Manic Street Preachers

The Manic Street Preachers came off a successful second album when they entered the studio in early 1994 to record its follow-up.

As their base of operations they chose a small studio in Wales, turning down the chance to record the album in Barbados, as Epic's top brass had suggested. Manics frontman James Dean Bradfield in fact stated he had no interest in that kind of decadent rockstar move, likely mindful of the unproductive and staggeringly expensive situations bands like New Order and Happy Mondays had found themselves in.

In their little room in Cardiff, the band worked tirelessly for a month, allowing only sound engineer Alex Silva to be present. Managers and label executives were cut out entirely and had no say whatsoever. Aside from Steve Brown, who produced "She Is Suffering", the album was directed entirely by the band themselves. This explains the stylistic leap from "Generation Terrorists" and "Gold Against The Soul", where the quartet had far less control over the production.

The title "The Holy Bible" was chosen by guitarist Richey Edwards (credited as Richey James in the liner notes). Edwards explained that evoking the Bible lent the song lyrics a sense of absolute truth. He pointed out, however, that this was a paradox, since the truths revealed by religion are almost always one-sided, with the ultimate goal of exercising power. Indeed, many songs on "The Holy Bible" set out precisely to tear down and expose the contradictions of power.

The album's lyrics were written for the most part by Edwards, with contributions from bassist Nicky Wire. Neither of the two took part in composing the music itself, as both could barely manage a few chords. Limited ability and heavy alcoholism made the official guitarist's musical contribution essentially pointless, and to all intents and purposes he doesn't play on the record. The guitar parts are entirely down to Bradfield. The bass lines appear to be Wire's, though Bradfield's hand seems to run through the more intricate passages.

Bradfield and drummer Sean Moore, unlike their bandmates, were capable musicians - not virtuosos, perhaps, but solid players further along in their craft, able to competently handle acoustic instruments, keyboards and whatever else was needed to enrich the arrangements.

That richness, though, is not yet part of "The Holy Bible", the most jagged work of the Britpop era, so sharp-edged and uncompromising that many refuse to file it under that umbrella, preferring the more generic label of "alternative rock". There's no point splitting hairs over it: some albums will always resist being boxed in by the categories drawn up by music critics, and "The Holy Bible" is a perfect example of that.

The sound is a hard rock stripped of the commercial sheen of American bands like Guns N' Roses and Bon Jovi (more than one journalist had caught a whiff of that on the band's previous studio effort), turning instead to look back home, seeking a bridge to the aggressive post-punk of Gang Of Four's "Entertainment" and Public Image Ltd's "First Issue". If any glance was still cast across the ocean, it was at most towards grunge, an element evident in the recurring device of pitting savage distortion against atmospheric guitars.

Bradfield didn't write a single word on the record, but the passion with which he strains his voice and makes every line hit home is easily explained by the band's modus operandi. Bradfield and Moore, in fact, set their bandmates' lyrics to music, reversing the process followed by most rock music, where the music usually comes before the words. It was Bradfield, then, who decided where every word would fall within each song, and the sense of identification produced by his impassioned delivery makes it almost a foretaste of the nihilistic anguish that, a decade or so later, would come to define certain strands of emo music.

These are lyrics with a direct message, yet they're scattered with so many references that they end up resembling puzzles. Many songs also contain lines sampled from lectures, interviews and TV shows, drawing on the whole spectrum of public debate at the time: philosophers, scientists, actors, politicians and so on. The aim is to paint a portrait of modern man and his flaws, but also to use the power of culture as a last line of defence (a couple of years later, the single "A Design For Life" would open, not by chance, with the line "Libraries gave us power").

Sure, wanting to celebrate culture while dropping a misplaced apostrophe into the title of the second track, "Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit's worldwouldfallapart", must have raised a few eyebrows at the time, but given that the typo has never been fixed in any of the album's numerous reissues, it's almost certain the author intended it. There's no telling why, and in the end it hardly matters, since it doesn't stop the song from being one of the Manics' crowning achievements, a relentless, drum-driven charge with soaring guitars and a closing section that veers into mutation, almost prog territory. Its lyrical indictment of racism, needless to say, remains just as relevant today.

It's not pointed out often enough just how varied the album is, since the arrangements themselves never really change. What does change, though, is the structure and the tone. So it is that "The Intense Humming Of Evil", pierced by distortion and feedback, boasts a mechanical, full-on industrial pulse, while "This Is Yesterday" echoes the sweetness of The Clash's "Lost In The Supermarket", albeit buried under a mountain of reverb. Where "Archives Of Pain" alternates funk syncopation with hardcore outbursts, "4st 7lb" is a weave of bare-bones guitar riffs, liquid background effects and twisted solos. Bradfield's voice shifts effortlessly from assault to caress and back again, depicting the horror of anorexia: "Days since I last pissed, cheeks sunken and desperate. It's so good to be six stone (note: about thirty-eight kilos), losing my only true friend left, watching my third rib appear. A week later all my flesh disappears. [...] I'm getting better. Karen (note: Carpenter, most likely) says I've reached my target weight."

The driving riff of “Yes” alternates odd and even time signatures, creating a circularity that somehow anticipates the mood of Strokes, while “Die In The Summertime” is marked by a dirty, grunge-tinged sound, and the post-punk of “Of Walking Abortion” draws interest for its use of a second guitar, mixed almost into the background, designed to build a luminous trail through a phaser effect. With its stuttering gait, “Mausoleum” depicts the horror of the concentration camps. Wire wrote it after visiting Belsen and Dachau.

“Revol” is a punk-pop hybrid that, with its cauldron of names (from Lenin to Pol Pot, via Gorbachev), runs through all the light and shade of 20th-century thought and political activity so dear to the band. The impression is of listening to the anthem of a revolution aimed at overturning the order of Western society.

It's in “Faster”, though, that the full extent of Edwards's alienation emerges: “I am an architect, they call me a butcher. I am a pioneer, they call me primitive. I am purity, they call me perverted.” Memorable was the appearance on Top Of The Pops in support of the track – Wire with his face painted (in theory military camouflage, in practice a zombie) and Bradfield in an IRA-style balaclava. The outraged conservative public flooded the BBC with complaints.

The album entered the UK chart at number 6, their highest placing up to that point, but just two weeks later it had dropped out of the Top 40 and was largely regarded as a flop. Some time after that, precisely at the start of February '95, Richey Edwards vanished without a trace. No one has heard from him since, and in 2008 a Welsh court, at the request of his parents, declared him dead.

It was that tragedy, combined with the huge commercial success of the Manics' next two albums, that laid the groundwork for the posthumous reappraisal of “The Holy Bible”, which has since gone on to sell more than a hundred thousand copies at home and become a cult classic. An object of veneration for British critics, it is now considered the masterpiece of Manic Street Preachers, overshadowing all their other releases in prestige, and is rightly ranked among the high points of end-of-millennium rock.

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03/12/2017