FEATURE:
This Is Yesterday
Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible at Thirty
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ONE of the greatest albums of the 1990s…
PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Tonge/Getty Images
turns thirty on 29th August. Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible was a period of change for the Welsh quartet. Their third studio album was the final one to feature Richey Edwards. He would have writing credits on 1996’s Everything Must Go, through he disappeared in 1995. Edwards was dealing with severe depression, substance abuse, self-harm and anorexia nervosa during the writing and recording of the album. The Holy Bible reached number six in the U.K. It was not a worldwide success. Perhaps some found it too dark or heavy as a listen. It is one of Manic Street Preachers’ most important, open and accomplished albums. To mark its upcoming thirtieth anniversary, there are some features that I want to bring in. I am not sure whether there is going to be a special and expanded vinyl reissue of this stunning album. The first feature is from Albumism. They celebrated twenty-five years of The Holy Bible in 2019:
“Despite its dour worldview, antagonistic posture, and, at the time, quite poor sales, The Holy Bible has been recast as a triumph of extreme art, a perception that the fans and the band themselves have been happy to help promote. The record has also been honored with two in-depth retrospective reissues—one on its tenth anniversary and another on its twentieth—followed by a tour and a cumulative performance at Cardiff Castle in which the band dolled themselves up in military regalia and spun the record out in its entirety followed by another set of crowd-pleasing hit singles.
So what more can be said?
I’ll offer here a personal perspective of the record because, in essence, this is all I have, what any of us really have, and an argument I have made in many of my writings on Manic Street Preachers: a version of the band that is ours and ours only.
Manic Street Preachers had made no sense to me until late 1996 and only through the lens of Britpop did they emerge in my line of sight. There had been previous echoes of the band as my listening tastes broadened and developed. My older sister owned the band’s second record Gold Against the Soul (1993) on cassette tape. I stole it from her shelf, listened to the first few tracks and tossed it aside. It wasn’t Iron Maiden, Metallica, Guns N’ Roses or Def Leppard enough for me. It was too emotional, too soft. I overheard a radio broadcast about the disappearance of Edwards and shrugged it off as another casualty of rock & roll excess. I had succumbed to American rock and grunge, where my interests lay until Oasis blew up and my focus returned to the music scene that was happening within my own shores.
Manic Street Preachers lay on the periphery. Not Britpop enough, not hard rock enough. When they released the single “Australia” from their mega-selling post-Bible record, Everything Must Go (1996), something just clicked. I was hooked and obsessed with their history almost instantly.
After receiving Everything Must Go as a Christmas present, the record stayed in my CD player for six months solid. For my birthday the following July, I was gifted the band's debut record Generation Terrorists (1992). A CD copy of Gold Against the Soul was acquired at some point (possibly my sister gave me a copy as I have no recollection of purchasing it) and towards the end of the summer I geared up towards buying The Holy Bible, a record I'd only read about in passing from snippets in the music press, the consensus perspective being that the record was a bit "dark.”
In the blistering summer of 1997, I made my way to the local HMV and found the record in the stacks. I returned home and slipped it into the player, took out the inlay booklet that contained the lyrics and hit play on my machine.
Confusion. Utter, utter confusion.
The opening lines of the opening song "Yes" read "for sale, dumb cunt same dumb questions.” The tune to “Yes” was also a bit nauseating. The second song was titled "Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit'sworldwouldfallapart" and seemed, like its title, to contain too many words for the music to accommodate. The third song was called “Of Walking Abortion.” I motioned my finger further down the track listing: “Mausoleum.” “Die in the Summertime,” "The Intense Humming of Evil.” The description of “dark” did not quite cut it. The Holy Bible was scathing, unrepentant, horrifying.
Throughout the record, small snippets of recorded dialogue can be heard. On “Mausoleum” the voice of British author J.G. Ballard summarizes his 1973 novel Crash by saying, “I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.” This single quotation perfectly encapsulates The Holy Bible at its core. The record wishes to put the listener on trial. The vitriol is directly pointed at you (“who’s responsible / you fucking are” - “Of Walking Abortion”).
This did not gel with the brash naive glitter of the band’s debut record or the stauncher and reserved intelligence of Everything Must Go. The surrounding Britpop scene was about having a lark and enjoying life. Anthems like Blur’s "Girls & Boys," Supergrass' "Alright" and to an extent the holler of “we only want to get drunk” from the Manics’ own “A Design for Life” surely confirmed this.
The summer of 1997 was a jubilant time. Cool Britannia, Noel and Meg, Liam and Patsy, Damon and Justine all loved up on the front pages of the daily newspapers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the offices of parliamentary power and pushing a liberal-left agenda on the country. It felt great to be young and alive. The Holy Bible was something else, something that could not be understood in the confines of a small bedroom on a summer’s day in the new clothes of a third way liberal democracy. No disillusionment had crept into my pretty decent and laddish existence. Yet.
To think of The Holy Bible as an anomaly, a blade that punctures the narrative of the band, is a mistake. It has to be heard as a perfectly executed part of the evolution in sound. The real spanner in the works came with the disappearance of Richey Edwards that changed the direction and tone of the remaining members. The confrontation heard on Generation Terrorists and The Holy Bible was scaled back and could never really be repeated, though they certainly tried on 2001’s Know Your Enemy.
No more youthful proclamations of “I laughed when Lennon got shot” as they had delivered on “Motown Junk” or “I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer” as they had boasted on “Faster.” Now the band’s approach was “analysis through paralysis” (from the EMG era B-side “Dead Trees and Traffic Islands”), or in other words, treading on the shadow of Edwards whilst still, in essence, remaining the same band to themselves and their fans, new and old.
So, yes a lot has been written and said about The Holy Bible. And what I've written here is not original nor has it added anything new to the discussion about this record. I've lightly trod on the same ground everyone else has. Everyone is guilty.
And yet, despite all of this content, the record still offers a fascination that seems, 25 years later, insatiable. I want to read more. I want to know more. I want to see and hear other perspectives. Even if we tread over old ground, it is old ground trod in a fresh pair of shoes. To know what others think and feel about not just the The Holy Bible, but any Manics release, any part of the band's history, is to be enlightened by that singular experience that no one else has had.
And now we turn to another perspective, that of writer David Evans, who recently authored The Holy Bible installment of Bloomsbury’s 33 ⅓ series of music books.
When did you become a fan of Manic Street Preachers, and how have they, as a band, influenced you as a writer and thinker?
I became a fan of the Manics in 2001, when I was in my mid-teens. I remember being dimly aware of them when they were at the height of their popularity in the 1990s, but I was more interested in the likes of Steps at the time. I’d bought a compilation CD called Q Anthems, which was full of some really quite awful music. But “A Design for Life” was on there, and that was the hook. Soon afterwards I got hold of Simon Price’s brilliant biography of the band, which taught me the history, and worked my way through their back catalogue.
Beyond the music, the thing that really drew me in was an idea that permeates everything they’ve done—that pop music at its best is deeply embedded in society and entwined with wider culture. The Manics’ records were like mini-encyclopedias that featured quotes from films and literature and encouraged you to strike out and explore new cultural landscapes.
There was a Reithian element to their approach: they wanted to inform and educate, as well as entertain. Without their influence, I would never have studied philosophy at university, or gone on to write about Herman Melville, whose name I first came across on the sleeve of an early Manics single. They completely changed my life, and there are lots of other fans with similar stories.
You decided to write about one particular Manic Street Preachers album, The Holy Bible. Why did you select this album and why do you still think it resonates 25 years after it was released?
The Holy Bible will always be associated with Richey Edwards’ disappearance in 1995, not long after the album’s release, and that’s where a lot of the lingering interest comes from. For many people, The
Lyrically speaking, the album has come under great scrutiny, especially in the wake of the disappearance of the record’s main author, Richey Edwards. What’s your perspective on The Holy Bible’s lyrical themes and Edwards’ legacy?
Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire shared lyric writing duties in the Manics, but The Holy Bible is mostly Richey’s work (aside from “This is Yesterday,” one of the gentler lyrics on the record). The Holy Bible’s themes include sex work, American imperialism, fascism, serial murder, genocide and political correctness. The band are from a staunchly socialist area in South Wales and always espoused left-wing causes, and the album can be read in that light. They are standing up for the underdog and standing against imperialism and capitalist excess, although a couple of the lyrics could be construed as libertarian in outlook”.
In the features that are out there, you get a lot of depth and insight. I would recommend that you read the entire article. I have been taken a fair bit from each. In 2021, Guitar.com saluted the genius of The Holy Bible. I have been thinking more deeply about the album after reading this feature:
“Lust, vice and sin
Though Edwards was its prime instigator, the collective agreement to pursue a darker direction had stemmed from a shared sense that the band was at an impasse, following the muted reception that met their previous record. “There was a realisation that we hadn’t got as big as we thought we would have.” Manics’ bassist and additional lyricist Nicky Wire reflected, back in a 2014 interview with NME, who also admitted that the switch was spurred by the band wanting to be ‘100 per cent truer to ourselves’. James Dean Bradfield, too was conscious of the band beginning to slide into a predictably ‘rockist’ niche.
In pursuit of this truer sound, the band resisted label pressure to record in a luxurious studio in sun-drenched Barbados and instead decamped to Cardiff’s minuscule Sound Space Studios. It was here the four set to work on concocting the more upfront sound which was more in-keeping with their formative influences, such as Joy Division, The Clash and Magazine.
Though friend and engineer Alex Silva was on hand to capture and engineer the four, no overall producer was designated. Silva told the R*E*P*E*A*T Fanzine that “I think at the time, the band had an ideal, James said that ‘No albums have been produced since Led Zeppelin III’. So in that case, they felt there was no need for a producer as such – maybe because the term ‘producer’ carried too much weight for them. I’m fine with my credit, I just recorded what was there.” Another guiding hand who would enter the frame later in the process came in the shape of mixer Mark Freeegard, who told the same fanzine that the recording choice to initially capture the album on 1-inch tape factored into the demo-like sound the band were striving for.
For The Holy Bible sessions, Bradfield minimised the number of guitars, and stuck largely to his trusty white Gibson Les Paul; a staple instrument that he’d purchased from a Denmark Street guitar shop back in the early 1990s. It’s a guitar that has appeared in some form on every MSP record. “It is my most valuable six-stringed friend” he lovingly expressed to Guitarist in 2014. Bradfield also used a buttercream Fender Jazzmaster for a handful of other songs, including the tonal switch of the glistening open-G-forged This Is Yesterday – a gorgeous composition that serves as the record’s brightest moment, a lone glimmer of candlelight in the stygian abyss.
James used both a Marshall amp through a 4×12 cab, as well as a Vox AC30 throughout the recording, with the occasional use of Soldano amp, output through the same Marshall cab. Though this was the core of the rigid and deliberately minimal set-up, Bradfield’s Fender Twin Reverb was occasionally wheeled into the studio to wrangle a few more interesting tones. Pedals were also kept at a relative minimum, though an unmistakable BOSS Hyper-Fuzz (rumoured to have actually been owned by Richey Edwards) is regularly deployed. A CH-1 Super Chorus (with a super fast oscillation) augments the sound of Faster’s opening squeal and is used in more slowly oscillated form for the racing barrage of Of Walking Abortion’s intro. Other effects were achieved with rack mounted units, such as the Marshall Time Modulator.
Though Edwards shaped the record from a conceptual standpoint, he never actually recorded any guitar parts himself, entrusting the more capable Bradfield to meticulously lay down each part. On the resulting tour however, Richey was known for sporting an elegant Thinline Fender Telecaster (later to be used by Bradfield) as well as his own Les Paul Standard.
I am an architect
Working from Edwards’ unstructured, essay-like lyrics, James assembled tight chord sequences, layered with turbulent eddies of noise, while also slotting Richey’s words into immaculate top-line melodies. It was a challenging, unconventional approach; “Some of the lyrics confused me. Some were voyeuristic and some were coming from personal experience. I remember getting the lyrics to [album opener] Yes and thinking ‘You crazy fucker, how do I write music for this?’” he recalled in the liner notes for the tenth anniversary edition of the record.
From the outset, Bradfield’s supreme gift for riff-craft is palpable. Propulsive opener Yes’s lead riff in E major manages to set both the jogging pace of the track, while also being spiky enough to mirror the bubbling paranoia of its lyric. As Bradfield fiercely delivers Edwards’ fractured observations on the parallels between prostitution and the broader notion that ‘everyone has a price’, this lasooing, spritely riff keeps the arrangement energetic, trickling out the scale’s notes rhythmically while a punctuated hammer on G♯ from F♯ contributes to a sense of unease. Jumping to a fuzzed-up, punkier tone for what is technically a pre-chorus (though in reality serves as the first of two different choruses for the song), the band ramp up the intensity with a sequence that switches to A major, before sliding back to E, a tonal switch of a C♯ and G♯, before a leap to a B major bridges us toward the chorus proper – a cacophonous, doom-laden ascent from E to C♯m, leading us to a wavering wobble over the precipice of a 7th position E5 power chord. It’s an exhilarating start that decrees the shifting violent sonic tone of the record.
The volatility is kept as the second track’s laddering 6-note riff jostles for attention, untangling itself to reveal the ferocious assault of Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit’sworldwouldfallapart. In lieu of a conventional chord sequence, Bradfield arpeggiates a deathly-sounding Cmaj7 shape, fretted down in the E note of the A string on the 7th fret. This macabre motif frames a venomously spat lyric, as Edwards’ words unpick the hollow fallacy of the exported American dream. A hard-lurch into a rhythmically double stopped E major chord ushers in what sounds like a cavalry charge, surging down a hill, as drummer Sean Moore thunders on his kit militaristically, and James swings between four valiant-sounding chords.
This newer, more intense, version of the Manics wasn’t just the result of stomping on a fuzz pedal and hammering out a salvo of power-chords, Bradfield’s writing on The Holy Bible is more carefully constructed than ever. The spindly, palm-muted arpeggios of She Is Suffering sounds like an inverse, gothic re-working of The Police’s Every Breath You Take while the perilous atmosphere of the tense Die In The Summertime finds Bradfield creatively playing off Edward’s lyric with a rigid two-note riff. “It’s quite a muso album” Bradfield claimed at the 2015 NME Awards, “It’s all very interlocked with each other – and it’s very fast.”
Even a close listen to the record’s punchy post-punk triumvirate of Revol, Faster and P.C.P affirms Bradfield’s commitment to housing and enhancing Edwards’ potent themes above all. Faster in particular is notable for its squalling high-oscillation Chorus pedal wail, as well as its thorny, push-and-shove verse part; both sections built from two wildly different, but complementary, variations of the same two notes (G♯ and A). The pulsing heartbeat of the verse part allows for the record’s most fluid stream-of-consciousness tirade. “I remember reading the first line of Faster – ‘I am an architect, they call me a butcher.’ – and I thought ‘Fucking hell, I can’t fuck this up, I’ve got to write some great music to this”, Remembered Bradfield, in Kevin Cummins’ Assassinated Beauty.
No birds
Interspersed throughout the record, are a series of – often chilling – spoken word audio samples (captured with Sean Moore’s newly purchased S1000 Akai) taken from a range of films, documentaries and interviews. These clips preface the thematic concerns of the songs-proper, such as the haunting clip of Irene MacDonald, the mother of Jayne MacDonald – a victim of atrocious serial killer Peter Sutcliffe – which prologues Edwards’ capital punishment-oriented Archives of Pain. This song proved to be a controversial one, with a seemingly pro-death penalty lyric that would perturb analysts for decades to come. Driven by Nicky Wire’s sludgy bass line, James sheds some high register rivulets of sound before snapping in line with Wire’s brutal riff-march. Haunting chorus-soaked arpeggios frame its chorus section, as Edwards’ most sinister lyrics yet are delivered. A fittingly odd arrangement for a particularly grim piece.
At its darkest, The Holy Bible underscores its writer’s unrelentingly bleak outlook on humanity, and the shape of the systems that govern it. It’s unquestionably a troubled mind that lay behind Of Walking Abortion’s indictment of humanity’s indifference to suffering, The Intense Humming of Evil’s fragments of barbarous holocaust imagery and Mausoleum’s black-skied, corpse-ridden landscape. But, it’s 4st 7lb where Edwards’ own personal pain reveals itself more candidly. The first song recorded for the album, this remorseless semi-self-portrait of a struggling anorexic, also illuminates his gift for poetic lyricism. For the track, Bradfield opted to set a tormented tone with an off-kilter, jittery riff, adrift amongst waves of feedback. The arrangement builds out with snaking fuzz riffs and staccato chord punctuation, as well as an ethereal, chorus-drenched second section, which features some harmonious Les Paul licks. It’s a painterly approach that wrings out every drop of the lyric’s underlying emotional heart”.
There is one more feature I want to source from before wrapping up. Ringer marked twenty-five years of The Holy Bible. Discussing this masterful work that was released in a year and at a time when Britpop was coming through. Few albums could be further away from that sound than Manic Street Preachers’ third studio album. I think it still sounds as affecting and singular as it did when it came out nearly thirty years ago:
“There’s also a fine line between vulnerability and exhibitionism, and the record’s emotional affect is derived from how deeply Edwards was reaching into his own pain. At several points, he was hospitalized for anorexia, and on the devastating “4st 7lb,” the narrator—who seems to be a teenage girl, though her identity is left deliberately vague—recounts the brutal details of an eating disorder, guiding us through a thorny labyrinth of contemptuous self-loathing (“Mother tries to choke me with roast beef”), twisted narcissism (“I want to be so pretty that I rot from view”), and ghostly metaphor (“Choice is skeletal in everybody’s life”). It culminates in the most beautiful, horrifying, and prophetic line Edwards ever wrote: “I want to walk in the snow and not leave a footprint.”
1994 was the year of The Downward Spiral, Live Through This, and Ready to Die, so it’s not like Edwards’s melancholy was without competition—or context. For kids coming of age in the early ’90s, the alt-rock paradox was that bands were glomming onto a genre that couldn’t choose between catharsis and agony and decided to conflate them. The melodrama inherent in Eddie Vedder’s every yelp wasn’t just commodified—it was aspirational.
It’s worth noting that in a market saturated with potent bad-mood enhancers, The Holy Bible’s methodology was one of stringent deglamorization; where the Manics had previously positioned themselves as sardonically heroic figures, here they worked with self-effacement to put the songs and their sentiments first. The one pop-flavored track, “This Is Yesterday,” has the buoyancy of early-’90s alt-rock (like something off of Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream), capturing, for three elusive and ecstatic minutes, a sensation of idealized nostalgia before the harsh, descending chords of “Die in the Summertime.” It’s gruesome, but also human-scaled: In a decade where R-rated Alice Cooper disciples like Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson gleefully flashed their parental advisory stickers and successfully carnivalized and commodified darkness, Edwards’s songwriting opted for wrenching cinema verité over cartoonish horror show.
From its King James–baiting title on down, through its confrontational cover art (a triptych of a scantily clad obese woman) and meticuloysly designed liner notes (which included photos of abandoned concentration camps in sync with Holocaust-themed album tracks “Mausoleum” and “The Intense Humming of Evil”), The Holy Bible was a scandal waiting to happen. The Manics did their best to play the part of provocateurs, with Bradfield performing “Faster” on Top of the Pops clad in a paramilitary-style balaclava. It was album promotion as a form of guerrilla warfare. (The BBC got over 25,000 complaints via telephone.)
Critics raved the record to the skies, while consumers were more ambivalent: It reached no. 6 in the U.K. charts and claimed instant cult status. Two years later, the Manics would break through comercially with Everything Must Go, yoked to the stomping, magisterial “A Design for Life”—a song whose skyscraping chorus would make even Noel Gallagher grit his teeth with envy. During their brief but spectacular commercial peak, the Manics-minus-Richey would tap a rich vein of populist emotion; The Holy Bible was more like a bundle of raw, exposed nerves.
In 2009, the Manics released Journal for Plague Lovers, an album whose selling point was that its songs were all written using posthumously published lyrics by Richey Edwards. Unsurprisingly, it remains their strongest 21st-century recording, purposefully evoking its predecessor without resorting to mere grave-robbing. After spending years mourning, quoting, excoriating, and exorcising their friend—with highly varied results—the Manics let him do the talking. “Once we actually got into the studio … it almost felt as if we were a full band,” Bradfield said in 2009. “It [was] as close to him being in the room again as possible.”
Masterpieces don’t need sequels—spiritual or otherwise—but Journal for Plague Lovers honored its heritage and reenergized a group who’d been verging on self-parody.
“I think that if a Holy Bible is true, it should be about the way the world is,” Edwards told a Swedish television station in 1994. “That’s what I think my lyrics are about … [the album] doesn’t pretend things don’t exist.” It’s that simultaneously abrasive and fragile quality—an escape from escapism, a denial of denial—that still rings out on every track. In a moment when the vast majority of rock music has deliberately evacuated any pretense of seriousness or larger meaning, The Holy Bible seems like an ancient relic: a towering monument to displeasure. It is hard to say, exactly, who an album like this for. But it is undoubtedly, for real”.
On 29th August – though some sites and sources say 30th August -, Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible turns thirty. It is one of the biggest albums of the 1990s. After its release, everything changed for the group. Losing Richey Edwards in 1995, they would have to regroup and reframe on 1996’s Everything Must Go. To many, The Holy Bible remains the best work from them. It is hard to argue against that. You only need to listen to it once to be pulled into its world. It is a truly…
UNFORGETTABLE listening experience.