Four and a half years ago, my life was altered when I listened to Manic Street Preachers’ first album, The Holy Bible, for the first handful of times. Thirty years on from its initial release, its bleak, uncompromising vision of the late-20th century as a site for nothing but various conflicting personal and political evils remains resonant, and yet, in tandem with this, it is impossible to discuss the album without understanding the other role it has come to play in popular culture, as a rallying call for the intellectual pride of working-class young people.
To set the scene, it's April 2020. The world is on pause for an undefined period of time, and nobody really has anything to do - least of all, 14-year-old Liz. Online school hasn't quite been figured out yet, and therefore, I am left with an infinite mass of free time. I spend this time diving into what has come to be my main passion over the past two years, music: spending countless hours browsing websites like RateYourMusic, curating playlists, listening to albums, and crucially, reviewing them on an Instagram account which I share with some of a broad network of online friends I’ve met through music. A group chat is where The Holy Bible first comes up. I'd seen the unconventional cover - a triptych of a morbidly obese woman in her underwear, painted by Jenny Saville, who allowed the Manics to use the artwork for free, after learning of the album’s themes - in passing, but never placed too much thought into it. At this time, amidst the external chaos, I'm listening to more music which is somewhat collected, dissociative and dreamlike, and the anger and misanthropy implied by the uncompromising cover isn't quite what I need. And yet, it becomes a talking point in a conversation, with the lyrics of songwriter and live guitarist Richey Edwards being a particular focus of the conversation, and I'm compelled to give it a listen to see what my friends are talking about.
“I think that if a Holy Bible is true, it should be about the way the world is and that's what I think my lyrics are about. [The album] doesn't pretend things don't exist”
It would be too straightforward to claim love at first listen: I enjoyed it from the start, but in perhaps a more casual way. The anthemic choruses of tracks such as Of Walking Abortion, despite my assumption that the lyrical content was bleak, beneath singer James Dean Bradfield’s often indecipherable vocal style - a common criticism of the album which I do understand - became earworms which I was prone to leaving on repeat. However, over time, my focus came to shift from the intoxicating snarl of the track’s core guitar riff, to a sample at the beginning, in which a man’s voice reads: “I knew that someday I was gonna die, and I knew that before I died, two things would happen to me: that number one I would regret my entire life, and number two I would want to live my life over again.” A startling proposition, and one made by Hubert Selby, Jr.: author of the likes of Requiem for a Dream. Though I will not claim to have read this particular book, the use of this sample from an author’s speech illustrates the unbridled intellectualism at the heart of the record: it’s a rock album made by people whose interests transcended the boundaries of rock mythology, and who believed in the powers of all forms of art and the necessity that they exist in tandem with one another. Spoken word samples are used at various other points throughout the album - with sources ranging from the film adaptation of 1984 on Faster, to the trailer for the Rising Tide show, which served to celebrate the achievements of Ronald Reagan, which is sarcastically sampled in Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart, and each time, they summarise the themes of the song almost like a foreword. This attention to detail is what continues to impress me about the album: it commits itself entirely to its stark vision of the world, and begs the listener to stay equally engrossed, through proving that the lyricists and musicians involved do not view music as purely an aesthetic form or as a career, but rather as a site for a manifesto, in which they could distill their myriad passions, fears, and pains, as working-class men, into one cohesive body. Even the title of The Holy Bible comes from Edwards’ own vision of the album: in a 1994 interview with Swedish publication ZTV, Edwards said: “I think that if a Holy Bible is true, it should be about the way the world is and that's what I think my lyrics are about. [The album] doesn't pretend things don't exist”. This is clearly true: it tackles various themes from institutional racism, eating disorders, the glorification of serial killers, and prostitution, to the echoes of the atrocities of the Holocaust in modern culture, with a lucidity and underlying black comedy which has made it so beloved.
The Manics have cited 80s gothic rock and post-punk bands as the primary influences on this album, and that influence is most apparent here (The Intense Humming of Evil): the haunting production encases the listener in the same way that the most somber moments on early Bauhaus albums do, forcing the listener into an isolated corner in which you are forced to listen as the sounds of history’s greatest evils rattle through your skull
The opening track, Yes, for instance, is written from the perspective of a perpetually exploited sex worker who longs for a better life, and it does not avoid the brutalities of their career or how it comes to affect them emotionally. In many ways, the song is an extension of the track Little Baby Nothing from their 1992 debut album, Generation Terrorists, but with a new-found level of viscerality compared to that song’s more tame and broadly agreeable approach (disclaimer: I LOVE Little Baby Nothing, don’t get me wrong). “In these plagued streets of pity, you can buy anything” is the mantra at the heart of the chorus, and this succinctly conveys the broader theme of capitalist alienation which runs through both the song and the rest of the album: the narrator’s career sees their body degraded simply to a site for a customer’s wishes, rather than it being the home of a human being with ambitions and dreams. Though the song explicitly is about sex work, much of the horror lies in the transferrable nature of the pain which the narrator speaks of to various lines of work: though the cliche of comparing the music industry to prostitution is age-old, the potential for artists to lack control over their works, and to lose their ability to act as voices for the voiceless as a result, has rarely been so harrowingly explored as in lyrics such as “Pity or pain, to show displeasure’s shame; everyone I’ve loved or hated always seems to leave”. These varying levels of meaning collide into such a lyrically disturbing, but oddly beautiful, track, with vocal melodies which are testament to Bradfield’s skills as a singer and musician: he transfers Edwards’ often meandering lyrics into a song so sharp that, despite the horrors that are inescapable throughout, is strangely catchy with an almost Pixies-esque loud-quiet-loud dynamic running throughout.
Despite the Manics’ own fervent socialist beliefs, the album has no clear loyalties to a state or ideology, but rather a loyalty against the inherent evils of all arbitrary power
The biting and caustic wit of two of the album’s most explicitly political songs - the aforementioned second track, Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart, and Revol - is deeply memorable and timelessly insightful. Ifwhiteamerica, written predominantly by bassist Nicky Wire, rather than by Edwards, particularly offers insights which unfortunately remain relevant. In dealing with America’s institutionally racist history, the line “Vital stats - how white was his skin? Unimportant, just another inner city drive-by thing” is delivered so rapidly amongst a barrage of other sarcastic aphorisms that you could almost miss it - and yet, it remains relevant. Discovering the album in the Spring of 2020 meant discovering against the backdrop of the horrific murder of George Floyd, and as such, this specific line gained another level of potency due to the direct relevance of its observation to present atrocities. The track does, however, offer a rare moment of slight optimism on the album: with the line “There’s not enough black in the Union Jack, there’s too much white in the Stars and Stripes” highlighting the potential for community to emerge if the contributions of ethnic minorities are recognised and steps are taken to challenge the racist fabrics of these countries. Listening to this track amidst the horrors of that Summer ultimately allowed for me to articulate much of my own anger with more clarity, whilst also forcing me to look more closely at the realities of racism and how embedded into the social fabric of our society they are, with these revelations being part of my decision to later study A-Level Sociology - reinforcing the reputation that the Manics have justifiably garnered for being a band that can create an education. Revol, the most explicitly humorous song on the album, meanwhile, imagines Soviet leaders and other core figures of the communist world in a variety of extremely funny sexual situations, proving the album’s willingness to criticise power from all angles: despite the Manics’ own fervent socialist beliefs, the album has no clear loyalties to a state or ideology, but rather a loyalty against the inherent evils of all arbitrary power, which had been proven obsolete by the collapse of the Soviet Union. This track, the shortest on the album, pulsates around a far more direct punk-rock structure than most of the album’s broadly post-punk leanings, which serves to reinforce the futility of power that is highlighted within the lyrics in an energetic, propulsive melody.
As Manics fans who are reading this may have already noticed, I have chosen not to mention the mystery which surrounds the album until now - this is because I believe that the sensationalism which surrounds Edwards’ disappearance has a tendency to overshadow the beauty of the music he helped to create. However, the next two songs I am going to discuss - Die in the Summertime and 4st 7lb, are particularly inseparable from his life, disappearance, and identity. For those who are unaware, Edwards would leave his Cardiff hotel in the early hours of February 1st, 1995, not 9 months after the release of the album, and would never be officially seen again, with the general consensus being that he committed suicide by jumping from the Severn Bridge, though there is no body to prove this as the truth. In the months leading up to this, his struggles with depression, alcoholism, and anorexia had become increasingly well-publicised, with the media often obsessively scrutinising his health and constantly asking the other members about his personal life, when they appeared at festivals without him due to him receiving treatment. Die in the Summertime, particularly, reads retroactively as an opaque cry for help: the track details an inherent dissatisfaction with the state of being alive, with less of a clear external target than much of the album, with Bradfield explicitly screaming “I want to die, die in the summertime” at the central point of the chorus, though he retroactively admits that he was forced to see Edwards’ lyrics as being more vicarious and impersonal than they perhaps were. It is a harrowing, uncomfortable listen, with Bradfield using a different vocal style on the verses to his usual almost shouted delivery: he delivers each word a sharper, more atonal bite than usual here, in a way which has often sounded almost like a precursor to the vocal style which would later be employed by another Welsh band, Mclusky, on their album The Difference Between Me and You Is That I’m Not on Fire.
4st 7lb, meanwhile, details Edwards’ struggles with anorexia, which were again impersonalised through the fact that he writes of his own issues from the perspective of a more stereotypical anorexia patient: a teenage girl, rather than an adult man. The track, fittingly, sounds deeply and profoundly skeletal, with the prominent, deep bassline and distorted, wailing guitars being mixed to almost sound hollow, like a sunken rib cage. As the song progresses, it slows, until the final verse is so elegiac, calm and lullaby-esque that it barely resembles the initial pulsating vitriol of the first verse. This dynamic shift, meant to represent the decaying body of the protagonist as she starves further, could so easily have been a gimmick which romanticises the issues at hand, and yet, the elegance of the ending, at which point the protagonist reaches her lowest weight, is outweighed by the continued bite of the lyrics which clearly come from the perspective of a disordered mind and highlight the absurdities inherent to such a disorder as anorexia: “I’ve finally come to understand life, through staring blankly at my navel” is how the song ends, and this slight hint of sarcasm, when mixed with self-adoration, ensures that the harrowing realities of such a disorder and the perceptual distortions it brings are never out of focus. It’s a truly uncomfortable track, particularly within the context, and yet it also serves as a masterclass in balancing a serious and horrifying subject matter with the correct balance of intensity and empathy. Another deeply moving image within the song, is the image of a “cocoon shedding”: the repurposing of the metaphorical “shell” which somebody can leave to improve their life, as being physical and literal flesh in the context of a disordered mind is a frankly unforgettable image.
In Mausoleum, the focus is upon the omnipotent ruins of the past, and how ultimately, most of human history is defined by atrocity: regardless of how much we “regain our self-control” or “analyse, despise, and scrutinise,” we cannot erase the shadows of such tragedies as the Holocaust
Perhaps the song which most explicitly summarises the album’s reputation as a reading list and an education, is Faster. Initially most noted for the record number of complaints to the BBC which the Top of the Pops performance of the track generated, (because of Bradfield wearing a balaclava, with “JAMES” scrawled across the front in Tipex, which was misinterpreted as being a show of support to the IRA - please watch the interviews on this, they’re hilarious!) the song has come to be era-defining within the 1990s alternative rock canon. An enraged musical scream, the simultaneously boastful and self-loathing lyrics have come to be some of the most definitive catchphrases of many Manics fans, who still often scrawl the likes of “I know I believe in nothing, but it is my nothing” and “I am an architect, they call me a butcher” onto the patches, pins, and t-shirts which are worn at gigs. Most crucial, however, is the chorus, in which Bradfield declares, on Edwards’ behalf, “I am stronger than Mensa / Miller and Mailer, I spat out Plath and Pinter.” This explicit boastfulness regarding intelligence and literacy, in the center of an album which has been so consistently wordy and reference-heavy until this point, is proof of the lack of compromise which exists at its very core. The direct name-checking of authors has influenced myself and many others to explore the writers mentioned - the PDF copies I found of Ariel and The Bell Jar became regular sites for discussion in my GCSE English classes once school reopened and I’d completed my metamorphosis into somebody who took pride in my creativity and intellect, thanks in no small part to this track’s belief in the duty of the individual to take pride in their own intelligence as a weapon against the loss of community. Ultimately, the song is a diatribe against conformity which spits in the face of anti-intellectualism with a venomous bite, and implores the listener to not apologise for their intelligence, albeit with a snark and anger at society’s unwillingness to grant material comfort to those who dare to think critically or to embrace themselves: “I’ve been too honest with myself, I should’ve lied like everybody else.” Similar themes would also come to resonate with me in the Manics’ comeback song, following Richey’s disappearance, A Design For Life, which holds a similarly unconquerable space in my heart and speaks with more sincerity and earnestness of the beauty of working-class intellectual development.
Faster ends with a riotous and explosive guitar solo, followed by the repeated declaration: “So damn easy to cave in, man kills everything.” Within the context of the Manics’ own upbringings, against the backdrop of the 1980s Welsh miners’ strikes which resulted in the loss of the staples which held their communities together, this image of man being responsible for its own demise is particularly striking: the song has no sympathy for the myriad authorities which forbid individual development or security, and yet seems to offer more of a solution than any other track on the album to the problem that it poses: pursuing the greater ideas and not losing sight of the power that culture and criticism holds. Can you tell this is my favourite song of all time?
Until now, I have generally spoken of the album in terms of its wit and humour amidst its misanthropic observations: however, there are two tracks in which, crucially, the wit is erased completely: with these being Mausoleum and The Intense Humming of Evil, both of which deal with the theme of the Holocaust. The band visited the Dachau concentration camp whilst touring for their previous album, Gold Against The Soul, and the horrors they came face-to-face with whilst there, echo through these two tracks. Mausoleum features perhaps the most affecting sample on the album, taken from author J.G. Ballard, in which he declares that he “...wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror” plays in the bridge of the song, and that is clearly the truth that comes through in both of these tracks in particular. In Mausoleum, the focus is upon the omnipotent ruins of the past, and how ultimately, most of human history is defined by atrocity: regardless of how much we “regain our self-control” or “analyse, despise, and scrutinise,” we cannot erase the shadows of such tragedies as the Holocaust. The track builds slowly until its furious and cacophonous outro, which then comes to an abrupt halt: the final note of the track is simply Bradfield screaming with perhaps his most passionate fervour on the album, a passionate cry for humanity’s improvement, lest humanity fall further into the trap of becoming simply a museum for its atrocities.
The Intense Humming of Evil, meanwhile, takes the skeletal and sparse sound of the album to its logical conclusion, with the track being centred around a drum and bass sound which is intentionally mechanical, to mirror the extent to which the Holocaust was automated and intended to be distanced from the perpetrators. It is lyrically less dense than the rest of the album, containing prolonged periods of the aforementioned very cold instrumentation, and samples designed to replicate some of the industrial noises found in concentration camps. The Manics have cited 80s gothic rock and post-punk bands as the primary influences on this album, and that influence is most apparent here: the haunting production encases the listener in the same way that the most somber moments on early Bauhaus albums do, forcing the listener into an isolated corner in which you are forced to listen as the sounds of history’s greatest evils rattle through your skull. The human face is, well and truly, rubbed in its own vomit through this track.
There are several other tracks I haven’t yet mentioned - such as Archives of Pain, which pairs a tremendous and earth-shattering bassline with meditations on the glamorisation of serial killers which have only become more relevant with time; and the most elegant tracks on the album, She is Suffering and This is Yesterday, which have less subject-specific lyrics, but which also serve the broader thesis of the album extremely well. And yet, I do not believe that the experience of listening to this album, and more importantly, delving into the million reference points it crams into its lyrical content, can truly be explained to another person unless you’ve experienced it yourself. After I’d listened to the album in full several times, I began my own deep dive through websites such as the Forever Delayed archive, which has an extensive archive of interviews with the Manics from the time period in which they explain the album and the process of creating it, and witnessing such a harrowing feat which was explicitly and clearly born from a distinctly working-class, intellectual, angry, perspective would end up being formative to the person I have become. My education became more of a priority of mine in the next year as I came to understand the power that being articulate, curious and unashamed could have, through the pride that was expressed both explicitly and implicitly throughout this album in its combination of anger at a system and society which was broken at every level, and confident belief in the need for the world to change. The album cover is an accurate depiction of how so many of these tracks view humanity: they are views of the collective human body and psyche in its least idealized, most taboo forms, stripped of all pretences and staring down at the listener from above; and yet, it is strangely beautiful, tackling these towering issues with a sincere belief that music can change the world. If this album proves anything, it’s that this last belief is the truth.
Liz Clarke
Edited by Harriet Bodle
All images courtesy of Manic Street Preachers
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