During my English A-level course in the late 1990s, we were asked to bring in a poem for analysis. I chose (and wrote out) the lyrics of the Manic Street Preachers’ “Faster”, feeling this to be a justified challenge to what my teacher Mrs King might deem to be “proper poetry”. I pompously readied myself for an argument. But she didn’t roll her eyes, and we discussed as a class why it might be that the lyricist, the Manics’ Richey Edwards, had described himself in the chorus as “stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer, I spat out Plath and Pinter” – given that these were four writers Edwards admired.
The album from which the song came, the Manics’ third, The Holy Bible, is one of those artefacts that has developed from a narrow cult obsession – selling fewer than their previous two on its release in August 1994 – to an acclaimed cult phenomenon. Its status grew during the late 90s, following the disappearance and presumed death of Edwards in early 1995, and the band’s New Order-style reinvention and blossoming popularity on their return in 1996. Few albums can withstand a book-length analysis without tedious padding, but The Holy Bible can – which is fortunate, as Triptych includes approaches by three authors: Rhian E Jones looks at its personal and political impact and context; Daniel Lukes at its literary influences; and Larissa Wodtke considers its relationship to memory.
Sometimes pop music is imbued with meaning by others, ascribed from afar, but The Holy Bible doesn’t need an intellectual kick-start. It is layered with meanings and reference points, a gothic architecture of provocations and allusions. Octave Mirbeau’s Dreyfus-era novel The Torture Garden is quoted on the sleeve; a Jenny Saville painting appears on the cover; and the songs address with graphic candour subjects such as anoxeria, the Holocaust (on not one but two tracks), American hegemony, body horror, self-loathing, the nature of evil, lost youth and lost innocence. The stark, militaristic rock-out “Of Walking Abortion” refers to Valerie Solanas in its title, and Miklós Horthy and Jozef Tiso in its chorus. It is a brilliant album, but it is not a party album.
Following Edwards’ disappearance, after a year of rumoured crises of mental health and alcoholism, the then-powerful music weeklies received mailbags of letters from readers about him, and about their own hitherto private self-harm and depression. Along with Kurt Cobain’s suicide the previous year, it prompted a special issue of Melody Maker produced in collaboration with the Samaritans, with a cover line referencing an earlier Manics song, “From Despair to Where?” This public discussion of the darker side of teenage angst is one of many aspects of 90s pop culture that is easily forgotten, beneath clip-show potted histories that zero in on Britpop, lads’ mags and girl power. Jones argues in her contribution to Triptych that the album reflected both adolescent anguish and nihilism, and a kind of lost period after the so-called “end of history” – sharing some of the rebellious disgust of the beats (whom the Manics had read with gusto), but with none of their utopianism: “Its adolescent rejection of the adult world is far darker and more pessimistic than the convictions of soixante-huitards that, with their elders’ generation overthrown, they could build a better world for all … it is an attempt to express trauma in order to exorcise it.”
The Manics introduced an entire generation to the likes of Henry Miller and Mailer, Plath and Pinter, and did so without seeming condescending – their successful comeback single in 1996, “A Design for Life”, began with the line “libraries gave us power”, a reference to the words above the door of a Newport library, an articulation of the power of working-class autodidacticism. This determination to cram as much as possible into every song, to refuse brevity and clarity, is not very pop, but it is somewhat adolescent, and it’s no wonder it struck a chord with so many teenage fans, trying to understand the world and their place in it. Even the Manics’ CD sleeves were something like a sixth form exercise book, scrawled with slogans and haughty quotations.
They would never have got away with any of this if the sonics on The Holy Bible didn’t perfectly mirror the lyrics; the music has a monumental quality, as Wodtke observes, exhilarating in its metallic nihilism and its speed – jagged shapes instead of flowing melodies. The aesthetics were well drawn throughout; the band copied their heroes the Clash in adopting military fatigues for the tours around the album, in the name of conveying a militancy of spirit, rather than machismo.
In an infamous appearance on Top of the Pops in June 1994, the band and stage were dressed in military camouflage, with lead singer James Dean Bradfield in a black balaclava, performing “Faster” between two flaming torches. Richey Edwards, who wrote 70% of the lyrics on the album, had scrawled “the slough of despond” on the back of his sailor top. It prompted more than 25,000 complaints to the BBC, at that time a record (viewers apparently thought they were expressing support for the IRA). Cutaway shots to hosts Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer grinning and teeny-boppers bopping, while Bradfield barks such epithets as “I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing” and “so damn easy to cave in, man kills everything” over furious, punky guitars, make for one of the stranger juxtapositions in 90s pop culture.
Triptych is unapologetically dense, and littered with quotations from HL Mencken and Nina Power, Jacques Derrida and Scritti Politti – and references to poets and philosophers, politicians and celebrities, theoretical texts and popular TV shows. Lukes’ contribution even takes the time to construct a critical bibliography of writing around the Manics (Simon Price’s Everything was the first book and remains the best). At times it can feel sprawling and overreaching – but that is rather part of the appeal. The experience of being a Manics fan always meant following cold leads until they made sense: around this time, I had a band T-shirt with a quote from Le Corbusier on the back, long before I worked out who Le Corbusier was. Like the Manics, perhaps like teenagers generally, it was embarrassingly pretentious, and mostly benign.
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