The Holy Bible was the third studio album by the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers. It was released on August 30, 1994 by Epic Records, a subsidiary of Sony Records, unlike their two previous albums which had been released on the Columbia Records imprint. It peaked at number 6 on the UK Albums Chart. The first single from the album, "Faster", was released on June 6 and peaked at #16 on the British singles chart. The single marked a new chapter for the band as the material was both lyrically and sonically different than their previous release, the Life Read more on Last.fm.
There are many who would consider the Manic Street Preachers as dated or cheesy – and they’d have a point, exemplified by some of the band’s early material or their flirtations with Britpop. However, it can’t be just me who sees in some of their material a timelessness which demands repeated listens, even 20 years later.
‘Motown Junk’ is one such example, as is the entirety of their third album. ‘The Holy Bible’ was to the Manics what In Utero was to Nirvana and Tusk to Fleetwood Mac: a bleak album driven by the painful tensions which surrounded the band: in the Manics’ case, the recent death of their mentor and manager, and the deteriorating mental state ofeffects of the band’s ‘spiritual leader’ Richey Edwards.
I was oblivious to all of this. It wasn’t until hearing their post-Richey single ‘A Design For Life’ two years later that I got pulled into the Manics’ world.
The Holy Bible which I bought for my fifteenth birthday, found fertile ground in a kid with problems at home, problems at school and an overbearing need for release. Songs like ‘Yes’ and ‘4st 7lbs’ kept me somewhat grounded in my hormonal misery, as Richey’s words and life had done for countless young people before me.
But The Holy Bible was more than an emotional salve. It ‘picked at the holes’ in its world and, in doing so, engendered a kind of intellectualism in the listener. Most took the Manics at their slogans (‘I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing’), but a lucky few went further, delving into their suggested-reading list. In between Marx, Camus and Nietszche, I read vociferously, finding out why the album’s second track placed such significance on ‘Grenada, Haiti, Poland, Nicaragua’; deciphering the obscure German references (Lebensraum, Kulturkampf) in ‘Revol’; brushing up on the politicians and killers listed in ‘Archives of Pain’. I came out the other side as I am today: a lover of knowledge, and an informed critic of the wrongs of the world.
Of course, I’m no longer the angry teenager I was when I first heard this album – and even the Manics’ arch-radical bassist Nicky Wire, in a recent Guardian interview, showed signs of mellowing. The world has moved on; even though many of their slogans and songs are of the utmost relevance today, the Manics’ fire has faded and ‘The Holy Bible’ has sadly become just as much a cult memory as Richey Edwards. Listening to it again, though, I can hear no reason why this – and its band of authors – should ever be considered anything less than a timeless, articulate call to arms.