predominantly in greys, reds and white. It pre-empts any criticism along the lines of cheap provocation through the depiction of National Socialist symbolism, while at the same time poking fun at commonplaces in responses to contemporary art.

The legacy of totalitarian regimes is also alluded to in the painting that was selected by the Manics for the cover of the Revol single, released just weeks before the album in August 1994. Sympathetische Kommunistin (Likeable Communist Woman, 1983) adopts the Socialist Realism art style of the Soviet era. In this case a more obvious link can be made with Edwards’s lyrics, especially the comparisons drawn in the first verse of ‘Revol’ between the arc of the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the start and eventual break-up of a romantic relationship. Kippenberger’s portrait is imbued with the optimism of revolution with no sense, except in the viewer’s mind, of the catastrophes that such attractive appearances betray. [9]

The painting used for the cover of the She Is Suffering single – for which the French title given in the 1991 Taschen monograph on Kippenberger’s work, Des tètons, des tours, des tortellini, was selected – also forms part of a larger series, Null Bock Auf Ideen (created in the same year as Fliegender Tanga). As with the single panel used for Faster/PCP, to see the piece in its original context is to be struck by the simultaneous coherence and inscrutability of Kippenberger’s colourful, confrontational art. Again it is hard to discern any specific connection between the song’s themes and the artwork save for a sort of irony similar to that which Wire appreciated in the Sex Pistols’ ‘Holidays in the Sun’ seven-inch cartoon; the smiling woman, and what appear to be buckets and sand, suggesting pleasure against the ‘suffering’ of the song title; and a counterpoint not only to Kippenberger’s looming brick towers but also Jenny Saville’s obese model in Strategy.

Truth is work

“He was exposing our weaknesses to show us some kind of essential truth about ourselves. It was often an uncomfortable truth.” – Susanne Kippenberger

In 1994, just as the Manics were recording The Holy Bible at Sound Space Studios in Cardiff, Kippenberger was exhibiting what would come to be regarded as one of his major works: a football pitch-sized installation inspired by Franz Kafka’s America, the German-language writer’s unfinished novel. Comprising a number of interview tables, and incorporating long-standing motifs and themes across a multitude of objects, including specially commissioned books, and works by other artists whose pieces Kippenberger had collected, the installation was considered by the artist himself to be his masterpiece. Mentions of Kippenberger’s work by the band members, or interviewers, in connection with The Holy Bible are few, but the singles nevertheless encouraged an interest in Kippenberger’s work at a time when he was still dismissed vehemently by a number of writers. The contractual agreement with Kippenberger can be seen among the archival materials reproduced in the twentieth anniversary reissue of the album. It confirms the 900 Deutsche Mark fee for which the band were given permission to use the three artworks in perpetuity, as well as a request by Kippenberger’s assistant Johannes Wohnseifer for copies of the single sleeve designs for Büro Kippenberger’s records.

Nicky Wire’s interest in Kippenberger’s work evidently continued. He used a quote by him for his 2006 solo album I Killed the Zeitgeist: “I’m rather like a travelling salesman, I deal in ideas” – a statement rooted in the culture of capitalism (in which ‘everything’s for sale’), which nevertheless gestures towards a curiosity and independence of mind. Whether the Manic Street Preachers album was known to Kippenberger or not, in 1995 he produced a large-scale, six-panel painting that perfectly complements its ideas and conceptual design. I Am Too Political features a naked, obese woman similar in appearance to one of Saville’s overweight models. The text across the artwork is painted in Greek, suggesting at once the importance of language, the birth of democracy and the unhealthy state of the body politic today.

Kippenberger’s own physical health was irreparably damaged by years of heavy drinking and he succumbed to liver cancer in 1997. But his ability to stoke controversy persisted. In 2008, when one of his crucified frog sculptures was shown at the Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano, there was a significant outcry, and newspapers reported that the Pope had called for a ban. As Kippenberger’s sister Susanne recalled: ‘A politician went on a hunger strike, protesters stood praying in front of the museum’s doors, other Catholics spoke up for artistic freedom…’ [10] In truth, it was not the Pope who joined the voices of protest but rather the Vatican Secretariat of State. Kippenberger never renounced the church entirely; or a sense of belief. According to some of those who knew him best, art was a matter of faith to Kippenberger and he was after the truth any which way he could through his art, whether that meant grappling with banalities, trash and pop culture, or historical and hallowed images.

In the same year as the critically acclaimed MOCA retrospective The Problem Perspective, Manic Street Preachers released Journal For Plague Lovers, featuring music based on lyrics left by Richey Edwards, once again using cover art by Saville. No singles were released at that time, but there is no doubt that another of Kippenberger’s pieces would have suited the personal themes, black humour and post-punk sound of the band’s songs. While promoting Futurology in 2014, Wire again made the connection between Kippenberger’s work and the band’s own, through a curious chain of occurrences on a trip to Italy:

“I was back at the hotel and the turn-down lady hands me a book, Futurism In Bologna, I thought ‘this is a nice service rather than changing the pillows’. I read that and realised that the first Futurist exhibition was in the basement of the hotel we were staying in, and then realising we’d been talking about the two towers in Bologna and that’s the front cover of ‘She Is Suffering’ [back in 1994], which was painted by Kippenberger, the German artist, because he’d been obsessed with these two towers in Bologna… It just sums up everything that’s good about our Greil Marcus Lipstick Traces life, when the dots are joined…” [11]

Notes:

[1] ‘Interview: Nicky Wire’, http://www.manics.co.uk 1999. Accessed at: http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Interview:_Nicky_Wire_%26_Jeremy_Deller_-_www.manics.co.uk,_20th_December_1999 (2 January 2021)

[2] Kippenberger, Susanne Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families. Translated by Damion Searls (J and L Books, 2013)

[3] Among the souvenirs that Kippenberger’s well-travelled parents showed the family were recordings of Welsh miners’ songs. See Kippenberger, Kippenberger.

[4] See interview in von Perfall, Josephine (ed) Kippenberger and Friends: Conversations on Martin Kippenberger (Distanz Publishing, 2013)

[5] Fahs, Ramsey ‘How Coca-Cola Came to China, 40 Years Ago’, Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel. Accessed online at https://chinachannel.org/2019/02/06/coke-in-china/ (14 January 2021)

[6] Martin Kippenberger in conversation with Jutta Koether, Flash Art International No. 156 January-February 1991. Accessed online at https://flash—art.com/article/martin-kippenberger/ (3 January 2021)

[7] Kippenberger, Kippenberger

[8] Setboun, Michel and Cousin, Marie (eds) 40 ans de photo-journalisme. Génération Sygma (La Martinière Editions, 2013)

[9] Interestingly, the woman is depicted wearing a budenovka, similar to that worn by Richey Edwards during Manic Street Preachers’ trip to Bangkok in April 1994.

[10] Kippenberger, Kippenberger

[11] Burrows, Marc ‘Dis meets Manic Street Preachers’, Drowned in Sound 13 July 2014. Accessed online at https://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4148004-dis-meets-the-manic-street-preachers (9 January 2021)

‘Love is part of desire and desire is always cruel.’ – Neil Gaiman

‘On to the female body have been projected the fantasies and longings and terrors of generations of men and through them of women, in order to conjure them into reality or exorcize them into oblivion.’ – Marina Warner

‘[A] Welshman called Ernest Jones, had an idea that, interestingly, sort of disappeared. He believed that everybody’s deepest fear was loss of desire, what he called aphanisis. For him that’s the thing we’re most acutely anxious about, having no desire.’ – Adam Phillips

‘She Is Suffering’ is seldom discussed at length in writing about The Holy Bible. Widely judged to be the least lyrically and musically arresting track on the album, it has been criticised by the band themselves and few critics have been inclined to consider exactly how it works within – and against – the style of the album.

To the casual listener the song might simply be taken to be vaguely feminist in intent, its title and repeated lead chorus line seeming to highlight a woman’s turmoil. But there is little else to sustain this line of thinking; nothing resembling the critique of female exploitation offered on the band’s earlier single ‘Little Baby Nothing’. Nicky Wire has derided the song on more than one occasion, framing Richey Edwards’s lyric as an ill-judged attempt to assume the role of the male saviour. Ten years after the album’s release, he told the webzine ireallylovemusic.co.uk: “I wish we’d left it off there. The lyrics are shit. Richey didn’t even think much of them at the time. It’s kind of like a bloke riding to the rescue of the woman, as was his wont occasionally.” [1] While it is not necessary to counter Wire’s withering assessment of the song in general, especially in the context of the rest of The Holy Bible, it is hard to parse any of the lyrics in a way that would warrant this bizarre summary.

Aside from the bitter domestic picture suggested by the line ‘Lovers wrapped inside each other’s lies’ (which might just as easily have fit on the single’s B-side ‘Love Torn Us Under’) and its longing for untroubled days of youth, ‘She Is Suffering’ simply depicts beauty in a negative light; ‘spoiled,’ according to writer David Evans in his monograph on the album, ‘by some rather clunky imagery of carrion and rotting flowers’. [2] It is hardly characteristic of Edwards and Wire’s lyrics. No caustic commentary on consumerism, monarchy or faded cultural figures. No frank first-person perspective on the malaise of contemporary life. It seems out of step too with the image of Manic Street Preachers and their famous slogan: ‘Stay Beautiful’.

Edwards uses the pronoun ‘she’ throughout the lyric, rather than the usual ‘I’ or ‘you’. The use of female forms to represent concepts, emotions and values, both positive or negative, is nothing new of course. In her 1985 book Monuments and Maidens, Marina Warner surveys an array of myths, statues and artworks across the centuries, from Hesiod’s Theogeny to caricatures of Margaret Thatcher, discussing the ways in which even vaunted ideals such as Truth and Liberty have been more often than not depicted as female, whether in stone or paint – as against the realities of the status of women and the circumstances of their lives throughout history. Edwards’s writing is in keeping with the longstanding uses of personification throughout the literature of the Greek, Latin and Romance languages, the critical depictions of womanhood in Judeo-Christian texts, as well as the modernist poetry of Baudelaire (cf. ‘La Beauté’) – even his contemporary, the comic book writer Neil Gaiman, who depicts Despair, Delirium and Death as sisters to his popular Sandman character. But given the band’s embrace of femininity, their awareness of macho tropes in popular culture, and their bold use of Jenny Saville’s artwork for the album’s cover, one might expect Edwards to have sidestepped such cliches. Rhian E Jones has remarked on the possible misogynistic readings of both ‘She Is Suffering’ and ‘P.C.P.’ [3] Daniel Lukes has also considered the contrasting ways in which the female form is presented across The Holy Bible:

‘It walks a line between the radical and feminist move of desexualizing femininity in a pop music context, exploring female spaces and consciousness with empathy and identification, and appropriating and colonizing these very tropes to mask and re-assemble classic white male self-loathing and fragility.’ [4]

It is clear from his public comments that Richey Edwards had a complex perspective on sexuality and sexual politics – and was forthcoming about the contradictions and hypocrisies in his outlook, as when he was confronted by journalist Barbara Ellen about his use of a prostitute during the band’s visit to Bangkok. It is also obvious from his extraordinary lyrics for ‘4st 7lb’ and ‘Yes’, and later on ‘She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach’ – in which ‘she’ would seem literally to refer to a particular, suffering individual, possibly someone known to him from his stay in Whitchurch Hospital – just how empathetic he could be in writing about women, still rare among male songwriters.

For the inlay of the single release in October 1994, Edwards selected the painting Balance by Joanne Celnik. This phantasmagorical image is composed of expressionistic strokes of green, grey, yellow and blue and appears to depict a crucified figure merging with a tree or other personal ‘cross’ of some kind. One arm, or wing, of the figure is aglow, burning brightly at its edges; the other appears dull and charred. Although the title might hint at psychological equilibrium, the picture conveys the opposite, but it would be hard to interpret it outright as expressive of female suffering in particular. The sense of an underlying Christian motif in the painting is present but also vague. And even so, any coherence is disrupted further by the overarching visual design for the album’s singles – each one presenting as its front cover image a canvas by the subversive German artist Martin Kippenberger. In the case of ‘She Is Suffering’, Des tètons, des tours, des tortellini (in English: ‘Tits, Towers, Tortellini’), which is itself oblique, but plays with the use of the female figure in art history and advertising. As Marina Warner explains, ‘the first posters selling goods began to appear, and their visual style was determined by the conventions of official art, including the affixing of meaning – any meaning – to a pretty girl – any pretty girl.’ [5]

What underpins the song, however, is a Buddhist notion of desire – which gives rise to a strikingly different interpretation. In contrast with his later comments, Wire had already explained this at the time of the album’s release. He told Melody Maker:

“It’s quite a simple song, both musically and lyrically. It’s kind of like the Buddhist thing where you can only reach eternal peace by shedding every desire in your body. I think the last line, ‘Nature’s lukewarm pleasure’, is Richey’s view on sex. I can’t really explain it, but that’s the way he sees it.” [6]

†††

‘She Is Suffering’ might be illustrated by an image of Jesus in the accompanying CD booklet of The Holy Bible, an ‘Ecce Homo’ postcard in keeping with the biblical imagery and evocations across the album, but the words reflect an interest on Richey Edwards’s part in influential texts outside the Western tradition and how they might inform a critical response to contemporary life. Indeed, the same chapter of The Teaching of Buddha on ‘Human Defilements’ that undoubtedly shaped some of the song’s content is also the source of another quote which appears on the final page of the lyric booklet: a philosophical fragment on the perils of ‘greed, anger, foolishness and the infatuations of egoism’, printed over a hammer and sickle graphic based on a Soviet Veteran of Labour medal, which would double as a logo for the band throughout 1994.

This provocative overlap of Christian iconography, revolutionary politics and Eastern wisdom, like the blurring of left and right-wing perspectives across The Holy Bible, may well cause confusion. But Edwards was unequivocal in his tour programme notes: ‘”She” is desire. In other Bibles and Holy Books no truth is possible until you empty yourself of desire. All commitment otherwise is fake/lies/economic convenience.’ [7] The opening track on The Holy Bible, ‘Yes’, warns of the way in which social status and exploitation are interwoven in the world of prostitution (‘power produces desire’). More generally, ‘She Is Suffering’ reflects on the pain brought about by any feelings of desire. The band had already linked the idea with the culture of consumerism on ‘Nat West-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds’: ‘The more you own the more you are lonelier with cheap desire’, a line which finds an echo here: ‘The less she gives the more you need her.’ But rather than drawing on the commandments of the Bible – ‘Thou shalt not covet’ – Edwards takes his intellectual cue from a different religion entirely. As can be seen in the archival materials reproduced in both the tenth anniversary reissue and the twentieth anniversary boxed set of The Holy Bible, there were plans to use an image of a ‘Bangkok Pain Taker Buddha’ to accompany the lyrics to ‘She Is Suffering’, taking inspiration from the sleeve design of The Pogues’ 1993 release Tuesday Morning for the layout. [8]

Speaking to Music Life in 1994, Edwards elaborated on his thinking behind the song:

“We never knew anything other than Western religion, but when we went to Thailand and Japan, we got interested in Eastern religions and picked up some books on it. It was all so simpler and written in a way that was easy to understand than what I was used to. I found it much better than the Christian Bible. According to these teachings, in order to become someone who has the abilities to judge and accomplish things on their own, a person must first start from ‘nothing’.” [9]

The simplicity Edwards refers to is evident also in his own writing here – as compared with the streams of compacted syllables, references and axioms found elsewhere on The Holy Bible. Referring to ideas he was absorbing from these Eastern religious writings, Edwards nevertheless maintained his sobering commentary on modern life in the West. Drawing upon the same spiritual philosophy that requires its adherents to dispense with passions such as vengeance, ‘She Is Suffering’ might also be heard as a warning, albeit futile, about those destructive human instincts that are the source of some of the album’s other songs – in particular the righteous, militant misanthropy of those which bookend ‘She Is Suffering’: ‘Of Walking Abortion’ and ‘Archives of Pain’. [10] Edwards also evidently saw a connection between this more general idea of ‘desire’ as destructive and the difficulties of maintaining a romantic relationship in the modern world – a pessimistic view of love which he would express in a radically different way on the song ‘Revol’, and in his final lyrics and writings which appeared on Journal For Plague Lovers. As he explained in the same Music Life interview following the writing of The Holy Bible:

“I was thinking about the high rates of divorce in Western countries. People are placing more and more value in financial aspects and outward appearances. “I want to sleep with him because he’s good-looking” or “I want to fuck my girlfriend” – there’s no way a relationship can last when it’s based on that. I’ve been single for 26 years, because I know I couldn’t spend my whole life with a partner if there’s no passion.”

‘Desire’ is a recurring word in the Manics discography and ranges as both a positive and negative emotion – from the ‘patrolled desires’ of consumers on ‘Methadone Pretty’ and ‘A Vision of Dead Desire’, to the ‘European desires’ of ‘Europa Geht Durch Mich’ and the ‘monochrome desire’ of the Yves Klein-inspired ‘International Blue’. The word would have sit easily within James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore’s musical arrangement, but it is in fact never used on ‘She Is Suffering’. Tasked with putting music to Edwards’s lyric, Bradfield struggled to relate to the intent of the song; like Wire, criticising its central motif of ‘defiled feminine purity’. Speaking with Keith Cameron for Mojo, he admitted:

“That thing of using ‘she’ and ‘beauty’ as a metaphor never really sat that well with me. I thought we were a bit out of our depth and I didn’t think it was one of Richey’s best lyrics (neither did Nicky or Richey).” [11]

The difficulty in finding a satisfactory musical form for the song, the eighth-note patterns failing to lift the rather staid rhythm; its comparatively vague statements; and the way in which that crucial underlying Buddhist influence is further obscured by the graphic selected to sit alongside the printed words – giving the references to ‘lust, vice and sin’ an equally Christian evocation – all contribute to the effect of the song: lacking any of the urgency, musical experimentation, journalistic detail or brutal subjective accounts that characterise the rest of the album.

Surprisingly, Wire has described the optimism he felt at the time of its release, that the song might land as a Manics-own ‘Every Breath You Take’. [12] Produced by Steve Brown, responsible for the band’s ambitious debut album, the song’s main arpeggiated chord progression does bear a slight resemblance to the smash-hit Police track; its theme is related too – alerting the listener to the suffering that voyeuristic desire entails. But it was not to be. Bradfield confirmed: “We convinced ourselves it could be a gothic ‘Every Breath You Take’. How deluded we were because it’s probably one of the worst tracks on the record.” [13]

One standout moment comes when Bradfield cries ‘No thoughts to forget when we were children’, conveying the same type of disillusionment and sense of loss that gives ‘Die in the Summertime’ and ‘This Is Yesterday’ their uneasy atmosphere of nostalgia. The recurring Manics theme of prelapsarian childhood corrupted by young adulthood, which David Evans has also commented on with regard to ‘She Is Suffering’, comparing it to a ‘Blakean song of innocence and experience’, is countered by the darker undertones of some of Edwards’s statements: on the lasting influence of the fire and brimstone sermons of his local church, and that stark admission in ‘Life Becoming a Landslide’: ‘My idea of love comes from a childhood glimpse of pornography’. That song, the last single to be released from the Gold Against the Soul era, also precedes ‘She Is Suffering’ in its bleak view of romance: ‘There is no true love/Just a finely tuned jealousy’.

Just as ‘Die in the Summertime’ seems to derive its title from a short story collection by Yukio Mishima, one of Edwards’s favourite authors, so too does ‘She Is Suffering suggest a trace of the Japanese writer’s influence on The Holy Bible – following on from the direct reference to his work in Mitch Ikeda’s artwork for Gold Against the Soul. As with the return of the imagery of Valerie Solanas on ‘Of Walking Abortion’, we are reminded of the short span of time between Generation Terrorists and The Holy Bible, and the ways in which the seemingly dramatic change in the Manics in 1994 nevertheless carried with it many of their longstanding ideas and themes. The epigraph to Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, which Edwards listed among his favourite books, is taken from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. It begins with the stark line: ‘…Beauty is a terrible and awful thing!’ [14]

†††

The slow tempo and more softly intoned verses of ‘She Is Suffering’ only intensify the contrast that it forms with another song on the album, ‘Faster’. The stark difference between the two might also contribute to the sense among critics and listeners that it doesn’t fit on The Holy Bible. Rhian E Jones has described ‘She Is Suffering’ as ‘plodding, murky drudge… which comes close to sounding like filler, or at least a non sequitur, with little connection to the rest of the album’. ‘Faster’ by comparison is a blazing edict, the declaration of a powerful ego determined to transcend the impositions of modernity, the violent present in which ‘Man kills everything’. But though there is difference, there is connection too. Or rather there is a certain tension. The values of ‘purity’ and ‘truth’ that ‘Faster’ asserts, as well as its variation on a Japanese proverb (‘If you stand up like a nail then you will be knocked down’) might be thought to align the song with the discipline that is called for in Buddhism, as a way of reaching nirvana. But ‘Faster’ is at root dominated, like the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’, by an ‘ego-personality’, for whom even an accepted emptiness – that ‘nothing’ that Edwards learned one had to start from in the Buddhist tradition – does not mean an absence of the self, but rather is clung to for a sense of self: becoming ‘my nothing’. In his teachings the Buddha also warns of the ‘passion for analysis and discussion by which people become confused in judgement’ and the ‘passion for emotional experience by which people’s values become confused’, which stem from ignorance and desire. But it is precisely analytical frenzy, self-assertion, unequivocal judgements, the furious articulation of confusion, which define The Holy Bible; which inspires, motivates, harrows and consoles listeners. The absence of any desire might be the onset of acedia, of depression. It might signal not the highest achievement of spiritual dedication, but the hollow feeling of the narrator of ‘Yes’: ‘I don’t know what I even enjoy.’

Edwards seems to have been trying to expand the field of vision beyond the West and its Christian inheritance, seeking the truth elsewhere since the old truths seem to have reaped so much destruction. It is one of the more obvious, though rarely mentioned, shortcomings of The Holy Bible as an artwork intended to deal with the “truth”, about “the way the world is” – as Edwards claimed in an interview for Swedish television – that its survey of post-war twentieth-century history is narrowly focused around Europe and America, with almost nothing to say about the Middle East, Africa and Asia, for instance – save for passing mentions of ‘Amin’, ‘Hussain’ and ‘Pol Pot’, and the band’s questionable fascination at the time with Maoism. A quote attributed to Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz, one-time ambassador to India and a noted critic of the Soviet Union, also appears on the ‘She Is Suffering’ single sleeve, citing his essay on Mexican culture and history, The Labyrinth of Solitude:

“There was the other culture, a culture destroyed but still inside us alive. In this sense I knew not only with my intellect, I knew with my senses and my body that the West was not the only civilisation.”

It is possible that Edwards had never read Paz before finalising the design. He did not refer to the poet as an influence in interviews, or elsewhere in his published writing – as he did with other writers such as Albert Camus and Osamu Dazai. Moreover, the lines do not appear in The Labyrinth of Solitude at all. Edwards may simply have taken the quote from James Park’s encyclopedia Icons, published in 1992, which features the same misattributed quote word for word at the end of the entry for Paz. A brief reference to Paz’s engagement with Asian cultures may have provided a vague connection. While this is certainly in keeping with the collage aesthetic of the album and Manic Street Preachers throughout their career, it only further adds to the muddle of meaning in the case of what is ostensibly a simple song. Similarly, the addition of a spoken word sample of the scientist and technologist John G Bennett on the US mix of ‘She Is Suffering’ (one that does not appear on the original UK release) somewhat diminishes the unique force of The Holy Bible – which arguably contains the best selection of samples of any rock music album – since it had already been used in a blandly repetitive way on ‘Exposure’ by Robert Fripp, the guitarist of progressive rock band King Crimson. [15]

Promoted with an underwhelming promotional video – featuring animated artist’s models, young women lying on artfully lit beds photographed from above, a cropped solo, and the band playing, blank-faced and uncharacteristically still, in a candlelit room – ‘She Is Suffering’ does not meet the passionate force, the abrasive post-punk attack, the lyrical and musical complexity that defines most of The Holy Bible. Still, one only has to watch the band’s performance of the song on the UK television show Butt Naked to be seized again by the self-confidence and articulation that Manic Street Preachers sought to convey in writing and performing the album. Bradfield’s voice rages on the final ‘suffering’. And one can also hear how allowing the space for him to stretch his vocal range and hang on single words – with fewer syllables to sing, no breathless passages such as those in ‘Mausoleum’ or ‘P.C.P.’ – would shape the band’s sound in the years ahead.

Notes:

[1] Doran, John ‘Holy Moley’, ireallylovemusic.co.uk 2004. Accessed online at http://www.ireallylovemusic.co.uk/interviews/manic.html (6 November 2020)

[2] Evans, David The Holy Bible (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

[3] Jones, Rhian E ‘Unwritten Diaries: History, Politics and Experience through The Holy Bible’ in Jones, Lukes, Wodtke Triptych (Repeater Books, 2017).

[4] Lukes, Daniel ‘Fragments Against Ruin: The Books of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible’ in Triptych.

[5] Warner, Marina Monuments and Maidens (George Weidenfeld & Nicholson Ltd, 1985)

[6] ‘Manics’ New Testament’, Melody Maker, 27 August 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Manics%27_New_Testament_-_Melody_Maker,_27th_August_1994 (23 November 2020)

[7] Edwards, Richey The Holy Bible tour programme, 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=The_Holy_Bible_Tour_Programme (15 December 2020)

[8] Both sleeves were designed by Simon Ryan.

[9] Akao, Mika, ‘Richey James talks about The Holy Bible’, Music Life, September 1994. English translation by M. Jun, accessed online at https://juritr.web.fc2.com/manics/94musiclife.html (15 December 2020)

[10] The Teaching of Buddha warns: ‘Misfortune always dogs the steps of one who gives way to the desire for revenge.’

[11] Cameron, Keith ‘B-Sides: Manic Street Preachers’, Mojo Collections, Spring 2001. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=B_Side:_Manic_Street_Preachers_-_MOJO_Collections,_Spring_2001 (23 November 2020)

[12] Doran, John ‘Holy Moley’

[13] Rosen, Steven ‘Sometimes You Need Some Creative Failure to Spur You On’, Ultimate-Guitar.com, 26 March 2015. Accessed online at https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/interviews/manic_street_preachers_james_dean_bradfield_sometimes_you_need_some_creative_failure_to_spur_you_on.html (23 November 2020)

[14] Mishima, Yukio Confessions of a Mask (New Directions, 1958)

[15] The band had already re-purposed an existing sample on the original version of ‘Spectators of Suicide’. The excerpt of Bobby Seale had appeared on the McCarthy song ‘Throw Him Out He’s Breaking My Heart’.

Note: this essay contains spoilers relating to Shade the Changing Man (DC Vertigo).

In a special feature published in Melody Maker in December 1993, Richey Edwards selected his ‘Men of the Year’. One of those singled out for praise was Peter Milligan. As Edwards explained to interviewer Simon Price:

“He’s the only comic book writer – not ‘graphic novelist’, it’s definitely comics – who did anything good in 2000AD. The main character in ‘Bad Company’ [one of the first things he did] is one of the most beautiful comic book creations ever, like a mix between Col Kurtz from ‘Apocalypse Now’ and The Virgin Mary. Just recently Milligan moved onto ‘Shade the Changing Man’ on DC, and this year, on DC’s more adult Vertigo range, he created ‘Enigma’, a mini-series of only six or seven episodes (little pants-pisser Michael Smith is the main chap). It isn’t often a comic strikes you as truly great, but along with Neil Gaiman, he’s the only person doing anything good in the genre at the moment.” [1]

The influence of comics on Edwards’s lyric writing has been largely overlooked in critical texts on Manic Street Preachers, with the exception of one memorable line from ‘PCP’: Be Pure, Be Vigilant, Behave – a phrase originally associated with the character of Torquemada, from the 2000AD strip ‘Nemesis the Warlock’. [2] The 2000AD connections go further back: a prize-winning reader sketch by the young Richey Edwards was printed in the same publication in the 1980s. In Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell’s ‘Zenith’ strip, the band were mentioned directly when the character of Domino appeared wearing a Manic Street Preachers T-shirt in one 1992 issue. And Edwards himself was referenced in a June 1993 storyline by Garth Ennis and Dermot Power, ‘Muzak Killer – Live! pt 3’, in the character of Clarence of the ‘Crazy Sked Moaners’ – who, in a send-up of the ‘4 Real’ incident lasers ‘4 Rale’ across his forehead during a television interview. [3] But any sense of lyrical influence is difficult to discern. As Edwards told Melody Maker, other regular strands in that landmark British title, as well Marvel’s popular publications, featuring some of the genre’s most iconic characters, were somewhat lacking:

“I grew up reading Marvel, especially Spiderman, but stopped at about 13 because, I wouldn’t say it was Enid Blyton, but it always had to be very moralistic at the end. Once you actually realise all that’s bullshit, you go off it. And even when ‘2000AD’ came along, it was very macho; something I could never like. Judge Dredd was like watching a f***ing ‘Dirty Harry’ film: this holier-than-thou cop blowing people away.”

Despite these criticisms, the band did take up the opportunity, following the recording of The Holy Bible, to compose a song for the 1995 film adaptation of Judge Dredd. ‘Judge Yr’self’ would be one of Edwards’s final collaborations with the band – although the song’s lyrics are more informed by Nietzschean philosophy, rather than simply being an homage to the futuristic law enforcement officer.

Peter Milligan’s Shade the Changing Man, however, made a significant impression on Edwards – before the writing of The Holy Bible, and even through to his final shows with the band, when excerpts from the comic appeared on some of his personalised setlists. In a Smash Hits interview in June 1993, Dominik Diamond asked the band members: [I]f you did split up after this album, what would you do? Edwards answered matter-of-factly: “Go round with Neil Gaiman or Peter Milligan.” [4] And when RAW questioned Edwards about touring life in early 1994, he again namechecked Enigma and Shade among the reading material that he had with him on the road. [5]

The ways in which Milligan’s preoccupations overlap with Edwards’s own, and more specifically the ways in which his writing might have influenced Edwards during the development of The Holy Bible invites further consideration. Indeed, a close reading of Shade the Changing Man suggests that standout lines were even adapted by Edwards in his lyrics throughout 1994.

†††

Steve Ditko’s character Rac Shade first appeared in a 1977 series for DC Comics but disappeared the following year amid changes within the publishing house, known as the ‘DC Implosion’. Shade would later become the focus of a new storyline in a 1990 series. Reimagined by British writer Peter Milligan – alongside penciller Chris Bachalo, inker Mark Pennington and colourist Daniel Vozzo, with letters by Todd Klein – Shade the Changing Man would run for 70 issues and was one of the founding titles of DC’s new, more adult oriented, Vertigo imprint. Milligan’s revamp explores themes of identity, sexuality, insanity, religion, addiction, abortion and suicide, as well as offering a trenchant critique of American culture and history – notably in the first story arc, which sees Shade fighting the incarnation of US culture in its most extreme, violent form: ‘The American Scream’.

Readers are introduced to Milligan’s Rac Shade when he emerges in Kansas, taking over the body of serial killer Troy Grenzer at the moment of his execution in the state penitentiary. He has been recruited by the Changemaster, Wizor, on his home planet of Meta and sent to Earth to try to contain its madness. Making his escape across the States, Shade begins a relationship with Kathy – the daughter of Grenzer’s last victims – who herself soon meets and develops an intimate bond with another woman, the free-spirited and cynical Lenny. The dynamics and complications of this interplanetary romantic triangle – encompassing bisexuality, body swaps and multiple personalities – play out as Shade, Kathy and Lenny must confront all manner of forces, both inner and outer, that threaten humanity and the world of the Metans. A number of guest artists, including Milligan’s early collaborator Brendan McCarthy, contributed to making Shade into a phantasmagorical masterpiece; a comic that crosses space and time, and captures intimate detail and psychological nuance as much as lurid violence and otherworldly imaginings. 

In January 1994, Melody Maker spoke to Manic Street Preachers ahead of their Life Becoming a Landslide tour. Discussing their forthcoming album, Nicky Wire indicated the intensity of the themes that they wanted to touch upon, especially following the band’s visits to Dachau and Hiroshima the previous year: “The human capability to inflict pain on its own race. That’s what we would like to write about.” Writer David Bennun noted how steeped the band remained in the popular culture and media that they had taken cues from since their teenage years, stating: ‘They monitor Britain as if they were in distant orbit around it.’ [6] In closing, Edwards told Bennun that he was drawing inspiration from the words of one American novelist in particular, hinting at what was to become The Holy Bible:

Henry Miller said: ‘At the edge of eternity is torture, in our mind’s never-ending ambition to damage itself.’ That’s what we would like to write about.”

But the words are not Miller’s, to be precise. Edwards was likely paraphrasing from a column that another comic book writer, Dave Louapre (author of American Freak), had contributed to that month’s issue of Shade the Changing Man. Louapre begins his ‘On The Ledge’ piece by quoting a line from Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, which he sees as encapsulating something fundamental about human psychology.

This further illustrates just how widely Edwards would read for inspiration for his lyrics and artwork, even taking literary references secondhand and making them his own. Not only did Milligan’s compelling narratives influence Edwards in various, often subtle ways, during the writing and public presentation of The Holy Bible; but the miscellany to be found elsewhere in the weekly or monthly publications he read also spurred him to continually rethink what was possible in terms of lyrical and visual content for the band.

The most obvious indication that Edwards continued to follow Milligan’s work on Shade the Changing Man throughout 1994 was the appearance of word balloons cut from the comic on some of the setlists that he would decorate and supplement with quotes while on the Holy Bible tour. For the band’s show at the Sheffield Octagon on 15 October 1994, Edwards copied out words spoken by the Devil. The edited excerpt comes from ‘The Morning of the Masks’ (issue #52) in which Shade is given a tour of Meta, having helped the Devil gain the upper hand there. He is encouraged to face the violent, murderous instinct within human nature, and the artwork includes gruesome imagery inspired by the crucifixion. The Devil claims the Easter period between the death of Christ and the resurrection as his dominion, pointing out to Shade the rotten fruits of mankind for which he is the conduit, including gas chambers, human ovens and rape camps.

It is not only such evocations of historical totalitarian violence, as well as Milligan’s caustic commentaries on contemporary culture, that resonate with Richey Edwards’s own writing. The complex, painful and often pessimistic depiction of love in Shade the Changing Man also captured Edwards’s interest. In issue #49 (July 1994), as a pregnant Kathy recalls a painful memory of a sexual encounter in her past and considers her uncertain future with Shade and Lenny, she concludes, ‘sometimes it’s easier to make love to a stranger than to ask a friend to hold you.’

The sentiment will sound familiar to some Manic Street Preachers fans. A variation of the same appears in the chorus of a Holy Bible B-side, ‘Too Cold Here’, which was included on the Revol single released in August 1994: ‘It’s easier to make love to a stranger than to ask a friend to call,’ sings James Dean Bradfield. Although the lyrics as a whole would not seem out of place coming from the mouth of a character in Milligan’s comic, it is hard to detect any sustained reference to Shade here; say, in the way that one can with another Manics B-side inspired by literature, ‘Patrick Bateman’ (unless, that is, one suspects a pun: ‘Always look for shade to cover your eyes.’) Rather it would seem to be another example of Edwards’s and Wire’s tendency to collect quotes from a wide variety of media sources, to supplement their own original lines; the lyrics then often edited in collaboration with James Dean Bradfield as the music is composed with Sean Moore. This collaging and reworking extends to the self-referential: another line from ‘Too Cold Here’ (‘Everyone asks what’s wrong, but what’s right?’) would reappear in a slightly different form in another of Edwards’s last lyrics, ‘All Is Vanity’.

Kathy’s long night of the soul occurs within a storyline that ran for six issues. Milligan’s ‘A Season in Hell’ was inspired by Arthur Rimbaud’s poem of the same name, with Shade finding a copy of the poem at the end of Part One and quoting from it in subsequent installments. It is Shade’s child that Kathy is carrying, and he has been ordered to kill it by ‘celestials’, who claim to have the power to give Shade his life and soul back (after he has discovered that he is in fact already dead, as revealed in an earlier storyline, ‘The Road’), thus initiating a torturous conflict which involves not only his own fate but that of Kathy, and his unborn child too – his own personal nightmare.

When Simon Price caught up with the Manics for a number of gigs in France in autumn 1994, he reported that Edwards had been walking around Paris by day with lines by Rimbaud scrawled on his clothing. Photographed by Tom Sheehan for Melody Maker at the time, Edwards was framed with his back to the camera, the jagged black handwritten letters standing out in contrast with the white boiler suit he was wearing – like a living Shade panel. Though Rimbaud’s words had already been referenced by the band in the sleeve of Generation Terrorists, had Milligan sent Edwards back to the French poet’s masterpiece? [7]

Other setlists from the band’s Belfast and Cork concerts in October 1994 suggest that Edwards was re-reading some of the previous year’s issues of Shade too – with Milligan’s Metan then inhabiting the body of an institutionalised mute, known as ‘Empty’, but finding that he must do battle with multiple versions of himself, reflecting various aspects of his personality; his behaviour further unsettling Kathy and Lenny. The issue cut up during those Irish Holy Bible tour dates deals with depression and suicide, with one of the residents of the hotel where the main characters have been living found to have taken his own life, and Lenny attempting to drown herself in the pond in the grounds of the hotel, leaving a note for Kathy written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror: ‘It’s not funny anymore’.

Simon Price perceived different ‘shades’ of Edwards’s own personality coming to the fore throughout his later interview, noting the logical contradictions and internal conflicts about which Edwards nevertheless spoke openly. He avoided broaching the subject of suicide outright with Edwards, despite the rumours that had swirled around the band that summer. But he did ask him to open up further about his feelings towards religion, and whether he had found God during his stay at The Priory. Edwards replied:

“Found God? The Big Chap? No. It’s something that interests me, but you’ve only got to look at our name, we’ve got Preachers in our name, I was made to go to chapel till I was 13, on our first album you’ve got ‘Crucifix Kiss’, a cross on the cover, a quote from Nietzsche about Christianity, so it goes deeper…” [8]

Milligan’s writing shows a similar fascination with religious imagery, questions about the afterlife, and in particular with presenting his own versions of religious – as well as Greek – origin stories (his sexed-up, submissive incarnation of Pandora in some ways even comparable with Edwards’s contrastingly authoritarian feminine depiction of political correctness on ‘PCP’). One of Milligan’s storylines from 1993 is ‘The Passionchild’, in which Shade is tasked with killing the title character by the aforementioned celestials – this, the first offer of his life back, in return for the murderous deed. Deceiving the celestials, Shade arranges it so that he, Kathy and Lenny in fact murder a duplicate created by him, while the Passionchild is allowed to escape. When the silent child finally speaks, he tells Shade: ‘I live on the inside. I found nothing out there. I find nothing in here but at least it’s my nothing.’

It is almost impossible not to see another connection here, between Milligan’s distinctive turn of phrase and one of The Holy Bible‘s most frequently quoted lines, from ‘Faster’: ‘I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing.’ [9]

Richey Edwards clearly found something in Peter Milligan’s work, counting it among the many sources of inspiration during the development of The Holy Bible. Like Edwards, Milligan transforms familiar Christian themes, images from history and facets of modern life, often in extreme ways. Both writers have taken often derided or clichéd art forms – the comic, the rock lyric – to extraordinary new places, all the while paying attention to what has gone before. Milligan, too, used the words of past authors – Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Calvino, Joyce and Hemingway – in developing his nightmarish and complex time-crossing narratives; even quoting Edwards’s favourite poem by Philip Larkin, ‘Aubade’, in one issue of Shade. [10] As much as Edwards took repeated inspiration from novelists and playwrights such as JG Ballard, Yukio Mishima and Tennessee Williams, a closer examination of his words and artistry reveals an equally intense fascination with contemporary comic book writers, Peter Milligan above all, and an interest in how the rock lyric might be reinvigorated under their influence.

Notes:

[1] Price, Simon ‘Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers chooses his Men of the Year’, Melody Maker, 25 December 1993. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Richey_Edwards_Of_Manic_Street_Preachers_Chooses_His_Men_Of_The_Year_-_Melody_Maker,_25th_December_1993 (11 October 2020)

[2] The phrase was also later used as the title of a concert film directed by Kieran Evans, documenting the twentieth anniversary tour of The Holy Bible. A line from Grant Morrison’s Batman story Arkham Asylum is also referenced in ‘Drug Drug Druggy’ on the band’s second album Gold Against The Soul. See ‘Anatomies of Influence’.

[3] The connections between Manic Street Preachers and 2000AD have been identified on the following weblogs: Jetsam (http://jetsimian.blogspot.com/2014/07/comic-strip-reachers.html); 2000adonline (https://2000adonline.tumblr.com/post/6201733462/liepardattack-oh-yeah-a-drawing-richey-did-of#.X49SJ9BKg2w); Babylon Wales (http://babylonwales.blogspot.com/2011/11/crazy-sked-moaners.html)

[4] Diamond, Dominik ‘The 5th Manic’, Smash Hits, 9 June 1993. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=The_5th_Manic_-_Smash_Hits,_9th_June_1993 (11 October 2020)

[5] ‘Road Hogs!!’, RAW, 2 March 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Road_Hogs!!_-_RAW,_2nd_March_1994 (11 October 2020)

[6] Bennun, David ‘All That Glitters’, Melody Maker, 29 January 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=All_That_Glitters_-_Melody_Maker,_29th_January_1994 (11 October 2020)

[7] See photographs published in Price, Simon ‘Archives of Pain’, Melody Maker, 3 December 1994. Accessed online at http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/msppedia/index.php?title=Archives_Of_Pain_-_Melody_Maker,_3rd_December_1994 (11 October 2020)

[8] Price, ‘Archives of Pain’, op cit.

[9] Incidentally, with further reference to ‘Faster’, lizards – as symbolic of the unenlightened masses – are a central motif in Milligan’s Enigma.

[10] Larkin is also among Edwards’s ‘Men of the Year’ for 1993. See Price, 1993, op cit.

No study of The Holy Bible, its artistic impact and its significance in the history of Manic Street Preachers should overlook the band’s live performances throughout 1994.

The Life Becoming a Landslide tour early that year saw the group adopting the military look with which they would be associated for their third album, before any new songs were included in their setlists. One track from the Life Becoming a Landslide EP, ‘Comfort Comes’, did however provide an indication of where the band would be heading stylistically, as recording got underway at Cardiff’s Sound Space Studios.

After playing at the Clapham Grand in London in March – in aid of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (following the death of their friend, co-manager and publicist Philip Hall in 1993) – the band visited Thailand in April for two packed shows at Bangkok’s MBK Hall. The trip was documented in the English language music press in two standout pieces, by Barbara Ellen (for NME) and Andrew Smith (The Face), which painted a vivid picture of the atmosphere of the gigs, and the nightlife in which band members and crew were immersed in Pat Pong – with Richey Edwards’s behaviour and comments in particular suggesting that the next album would unhesitatingly explore more morally complex terrain as regards the use, and abuse of bodies.

After their return to the UK, the Manics appeared on the bill at the Carnival Against the Nazis at Brockwell Park in May before their notorious, confrontational Glastonbury festival slot in June, with more new material now being played publicly, following the release of the double A-side single Faster/PCP.

At the end of August, just days before the release of The Holy Bible and in light of Richey Edwards’s hospitalisation during the summer (first in an NHS facility in Whitchurch and then The Priory), the Manics took to the stage at Reading as a three-piece, with some uncertainty as to whether the lyricist and guitarist would return. The entirety of the album’s lyrics were printed as an advertisement which featured in the music press, underlining the significance of Edwards’s and Nicky Wire’s words – how far the band stood apart on the page from the majority of rock bands at the time. On 30 August listeners were finally able to hear The Holy Bible and gain a deeper sense of what had been unfolding in the course of the year.

Edwards rejoined his bandmates for UK and European tours to promote the album in the autumn, his health still a matter of concern within the band and among fans and journalists – but the power of the Manics as a live act was in no doubt. The year culminated in three explosive nights at the London Astoria – Edwards’s final public appearances with the band.

Here, a number of concert goers recall their experiences of seeing Manic Street Preachers on selected UK dates throughout 1994, alongside photos and ephemera. This not only provides an opportunity to consider the captivating energy of the band at an undoubted peak in their career, and amid the difficulties that they faced; but also a chance to include more voices in a project focused upon a work of art that is itself composed of multiple voices and perspectives.

By no means intended as a comprehensive account of the band’s live year (there are no supplementary documents of the Thailand and European gigs, for which readers are referred to the previously mentioned articles in the NME and The Face, as well as Simon Price’s tour reports for Melody Maker), this feature does nevertheless convey something of the visceral experience, the thoughts and reminiscences of those who followed the band as they entered this critical phase. It is also a reflection of fan culture and the attachments that Manic Street Preachers have always inspired.

Both personal and journalistic, full of evocative detail as well as hazy recollection – the effects of history and memory – these contributions offer snapshots, especially for those who weren’t there, of The Holy Bible as a live experience. Yusef Sayed

Christian Oldcorn – Leeds Town & Country, 16 October 1994

The Holy Bible tour was the first time I had seen the Manic Street Preachers live. I was 17 at the time and it was my first “proper” gig. That is, I went with my mates, and not my dad, who had dragged me to gigs he wanted to go to for a few years. I was familiar with the Manics, without being a huge fan. I had taped copies of Generation Terrorists and Gold Against the Soul because my mates and I had a band and we covered a couple of Manics songs. I was listening to lots of music, from Dire Straits and early Fleetwood Mac to INXS, and developing a more indie taste via St Etienne, the Cure and Blur. Everything changed forever for me, on Sunday 16 October at the Town and Country Club in Leeds.

I had heard the lead tracks from The Holy Bible, but not the whole album. The money I had spent on my ticket and taxi meant my budget had been blown. But I knew if ‘Faster’ and ‘Revol’ were anything to go by, we were in for a treat. The preceding weeks were full of chatter about whether or not the gig would happen. Richey had missed Reading, and he clearly wasn’t well. This gig was just six or seven weeks later.

I witnessed for the first time, the army of Manics fans. Those in leopard print and feather boas, and those who had fully embraced the military look. The stage was a chaotic mixture of Marshall, Ampeg, Yamaha and cargo netting! From the opening moment, to the last strained chords of ‘You love Us’, I was captivated. ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head’ was a highlight but the best moment was, I now know, ‘This is Yesterday’. This song has become the anthem for my life, and a comfort for over 25 years now.

The gig went by in a flash. The next day I made it my mission to own The Holy Bible and the Manics had become “my band”. I’ve seen them over 30 times over the years, and only one gig comes close to that first one for memories and impact: their return to the T&C in Leeds in April 1996, for their first headline gig after Richey disappeared.

The Holy Bible was born for me that night. And it has changed my life forever.

David Granger – Northampton Roadmender, 24 June 1994

I only know which day of the week it was, that it was a Glastonbury warm-up and what the setlist was, thanks to the internet. Thursday 24 June 1994 at the Northampton Roadmender was a long time ago. But I do remember it was a cauldron of Welsh punk rock, wrapped in military garb – and that the support, Dub War, were equally incendiary. We were still a month away from The Holy Bible being unleashed, and the only thing which had been released to date was the set opener ‘Faster’. No-one was really ready for the left turn taken after Gold Against the Soul.

That time in the ’90s was a wasteland in terms of music. Acid House was a mere hangover, Britpop was not yet born or named and, at that time, the NME were so desperate to find a new scene, the best they could conjure up was the New Wave of New Wave. At the Manics gig, the cooler kids had S*M*A*S*H T-shirts, and the less cool wore These Animal Men. These were the cultural barometers we consulted.

That June evening was hot, it was sweaty, it was beer-soaked, it was frenetic, it was a time when the Manics weren’t afraid, and indeed courted confrontation: stylistically, lyrically and musically. It did feel like a return to the edge, anger and distortion of the first record, but carved with a sharper political pen.

Trying to jog my memory, I looked up that ’94 Glastonbury appearance, which was the following night. And you can see the four of them brimming with an arrogant, angry confidence. It was the year of Wire’s “Build a Bypass” proclamation – and they were a band looking for a metaphorical fight. They knew it was a great record.

The context, complaints and consequential news stories overshadow the memories of that Manics period, but I remember that warm-up gig in Northampton felt triumphant. They were ready to conquer.

Helen Davies – Liverpool University, 3 February 1994 // Manchester Academy, 13 October 1994

Although it was before The Holy Bible, I always think of the Liverpool University gig in February 1994 as being the start of that era, because it was the first time I’d seen them wearing the army gear. James came on stage wearing a black beanie hat which he threw into the crowd after a couple of songs. My brother nonchalantly reached up one hand and caught it. I can still picture this so clearly, it was such a perfect moment. I was stood on the barrier, directly in front of James, and I took loads of photos of him and Nicky. I have almost no recollection of Richey at all. I only vaguely remember him as a figure in the shadows.

At the end of ‘You Love Us’, the final song, James threw himself backwards off the stage, partly landing on me, my brother and my penpal who’d come up from London to stay with us, and lay on top of the crowd, still playing, while metallic confetti swirled everywhere. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I still think, ‘I’ve touched that guitar!’ whenever I see him playing the white Les Paul.

I ended up with James’s setlist. At the time I was disappointed because my penpal was completely overwhelmed with emotion and collapsed on the floor and couldn’t stand up, so I had to take her home in a cab rather than waiting around to get the setlist signed. Anyway, years passed and I forgot all about it, until I found it in a box in the loft last year. I took it with me when I went to see James talk at the Cardiff Poetry Festival earlier this year [2020] and asked him to sign it. He said he was surprised to see that they hadn’t played any Holy Bible songs, as he said by that point they were all “in the bag” (his words).

At the Manchester Academy in October, I was on the barrier again, between James and Nicky – and again, I remember very little about the gig, other than the fact that I loved every minute of it. I think I was so completely in the moment that I wasn’t making any effort to store up memories for later. I feel a bit sad about that now – if I’d known how short-lived that phase of Manics history would be, and that it would be the last time I’d ever see Richey, maybe I’d have written down my impressions immediately afterwards. But then you never think you’re going to forget the things that are important to you.

After the gig, I bought the only piece of official Manics merch I ever owned: a set of dogtags. They’re really poor quality, like they’re made out of a Coke tin, which it now occurs to me would have been the perfect Manics merch, but I loved them anyway and still treasure them.

For all that The Holy Bible is such a famously depressing album, it never made me sad, with the exception of ‘4st 7lb’. At the time I mainly found it incredibly exciting: all those new ideas to think about, new books to read. I was a very bookish kid, but I was never lucky enough to have an inspiring teacher, or any adult who took an interest in recommending books I might find interesting or even talking to me seriously. I was bored out my mind. I know it’s a cliché, but I really did get an education from the Manics, as well as the idea that your intelligence is something to be proud of and a tool you can use to improve your life, rather than something people take the piss out of you for and that’s only useful insofar as it can enable you to earn more money in a job you hate. I never had that thing of an older person saying, ‘Here – read this. You might like it,’ from anyone other than Richey, and there was absolutely nothing in the education I received at school that broadened my mind or made me think differently about the world.

I find, as I get older, I sometimes feel a bit guilty for loving that album so much, when the Manics clearly had to go through hell to create it, but I’m enormously grateful to them that they did and it changed my life for the better.

Rosey R*E*P*E*A*T – Reading Festival, 27 August 1994

I think that a large part of my memories about the Manic Street Preachers at Reading in ’94 are due to the gig’s place in the history of the band, and also its place in the history of my relationship with them.

It lacked the exceptional vibe of a couple of the gigs I’d been to earlier that year, such as the performance at the Clapham Grand in March with Bernard Butler turning up and The Pogues in support, and it was nowhere near the ecstatic, euphoric, passionate and committed chaos of their set at the Anti-Nazi League carnival in June (where I helped fill 11 coaches from Cambridge – and still had to send lots of people on the train!) These standout shows kept alive my belief that this band was special, that this was the band I’d been waiting all my life for.

I’m not sure how much everybody believed that Richey would really not be at the Reading Festival, that he wouldn’t attend, that he was really ill. After some of the hype about past statements turning out not to be quite true, I know that we hoped we would see him pouting and posing, unplugged, stage right as usual. In the event, all there was was this yawning, gaping gap. Something we’ve sadly had to get accustomed to, while never getting used to it.

This appearance, and their position within the festival, had none of the swagger or subversion of their set at the same festival two years earlier, where their noise, their abrasive stage insults, their presentation, their persona and their (albeit unintentional) injury of a security guard, had made them genuinely seem like the outsiders that we had originally fallen for, a continuation of the working class kids wrecking the posh Downing College Ball. It felt less like a normal, enormous ‘Fuck You’ to the musical establishment, and more like a band fulfilling a contractual obligation. (And later we found out that that is what it was, a performance needed to help pay Richey’s Priory fees.)

While these are the doubts we may have intellectualised beforehand or afterwards, of course whenever Manic Street Preachers take the stage, now as then, all such cerebral bullshit is forgotten for the sheer rush of joy, solidarity and vindication. They appeared in camo gear, James hiding his long locks and stubble beneath a raised hood like an awkward teenager, yelling “Go Faster!” before launching into incredibly powerful versions of ‘Faster’ and ‘PCP’. Hearing ‘She Is Suffering’ and ‘Revol’ played live for only the second and third time, ahead of The Holy Bible‘s release, felt like privileged information, even if it meant we were as yet still unaware of the brilliance of the album that was to hit us so hard, and leave music immutably altered, just a couple of days later. The cover of ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ was telling, and the cheeky smuggling of snippets of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ (along with the intro to ‘Suicide is Painless’) into ‘Repeat’ was inspired.

Here it fades in the memory besides the early shows, and also some of those to come later that year, such as the incredible Holy Bible tour dates, which I remember much more vividly, and of course the definitive Astoria gigs.

On a personal level, the gig was a chance for my friend’s MSP obsessed 9-year-old son, known by his fanzine name of ‘Dweeb’ when he helped with the zine, to get to his second Manics gig, as he was too young for most rock venues. His unpretentious joy at catching his idols live, and his genuine care for the absent Richey, are probably my abiding memories of the day.

Gavin Thomas – Cardiff Astoria, 20 October 1994

The Manics were “my band”, in many ways. They were from the same Eastern valleys as me, they were history students, punk fans, metal fans and at the heart of my education. I had spent hours poring over the quotes in Generation Terrorists, I had bored my sixth form friends with constant quotes and much the same when I moved on to uni in ’92.

I had a green St Sebastian T-shirt with ‘It’s not that I can’t find worth in anything’ on the back that I wore to destruction. I bought Gold Against the Soul, which I secretly loved (always a metal fan at heart) but the album seemed out of step with the world. I had seen the Manics at the Philip Hall benefit at the Clapham Grand in March. And then at an Anti-Nazi League gig in Brockwell Park in May. These were weird gigs, as the crowd weren’t solely Manics fans. It was also the beginning of the Britpop period and things were becoming more parochial and uniform.

I read about The Holy Bible with ridiculous excitement, I remember the Melody Maker misreporting that the cover would feature a sumo wrestler, it seemed so confrontational. I bought it from Woolworths in Ebbw Vale… and it consumed me. I’d seen the performance of ‘Faster’ on Top of the Pops and I was mesmerised. The Rolling Stones inspired, glammy rock ‘n’ roll look had disappeared: they looked terrifying. My Dad asked me, “What’s wrong with them?” I found the album bewildering, it was so dense, but unlike the previous two I didn’t know the musical references. The metal influences had given way to post-punk and industrial influences. My musical world changed, I became obsessed with Joy Division and Magazine. I wrote dense lyrics about consumerism.

My friend Kristian, who had introduced me to the band, rang me up excitedly to say he had got tickets for The Holy Bible tour. I travelled back from London and we met in Cardiff. The venue was strange, it was historically a nightclub that played chart music. It had ferns, and mirrors and felt weirdly artificial. Reggae/metal act Dub War opened. They felt appropriate, their music was aggressive, angular, awkward. Sleeper were next, it felt too lightweight, too “normal”. By the end of their set the venue was seething, the mirrored walls and ceilings were dripping with rivers of sweat. It genuinely fell as a light mist.

The atmosphere was now oppressive, the heat was overwhelming, my green St Sebastian shirt stuck to me. When the Manics hit the stage it ignited the room. The hot sweaty mass of people lurched and leapt as one. When they played ‘Faster’ it felt like the walls were shifting. ‘Of Walking Abortion’ was terrifying, “Who’s responsible? You fucking are!” we all screamed along. This was our band, we all shouted “fuck off” when James played the bends in ‘Stay Beautiful’. The break to play ‘Raindrops’ and ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ was needed, as we all took a breath.

When we left the venue, it was a release. The cold air revived me. I would see them again (never with Richey) but it never felt the same, it never had that communal sense – people looked me at weirdly when I shouted “fuck off” during ‘Stay Beautiful’.

Steve Burnett – Cardiff Astoria, 20 October 1994

It is hard for me to disentangle the gig itself from the sense, in 1994, that the Manics were the only band that genuinely mattered, and that they were stealthily taking over my entire existence. I’d lived in Whitchurch, Cardiff for most of my life and it would be hard to overstate the mundanity of the locale. Two things stand out about Whitchurch in the early 90s; a massive secondary school and a massive psychiatric hospital. Whitchurch is not a village that often attracts a visiting rock star. I mention all this because, in 1993, I moved into a rented house in the shadow of Whitchurch Hospital.

1993 was when I came to live and breathe the Manics. I’d been aware of the early singles as a student in London and I’d suffered the inevitable and hilarious abuse that follows when you are from Wales and there’s a ‘comedy’ Welsh band making the front page of the NME. 1993 was my first Manics gig and, as a Sociology graduate/former devotee of Hanoi Rocks, I was swept up in the incongruous mix of politics, polemic and cross-dressing. Nicky taking the stage like a distorted Bette Davis drew the adoration and bile of the festival audience whilst James rained a torrent of apposite insults upon us – it just seemed to be the ultimate desecration of the corpse of rock ‘n’ roll. Spiteful, danceable, fun.

1994’s show wasn’t fun.

I don’t think I can articulate quite how despised the Manics were in Wales in 1994. They had painted a target onto our nation and invited the world to take a shot. The Holy Bible seemed to be a last stand for the oddballs of Cardiff to rally around. Let’s be clear, Cardiff in the ’80s and ’90s was a Wild West town. Hordes descended from across the valleys, suited and booted and ready to bust your nose if you looked a bit dubious. I wore silk shirts and an armful of cheap bangles. I shed a lot of blood, smiling broadly as each punch landed. Oddballs needed a home and the Manics provided it. There were no Welsh flags and Valley Girl T-shirts in 1994. There was a disenfranchised core. There was defiance and hate.

There were also the ambulance chasers. Twice, while driving though the back streets of Whitchurch, I dreamt that I saw Nicky Wire strolling about with a carrier bag in his hand. I assumed I was hallucinating. Eventually the news broke about Richey and all became clear. Suddenly the Manics were tabloid fodder and that attracted both curiosity and some deeply, deeply troubled new followers of the band.  1994’s show wasn’t fun.

Richey wasn’t anti-fun though. My first encounter with him was at an Oasis gig in Newport TJ’s. He wasn’t there to pour scorn, he was clearly soaking up the zeitgeist but also, y’know, enjoying himself. People seem to set up the Manics as the alternative to Britpop but there was great commonality. Both bands fiercely working class, aiming high and exuding nihilism. It made total sense to me that my next MSP show would see them supporting Oasis. That 1996 show was like the uncorking of undiluted hope. A desire to just BE.

1994, though. The atmosphere in the incongruous setting of a faded nightclub was seething. Dark. Tense. Dangerous. The camouflaged stage promised a war. Richey patrolling his corner like an institutionalised polar bear. Hollow, blank eyes. Impossibly glamorous of course, but less so with hindsight. No cross-dressing tonight, no ‘cheeky’ quips from Wire. No fun. Quite simply the most emotionally devastating cultural experience I will ever have. This was a band fighting for its life, each member struggling for air. Brutal, unforgiving, unforgettable. Unsustainable. Even then it was hard to escape the feeling that, just by being there, by encouraging this, you were part of the problem. Yes, there was the intellectual draw, the musical draw, the sheer magnetism of the power of expression, but there was also the circus sideshow. Would he turn up? Would the show be cancelled? Was this the end?

I find it impossible to convey here, or in any form of expression, to anyone that wasn’t there in 1994 quite what it was like before the Welsh flags and lager louts carried the band into arena tours. There’s no question that everything did have to go, it just couldn’t be like it was any longer. It’s okay to visit that level of bleakness, but nobody should be expected to dwell there.

Simon Cole – Cambridge Corn Exchange, 10 October 1994 // London Astoria, 19–21 December 1994

I was an early adopter. I was introduced to Manic Street Preachers on the cusp of the album Generation Terrorists being released. A more musically adventurous friend gave me a copy of New Art Riot on 12″ and I was hooked. I didn’t pretend to understand it (I could barely make out a word James was saying) or realise why it was so different to the Now That’s What I Call Music 17 CD which had been the last album that I had bought, but something really clicked. The posturing, the sloganeering, the confidence, the quotes, the attitude, the glamour. All of it felt strangely recycled but also totally relevant and important. I saw them live for the first time at the Cambridge Junction in 1992. Unforgettable, sweaty and necessary. My first revelatory gig (everything up to that point either naff and mainstream or minor and local). It dawned: an important band with a message delivered in spray paint and glitter who I loved and would have a connection with for the rest of my life.

In the lead-up to the release of The Holy Bible, I had just turned 18 and was living away from home for the first time in “that London”. Previous jaunts that meant lengthy train journeys and missed last buses suddenly became easy and regular to do. Rock Against Racism in late May outside in Brockwell Park, the first airings of tracks from The Holy Bible (and starting a gig with ‘Repeat’ – perhaps the first and only time?). ‘Faster’ and ‘PCP’ had a vitality and speed to them unlike anything before. ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’ and ‘Stay Beautiful’ seeming almost staid on the same setlist. You could just tell it was the beginning of something special.

Fast forward to 10 October and the third time seeing the band in Cambridge, the second time at the Corn Exchange – but something is different. Richey gaunt and haunted, lacking the abandon which he would always have in the early days. Now properly playing and not going through the motions exactly, just not as present. The rush to the left hand side of the barriers/stage right of the stage so you could be on the “Richey side” now not so vital. ‘Revol’ and ‘Yes’ a sucker punch of a start, following the Dust Brothers opening salvo of ‘Done and Dusted’, which would now define the start of a Manic Street Preachers gig, for the next few months anyway.

The album, which had practically never left my Walkman as I travelled around town and up to Cambridge, had a bite when played live, which immediately made you pay attention and question in which direction this band was going. It was brutal and rhythmic. They were so removed and apart from anything else in the scene at the time. Lacking the polish and sheen of the Gold Against The Soul era gigs and the abandon of the Generation Terrorists era. This was a band deep within a white-hot zone of creativity and drive which was borderline scary.

On to December and the three-night salvo of the Astoria gigs. Legendary and unforgettable. This was the band at its peak and strangely, it also felt like the end of something – easy to say with hindsight, but this was a definite punctuation mark to the history of the band thus far. Probably not a full-stop, but where could they go from here? The sheer noise of the first night. Levels which must have blown speakers and eardrums and yet it didn’t feel too much, it felt just right. ‘Faster’ now finding its way to the opening position, or close to the top, as opposed to being buried mid-setlist in Cambridge. James in his ‘Kill Them All, Let God Sort ‘Em Out’ T-shirt, which I spent the next year looking for in Camden and surrounding Army and Navy stores. Tattoos were handed out to those at the front of the queue on night 1 and 2 and then literally thrown with abandon to all and sundry on night 3. All of it felt like a band at their peak, but perhaps not knowing what the future held due to the uncertainty of that year. ‘Slash N Burn’ jettisoned on night 3 for a trio of covers: ‘Bright Eyes’, ‘Last Christmas’ and ‘What’s My Name’.

On the final night the stage destruction just felt inevitable. Probably unplanned, but once it started it was right and righteous. It was the only possible ending. Devastation as Richey prowled, wandering the stage seemingly wanting to rent every string from every instrument. I had moved up to the balcony, exhausted from having done a day shift at a temporary Christmas job sorting mail as a student and then racing to the Astoria three days and nights in a row. I hung out around the stage door at the conclusion of it all. I couldn’t go home just yet, surely there was more. We all knew there wouldn’t be an encore, but surely there must be something.

I struck up a conversation with a Japanese journalist leaving the after-party who asked if I wanted his backstage pass as a souvenir as we shared a cigarette and I commented that I had seen all three nights. Grateful and adding the pass to my tattoo stash I realised that I suddenly had the keys to the kingdom and headed up past the tired bouncer flashing my pass and into the after-party, upset to hear that the band had left relatively quickly following the trail of wrecked instruments (and that someone from Columbia was probably looking to have a chat about the bill for the impromptu ending). The energy was celebratory but also strangely muted. Things were winding down, but people honestly felt like they may have seen the last Manics gig.

Obviously no-one knew that was the last gig that Richey would play and for those select few, the last time they would ever see him again in public/on stage. However if that was them going out with a bang, you knew it would truly never be forgotten, flicking through each new book on the band, looking for mention of 19-21 December 1994.

Gary Law – Cardiff Astoria, 20 October 1994

My memory holds a few things clear about this show. The Manics were in a dark place in this period and their performance was raw, emotional and angry. The club was hot and filled with condensation. Dub War were the first act and I’ll be honest, this passed me by completely. Sleeper were second on the bill, Louise Wener was a star on the up. Their bubblegum indie pop did seem to jar a bit with the audience who were pretty much all waiting for the headliners.

The Manics came on in their full military regalia, James in a white sailor’s uniform, Richey in a black U-boat uniform, Nicky in combats and Sean in, of all things, a United Nations blue beret.

The set started with ‘Revol’. The sound was loud and very powerful. There seemed to be a morbid curiosity about Richey. People crowded at his side of the stage muttering about his weight and mood. He just sort of stood there in his own world, strumming gently through the set while the noise swirled around him. The set leant heavily on The Holy Bible and some of those harsh pieces jarred against the older more melodic material. In between ‘La Tristesse Durera’ and ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ they played two of the darkest Holy Bible tracks, ‘Mausoleum’ and ‘Of Walking Abortion’, with James swapping his Gibson guitar for a Fender, giving the songs a jagged, edgy sound.

The show climaxed with ‘You Love Us’, with Richey and Nicky trashing their guitars at the end and Nicky holding his mic stand out into the mosh pit. The walls of the club were drenched with condensation and I noticed that as people were leaving they were drained by the power of the performance.

I remember my friend wondering if the band were going to break up because there seemed such a finality to the performance. They had had a hard, problematic year after all.

And then in 1995 it all went to shit.

David McDonald – Belfast Mandela Hall, 23 October 1994

There was a girl in my maths class called Carly, and she was one of those Manics fans, the joyously obsessive type, which all Manics fans were before Everything Must Go made all your mates Manics fans. The Manics were coming to Belfast and Atlantic 252 had been playing ‘Roses In The Hospital’ every morning on the way to school for a year and I liked that, so I decided to go. The Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdown has reminded many of us of how important live music is to us. That feeling of being crammed into a room with so many folk you have something in common with, all shouting the same words, is hard to describe, but it’s important to many of us, and it’s important to Manics fans, the perennial outsiders and rejects. 

That night in autumn 1994, in the students’ union at Queen’s University in Belfast was the first time I’d really felt like that. I didn’t go, like Carly would have, as a confirmed Manics obsessive, however. I went because in 1994 Belfast was at the tail end of a decade long lockdown of its own, which meant that the majority of the bands we read about in the NME and Melody Maker just didn’t bother coming to play. Partly it was the added expense of loading all your gear onto the ferry, the hotels, the different promoters, but partly it was the Troubles too. At 15 years old, I hadn’t been to that many gigs yet, and it didn’t feel like there were many to go to. Anyone who was coming to Belfast was worth a listen.

I gave Carly in Maths a couple of blank tapes and she reappeared a week later having filled them with everything the Manics had ever done, B-sides and all. I got my ticket and pressganged my pal Phil into coming too. He thought the Manics were a bit naff, a bit over the top, cheesy metallers, but he agreed to come for the night out and also because there just weren’t that many gigs to go to.

My memories of the gig itself are frustratingly few – it was nearly 30 years ago and I’d probably put away two litres of Old English cider on the way in. I remember walking up Royal Avenue with my ticket in my hip pocket and my hand on top of it because I was so afraid of it flying away. I remember the sense of relief as we were actually allowed into the students’ union, past the bouncers. Sleeper, at that point an up-and-coming indie prospect, were the support act on the tour, but as often happened in Ireland, it wasn’t deemed worth their while coming, so we were treated to a set from Derry band Schtum.

The Manics were in full army surplus chic mode, James was wearing the white sailor suit; Nicky and Richey had camo face paint on. Of the stuff on Carly’s tapes, it was Gold Against the Soul which had grabbed me first, it was after all only a few years since I’d been obsessed with Extreme’s Pornograffiti. The Holy Bible material was more difficult to get into, even if ultimately it was more rewarding. There was a distinct difference at the gig between the songs from Generation Terrorists and Gold Against the Soul, and the Holy Bible material. The atmosphere for those songs was eerie and the crowd was quite restrained, compared to the moshing and dancing which happened during earlier songs.

It was my first Manics gig, and I’ve lost track of how many others I’ve been to; but it was also the last Manics gig I went to where the crowd was mostly comprised of those kinds of Manics fans – the ones with the make-up on and the feather boas and the slogans written on their clothes. A few years later, after the success of Everything Must Go, the crowds were different. At the Mandela Hall that night it was all fishnets, with the odd heavy metaller – in 1994 the Manics were as likely to be in Kerrang! as the NME.

I remember being right up at the stage, I remember dancing and moshing, and I remember an older girl checking I was alright after I got bumped. Manics fans are always really good with each other like that, but it was new for me that night. 

There was a quiet bit towards the end, with James doing some songs solo. It wasn’t like the acoustic interludes he did later, it was just him and his white Les Paul. A sparse cover of Nirvana’s ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ from that part was a highlight of the night. The band finished raucously with ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ and ‘You Love Us’, during which Richey put his guitar through the roof. And that was me, one of those Manics fans now.

Not long afterwards I found myself in Waterstone’s, having a copy of The Torture Garden put on special order for me.

MissF – Manchester Academy, 13 October 1994 // London Astoria, 21 December 1994

I have seen hundreds of shows since, but the closest thing I have found to the experience of the two Holy Bible shows is immersive theatre. It’s impossible to explain the sensory intensity and I have never witnessed anything else that has come close.

The Manchester Academy date was my first gig. I was 14. I took a tenner in my jeans pocket with the idea that I could bribe the bouncer to let me into the (over 18s) show if my awful fake NUS card didn’t work. It wasn’t necessary.

The room felt oppressive. The smells are the most evocative in my memory – the thick dry ice hanging in the air, the sweat. The air felt heavy and earthy. Everything looked and felt murky. The stage was draped in camouflage netting and was dark. All the gear on the stage was dark, the lighting was dark – reds and blues and greens.

I worked my way to the middle of the crowd near the front – I didn’t know how this worked. The moment the band started playing the crowd exploded into aggression. James adopted a wide-legged stance, grubby white sailor suit, feet planted, screaming, spitting out streams of words, his face contorted with the effort, his fingers dashing off the guitar parts making it look like nothing. Nicky sneering and pogoing. Musically it was like a percussion bomb radiating out from the stage, it felt like a battle – the band a finely drilled unit of pure rage and the audience responding in kind. It felt like the band despised the crowd for their adoration.

Surrounded by solid men in stinking clothes, their sweat soaked my T-shirt. Their smell. I fought to stay standing, I desperately wanted to see the band but I could only catch glimpses of their heads silhouetted in the seconds when I wasn’t overwhelmed by bodies pushing me around. Feeling woozy, I pushed backwards and worked my way out of the epicentre. I felt arms around me from behind and remembered reading about how people helped each other at gigs. Then I felt a wet mouth on my ear and I realised this wasn’t friendly. The sensation jolted me and I jabbed my elbow into the body behind me and broke free, fleeing to the back of the hall. 

At the London Astoria, the crowd seemed older, much more gentle. I worked my way close to Richey’s area and ended up on the second row. The stage set was muted again and Richey’s lighting was especially dim. There were aged flowers on his speaker. Throughout the show he mostly looked down, sometimes smiling at a private joke and mouthing the words to himself – defiant, “these are mine”. Occasionally making eye contact. The whites of his eyes looked huge in the dark. He often physically recoiled from the stares of the crowd and appeared most comfortable subsumed by the gloom.

The mood of the show was less abrasive than Manchester – even playful during James’s acoustic section. Richey was angular – jutting bones and splayed elbows, playing the rockstar more, preening and throwing occasional shapes.

The destruction of the gear at the end of the set felt joyful. One by one the band left the stage until Richey stood alone in the centre, repeatedly hitting himself over the head with the neck of his broken guitar. It looked like it hurt.

Lee Morgan – Norwich UEA, Friday 7 October // London Astoria, 21 December 1994

1994 was an interesting year for me personally. I passed my driving test on the third attempt, I was in my first serious long-term relationship but more importantly my favourite band – Manic Street Preachers – were releasing their third album, with rumours circulating of another re-invention and another new direction.

Looking back, some seeds had already been sown. I saw them in January at Brixton Academy and James was wearing army surplus. That same month Life Becoming a Landslide was released as the last single off Gold Against the Soul and one of the B-sides really stood out. A harsh, stripped back snarl with a militaristic drum beat, ‘Comfort Comes’ was a sign of things to come. It is still even now my favourite Manics B-side.

But it was when I opened that May issue of NME and saw the news piece announcing they were releasing a new double A-side single, Faster/PCP, that things became interesting. The image that accompanied the text had James front and centre in Russian army jacket and balaclava, the other three behind him in military wear and medals. I can still remember the sense of excitement looking at this image, knowing that something within the group had dramatically changed.

And then came the TV appearances – ‘Faster’ on Top of the Pops, Channel 4’s Naked City, Butt Naked and their Glastonbury coverage. Reading Festival highlights on ITV’s The Beat. Their look and sound had now become raw, angry, spiteful, nasty, pissed off.

With The Holy Bible now released, purchased and played on continuous repeat I could not wait to see them live. A tour was announced for October and, living in Essex, I’m naturally drawn to the London dates. But strangely there were no London shows scheduled. So myself and a few mates decided to go the Norwich gig on the Friday night, at the University of East Anglia. The Manics did not disappoint – the intense ferocity of what I had seen and heard on TV was in full evidence.

Even though it is almost 26 years since I saw them at Norwich I still have one abiding memory. During ‘Faster’ there was a power cut – no sound, no lights, no nothing. As various technicians and crew scurried around trying to resolve the problem, the crowd continued to sing along word and note perfect. I still remember James, in his white sailor suit, standing there with a smile on his face, which was somewhere between astonishment and admiration.

Fast forward to December and the band announced a Christmas show at the London Astoria on the 19th – it sold out within minutes. They put on another the next night – that too sold out quickly. So when they announced a third show on the 21st I was not going to be left behind again and managed to get a ticket. My mate Andy went on the first night and told me they absolutely blew everybody away with their passion, power and aggression. Not to mention a small display of petulant instrument smashing.

So the 21st arrived and at the venue excitement levels had reached fever pitch. Unfortunately I could not get a standing ticket, so had to be content in the seats in the balcony, but looking back at the absolute venom MSP were spitting out at these Astoria shows, I was glad to be at a safe distance. The show itself seemed to whizz by at breakneck speed and then came that famous last five minutes when ‘You Love Us’ just exploded into a frenzied mass destruction of equipment (and anything else they could get their hands on it seemed).

I managed to take a photo of James smashing Wire’s bass whilst wearing a Santa hat, something that has become the envy of some Manics fans I know.

For me, 1994 was a benchmark year for the Manics and those three Astoria shows will always be a defining moment. I truly believe even to this day that for those 12 months they were untouchable as being the best UK rock band in the world.

Contributors: Séamus Colgan, Helen Davies, Steve Burnett, Simon Cole, MissF, Christian Oldcorn, Gavin Thomas, Gary Law, Simon Whittle, Rosey R*E*P*E*A*T, David Granger, David McDonald, Lee Morgan