I Know I Believe in Nothing but it is my Nothing...





Manic Street Preachers

The Holy Bible  50 Further Facts

March 2016 (Updated Summer 2020)

Compiled By: Steve Bateman

Having recently added postscripts detailing 'The Holy Bible 1994 Studio Equipment & Recording Sessions Gear' + 'The Holy Bible 2014 Tour Gear' to R*E*P*E*A*T's interview with 'Alex Silva On Engineering/Co-Producing Manic Street Preachers  The Holy Bible'. I then started thinking about some of the other interesting facts which could perhaps be turned into a timeline-type of feature and act as a companion-piece to that article (which is 5-years-old this month), and although a number of these facts are well-known, others may be surprising or even new to some MSP Fans. The bite-size pieces of information were all written with help from, or sourced from, A Critical Discography, BBC Radio 4 Mastertapes, Dazed, Guitarist Magazine, Manics Promo Materials, Melody Maker, NME, R*E*P*E*A*T, Select Magazine, The Face, Wikipedia and more - a very special thanks to all! Branded as everything from "disturbingly traumatic" to "laceratingly savage" to "a group in extremis" to "a triumph of art over logic" by music critics, here are 50 Further Facts about the dark and divine, one-of-a-kind and acclaimed album that is The Holy Bible. But just before this, although his best friends and bandmates, James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire and Sean Moore, legitimately believe that everything that happened to Richey Edwards, would most likely have eventually materialised in whatever career path he chose to pursue in life. Now older and wiser, they have accurately ascribed the dramatically sped-up disintegration of his personal well-being, followed soon after by his tragic disappearance, to the irrefutable harsh realties, sacrifices and consequences of being a full-time member in a professional touring group. Also putting an enormous part of his rapid decline down to having a creative outlet / emotional sanctuary, whereby Richey plainly and persistently suffered for his art. With both his worldly-wise inspiration and wrath-filled meditations, plus the weight of incessantly and methodically writing erudite / bookish words becoming all-consuming, to the point where sometimes, he was unable to think about anything else. Crucially though, and against all odds, this unholy outcome didn't hamper or derail the group for long! And by carrying on, thankfully, with the cream of the crop record that is THB, Richey's memory, his heart and soul and his exceptional / captivating highbrow lyrics (bolstered by the tantalising and mesmerising musical handiwork, provided by the other three equally as cultivated, philosophical, sagacious and sincere Manic Street Preachers), shall live on by virtue of a rather significant and all-enveloping LP. Which, remaining in a league of its own, supplies listeners with an unparalleled feast of engaging, exhilarating and enrapturing auditory / mental nourishment. Executed with excellence, attack and immediacy, and bearing all the hallmarks typically associated with a cult classic album. Not only did The Holy Bible raise the stakes with a collection of 13 instantly recognisable songs, when originally released in August 1994, but it is now highly rated as a work of art, as a cultural artefact and as a true masterclass in cerebral rock 'n' roll...



1. Recorded in late 1993 as a b-side for the Life Becoming A Landslide EP, Comfort Comes famously set the tone for what fans could expect from The Holy Bible. The foreboding track was even included on the Japanese Faster CD single, most likely so that listeners could compare the similarities shared by both songs. Also worthy of note and adding a brand new twist to this fact, is that when readying the remastered 2020 Deluxe Edition reissue of Gold Against The Soul, after "tidying his house, going through MSP's archives, moving studios and finding a load of stuff that he thought was lost forever." Nicky told NME: "The b-side, Comfort Comes, is definitely the bridge to The Holy Bible, but interestingly, the demo of the title track of Gold Against The Soul is very The Holy Bible. Its got some Simple Minds-sampling guitar. When I found that demo and played it to James, he was shocked as well at how it fitted in with our later post-punk ideas."



2. Proof that the Manic Street Preachers certainly considered enlisting Mike Hedges to produce THB, could originally be found in a July 1996 interview with Select Magazine, whereby Nicky elaborates on wanting to "have him for The Holy Bible's more gothic punk side." While in Kieran Evans' devastatingly brilliant and lauded 2016 Everything Must Go feature-length documentary, Escape From History, James confirmed for sure: "We tried to get Mike Hedges to do The Holy Bible, because of The Cure and Siouxsie And The Banshees etc. He sent us a really nice reply, saying that he would love to work with us but he was booked up."

3. Whereas the plush, opulent and luxurious residential recording environs used for Gold Against The Soul, Outside Studios (later known as Hookend Recording Studios) near Checkendon, Oxfordshire cost £2,000 per day. By comparison, the since demolished, primitive and unheated, 16-track recording facility rented for The Holy Bible, Sound Space Studios situated in the red-light-district of Cardiff (with the area's scuzziness having inevitably seeped into the LP's overall morose make-up), cost a mere £50 per day. Sony did offer MSP the chance to record in Barbados, but the band collectively responded with a resounding: "Fuck off, no way - that's not us!" Now the stuff of legend, they instead dismantled what the group had become, rewrote their rulebook, were focused, well-rehearsed, determined, diligent, dedicated and chose not to use "all the resources at their disposal" - also abstaining from "all that decadent rock star rubbish" - while purposefully staying under the radar. In a rare, archived 1995 American Q&A published on The Quietus, James spoke candidly and straightforwardly about Sony being unaware of the 'new and improved' group's plans after they had used their initiative, as well as how they unfalteringly write songs for themselves first and foremost: "'We've got this album, it's nearly finished. Do you want to come and hear it?' And of course we needed to mix it. But once the record company knew we'd gone and taken control of the situation, and they heard what we were doing, and they heard the directness, the energy and the attitude, they just went for it. They thought: 'Ah well, that's okay.' We took charge of their own destiny and I think they were almost thankful for that. It takes a lot of work off their hands... We do it for ourselves first. There's no prerequisites for what somebody's going to take from you. We just realised at one point that we're in love with failure. Everything we love just completely failed, whether it be an ideology, even religion. I think that's our biggest achievement: we realised we don't want to be in love with failure all our lives, and we want to do something about it." In an interview conducted by PopMatters, when discussing MSP's work shift patterns for The Holy Bible and gaining traction with recording, James divulged: "It was kind of standard practice back in those days. You go to a residential studio and you record a record. Residential studios back then were really lovely places to create and record. But we knew that it was just wrong for the music. Especially with the lyrics that had inspired the music. We knew that it would be a wrong decision to try and create this kind of music, which had threadbare emotions and hard political intent and acute observatory historical references in it. We knew that if we ended up trying to create this music somewhere in Surrey, England, which had four poster beds and every technical specification you could wish for, there would be something slightly off-message about that. I suppose, in our youthful, delusional state, we thought there should be some kind of 'method recording', our version of method acting. We should immerse ourselves in a shitty environment to try and replicate the edge in the music. And thats what we did. We hired a studio which we had used before in Cardiff, which was kind of in the red-light-area, and had no mod cons. It was a very, very monotone kind of experience. And we decided we wanted that kind of utilitarian vibe to try and rub off in the music, I suppose. It all sounds pretentious and I wouldnt want to repeat it all now, but we were young." Commuting daily (and starting each new day with engineer/co-producer Alex Silva, by all having morning coffee together in the office next to the studio's control room), Richey - who had just bought a flat in Cardiff Bay which he was decorating and collaging - would pick-up James and Nicky by car, while Sean travelled from Bristol (where his girlfriend was studying) by train. With The Wire treasuring the fact that he could go home to his wife / new house in the valleys every night and watch Sky TV after a hard day's work. Tellingly, with a renewed sense of purpose, a galvanised and revitalised JDB recalled: "I felt alive with something again, whereas before that I was just fearing things - the end of the band, the world not even wanting us to play some shit festival. As soon as we stepped in the studio and started doing these songs, I felt alive with something I hadnt felt for about six months... It did feel great straight away." "James was the most feverish I've ever seen him work" exclaimed Nicky. With JDB confessing to Uncut in 2011: "The genesis of the record was Nickys idea, and the motivation. I really wanted to do a lot of my John McGeochisms, from Magazine. I was getting fed up with trying to ape Slash, because it was obvious the world only wanted one Slash and they didnt want a five feet two bloke from Wales doing it."



4. Nicky's working title for The Holy Bible was The Poetry Of Death.

5. "Every single morsel of that album is us being in control, for better or worse" once proudly pledged an unbridled Nicky, in adhering to their unassailable beliefs / objectives. And prior to acclimatising to / hunkering down in the back to basics studio, which had minimum production wizardry and was somewhere that the Manics were already familiar with, having previously recorded Suicide Is Painless (Theme From M*A*S*H) plus an assortment of b-sides there, earlier in their career with Alex. In realising Richey's dark visions as songs - who, as a compulsive and prodigious wordsmith, had given great consideration to his educational / illuminating discourse with impressionable listeners, to verse-chorus structures, to lyrical narratives, word selection, syntax, meter, stanzas etc. And now, functioning with an almost innate survival mechanism, was flourishing and reaching the peak of his powers as a compelling songwriter and poet. With unique, profound, stimulating and more thought-provoking, didactic, voluminous and literate lyrics than ever before, which showed a marked progression in the courage, gravitas and genius of his inward-looking and perceptive writing skills. Nicky: "I could tell he was in such a rich vein of this stunning prose and poems. We knew it was going to be pretty special." Although sounding nihilistic, grim and discordant on record - at times, even crude and coarse - most tracks were actually intuitively, meticulously and industriously written and sculpted by James on an acoustic guitar at his Mum and Dad's house, with Sean also writing the verse music for The Intense Humming Of Evil acoustically. And though it may have been seen by scores of composers as a task beset with great responsibility, JDB effused about how his recipe for success was owed to his indefatigable stamina; fusing motivation with his tools of the trade and chipping away at his songcraft. Which in turn, triggered the organic, masterful, awe-inspiring and unmatched sonic actualisation of (his songwriting foils) Richey and Nicky's torrent of words, bound together with his distinctive singing diction / vocal delivery when dispensing lines, his projection, venting and vocal hooks. On being tasked and entrusted with this duty, relying on his acumen and feeling emboldened after imbibing lyrics, he gushed: "I've got total interpretative carte blanche to do whatever I want and that's really a privileged position to be in... I think our musics just always been led by the lyrics. Thats given credence and truth by the fact that I need lyrics in front of me to write music. Nicky and Richey would always give me lyrics, and 99 percent of the time I would always write music with the lyrics in front of me, and I would try and let the lyrics inspire the music. I was being given lyrics like Yes, Of Walking Abortion and Archives of Pain. Looking at these lyrics, there were twists and turns in there. Theres some kind of indecipherable, fucked up Iambic Pentameter in there, and I knew that these werent normal kind of lyrics, they werent even normal for us, really. And I just knew that the music had to twist and turn and convulse with the lyrics, as the lyrics were themselves. So its really as simple as that. I love the lyrics, and I remember being given Die In The Summertime and I remember being given Yes very early on, and thinking I must follow this muse that Richey created. Richey had written 70 to 75 percent of the lyrics on this record, and I was being given this stuff and I just knew I had to follow his direction. Otherwise Id be betraying the lyrics themselves... I dont really think we were reacting against anything. I think we were just so secluded and so self-insulated against what was going on with the start of Britpop and stuff that we didnt even pay attention to it. Again, its that delusional state of just thinking that youre right, and I think thats the place we were in. By the time wed finished mixing Faster, we still thought it could be a Top Ten hit, thats how fucked up and deluded we were! Everything was led by the lyrics and they still are. On The Holy Bible, despite the nihilism and despite the misanthropic bent, sometimes the lyrics are so pleading to be understood." Much of James' expressive, beckoning and committed playing on THB, was done using his favourite guitar - a 1990 Gibson Les Paul Custom which he has since christened 'Faithful' - although while laying down tracks, Nicky once accidentally snapped the guitar's neck off! When recording, the band also managed to blow-up a speaker and so had to loan some from producer, Greg Haver, who worked in a nearby studio and had first met them while they were rehearsing songs for the LP. On the long player's challenging / cauterising mercilessness and brutal sense of impending doom - with the band beyond doubt that the staccato nature of some of Richey's unpruned lyrics, is what was the catalyst that helped to stimulate their creativity and generate the constituent components of the album's stern musical framework. Severe / streamlined arrangements and jagged post-punk sound, as well as its desolate and dissonant co-ordinates. One writer astutely noted: "In 1994, Edwards mind was a dark place and The Holy Bible has come to be seen as the ultimate musical expression of this period in his thinking. Reflections on the darker parts of life had long been a Manics staple, but not like this... A purging of the whole bloodied wreckage of the 20th Century. The words were raw and close to the bone, suggesting a kind of rock that didnt just return to the bands punk roots, but invented a whole new soundworld that dripped with a nihilism and menace that histrionic heavy metal pretenders could only dream of. The Holy Bible (seen not only as a work of art by many, but also as Richey's epitaph) would be exposed, like a gaping wound uncovering the ugly sides of humanity." Famously, as a potential follow-up, Edwards expressed a desire to create a concept album which he described as "Pantera meets Screamadelica." However, MSP's musical maestro and sonic architect, Bradfield, has since countered with doubts over whether the group would have produced such an LP: "I was worried that as chief tunesmith in the band, I wasn't actually going to be able to write things that he would have liked. There would have been an impasse in the band for the first time born out of taste."

6. 4st 7lb - the threshold weight below which death is said to be medically unavoidable for an anorexic sufferer - was the very first song to be recorded for THB on Valentine's Day, February 14, 1994. Talking about this ominous track and the complicated time-signature changes, JDB - whose girlfriend had just called off their engagement - articulately observed: "Of all the songs on The Holy Bible, it has the most amount of words (This Is Yesterday is the simplest) and when I looked at the main body of the lyric, I wanted to reflect the frenetic nature of this vanity that keeps analysing itself and keeps trying to find a reason for something which is so irrational. Then, I wanted there to be a resolution in the end, I wanted there to be some kind of defeat, because the lyrics at the end seem to have a self-knowing wry observation about themselves, that they knew they were being irrational but they couldn't stop it. The one song that I didnt enjoy writing the music to. There are moments of The Bible where I felt as if I was being really precarious about singing the thoughts of other people channelled through Richey, but I felt slightly uneasy doing that song. I was glad when I finished. I felt like I was prying when I wrote it. It was a weird feeling."



7. A state of the nation address, partly comprised of ironic interpretations of USA Patriotism with critical and stinging lyrical sideswipes at the 'Land of the Free' (themes previously touched upon in the Generation Terrorists b-side, Dead Yankee Drawl). Musically, Ifwhiteamerica... was inspired by West Side Story (James jokingly refers to it as "the American Musical gone wrong") and as spotlit by 227 Lears - a blog / web project focusing on The Holy Bible - the gang rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks, e.g. the call-and-response chorus: 'Conservative say... / Democratic say...' With its title thought to have come from a quote by controversial US comedian Lenny Bruce. In pre-production rehearsals, the band almost gave up on this song, but Sean said that he knew exactly what to do with it and went onto add one of his most skilful, unrelenting and memorable drum tracks ever! "Its me trying to be Topper Headon, in a strange sort of way. I remember the quote at the beginning - I did all the samples. Richey would source it and Id be the one dragging it off old VHS tapes. Its one of those songs where it just happened, the ideas were there, the little fast tom. I was thinking all the time of London Calling. For us it was the end - third album, everythings bombing, fuck it, lets do what we want." Recently, the eagle-eyed 277 Lears, cleverly discovered how the unusual, compressed typography of the track title, Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart, might possibly be traced back to a song, Antiamericancretin, by McCarthy. The site goes onto add how McCarthys leftist vision of an England bowed beneath a baseball bat / Beneath an ice-cool Cola can, a country sold on fast-food chains and trivial TV, are echoed in Manic Street Preachers breathless attack on the vacuity and violence of American life on Ifwhiteamerica - a song that in fact takes on American and British nationalism as twin menaces. The well-researched and informative essay, also deconstructs previously undocumented thematic links between Ifwhiteamerica and Of Walking Abortion, plus how key lyrical inspirations in the acerbic and castigating Ifwhiteamerica... were derived from source material including Paul Gilroys study of black identity and national identity, There aint no black in the Union Jack - noting how the choice of conservative (not republican) and democrat (not labour) contribute to this blurring of the two nations. Yet, America remains the focus from beginning to end. Among many other insightful and intertextual lyrical studies, 227 Lears also explores the article, Gun control in the USA, written by Kevin Young and published in the November 1993 issue of Living Marxism. In which Young argues against the implementation of the Brady Bill, in a piece of writing that unquestionably shaped Edwards contribution on the topic to Ifwhiteamerica... e.g. lyric reference to the line: '"God made men, Samuel Colt made them equal" so says the old Wild West proverb.' 227 Lears also perceptively spotted and pinpointed how other Living Marxism editorials, more than likely impacted Richey's thinking behind Of Walking Abortion ('Who's Next - Hitler?' written by Joan Philips / published in LM No. 61 - November 1993) e.g. lyric reference to the passage: 'A burial took place recently in a small country church in Kenderes, Hungary. But it wasnt any old burial. For a start, the deceased (Horthy) had been dead for nearly half a century. Even more bizarre, the spectacle was broadcast live on government-controlled television in the manner of a British royal wedding.' And, P.C.P. ('The right to be offensive' written by Unknown / published in LM No. 64 - February 1994) e.g. lyric reference to the line: 'Bans are for bigots and Big Brother.'

8. It is crystal clear that these are not songs of faith and devotion, and that The Holy Bible is an immutable and misanthropic 'Monument To Misery' - with JDB stretching his pronunciation of words and avowing that "matching the sounds with the songs was a very natural effort." For example, the post-punk, metallic and eviscerating rhythmical guitar riff on Of Walking Abortion - which bombards your ears - was influenced by Magazine's The Light Pours Out Of Me: "I just went straight to my memory file: 'If I can somehow have a modified version of the riff...' So I just lengthened it, different notes and that was it." The portentous, mordacious and barbarous song, also takes its name from a passage and lifts one or two additional ideas (i.e. 'The male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage') from the radical feminist manifesto by Valerie Solanas, 'SCUM Manifesto'. Something else also worth touching upon, is how Of Walking Abortion - along with Mausoleum and Faster - all feature several more lines penned by Nicky than he could initially recall from memory, which in preparation for The Holy Bible's 20th Anniversary in 2014, he only rediscovered after reinspecting pages from his and Richey's lyric / ideas notebooks from the 1993-94 time period. With subject matter / imagery overlapping across numerous tracks on The Holy Bible, the idea of hollow consumerism present in Ifwhiteamerica..., can also be found in the incisive Of Walking Abortion lyric: 'So wash your car in your X baseball shoes.' Which, based on convincing suggestions, the MSP website A Critical Discography believes to be a reference to the explosion in merchandising around the release of Spike Lees Malcolm X biopic in 1992. ?Of Walking Abortion is even connected to Archives Of Pain, as the lyric: 'Little people in little houses, like maggots, small, blind and worthless' alludes to the ruthless child serial killers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, and is based on a diary entry written by Hindley's 17-year-old brother-in-law, David Smith, who Brady began trying to systematically brainwash and aimed to recruit. Dictated to Smith by Brady, the original line in his diary actually reads: 'People are like maggots, small, blind, worthless fish-bait.' Smith is also the man credited with stopping the killing spree of 'The Moors Murderers', after witnessing the couples fifth and final murder in October 1965, before then going to the Police. 227 Lears also called to attention how the Valerie Solanas and Ian Brady quotes had been referenced by the Manics in the past. Firstly, the full Solanas text: 'The male chromosome is an incomplete female chromosome. In other words the male is a walking abortion; aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples', was printed alongside Little Baby Nothing in the Generation Terrorists sleeve artwork. While the Brady line, popped up in a diary entry that Richey wrote while the band were recording their debut long player in late 1991. Published in the February 1992 edition of Select Magazine as 'Seven Days In The Life Of... Richie Edwards Of The Manic Street Preachers', here is an extract from Wednesday: 'Feel depressed. We leave Black Barn tomorrow. There's thousands of pictures to be taken down. Breakfast is always sad on Wednesday though. (Because) The music press arrives. Go back to bed. Stay there until the Six O'Clock News. Rip down my bedroom wall. I don't want to leave Keith, Johnny, Stalin, Flavor Flav, Axl, Liz Taylor to be as maggots. People are like maggots. Small, blind and worthless.'

9. While in the first instance, it was Nicky who unpacked the idea of not using "all the resources at their disposal" and hiring a low-rent studio to record The Holy Bible in, before the Manic Street Preachers distilled their inimitable music into its purest form. He also tried to convince James that She Is Suffering could be MSP's Every Breath You Take (The Police) and a huge 'Transatlantic hit'. Now however, not only would Nicky "definitely take it off" the record, but it is one of the Manics music videos he most despises (the promo clip was directed by Adolfo Doring). Drafting in Generation Terrorists producer, Steve Brown, as JDB simply "didn't know what to do with the track," She Is Suffering has also now become his least favourite song on The Holy Bible (after the Manics maligned Revol for years), who humbly conceded: "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). I wanted Ifwhiteamerica... to be the single." Furthermore, The Wire has since aired his own regrets of not going with Ifwhiteamerica... and instead having She Is Suffering as a single choice: "I'm not sure why we chose it now." For its European release, a 2trk and a 4trk tour edition CD single were pressed, which both included the 7" radio edit of She Is Suffering, as well as an exclusive acoustic version taken from a live performance on MTV's Most Wanted. In terms of The Holy Bible as a collection of songs and on people's emotional investment, with heartfelt enthusiasm, James has acknowledged that he's "conscious of how many of the album tracks are far superior and much more loved by fans, than any of the singles released from it" - with the exception of The Bible's vital ingredient and crowning glory, the invigorating Faster. Which ultimately, is what has led to the LP's survival, prosperity and reverence!

10. 'Nothing turns out like you want it to.' 'Don't hurt, just obey, lie down, do as they say.' 'Analyse, despise and scrutinise.' 'Life is for the cold made warm and they are just lizards.' 'I've been too honest with myself / I should have lied like everybody else.' 'The only way to gain approval / Is by exploiting the very thing that cheapens me.' Along with these jolting and transparent key lines and their lyrical thread - words which are brimming with revulsion and revile - plus the unforgiving onslaught of The Holy Bible's dyed-in-the-wool, hell on earth, discontented, resentful and (never once rose-tinted) sour worldview; 'Life is lead weights, pendulum died / Pure or lost, spectator or crucified / Recognised truth Acedia's blackest hole / Junkies, winos, whores, the nation's moral suicide.' Where 'Loser - liar - fake or phoney / No one cares, everyone is guilty' for all that's wrong with the world, which has transformed into nothing more than an unethical and unconscionable 'systemised atrocity.' With a sizeable quantity of The Bible's lyrics using the fallibilities of the past, to illustrate the shortcomings of our present (long a favoured Manics trope); the unwholesome underbelly of society, taboos, having to sell yourself out, geopolitical misdeeds, fragmented hegemony / democracy, capitalism / socio-economic issues, virulent corruption, injustice, American/British nationalism, racism, historical revisionism, political correctness and the inescapable / unrecoverable loss of childhood innocence (the latter of which subject-wise, is more than feasibly the reason why This Is Yesterday and Die In The Summertime were positioned side-by-side, as a pairing, in the final tracklisting). Other gritty, real-life and odious themes also subsumed and saturated in spite on THB, include how anybody - on account of the human condition - has the capacity to commit nefarious sins or evil deeds - a microcosm of the whole record: 'The centre of humanity is cruelty / There is never redemption / Any fool can regret yesterday.' And, exhibiting the lyrical prowess of MSP's conceptualist and lodestar, one of the bravest songs ever penned by Richey, is the chilling, jarring and lurking Archives Of Pain - named after a chapter in a biography of French philosopher Michel Foucault - which seemingly advocates the use of the death penalty for maniacal, fascist war criminals and convicted, unhinged serial killers, who have committed deranged and heinous crimes. Yet are implausibly treated as celebrities by the media, or sinisterly lionised and hero-worshipped; 'Pain not penance, forget martyrs, remember victims.' 'Sterilise rapists, all I preach is extinction.' With JDB adding: "To reiterate the fact, the lyric was about coming from a left-wing perspective, but actually just saying that: 'Despite my political leanings, despite the essence and the core of what I am, I think I believe in Capital Punishment. I believe the punishment should fit the crime.' Our songs are at their best when they're at their most irrational or like three minute well informed news stories... The new album's a lot more dense and obtuse - if it was a book, you wouldn't say there were many sympathetic characters in it. We treated it almost like an essay. We started off with the title, we didn't have one lyric or one piece of music written... We've always been a band who wanted something to believe in, but couldn't find anything and there's one pivotal song on the album, Archives Of Pain. It started out as a riposte to that line in Therapy?'s Trigger Inside ('Now I know how Jeffrey Dahmer feels') and, even though I really like Therapy?, we just couldn't agree with it, so decided to come up with a modern response. It went on to become a Capital Punishment diatribe and by the time we'd finished the song, we sounded like a bunch of right-wing cunts. It's basically O Level Sociology, left and right eventually meet and they become impossible to differentiate from each other. And I thought that's what we'd become, when one side becomes totally fucked-up. We started out as such a traditional working class band, and based all these situations on anywhere we could find a strand of unfilled ideology, but we've drifted further and further sideways. By the end of this song, I realised that we were just a product of our times. We'd believed in so many things only to become disillusioned. That was one of the first songs that we'd finished and it was then that I realised, that the whole album would be quite ambivalent in terms of its morals." And although Archives Of Pain was the track which Nicky and Richey "worried about the most and did the most work on." In the liner notes for the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Holy Bible, the album is described by Keith Cameron as "a triumph of art over logic" which James found flattering: "Its always nice when somebody else says it, because you can never say that about what youve done yourself, because it makes you an arrogant fool if you make such a statement about your own record or book or film or piece of furniture - whatever youve created. But I can see some kind of logic in that statement. I dont really think a band like us, that comes from a very left-wing area and place in history, ever expected to write a song like Archives of Pain, which talks about Capital Punishment and talks about it within a song - openly questions it and openly investigates and doesnt condemn. I dont think a band like us, from a working class area in South Wales, were ever meant to write a lyric like Faster, that has ambitions of overcoming everything with the power of your own will and your own self-made intelligence. And I dont think that would be married to that post-punk influenced music. So there is a natural ridiculousness of us coming from South Wales, from a very working class, proud area; actually doing a record like this was nothing anyone expected. We didnt either. So I kind of accept Keiths statement, and Keith is one of the best music journalists Britain ever produced, so Ill stand by his statement. Its always better when somebody else says it." With James, Nicky, Richey and Sean taking immense pride in the evolution of the Manic Street Preachers, whenever questioned about treasured tracks, JDB maintains that the apoplectic Archives Of Pain is "one of the most important things we've done." Sonically, this song is also renowned for boasting one of James' premium, undulating and piercing guitar solos, as well as one of Nicky's finest and most pulsating bass lines (his personal favourite), which sounds demonic and like it has crawled out from the very depths of hell wrapped in barbed wire and laced with malevolence! While in a 1999 interview with Rhythm Magazine, Sean chose this particular track as having the drumming performance he's most proud of, recounting: "It's something I wouldn't normally do - it was one of those sudden rushes of blood. Even now I couldn't really play it to you." Notably, JDB frequently "nagged" Sean to put a harmonizer (studio effects processor) on the drums during The Holy Bible sessions, in order to make them sound boxy / claustrophobic and as Archives Of Pain was in the process of being recorded, Blur's poptastic new single Girls & Boys hit the airwaves, causing Nicky to fret: "It might not be our time." Similarly, James has since disclosed: "I remember being in a taxi with Richey and we heard Oasis' Supersonic on the radio. We felt a bit bowed by it, in a strange commercial kind of way." Referring to MSP's more melodic and accessible side, JDB's Mum, Sue, would even later ask him why they no longer wrote "nice songs" akin to Motorcycle Emptiness.

11. In a 2011 NME Poll, the Manics themselves named Faster as their 'Best Single', which was labelled by the longstanding music publication as "The most incendiary tour de force of their career, the band on the point of glorious combustion. It is the dark heart of The Holy Bible that emerges as Manic Street Preachers' Number One of their own Top 40 hit parade. What else? A Molotov cocktail of post-punk guitars powers along one of Richey's most freeform and barbed lyrical displays. The result of one of the most intense compositions of all time and one of the most exhilarating pop songs of all time." While in April 2018, as part of an 18-month long comprehensive, social media 'song contest' run by the Twitter account, Every Manics Song; "All studio tracks pitted against each other (nearly) to decide the most accurate & unofficial complete song chart ever!" With votes coming from genuine MSP Fans, it was announced that out of over 200+ tracks in their back catalogue, Faster was once again in pole position after being ranked and rated as the band's greatest song (The Holy Bible was also the most popular era and LP - with or without singles included - by average track score). Dissecting the furious urgency of the full-throttle Faster, which was the last time that Nicky and Richey "collaborated lyrically on an even keel," Nicky once stated: "A lot of it is all Richey again and he told me it was about self-abuse... I think it's the most confusing song on the album. I added some stuff about the regurgitation of 20th Century culture, and the way that everything's speeded-up to such an extent that nobody knows if they've got any meaning anymore... It's not a post-modern nightmare number, it's more a voyeuristic insight into how our generation has become obliterated with sensations. We could deal with things, but we prefer to blank them out so that virtually every atrocity doesn't have that much impact any more. I don't even know if that's a bad thing, I don't know if we're not on some kind of path to a super-being, where all emotions are lost and everyone finally gets on perfectly because of that... It's probably the first time that we've written a song and not completely understood what we've written... It's my title. I think the outro: 'Man kills everything' is mine. 'If you stand up like a nail...' is a Chinese proverb. So it's a perfect synthesis of everything really. I think 'I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing' is the great catchphrase of The '90s. And for Richey to actually write: 'I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer', it shows an almost heroic self-indulgence. But it makes you great. Because at the time, Blur's Girls & Boys went Top Five and I remember thinking: 'What the fuck are we doing?', just completely ostracised. But then I remember having a moment thinking: 'This is brilliant.' We'd never felt so alone and we really were distanced from everything else. And that's why we were the biggest cult band in Britain. It was one of those moments when you're never gonna do something that good again. You might do something more commercial, more uplifting, which we have done. But the cult-dom of it - I think it was once described as 'a heady mix of Ace Of Spades by Motörhead and Anarchy In The UK.' When Richey gave the finished lyric to James, it had no punctuation whatsoever, who has since categorised this specific song as "One of Richey's soothsaying lyrics. There's a lot of prophesy, in terms of the acceleration of everything - joy, pain, death, consumerism... Also, I can see that Richey perhaps wrote the lyrics for Donkeys, and then shortly afterwards, he wrote Faster. Because where Donkeys is quite self-pitying, I almost felt like he was riposting himself on Faster." Interestingly, the line: 'Self-disgust is self-obsession, honey' was a phrase actually coined by MSP's Press Officer, Gillian Porter, which she used when anatomising Richey's scornful opinion / scathing critique of himself - "That's the truest line on there, probably" he contended. Also echoing the lyrical theme found in Archives Of Pain and the most logical reason why a portrait of Soviet serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, is placed next to Faster in THB's CD lyrics booklet. Picked-up on by 227 Lears, when identifying a lesser known aspect of Faster's message, JDB set forth: "Were a civilisation where were constantly trying to find a cure, cures for death, were constantly trying to find cures for diseases. But also, were a civilisation thats grown up with an obsession with death. Or, were a civilisation thats grown up with an obsession with, like, mass murderers. How the hell do we function when were obsessed with prolonging life, and were obsessed with people who kill? Its about the strength to believe in life and death." The title is rumoured to have a double-meaning, based around the aforementioned idea of the acceleration of society, as well as fasting, and was also the adopted name for the first recording studio - Faster Studios - that the Manic Street Preachers owned in Cardiff between 2005-2016. In terms of matching the sentiment of the "cold voiced" words with a "disembodied vocal" and sonic enhancements, James with his high level of artistry, wanted the music to sound as if it was regimented, serrated, parallel-lined, compressed, stark and in control of itself, although he "didn't realise that Faster was going to be a single (let alone the lead single) for a long time." And even though it went through 20 reworked overhauls, apparently, the Manics' co-manager Martin Hall was never overly fond of this track at any stage of its development, or indeed the finished version either. The template for this song was Faith No Mores From Out Of Nowhere, with Sean proclaiming: "It's us at our most visceral best, spitting bile. The lyrics werent in the form that they ended up in, but just that bit stronger than Mensa was enough for us." With JDB admitting: "It was the hardest one to write music to by a million miles (including Sean's drums in the final section). I was worried, as I knew it was the key to everything on the record. So I stomped around, and then put Never Mind The Bollocks on and that was it. Sometimes the way Johnny Rottens voice goes down the middle of a song and barely changes, its about the twists and phrases and the commitment to the words. And thats exactly what it needed, that straight line through the middle... It's something that connected with the darker parts of all our selves and it's hard to get a career out of those moments." "It was a defining moment for us. That song laid it all out. It was like a band manifesto" later mused Nicky. Faster was first played live in Thailand at Bangkok's MBK Hall in April 1994 (MSP's first magazine cover feature for The Holy Bible era also took place in Thailand for the NME), and whenever used as the opener in set lists throughout that year, it had an extended intro with James calling out to the crowd: "Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello..." as a nod to John Lydon's greeting on the PiL song, Public Image. At recent THB gigs, the group used Faster (Vocal Mix) as their walk on music - just as they did in late '94 (when they even sometimes had an Air-raid siren). Lastly, for history buffs, The Holy Bible's centrepiece, the adrenaline-charged and primal Faster, was deployed as the lead single on June 6, 1994, which not only officially signalled the start of the promotional campaign for its landmark parent album. But battle ready, also coincided with the 50th Anniversary of the Allied Invasion of Normandy during World War II. It was MSP's very own D-Day. Nicky: "When people got the first taste of Faster and P.C.P. they just felt like: 'Oh, we've got our band back. This is the band we fell in love with, almost even better than before.' I can't remember any negative reaction, really." One music columnist was so taken with the vortical Faster, that he eulogised: "As always, the music was credited to James Dean Bradfield and drummer Sean Moore, but it was Bradfield's contribution which clearly signalled the change in tack: the sheet-metal-cutter tone, the skittish riffing, the new approach to layering and texture, the sharp corners, the brutalism. Forty-five seconds in, it was clear that now the Manics understood that subtlety isn't the opposite of power."? Interestingly, some 8 years later on November 18, 2002, at MSP's 'Carling Homecoming' Cardiff St. David's Hall show (possibly taking their cue from Nirvana's now legendary 'MTV Unplugged In New York' 1993 concert), Faster was reimagined as a much mellower semi-acoustic track. The band continued to perform the song this way during their 2002-2003 Forever Delayed Greatest Hits Tour, and an official live recording of this version can be found as a b-side on the extremely rare, alternative European CD reissue of Motorcycle Emptiness - which was primarily sold in Finland.

12. A first draft of the irrepressible and imposing The Intense Humming Of Evil (the sister song of Mausoleum and some of the earliest Holy Bible tracks to be written, after the band had visited the sites of former German concentration camps during their Gold Against The Soul, European Tour in Autumn '93) was considered insufficiently judgmental by Bradfield, who asked for a rewrite, explaining: "You can't be ambivalent about the Holocaust." Notably, the only member of MSP who can read music is Sean, and for this tense, unnerving and unvarnished composition, his idea was to use the minimalist delineation of modern song structures to make more out of less. Coupled with the propulsive and grinding, looped industrial noises (possibly factory / piston sounds sampled by Sean using his Akai S1000 Sampler, before then being programmed?), it is unlike any other track in the band's entire body of work. As one of his historical "obsessions," Richey was justifiably appalled by reprehensible and intolerable Holocaust deniers, who deplorably and unpardonly attempted to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry: "It's the most horrific event in world history." The title, The Intense Humming Of Evil, alludes to the sombre, eerie and deafening silence that the Manics noticed while in the grounds of at one-time death camps, where even birds don't fly over (Nicky mournfully remembered: "All you can hear is this humming of nothing.") Something which is also cited in the dour and festering formations of Mausoleum's taught, gloom laden, ravaged and reverberating chorus: "No birds - no birds / The sky is swollen black / No birds - no birds / Holy mass of dead insect." Nicky: "The song was originally going to be dubbed No Birds, but PiL already had a track with the same name. Then, Richey said that he had a much better title, and I concurred, Mausoleum sounded far more scary!" Unveiling to The Quarterly in 2014: "I wrote the original lyric ideas in my hotel room after walking around Belsen. I was struck by the lack of creatures and the silence. Theres greenery and trees, but it seemed to me even nature couldnt face touching that horror. The first time we went to Japan, we visited the museum in Hiroshima. Weve always faced up to universal truths as much as is humanly possible and its been a good thing for us, because truths about the only thing that has kept the band going." JDB: "Touring does have an effect on you because you experience different strains of ideology and failed ideologies." With Richey once phlegmatically declaring that as a band, MSP "havent got well-defined ideologies." In 2005, Nicky - who also believes that these experiences may have subconsciously seeped into some of his words for Of Walking Abortion - further elaborated to PopMatters: "I find The Intense Humming Of Evil quite unlistenable. It reminds me of our days off (from touring) Gold Against The Soul, when we visited Belsen and Dachau, the death camps, which was in typical Manic Street Preacher fashion. Most bands, on their day off, would look for a pile of drugs or drink or whatever - we decided to visit the death camps on our days off. We didnt go there for a laugh. We were driving and we felt we should see this. Its our idea of forcing humanity to face itself. They were pretty startling days. That was definitely one of the seeds for it, really. In Germany, Gold Against The Soul wasnt selling many copies, and we were travelling around thinking: 'Weve got to regain our soul.' We were all on the same wavelength. We knew that regaining control was the main priority. Going back to Cardiff and a crappy little studio was the essence of that, really... I think James just really rose to the challenge at this point. He felt a desire to create something really original: sounds of our youth, and the darkness and the melancholy of Wales, transferring that into all the places we'd visited on tour and the death camps of the Holocaust. I think he just loved the challenge of trying to make those words into tunes." On May 28, 1994, MSP performed at the Anti-Nazi League 'Carnival Against The Nazis'.



13. Revol (lover spelt backwards) and This Is Yesterday (which musically, was loosely based on Ghosts by The Jam) were late additions to The Holy Bible and were both written side-by-side. JDB told NME in 2014: "It was in our pocket for a long time. That's why two other songs got recorded at the end. We'd lived with it for so long that we realised just in time that it wasn't balanced. Well, in its own fucked-up way."

14. Song titles nearly used include: Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit'scountrywouldfallapart, Walking Abortions and No Birds (Mausoleum).

15. A differently sequenced tracklisting of the 13 songs (obviously later revised and re-jigged) also appeared on an early pre-release PR information card

16. Sculpture Of Man is the sole b-side dating from this period, all others were recorded later. Nicky called this "The darkest lyric ever!" With James continuing: "That's completely Richey's. But that just shows how bullet-nosed we were." 17. Although the rock-solid, unfiltered and explosive Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit'sworldwouldfallapart ("one of the greatest titles of all-time" as claimed by Nicky), plus the sedate, sentimental and tranquillising This Is Yesterday. A winsome, tender, moving and fleeting breather amid the mental and emotional bloodletting, which momentarily enables the outlying and unshrinking Holy Bible to transfigure, were long thought to have been the sole work of Wire. When putting together the pristine, exemplary and life-enriching 20th Anniversary Box Set for THB, on closer inspection, he actually discovered that Richey had contributed more to both tracks than he remembered. And, if you were to combine all of Nicky and Richey's traded lines and wide-ranging lyrics together, unbelievably, there are over an astronomical 2,800 words across all of the songs included on the record! With Q Magazine giving its affirmation and adulation by trumpeting: "The Holy Bible is among the most lyrically ambitious albums any rock group has made!" This long player also unequivocally demonstrates and validates 'the power of words' and how they can permeate your mind. But due to the vast amount of pre-internet information, knowledge and wealth of words crammed into THB's unequalled lyric sheets - some of which could even be classified as prose, or as hard-hitting investigative journalism. And encompass everything, from cultural, historical, political and societal connections, to weighty subject matter, to well-read literary references. JDB - sometimes even without a moment to take a breath - recorded far more vocal takes than usual (for comping) so that he sung every syllable correctly, with his astonishing / incomparable voice, vox techniques and outstanding approaches to singing, reacting perfectly to the array of convulsing sonics, abrasive lead / rhythm guitar tones and counter-melodies used on different compositions. Also making The Holy Bible on their own terms, and by now, a well-oiled machine in the studio - when probed about the rhythm section's listening habits, musicianship and contributions, after chewing this over, Nicky marvelled: "It doesn't happen often in a band's career when you all start listening to the same sort of music and reading the same sort of things. With us, it was Wire, Magazine, John McGeoch (PiL, Banshees, Visage) was a big influence on James, Jah Wobble was a big influence on the bass sound and Gang Of Four were a big influence as well. It was all the music we grew up listening to. When we first started, Guns N' Roses came along and changed us for a couple of albums, but this music was our natural habitat. Post-punk was what we listened to the most, because we missed out on punk. Sometimes in a band there is a telepathy and even in the rhythm section, with me and Sean, that was happening on tracks like Ifwhiteamerica... it was just like speeded-up Adam And The Ants! We didn't need to speak about it. We just felt like we were doing the right thing." And on the breakneck-paced, 2000AD & Judge Dredd, 'Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave!' (a slogan uttered by Tomas de Torquemada, puritanical and xenophobic villain in Nemesis the Warlock) referencing P.C.P. - a clever song title that refers to Political Correctness (PC), to a Police Constable (PC) and to the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). Although always much more coil springed, jittery and venomous live than on record, Nicky raved about this track's instant gratification: "You can hear a real joy in our playing!" On a side note, Richey was a die-hard 2000AD & Judge Dredd comic book fan - he even once had a drawing of the character, Ace Garp, published in an issue when he was younger, winning £3. Then, the ultimate dream of any comic book fan, Richey himself was immortalised within its hallowed pages, when the long-running British science-fiction comic anthology satirised the '4 REAL' incident in a story. The character based on Richey was called Clarence from The Crazy Sked Moaners, and in a different story, Zenith, a character named Domino even wore a Manics t-shirt! Although never licensed or used, MSP originally wrote and recorded the fluid and blistering Judge Yr'self, for the 1995 Judge Dredd movie starring Sylvester Stallone (Richey excitedly told his father that a song might be featured on the soundtrack). But out of respect to Richey after he had vanished and not wishing to dwell on this, the track was put on the back burner and wasn't completely finished until its poignant inclusion on the 2003 b-sides, rarities and covers compilation, Lipstick Traces (A Secret History Of Manic Street Preachers). As one of the final songs that the gentle Richey penned before he went missing, lyrically and sonically, Judge Yr'self patently has its foundations in THB (the music video is appropriately included on the 10th Anniversary Edition). In a 2015 Q&A with Ultimate Guitar, when disassembling the LP's splintered and fraught tension, JDB extolled and reiterated about The Holy Bible: "In its own way, even though it's regarded as an album which has a bit of indelible punk spirit in it, it's quite a muso (musician's) album. There are some awkward little time-signatures on there and the drums are very much linked in with the guitars. The bass is very much linked in with the guitars too and the bass is not always on the bass drum. There's a lot of post-punk chords and effected bass on there, which weaves in and out of the music. And it's quite a muso little record really. I'd say it's a post-punk album influenced by bits of Rush. It's a very kind of infused album and there's a hyper-reality about the lyrics."

18. Interestingly, James "never felt completely comfortable as the lead singer of the Manics, until The Holy Bible"  and before then, would have "just preferred to have solely been the lead guitarist, with either Nicky or Richey as the frontman, because they had the cheekbones for it!"

19. In 2004, James unexpectedly admitted to Guitarist Magazine: "Sometimes I've resented putting vocals over the music, especially on The Holy Bible."

20. Carefully sourced by Richey and in-keeping with / highlighting the songs' themes - sometimes adding a menacing and dystopian atmosphere - every dialogue sample on The Holy Bible had to be cleared for usage, in turn, costing Sony a lot of money. In reference to the mercurial and diffusive sample used on Mausoleum, when talking to The Face in '94, Richey expounded: "When J. G. Ballard wrote Crash, he said that what he was trying to do was force humanity to look itself in the mirror, then rub its face in its own vomit. That was what we wanted, too." With Nicky additionally looking to write about the atrocities caused by "the human capability to inflict pain on its own race," and an intransigent Richey reasoning in another interview: "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." Arriving just over 14 months after its predecessor, Gold Against The Soul, when later elaborating on The Holy Bible's concept, or through-line, a perspicacious Nicky cogitated: "Theres an overriding philosophy behind the whole album: evil is an essential part of the human condition and the only way to get over it is recognising all hypocrisies, all evils - recognising its in us all - which I guess is not a liberal view."



21. Financially, with all band members existing on a low income at the time - a teeny £250 per month each, later rising to £200 per week - which was an unfathomably minuscule amount of money for an international act signed to a major label. JDB, who "didnt have a pot to piss in," was still living at home with his parents during the making of this long player, with the others 'clubbing together' so that he could stay in a Marriott hotel one night a week. Notably, part way through recording - after having seen them play live and been magnetised by the Washington DC indie hardcore outfit, later purchasing some of their LPs - one of James' morning wake-up songs and on repeat studio favourites, was Learned It by Girls Against Boys. "I really latched onto that song and I think they had a small bearing in the music I wrote for The Holy Bible, so its a good memory for me" he revealed on BBC Radio 6 Music. However, not everyone in MSP recollects Bradfields choice of alarm call so fondly. "I remember James' obsession well," laughed a mystified Nicky of hearing the song a lot... "To my pain!" With regard to the unpleasant setting and the seedy side of where Sound Space Studios was located in the red-light-district of Cardiff. Late at night, both JDB and Alex would be aware of prostitutes prowling the streets outside, who even sometimes performed sexual acts with clients in their parked cars.

22. While refining the Manic Street Preachers' sound / twisting melodies into new shapes, and at the same time, managing to make atypical song lyrics scan and rhyme. Although the THB sessions involved long hours for James in the studio, along with engineer/co-producer Alex Silva - 16-hours per day, sometimes more, 7 days a week for 1 month - who also ate breakfast, lunch and dinner together, he has described it as "one of the best times of his life." Elaborating: "Brilliant memories. All the dark humour around that time makes it seem happier in retrospect than maybe it actually was. Regardless of the lyrics, I remember Richey as being quite cuddly at that point (who was regularly holed up in the studio's Gaffer-esque office with his Olivetti portable typewriter, typing lyrics, and also went to the odd nightclub in Cardiff with JDB). He didn't seem in the perpetual motions of darkness as the lyrics might imply. It was a happy period, recording that album, even though it was done in bleak surroundings. It felt like we were all pulling in the same direction. I remember thinking if this is our last album, it's a fucking brilliant album to finish on. We felt it was our final riposte." And in spite of the fact that "some bands wouldn't have even used Sound Space Studios to record demos, even though it had an amazing drum room" in the opinion of Nicky - the studio, vicinity, environment and 'method recording' to stay on-message, proved to be advantageous as it fortuitously suited everything about the lo-fi and stylised Holy Bible perfectly! JDB: "Gold Against The Soul was slightly hollow. I think we're a band best following our own lead. We're a band best following an idea or we have a little mini-manifesto before a record. With that record we didn't. We just kind of knew we had to do a second record and keep the momentum going and we fell into that very clichéd trap. I think the record has some good guitar work in it but it's not enough. It's holding up a bit of an empty fortress. The Holy Bible was a rearguard action against ourselves to a certain extent. We knew we'd failed ourselves and fallen into the biggest rock 'n' roll cliché in the world: the difficult second album. So I kind of think to create something that was born of a big idea I suppose. Sometimes you need some creative failure to spur you on. On the first and second album we'd had all the trappings of being a newly-signed act for Sony, we just felt we had to strip ourselves and disavow ourselves of all those trappings of being a signed act to a major record label. It was definitely the best thing we could have done. We actually recorded on smaller tape; we didn't record on conventional tape. We recorded on tape you'd use for demos usually and recorded on very small 16-track decks. Working within those limitations made everything so vital." With The Wire (who habitually wore a football manager-style coat, loaned from his Dad, to keep warm in the "freezing studio") recently reflecting: "It makes you realise the power of youth, feeling fearless and, in blunt terms, not giving a shit. Which obviously dims with age and having kids and responsibilities, and all that. It does make you realise the power of the four of us locked away from mainstream Britain in the early 1990s, and how glorious that feeling was... It just felt like a brilliant environment, to create what felt like some sort of piece of art." James: "I think it's a snapshot of the time and it's a snapshot of Richey to a certain degree as well, in terms of the lyrics and the tone that it set. I associate it with those times and all of the information that Richey was digesting, and then Nick trying to balance things out a bit." DJ Huw Stephens noted: "The album's subject matter didn't darken the mood in the studio, when four friends got together to record what would become one of the band's most celebrated works." Nicky: "At that time, we'd still be sitting down and watching rugby or football as well... We were getting chips from Canton, reading the NME and watching crap telly." James: "It's true, being in the studio wasn't like the Marlon Brando scene from Apocalypse Now or something. It wasn't backlit with shadows everywhere. We were going to Servini's Café in Cardiff and still getting excited about eating half a tuna melt!" At the end of making THB, James, Nicky, Richey and Sean bought Alex a bottle of Champagne, among other gifts, as a thank you for all of his hard work. However, when he arrived home that day, his long-term partner announced that she was leaving him as he'd spent so little time with her! With Alex jesting that the Manics had "left him with a bottle of Champagne and a broken heart!" Also clarifying to Wales Online: "The last day alone was a straight-through 36-hour session and when I got home my girlfriend of five years, with whom Id just bought a house, said shed had enough and walked out. Thats still James favourite topic of conversation whenever he talks about me - in the nicest possible way, of course." Discussing the mixing stages of The Holy Bible with Mark Freegard, and then, its critical reception, Nicky imparted: "That year in particular, obviously, was the year of Nirvanas In Utero and everything else - it was a pretty bleak year and it just seemed to all come together at the same time. I remember we were in Britannia Row, which was where Joy Division recorded Closer, we were there when we heard that Kurt Cobain had killed himself. We were mixing The Intense Humming Of Evil, or some other really bleak track. It was a pretty bleak moment - it actually felt like a lot of connections were falling into place... In terms of the press in the UK, I think the difference was that it was the album theyd always wanted us to make. When we first started, I guess theyd been not disappointed, but you know, Generation Terrorists was so cosmetic and glam, and Gold Against The Soul was this cavernous, empty and miserable stadium rock. I think the fact was that the band that theyd wanted to love, all of a sudden they could love. Wed always been a band to cherish critically, but I dont think wed ever made the record - maybe with the exception of Motorcycle Emptiness - that people wanted... It's certainly one of those cult albums, that if you liked it, I think you love it forever!" In a Quietus editorial entitled, There Are No Horizons: The Holy Bible At 20, one penman contemplated: "The Holy Bible has what British groups always used to have over everyone else: a kind of mobility, a liveliness, an aversion to wasted space. It's still hard rock, but it's hard rock coarsened and enriched with the urgency of post-punk and the mordancy of metal. Aside from anything else, it suited the band a whole lot better: the Manics were always capable of generating power, in a seething, pummelling kind of way, but in strict stylistic terms they never really rocked. Sean's drumming was too rigid for that, Nicky's bass lines nailed to the beat - they always sounded like punks at heart. The Holy Bible finds a way to harness that and elevate it. They'd never sound this sharp again... Almost all these songs view their subject through a prism of disquiet, but only three or four are purely introspective... The Manics understand their medium so well, they rarely sound less than totally convincing. Out of the babel and the noise comes a truth, or a set of truths, which have seldom been expressed so abstractly yet with such intense immediacy." Also worth mentioning and something which is a little known fact, is how MSP's longstanding producer, Dave Eringa, had a minor role in the making of The Holy Bible. Although uncredited, he did a recall for the final mix of She Is Suffering as Mark Freegard was unavailable: "I wind James up by saying that that means I worked (in however stupidly small way) on The Bible! The song's atmosphere and texture, was created using a synth pad that runs in the background through the entire track." Dave also mixed Faster/P.C.P.'s bone-rattling and driving b-side, Sculpture Of Man, as well as demoing Judge Yr'self in its original form before the final 2003 mix: "We did a more programmed version of Judge Yr'self during the January 1995 demo session. It was the same arrangement, but more electronic in the drums. It was just a case of finding what worked best for the song. We were just demoing as a tester for the Judge Dredd movie, so it's quite normal to try out a couple of different treatments!"



23. After his initial concerns as to whether or not he'd be capable of even turning some of Richey's lyrics into singable songs: "You crazy fucker. How do you expect me to write music to this!?!" As pure year zero and the "most natural thing" that MSP have ever done, JDB later revealed: "Other than Lifeblood, The Holy Bible was the only other time I've had to re-design what I do. That album gave me so much confidence. Once I'd done that, I knew that - in terms of pure musicality - writing a song to whatever words I was given, there was nothing for me to be scared about any more." When asked which Manics lyric has been the hardest to put music to, Sean answered: "Yes was a challenge, hence the time-signature of the song" - with its melody and repeated verse guitar riff / note pattern motif, also rooted in The Penguin Orchestra Cafe's Music For A Found Harmonium, as at the time James was writing the music for Yes, he kept hearing this instrumental track being played on the radio. 227 Lears - a fansite of collected writings about The Holy Bible - even noted how in addition to the television material sampled, the lyrics excerpt fragments from a newspaper article. As Wire indicated in an interview with Metal Hammer in September 1994: "Yes, for example: we had just read this article about prostitutes in Nottingham and it was written around that. Prostitutes are derided by society as a very low form of human life, but most people do the same thing every day of their lives - they just dont do it in a sexual way. But in all honesty, the lyrics are about being in a band and prostituting yourself every day. It completely is. Theres one line in there, 'Theres no part of my body that has not been used.' We feel like that really, being in a band - theres not much left with any purity." 227 Lears also unearths how the article, Children for sale on the streets of UK cities, written by journalist Nick Davies appeared in The Mail on Sunday in November 1993 and could equally have suggested the songs key opening phrase. Edwards used other elements to help shape his startling vision. Davies first reports on the harrowing activities of two boys, Jamie and Luke, one of whom recounts the first time that he was asked to T somebody, explaining that this stands for toss. Edwards in turn elaborated on this: I T them 24/7 all year long. Later in the piece, Davies quotes a senior official of Notts County Council who says of the difficulties faced in confronting the issue of child prostitution: Our community homes now contain a combination of the most damaged, deprived, depraved and delinquent children, and they are incredibly difficult to work with. And our problem is that we are the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. We pick up the pieces when they have been damaged. At best, we may find a remedy. At worst, we are just running a damage-limitation exercise. The report also features references to old ladies, a young girl evading 24/7 watch by her social worker, a child being conceived of a pimp and prostitute, a boy being raped on video.

24. Career-wise and despite having tasted some success, the group still felt like failures, with Richey pondering: "In maybe twenty years we might have an impact on somebody because of what we believe or what we say, but were not important now." Placing his first love of penning lyrics way above performing, travelling and doing press - while aware that the extremely high calibre and depth of MSP's vocabulary, was what elevated them to another plane and massively separated them as sui generis, from their peers also operating within the rock sphere. Even postulating in a 1992 interview with Siren magazine: "I can't see any way that music can go forward, we always thought that the only way that rock music could go forward was with the lyrics." Irrespective of people's acceptance or understanding, Richey (who was incapable of 'switching off' and now devouring a book a day / using references that sometimes JDB and The Wire couldn't even grasp), constantly strove "to write a flawless lyric that would scan rhythmically with James' music, and summed-up exactly how he felt about himself and the world around him." Always treating songwriting as an artform and never aspiring to be compared to any other lyricists - he was especially proud of Archives Of Pain and Die In The Summertime. Nicky (enjoying domestic bliss, preferring instead to concentrate more on his bass playing and "not so much on his game" with lyrics and reading, concluding that his songwriting partner's creative flow and contributions were perfect anyway), even perceptively noted that with THB, Richey invented "A new lyrical language." Infused with intent and ideas, and containing a multitude of searingly memorable, honest and endlessly fascinating words, one of the greatest, most quoted and famous lines of them all remains: 'I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing'. This was also nearly used as the title for the long player that became known as Journal For Plague Lovers, which in many ways, is a companion-piece to The Holy Bible - with some fans and music scribes even affectionately referring to them as 'Richey's albums', or as 'Richey's Old and New Testaments'. Renowned for their love of strong LP and song titles, with regard to tracks on THB, Nicky's suggestions for Yes and Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit'sworldwouldfallapart, mean that these are some of the shortest and longest titles ever in the Manic Street Preachers' song index! 25. Speaking about trying to connect with, then convey, the complexity of the lyrical content (which refused the brevity typically associated with the concise nature of most song lyrics), James unveiled: "It's just about believing it as much as the author believes it. Sometimes it really was not about questioning anything in the lyric, but just going along with it because you knew there was this militancy here that would only work if you're 100 percent committed to it. For me, it just feels like something that could only ever have been done in Europe. There's a morass of remains. We went through two world wars, and it's man's greatest achievement that we now live in Europe in peace. But the record says that there are ghosts there: it's built on blood, bones and rubble and we still live with those things." Sean has since described the topics tackled in these lyrics as being "as far as Richey's character could go." And even though Nicky has revealed Richey's oft gallows humour, i.e. when handing him the lyric sheet for the macabre Archives Of Pain, how he had a big smile on his face and announced: "Here you go Wire, you'll like this one!" Then, with Revol which covered the sexual peccadilloes of Totalitarian leaders: "You'll love it!" Nicky has still expressed fears that having put so much of himself into his words over the years, that towards the end of 1994, Richey had finally become "an empty shell inside." JDB has even talked about the immense amount of pressure placed on Richey by some people at the time, who after scrutinising the extremities dredged up and ingrained within his lyrics and believing his words to be prophetic, would ghoulishly urge: "If he truly means all of these things, then he'll do something drastic to prove that he is '4 REAL'." When interviewed in '94, Richey was "certain that the group's visit to Belsen, Dachau and Hiroshima, influenced their entire perspective of the role of themselves as individuals and as a band." While James reflected: "The title, The Holy Bible, seems like a very good metaphor for a lot of things. We took the Ten Commandments and realised that they had contradictory failures in Western terms. The album is designed to challenge complacency at all levels. It sounds really pompous and it is, but it gave us a good sounding board for all of the lyrics. It's a sarcastic Valentine to religion itself." However, he was later taken aback after Richey "persuaded him that there's no catharsis in art." "We made the new album without the record company's permission, laid down our own money for it. It's completely uncompromising in every sense, and it's our best album yet. I really hoped Richey would find some kind of redemption in it, but he didn't. And that's upsetting." With regard to Richey's more personal lyrics, when playing Yes live, James is now understandably sometimes unable to sing the tormented line: "I hurt myself to get pain out," which deals with Richey expressing frustrations about his need to self-harm, as he "can't shout, can't scream." With JDB adding: "People will say to me: 'Do you think you did everything you could to stop Richey doing this?' I say: 'Yeah.' Then they'll go: 'Are you sure?' And at that point I just want to fill their faces in." On a lighter note and in relation to the extensive cultural, historical, political and societal signposts + literary references used throughout The Holy Bible, over the years, an inexhaustible amount of MSP Fans, bookworms and English Lit students have all been led to discover a variety of texts, which once caused James to label this long player as "one of the great reader albums." In fact, in February 2017, an unofficial academic book entitled, 'Triptych: Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers The Holy Bible' was published. Whereby three authors "reconsider The Holy Bible from three separate, intersecting angles, combining the personal with the political, history with memory, and popular accessibility with intellectual attention to the album's depth and complexity." 2019 will also see the publication of a pair of brand new MSP tomes, kicking off in January with 'Withdrawn Traces: Searching for the Truth about Richey Manic' (which includes a foreword by Rachel Edwards and is the first book written with the co-operation of the Edwards family, testimony from Richeys closest friends and unprecedented and exclusive access to Richeys personal archive). Then, in April, the long-running title, 33 1/3 (a series of short books about popular music, focusing on individual albums) will be exploring The Holy Bible.





26. Length-wise, The Holy Bible clocks in at 56:17, with Revol being the shortest song at 3:04 and The Intense Humming Of Evil the longest at 6:12. On completion, JDB was convinced that the record was a "positive" artistic statement and would do well, as although even sometimes 'speaking in tongues', when people did hear the messages in the songs, they would think: "Finally, the truth!" Elaborating: "We're quite an academic band and when we start recording an album, we treat it like an essay almost. We start with the title, then we write the songs. So, the title of the album is like a question for us and then under that title, we try and answer all of the questions - only for ourselves through all of the songs. The inspiration for the title, The Holy Bible, came from this little news bite we read that said: 'There are more holy wars going on in the world one time last year, than at any other time in recorded history.' That kind of set our minds off and we just looked at the Ten Commandments and they have all failed and contradicted themselves in Western terms. If you compare Christianity with Islam, Christianity has failed in its own eyes. Whereas Islam, is still strong in its own people's eyes. I'm not expounding any kind of religion, that's just a fact. So basically, we just thought that we'd try and give our version of the Ten Commandments, or Thirteen Commandments. You know, The Holy Bible, divine truth - well, this is our divine truth! It was just a good framework to work under." James even once summarised the LP as "A Holy Chalice burning through everything it touches." The meaning behind every lyric was also printed in track-by-track notes for journalists (subsequently published in The Holy Bible tour book), with all explanations by Richey and thus further emphasising the ferocity of his mind / intelligence. Echoing James' thoughts, Richey judiciously commented: "If the Holy Bible is true, it should be about the way the world is, and I think thats what my lyrics are about." Adding: "I went to church for 13-years, I've read most holy books there are, but I don't find much in it apart from cruelty. That's the centre of human existence. It's not a religious album, but the imagery is very important to us." Interestingly, even though Edwards began carrying a book of biblical quotes on tour with him in late '94, when commenting on Richey's fixation with organised religion and his misgivings about the church, Nicky once divulged: "Hes always had this thing about it. Ive never really talked to him about it, but hes always made out that it really pissed him off and fucked him up." However, Richey's sister, Rachel, has since gone on record to dispute this theory.

27. The now iconic album cover, designed by Richey while hospitalised, features a 1993-94 oil on canvas triptych by British artist Jenny Saville, depicting three perspectives on the body of an obese woman in her underwear and is titled Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face). After seeing the painting in a weekend Independent Sunday supplement magazine, Edwards contacted the Saatchi Collection to buy it, but was put off by the £30,000 asking price. Saville originally declined the band's request to use the artwork, but changed her mind after a 30-minute phone call from Richey in which he described every track on the record in detail, giving them permission to use it for free. Nicky: "I don't think it was until The Holy Bible, that we probably hit our stride in terms of artwork. We both saw the picture in the Independent Magazine on Sunday first off, and I remember I phoned Richey up and said: 'That's brilliant!' and he went: 'Yeah, I loved it!' He phoned her up the next week and it was a marriage made in heaven. The painting seemed so striking and the album seemed so messed-up at the time." 227 Lears noted how in 2010, Wire reiterated this fact to writer Dan Richards: "I remember the day vividly... because in the magazine, was a special on Jenny Saville - the first time wed been exposed to her - and we both phoned each other up and said, Those paintings are amazing. It was a sort of psychic thing that me and him had." 227 Lears also adds that the article was written by critic David Sylvester and published on 20 January 1994, with Saville explaining to Richards: "The first time I did the Manics thing, I was living in Glasgow. Id just done the show at the Saatchi Gallery and Richey Edwards called me up and we had a conversation about anorexia and I wasnt initially keen on doing an album cover but then, after talking to him, I really wanted to do it because we had a lot of interests that were similar - about technology and the body, writers we liked - and he faxed me the lyrics to 4st 7lb and I read that and said: Ill do it. Use the triptych, you can have it." This particular painting showing a confrontational image of obesity, was chosen by the Manics' aesthetes, Edwards and Wire, because of its portrayal of 'beauty in perceived ugliness'. And, as is the case with all MSP artwork and sleeve quotes, it complements the character and lyrical / musical inspiration of the album within - also adding to the total immersive experience. The back cover features a photograph (painted on by the late artist, model and stylist Barry Kamen) of the group in military uniforms and a quote taken from the introduction of Octave Mirbeau's book, The Torture Garden. This long player is also the first instance of the Manic Street Preachers using Gill Sans typeface with a (Cyrillic-style) reversed 'R' in their album art. The font would be reused on later LPs and has become an easily recognised motif of Manics' artwork. The typeface is similar to one used on 1980's Empires And Dance by Simple Minds, one of James Dean Bradfield's favourite records (coincidentally, the band's third LP and also recorded in Wales), with the sleeve's warfare visuals, sophisticated / clean minimal design and white background, another obvious likeness to The Holy Bible's cover. JDB: "Yes, we did plagiarise the sleeve art for The Holy Bible. A little nod." An additional element worth mentioning, is that of all MSP's albums, this is the only one to incorporate the tracklisting on the front (as did each of THB's accompanying singles) - which with sleeve art, is generally quite a rarity in itself! Finally, when originally released in '94, both The Holy Bible's title and its cover, caused controversy due to the religious overtones of the long player's name and the image of the obese woman in her underwear, which some people called "morbid and grotesque." When interviewed by Music Week in April 2018, Nicky ruminated: "Calling our third album The Holy Bible was brave in retrospect, but when Richey suggested it, I didn't even think about it, it just seemed totally natural. I remember there was one territory in Europe that wouldn't release The Holy Bible because of the title - perhaps a Catholic country, I don't know - and that was the first time I thought: 'Fuck me, it is a funny old title.' But at the time, it wasn't a debate at all. Fair play to Sony/Epic, they never said a word. It was a much freer time in terms of artistic license."



28. The CD lyrics booklet (which unusually, has the songs in non-running order) features various images each relating to their corresponding tracks: Of Walking Abortion = A photograph of Margarete Clark, who has a Siamese twin appendage growing out of her belly (originally taken at the James Strates Shows in 1949 and later published in Daniel P. Mannixs 1976 book, Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others)*. She Is Suffering = An illustration of Jesus Christ wearing a crown of thorns. Yes = An abstract piece of fine art of a cum shot. 4st 7lb = A picture of an apple. Faster = A painted portrait of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo - the Butcher of Rostov as it appeared in a series of True Crime trading cards, released by Eclipse in the US in 1992*. This Is Yesterday = An illustration of the Sacred Heart (religious iconography). P.C.P. = A photograph of British Police Officers in wartime (WWII) gas mask training. The Intense Humming Of Evil = A still of the gate at Dachau concentration camp. Mausoleum = A plan of the gas chambers at Belsen concentration camp. Die In The Summertime = Photographs of each of the Manic Street Preachers as children. Archives Of Pain = An engraving depicting an execution by guillotine in Revolutionary France. Ifwhiteamerica... = A skewed version of Richey's US handgun image. Revol = A photograph of Lenin's corpse, the first Soviet Union leader who was embalmed in 1924. The booklet also contains black & white portraits of James, Nicky, Richey and Sean, images of crosses / gravestones, album credits and a Buddhist saying from the Tripitaka alongside a dedication to the band's co-manager / publicist, Philip Hall, who had died of cancer on December 7, 1993. In 'Withdrawn Traces: Searching for the Truth about Richey Manic', it is revealed how Edwards had designated A4 folders filled with ideas, pictures and scribbled notes etc. for each MSP album, including The Holy Bible. As well as scans showing design layouts and lyrics being proof-checked by Richey in early July '94, he had also asked Sony's legal department to check for permission to use the Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden quote. Also of interest, is that at one stage, it would seem that the record was going to be dedicated to the memory of both Philip Hall and to Richey's close friend from University, Nigel Bethune. We even learn how Edwards had penned instructions for James when composing the finish to Of Walking Abortion: 'Maybe end like Rage Against The Machine - Killing In The Name Of?' and how JDB had a revised lyric sheet for The Intense Humming Of Evil, as requested.

*Details courtesy of 227 Lears https://227lears.com/

29. All artwork for the front covers of The Holy Bible singles was licensed (relatively inexpensively) from German artist Martin Kippenberger, and each picture is oil / mixed media collage on canvas dating from 1982-83. Part four of the five-part, Fliegender Tanga (Flying Tanga), was used for the first single and tri-fold Digipack, Faster/P.C.P. Sympatische Kommunistin (Nice Communist Woman), appeared on part one of the two-part single Revol. And, Titten, Türme, Tortellini (Tits, Towers, Tortellini) - credited under its French title, Des tètons, des tours, des tortellini - was the cover artwork on both parts of the two-part, third and final single She Is Suffering. The limited edition part ones for Revol and She Is Suffering (7" radio edit), are housed in Z-cases with spaces to hold CD2, which were released a week later (at one time, a record label tactic to try and keep singles high in The Charts). Both have additional inner and back cover artwork, including a D-Day stamp and a Joanne Celnik painting, Balance, respectively. CD2 for Revol (which has a front cover featuring a live photograph of James performing at Glastonbury '94) and She Is Suffering (which has a front cover featuring sections of Des tètons, des tours, des tortellini, with modified colours in a row of circles), are each packaged in maxi single slimline cases. All CD sets have 'hype stickers'. Notably, an MSP Fan once detected that the sleeve design for the 1961 LP, The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Further Out, may have possibly influenced Richey's own design ideas for the Revol and She Is Suffering front covers. Opting for a different aesthetic approach on the limited edition numbered 10" vinyls, these instead feature a montage of Manics tour pictures (P.C.P./Faster) and music video stills (Revol, She Is Suffering). Every format - CD, vinyl and cassette - also comes adorned with a customary related literary sleeve quote and has extra tracks. Faster/P.C.P. was the only single to be issued as a 7" and there is also a 3trk 12" DJ promo of The Dust Brothers (now known as The Chemical Brothers) mixes, in a grey sleeve tagged with the sticker 'M.S.P. done & dusted' (a revamped alternate version was issued for RSD 2020). The 1994 UK release dates for The Holy Bible singles were: Faster (June 6), Revol (August 1) and She Is Suffering (October 3). In Europe, only CD1 for Revol and She Is Suffering (available as either the aforementioned 2trk or a 4trk tour edition), were issued and came in maxi single slimline cases.

30. Having first begun to outline their intentions for The Holy Bible, lyrically and musically, to management / reporters from late 1993 onwards - songwriting had already commenced in the summer of '93 with tracks including Yes (the very first song to be written for THB) and Die In The Summertime. The record's title / tracklisting and August release date were officially announced in mid July '94, but on July 19, following a particularly alarming bout of heavy drinking and self-mutilation, after going missing for 48-hours and locking himself away in his flat. A vulnerable and sapped Richey - who had long been prone to bouts of crying - was admitted to Whitchurch Hospital in Cardiff, then to The Priory Clinic in Roehampton on July 28, for 10-weeks of rehabilitation to help him overcome and recover from his self-destructive problems (depression, cutting himself, alcohol dependency, drug use and borderline-anorexia nervosa). While also still mourning the deaths of the Manics' mentor Philip Hall and his best friend at University, Nigel, who had hung himself earlier that year. By this point, he weighed only 6st and was teetering on the edge. James: "Richey's a very academic person, he loves routines and timetables. When we were working he always had timetables that he had to follow. But then we had some time off and he'd spend his time taking drugs and drinking and doing a bit of slashing here and there and that's how it all started really. We've always been a very clinical band because we've always believed in creating some kind of self myth. We've always admitted that, but then it went way beyond that and got to a point where it became really irrational. Before, everything he did was quite rational, he always did things to make a point which we weren't ashamed of. Then he started doing it in private." Long-believing that "There's a certain kind of beauty in taking complete control of every aspect of your life. Purifying or hurting your body to achieve a balance in your mind is tremendously disciplined." Briefly emancipated from this 'redeeming' thought process, with regard to his breakdown, Richey eventually unassumingly elucidated to the NME: "I wasn't coping very well, and I thought my body was probably stronger than it actually was. My mind was quite strong. I pushed my body further than it was meant to go." Though addressed by Hall or Nothing as "nervous exhaustion" in a press release, some supercilious, disrespectful and detestable detractors insensitively and shamefully revelled in reporting this as a suicide attempt or astringently pontificated that it was all part of an elaborate publicity-stunt. But the band, though self-confessed press junkies and appreciating 'dirt dishing' sensationalist scandal, were mortified by the distasteful, flagrant lies and obscene misinformation printed in accusatory, inflammatory, exploitative, unkind, slanderous and harmful stories, which were anathema to both them and to Richey's family. And, although for the duration of The Holy Bible era MSP were the subject of a slew of headlines, column inches and write-ups. Because of his susceptibly to being perceived as a 'tortured artist', music magazines/papers later began to single-out Richey on front covers for his saleability, much to the group's irritation and indignation who took umbrage at this. Amid rampant rumours and growing / gnawing media speculation that MSP wouldn't continue without Richey (who abstained from doing interviews for some time after this), a frustrated and reproachful JDB retaliated: "If he hurts himself then he hurts us too, not professionally but personally. There's certainly more than a 50 percent chance that we would've split up if he'd left the band. From the band side of things that's the only time resentment ever came into it. Actually, it's not really resentment, it's more that now and again I was thinking 'being in a band just isn't any good for him, we should just pack it in' but he didn't want that to happen at all. That was the only time when things became compounded to such a degree that it felt like they were going to explode." Tenaciously soldiering on regardless (thanks to their Protestant work ethic) and playing as a three-piece in the throes of these circumstances, to honour their remaining summer festival commitments - Nicky: "Reading '94 was the peak of anger-worry and disillusionment, but still great" - and to pay for his treatment. After visiting Richey during his stay however, although naturally worried and distressed, James, Nicky and Sean sceptically called into question how beneficial the 'Twelve-Step Programme' treatment actually was to his mental health and well-being. With a despondent Richey, himself even swiftly deconstructing and deciphering its inherent faults, as well as the therapy's over-reliance on, and liberal use of, antidepressants: 'Pass the Prozac, designer amnesiac.' After having spent 6-weeks there, on September 8, Edwards discharged himself early from The Priory Clinic. JDB theorised about his inner-turmoil, emotional oversensitivity and the burden of adulthood: "I think he just feels things so fucking intensely. He always had this vision of purity or perfection, a kind of childlike vision, that became completely obliterated." Adding: "A psychiatrist is always going to pick a target to establish the problem and we were scared that the target would be us. In the end, thank God, it was something else." Later conceding that upon leaving the psychiatric clinic, Richey had "come back a completely different person," even as far as wanting to be called Richard. A riled, disgruntled and dejected Nicky, even accused The Priory Clinic of "ripping the soul out of him." Upon reflection however, with deep-seated antipathy, James bemoaned and vehemently asserted his utter disdain for anyone who judged or denigrated Richey: "The only thing that perhaps pissed me off in terms of what's happened to him, is in relation to the terms that people are gonna view Richey. They'll think that he's a walking capital letter 'I' - all ego. And yet on the new album for me, his two best songs are written from his point of view, but through other people, not himself: Ifwhiteamerica... and The Intense Humming Of Evil. I think he's maybe deflected attention away from the way he can write about other people and turned it all on himself. It's the only thing I'm angry about, because that makes him look very vain." Also speaking in defence of his best friend and favourite lyricist, Nicky posited: "As a kind of physical and internalised hatred and dissection of humanity, The Holy Bible is pretty untouchable... We thought about delaying it until September or October, but Richey was insistent that it should be 'business as usual' and we're just hoping that he'll be fit for the tour." And, although he could have easily corroborated JDB's assumption about his unsung qualities. Instead, not wanting to wallow, an unembittered Richey - who by now, had penned such staggering, heart-breaking and contemplative clear-cut lines as: 'I don't know what I'm scared of or what I even enjoy.' 'The only certain thing that is left about me / There's no part of my body that has not been used / Pity or pain, to show displeasure's shame / Everyone I've loved or hated always seems to leave' (Yes). 'I wanna be so skinny that I rot from view.' 'I want to walk in the snow / And not leave a footprint / I want to walk in the snow / And not soil its purity.' 'Choice is skeletal in everybody's life.' 'Self-worth scatters, self-esteem's a bore / I long since moved to a higher plateau.' 'Yeh 4st 7, an epilogue of youth / Such beautiful dignity in self-abuse / I've finally come to understand life / Through staring blankly at my navel' (4st 7lb). 'Scratch my leg with a rusty nail, sadly it heals / Colour my hair but the dye grows out / I can't seem to stay a fixed ideal.' 'Childhood pictures redeem, clean and so serene / See myself without ruining lines / Whole days throwing sticks into streams.' 'The hole in my life even stains the soil / My heart shrinks to barely a pulse.' As well as: 'I have crawled so far sideways / I recognise dim traces of creation' (Die In The Summertime). Measuredly, modestly and felicitously averred: "I'm not really worried what people think about me. Because I judge myself harsher, and on more strict terms, than they ever could probably... I have a very childlike rage and a very childlike loneliness... I guess I identify with victims." Likewise, the THB era saw the rise of an infamous fan collective / obsessional subculture known simply as 'CoR - Cult of Richey', who themselves identified with Edwards. James: "Around the time of The Holy Bible, it was slightly disquieting the kind of stuff that would be attached to us in terms of some fans. I was never comfortable with that." This period would also later become the marker for Manic Street Preachers' pre / post Holy Bible phases (first act before second act) and fanbases (old fans vs. new fans). Nicky has even termed fixated and loyal THB devotees, who are extremely precious about the long player, as 'Bible Ites'.



31. By way of promotion and based on Rob Stringer's (currently Chairman of Columbia Records) suggestion, every word from every song was reproduced as a centre-spread advertisement in the music press (and the Reading Festival '94 programme), in the lead-up to the release of the album - although all explicit words were blacked out. Mirroring the printed lyrics theme, each single - Faster/P.C.P., Revol and She Is Suffering - also had its own full-page and mini press adverts. NME even gave away a free 4trk flexidisc 7" sampler entitled, 'Verses From The Holy Bible', which was sellotaped to the front cover of their August 27, 1994, issue. The excerpts were: 1. She Is Suffering 2. Yes 3. Archives Of Pain 4. Ifwhiteamericawastotellthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart. The latter song is erroneously titled. Also of interest, is that whereas advertisements, promo, reviews etc. used to remind buyers of new releases out on a Monday, as The Holy Bible's release date coincided with a Bank Holiday Weekend, it was instead available from most record shops on the Tuesday.



32. THB was put out on the same day as Oasis' Definitely Maybe: August 30, 1994, just as Britpop was really starting to take-off. The long player (issued via the Epic label and MSP's "most complete album by a long way" according to Richey), reached No. 6 on the UK Albums Chart and remained in the chart for 11-weeks, but didn't chart in mainland Europe or North America (as an import). It did however make a tiny dent in the Japanese marketplace, where it was released on September 8, 1994 (with 3 bonus live tracks recorded at Glastonbury '94), peaking at No. 50 on the Albums Chart. Also of note, is that whereas some parts of Europe - including Bulgaria, Poland and Spain - had cassettes produced exclusively for each country. Conversely, as a devoutly religious country, Italy ostensibly refused to sell the LP at all based on the grounds that the title, The Holy Bible, could be construed as deeply offensive or even sacrilegious by Italians. The record also had a small-scale release in Australia (featuring an explicit content warning CD jewel case sticker) and Asia (wher