Category Archives: Essay

‘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.Continue reading “This World of Negation”

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, asContinue reading “Word Limits”

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 visitedContinue reading “Nothing Is Nothing”

“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 wantContinue reading “Revolutionary Positions”

“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 KippenbergerContinue reading “Unconventional Redemption”

‘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 ErnestContinue reading “Desire and Anxiety”

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 writerContinue reading “Always Look for Shade”

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 anyContinue reading “Eyewitness”

‘Let a hard and just sentence be given and carried out, as the honour of the nation demands and its greatest traitor deserves.’ Resolution of Czechoslovak resistance organisation, demanding severe punishment for Father Jozef Tiso, November 1946 ‘We bear within us a reticent executioner, an unrealised criminal. And those who lack the boldness to acknowledgeContinue reading “Life and Death Sentences”

Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire first learned about artist Jenny Saville by way of a feature article in a weekend newspaper supplement. Wire told writer Dan Richards in 2010: “I remember the day vividly because we both bought the Independent on Sunday and in the magazine was a special on Jenny Saville – the firstContinue reading “Interfacing”