“There are parts of the country where the 90s didn’t happen, they just passed in a slow iron-grey drag, and though I’ve never been there I imagine Blackwood in South Wales might have been like that too. It’s not poverty these places have in common, it’s the sulkily selfsufficient feeling of not mattering: the sing-song accents, the patches on the jackets, the dead industries, the endless guesthouses that used to be farmhouses, the metal on the radio – all one side of a timeless equation of which the other is metropolitan contempt.”
– Tom Ewing, freakytrigger.co.uk
“We’ve got to be understood in the context of where we’ve come from. We really have.”
– Nicky Wire
All unhappy provincial towns are both alike and unhappy in their own way. Richey Edwards famously claimed that if you built a museum to represent the Manics’ home turf of Blackwood, “all you could put in it would be shit. Rubble and shit.” In the moribund middle of the 1990s, a short enough trek from 80s Blackwood, the only place in my own town which sold records was Woolworths, which had the Top Forty on cassette and little more. In August 1994 I entered the white strip-lit aisles, tense with trepidation, and tried to preorder a copy of The Holy Bible by Manic Street Preachers. My enquiry was met with the same look of horror-struck uncertainty with which my mother, that same year, asked me whether I’d been in a punch-up — I hadn’t, my Rimmel eyeshadow palette and I were in our ill-advised experimental period, but the mistake was understandable.
Like all such teenagers, I was ludicrous and insufferable. When I look back on my teenage years I remember wanting to escape them, and the 90s, as quickly as humanly possible. My adolescence felt like being stuck on a train station platform, bags packed, waiting in vain for my ride out to arrive. The 90s were a shapeless, watery, self-indulgent decade, still waiting to be plumbed for meaning in any notable depth. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, history had apparently ended, which raised the question of what on earth we were meant to do from here on in. In small-town post-industrial non-Camden Britain, before mass internet access, 1994 was another world, another planet. Living through the decade as a teenager felt like being kept in a holding pattern with no hope of coming in to land — as though you were, as a Super Furry Animals song of 1996 had it, constantly “Waiting to Happen.”
Both I and the Manics grew up under the shadow cast by the year-long Miners’ Strike of 1984–5. There had of course been any amount of miners’ strikes during the Welsh coalfield’s twohundred-year history, but the Miners’ Strike usually gets those capitals, and certainly deserves them. This particular strike — the Big One — was iconic and historic, and came to symbolize some of the decade’s defining themes: Thatcherism’s triumph over the country’s trade unions, the demise of the country’s old heavy-manufacturing order, and the abandoning of much of the country to the vagaries of a post-industrial economy. James Dean Bradfield juxtaposed the experience of growing up during the strike with developing the knowledge of hatred:
We set ourselves the rule that we would never write a love song because we just felt that everybody knew what it was like to fall in love, and everybody knew what it was like to have a broken heart, but not everybody necessarily knew what it was like to hate something or to really hate somebody. I just think we are of our environment, wherever we come from. Just when we were getting into music, at about fourteen or fifteen, the Miner’s Strike was going on right on our doorstep. That really affected our whole community and everything. Sometimes, you know, you’re just part of the circumstances that surround you.
(qtd in JereC7)
The Manics were in at the death of coalmining; I grew up in the graveyard. By the time of The Holy Bible, ten years after the strike, a de-unionized and privatized industry had been turned into either museums, or rubble and shit:
On Friday nights in the Welsh valleys, miners go from pub to pub hunting for their employers to claim unpaid wages. Pay cheques bounce, mining companies close and re-open under other names, men are sacked for being union members or refusing to work on Christmas Day […] Dotted around the wreckage of the South Wales coalfield, mining heritage museums are opening up on the sites of former collieries, where visitors can go underground to see re-creations of the horrific conditions in which miners toiled in the early years of this century. In working private pits nearby, the re-creations are for real.
(qtd in Milne)
Growing up somewhere so solidly, triumphantly bleak, made you solidly cynical. We spent the 90s being assured, by politicians, media and popular culture, that we were All Middle-Class Now. We were told the 90s were post-ideological, when what was meant was post-socialist. We were told the battles of the 80s had been won, but we were conscious that we’d been on the losing side — and that, as losers, we weren’t meant to still be hanging around and getting in the winners’ way. For those of us the 80s left bereft of jobs and prospects, in the 90s the listless, frustrated boredom of adolescence just kept dragging on. In 1994 my teenage world was turning with excruciating slowness. I wanted something stripped down and sped up, songs that had the sharpness of neat spirits. Something to blow away the dust I dreaded settling upon my brain and body.
Anwen Crawford: “We lived in a part of Sydney that I think we intuitively sensed was analogous to the Welsh valleys: the part of Sydney with a long and severe stigma attached to it, the part of Sydney that the rest of Sydney regards as trash… I see the expression on people’s faces, to this day, if I tell them which part of Sydney I’m from: a quick mixture of surprise and distaste. People hated us, and we hated them for hating us, for presuming that we were idiots. We got the Manics, even though we were on the other side of the world.”
The music writer Steven Wells described the Manics as a speed band in an E age; for me they were also colour in an age of grey. Growing up where I did, I felt like I’d been defeated before I even began. There was, for most of us, no thought of getting out — due not to an absence of intelligence or imagination or talent or drive, but due to a lack of direction for any of it, and a lack of faith that any of it would get us anywhere. So you may imagine how it felt to discover a band, close-knit since childhood, defiantly dressing ridiculous, wrapped in fake fur and glaring at the world through thick black kohl, not so much taking refuge in the past as weaponizing it and making declarations like: “Our romance is based on where we come from and the desire to escape… Our romance is having total power because we know we have nothing to lose. We’re secure in the knowledge that we already lost a long time ago” (qtd in Forrest, “Cut”). The Manics made me aware that I — and they — had company and comrades both in history and the here and now, however out of step and out of time I felt. Other people had thought these things before, and felt this same discontent with what their world had to offer. They made me aware of a way out, a way of moving on, where otherwise I was offered only stasis and stagnation.
In 1994 I was more or less the only Manics fan I knew. Too young to be there from the start — and didn’t I know it — I’d read the lyrics to “From Despair to Where” in the unlikely setting of Smash Hits one damp spring afternoon, and the rest was history. To relieve my teenage boredom I now had, besides alcohol, the cultural resources that came with being a Manics fan: the discussions they inspired in fanzines and exchanges in the letters pages of the music press, their stacks of recommended reading and listening. The more I expanded my horizons through reading, the more dissatisfied I grew with the surroundings I was stuck in, and the more I listened to the music of the past the more frustrated I grew with its present pale imitations. I seemed to have chosen the worst possible band to become obsessed with, and the worst possible time to become obsessed with them. Not only was the first Manics album I’d bought the critically panned and over-slick Gold Against the Soul, but the drama and damage surrounding the band in the summer of 1994 seemed to suggest there was no guarantee they would even manage to drag themselves on after a third album that looked set to be their last.
Summer’s promise was epic, immense — six weeks of school holiday, when they began, they seemed like they wouldn’t, couldn’t end. But before too long, summer dragged. Summer was static. Summer held you in suspension. I spent the summer of 1994 being primed to hear The Holy Bible by the music press, who mediated and magnified the band’s internal crises. For me and others like me — small-town, provincial or suburban kids beyond the pale of London’s bright lights, gazing wide-eyed on stories of the gig-circuit — the weekly music press served as a channel of cultural discovery. Every Wednesday lunchtime saw me, lower lip bitten with anticipation, heading into town to snag the latest issues of Melody Maker and NME; our newsagent stocked all of three copies, and I never found out who, if anyone, bought the others. Back then the music press existed for a constituency that the mainstream didn’t cater for or even really recognize; in April 1994, I read the death of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain reported in a few column inches on page nine of the Daily Mirror, as though such news had little to interest anyone who might be reading. I had to wait for the NME front cover with its black and white picture of Cobain — that iconic eyelinered thousand-yard-stare — which treated the death as an image to stamp on the decade, a way of ascribing meaning to a meaningless time.
Kurt was becoming a secular saint, but, for me and for much of the music press, the overriding iconography of 1994 was that of Richey Edwards: hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked, his sharp words softly spoken, his skin scattered with scars, tattoos and cigarette burns, apparently attempting to purify his flesh through mortification like an early Christian martyr. The high drama of that summer — rumours of suicide, breakdown and breakup, hospitalization, potential collapse and implosion — saw the Manics play two festivals without their guitarist. In July it was announced that he was suffering from that time-honoured catch-all, “nervous exhaustion,” and would be taking a break from the band.
Shortly afterwards, in the run-up to the album’s release, the music press published its lyric sheet as a promotional doublepage spread. The spread was full of blanked-out words, black bars on white, making it look like a chessboard. I thought it might be some kind of fill-in-the-blank puzzle, some kind of tease. It took me some time to realize that what was blanked out was every instance of profanity in the lyrics. On the album, presumably, all this would be unhidden, uncensored, unapologetic. I couldn’t wait to hear it. Late in August, I returned to Woolworths and left this time in triumph, The Holy Bible clutched under my coat like a samizdat publication. The album dropped into the summer of 1994 and split it open with the force of a depth charge.
Phil Bird: “I can remember Faster coming out, it being dismissed on some ‘Jukebox jury’ type show on GLR – ‘they’re good – but you can’t really hear the words,’ I remember the video (probably from the ITV chart show) and Top of the Pops and just being blown away by it. I was only twelve and don’t think I really got it completely, but there was just something about the combination of music and slogans that drew me in. It wasn’t like everything else.”
History, of course, has a habit of not ending, and certainly hadn’t ended in the 90s. It’s curious how bored I felt, given how much was going on under the end-of-history radar. The early 90s saw riots in Los Angeles, the splintering of Yugoslavia, and, closer to home, the dismantling of the Labour Party’s reason for existing. As some things fell apart, other things were brought together: in August 1994, the IRA declared a unilateral ceasefire which would last until 1996. Two months before this, the summer of 1994 kicked off with a jamming of the BBC’s switchboard with over 25,000 outraged calls — still a record number — following the appearance on its chart showcase Top of the Pops of a man in a black balaclava, which many offended viewers interpreted as a showing of paramilitary solidarity. For me, the balaclava’s arguable menace was fatally undermined by the fact that someone had scrawled “JAMES” across it in white paint, as though his Mam had sought to guard against anyone else mistakenly picking it up from the school cloakroom.
James Dean Bradfield — for it is he — fronted a startling performance of the album’s lead single “Faster,” its outrageous impact apparently owing to the militant chic in which he chose to dress, but surely also something to do with the eruption into living rooms across the land of a song which goes on to paraphrase Goebbels, Hesse, and Orwell over Sean Moore’s implacable drums and a scree of speed-metal guitar. The whole spectacle — the scything solo, the military regalia, the final so damn easy to cave in / man kills everything spat out in brutal staccato — was exhilarating. I felt drunk on it. I knew I had chosen to waste my time in pretentious and preposterous obsession with exactly the right band. The Manics were due to reappear on a subsequent week, but after this performance they were, as Nicky Wire recalled with characteristic archness, “overlooked, shall we say.”
Mark Patience: “In the run up to the [2014] Holy Bible tour I would listen to the album on the bus both to and from work every day. I would sit with the lyrics displayed on my phone and really try to make sense of what I was listening to. I found that the album started to get under my skin and into my psyche in a way it hadn’t previously. I found [the lyrics] to be bleakly depressing in tone yet somehow that didn’t translate across to how I felt when I listened to the album.”
Although Mark Patience became a fan of The Holy Bible retrospectively, my engagement with the album twenty years earlier was very like what he describes. The Holy Bible was its own country, with a language you needed to learn in order to cross the border. The album taught me words I didn’t know, mostly in order to describe it adequately. I needed words like “scabrous” and “abrasive” to pin down its peculiar atmosphere, to express its tension and its claustrophobia, to do justice to Bradfield’s furniture-chewing Rottweiler growl. The music felt frantic, jagged, viciously melodic. Guitars prowled and skittered, lashing like the tail of a cornered animal or buzzing like a trapped cloud of flies. And the lyrics! Still a Burroughsian cut-up as on previous albums, still a plethora of namechecks, allusions, politics and history illuminating a world beyond my own — but somehow concentrated and distilled here, and individually focused rather than the scattergun sloganeering they had previously spread interchangeably over several songs.
The album was, at last, not static and not stuck. It was something fast, unstable and unstoppable. It was speed metal, metal and speed. At times its pace felt breakneck, like something unravelling — the headlong slalom of “Revol,” the skittering plunge of “P.C.P.” — but you didn’t want it to slow down. There was a thrill in hanging on for the ride, when so much of my teenage years had been spent chafing at the bit, awaiting the point at which I could pull away and see how fast this thing could go. I may have been moving only inside my head, clinging onto the music, but I was moving at a dazzling, desperate speed.
The definitive 90s troubadour Noel Gallagher, departing recession-struck Manchester via the time-honoured escape route of strapping on a guitar and playing some rock ‘n’ roll, wanted his band’s debut album to sound “like an aeroplane taking off.” Definitely Maybe, also released in 1994, has come to instantly define the decade, but its escapist trajectory was an optimistic and naïvely uplifting one. The Holy Bible, equally definitive, offered a different escape route — one whose end might be a brick wall or an unknowable void. Keeping this possibility in plain sight, I took the road out anyway.
At last, just as it seemed they never would, the 90s ended. What did it mean to leave the twentieth century? Despite the personal crisis represented by The Holy Bible, the band’s trajectory had taken them from despair to triumph via the critical and commercial success of “A Design for Life” and their consequent establishment as a respectable, credible outfit. Accepting awards for Best Band and Best Album at the 1997 Brits before performing “A Design for Life,” the band dedicated their win to “every comprehensive school in Britain which the government is trying to eradicate.”
In February 1997, rock guitarist manqué Tony Blair was still the Leader of the Opposition, though the election which would deliver his tamed New Labour a landslide victory was only months away. Although the decade was already more than half over, in many respects what we think of as the 90s had not even begun. The Manics’ critical and commercial victories — and, more significantly, their politicization of them — were a reminder of the band’s particular brand of working-class identity, rooted in a tradition of escapism and aspiration through education, which had long been absent from both politics and pop culture. In the last days of John Major’s frayed and decaying Conservative government, it was easy to hear this as the opening shot in a battle that would take back the country. The Manics’ own attitude, as expressed in “A Design for Life,” was one of typically few illusions, the white-hot irony of the chorus an epitaph for the scorned and neglected industrial working class from which the band had come. (“I don’t think we’re Old Labour,” mused Wire at a later date. “More Classic Labour.”) The Blairite 90s — only three years to Major’s seven — were enough to sweep away the grey in a flood of glorious, vacuous Technicolor, but Blair went on to prove the sceptics right.
Almost three years later, New Year’s Eve 1999 offered a multitude of ways to mark one’s leaving of the twentieth century. The country’s official Millennium celebrations were generally agreed to be a predictably embarrassing waste of money. In London on the windswept Greenwich peninsula, a white elephant of a Dome arose, its business-friendly contents marketed as an antidote to Britain’s “damaged culture, low self-esteem, shrinking pride and a diminishing position in the world” and — rather remarkably, after that litany — as a statement of “optimism for the future.” Initially a Conservative project, the Dome was meant to cater to a perceived popular need for “the sense of congregation, of coming together” (Weight 692). The fact that such a collectivist need could be identified by a Conservative Home Secretary demonstrated how glaringly apparent the damage done by 80s individualism was by the end of the 90s. That longing for congregation and coming together had in fact been manifested throughout the decade in the struggles to maintain the free party scene, the rave and techno gatherings in contravention of the Criminal Justice Bill, the crowds at Oasis’ mass gig at Knebworth, and the public hysteria over the death of the Princess of Wales. Ultimately though, these were popular and semi-spontaneous, largely autonomous gatherings; they could not be imposed and directed from above. We might have wanted to get loaded and have a good time, on Millennium Eve as on any other occasion, but we objected strongly to being told to do so.
The corporate cynicism and political incompetence that characterized the Millennium Dome generated apathy, mockery and hostility rather than an optimistic coming together. The kind of congregation we appeared to be seeking was more happily fulfilled, on the same night, by the Manics’ sold-out and celebratory gig in Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium. For me, the night proceeded as the best nights do: drinking in successively degenerating venues (City Arms, Yates’ Wine Lodge, Wetherspoons, and eventually the doorway of McDonalds at dawn), reaching the stadium by following the trails of shed glitter and moulted pink boa feathers that covered the streets. Scrubbed-up and sanitized, millennial Cardiff already felt a world away from how it had in the early 90s, in a nation that, after devolution, seemed very far away from being “British.” Cardiff’s newfound confidence and cool did not necessarily extend to the rest of Wales, especially the still-deprived Valleys, but things felt steadier and more sorted in comparison to an England which felt increasingly confused and resentful, uncertain of its status in a way that the branding-exercise of Cool Britannia had done nothing to resolve. The Millennium Stadium was full to capacity and the gig had much in common with the rugby matches it normally hosted — except, perhaps, that while victory for the Welsh rugby team is exceptional and rarely expected, for the Manics triumph seemed assured. The gig was both communion and homecoming.
By the turn of the millennium, I had made my getaway. I was in London, at university, immersed in activism, study and the city. I no longer defined myself by my status as a Manics fan, due to their changes and my own, to divergent interests, to other bands, to a run of mediocre albums that said little to me about my life. We had drifted apart like embarrassed exes after an intense teenage fling, but returning for this gig was automatic, an irresistible reunion. I found myself happy to coast for an evening rather than restlessly waiting to speed away.
Berry Jordan: “Between 1996 and 1998 I listened daily/weekly and photocopied lyrics, cut them out or drew them out and plastered them on my wall. It’s funny if you ask if I listen regularly, no I don’t, occasional tracks by chance – they just cast me back to a time of smoking, or talking about politics and the situation a lot, of raging against the machine a bit. From that period there are albums (most actually) that I would never listen to again but I would happily listen to The Holy Bible because it stands up like a monument. It’s so strong, even if its ideas and ideals would date it now, it was still incredible at the time. Shocking, political, harsh and that was what was brilliant and refreshing about it.”
Jeremy Deller: “[The Manics’ fanbase] was exactly as I expected, which is a community in itself. But now with the internet it’s much easier to really feel part of something. Before it was fanzines, letters, maybe phone calls, but now of course it’s something else. So maybe it’s about something that has disappeared.”
(qtd in Pyzik “Orgreave”)
Manic Street Preachers were my first experience of fandom, although I wouldn’t have called it “fandom” at the time. The 90s are a decade with little online record, and it can be difficult to reconstruct the texture of 90s fandom, particularly compared to the level of activity now possible among contemporary fans. For me at least, fandom was based around the weekly music press, fanzines, sleeve art, gigs — physical and tangible things, rather than virtual and more or less instant communication. Today bedrooms, via laptops, can contain the entire world, but in 1994 my bedroom was small, stifling and static. Then as now, being fans of a band inspired individuals to create and communicate, overcoming atomization, isolation and alienation — but everything happened in slow-motion. The time between tours could stretch to years, and the weeks or months between dispatching small change and a self-addressed envelope to some obscure provincial address and getting back a fanzine or a bootleg recording, or the point after sending in a letter to the music press, awaiting its possible publication, could hold you in unbearable suspense.
The fandom when I knew it was also based around running off and sleeping in bus stations to follow tours, spending whole days or even weeks in ritual preparation for gigs: spray-painting and stencilling charity-shop shirts, planning cross-country journeys while plastering on eyeliner, whiling away the queuing time drinking own-brand vodka from the bottle. Taping the occasional gems of the Top Forty onto blank cassette, capturing Top of the Pops performances for posterity on shaky VHS. Communiqués and bedroom manifestos. The music press, too, was a forum for debate and disagreement and for finding comradeship, whether with the bands featured, the writers of letters or the journalists themselves. You kept up with your friends and idols in staggered dispatches, through words in smudgy ink and pictures on glossy pages.
Of course, this was how the band communicated too: sending off their demo tapes to London like distress flares, plastering their record sleeves and themselves with politics and philosophy condensed to four-letter words. Many fans peppered our own communication — fanzines, letters, mixtapes, the envelopes they were sent in — with slogans and snatches of lyrics, as a ready-made argot and frame of reference. At school, I gradually identified other fans of the band, and they identified me, by the lyrical fragments written on school folders or on the sleeves of khaki jackets like a clandestine code. We all knew what we meant. Lyrics can be signs, signals and shibboleths, sometimes bridge and sometimes barricade. Throughout my part of this book, I have taken chapter headings and subtitles from The Holy Bible and from songs outside it, hopefully showing that Manics’ lyrics, like a cut-up collage, can cross-reference and interrelate and, when juxtaposed, illuminate each other.
Emily Jones: “The Manics have arguably had a bigger influence over me in terms of culture, politics, personal appearance, etc. than anything else and I would go as far as to include my comprehensive school education in that. They encouraged me to educate myself outside of the curriculum by researching the people, events, books, films, etc. mentioned in their lyrics and interviews, and by researching the quotes they used in setlists and album booklets. They also helped me, inadvertently of course, to decide what I want to do with my life and I found inspiration (for want of a better word) in their music and interview material to pursue it.”
My part of this book looks at the album in its personal and political context, in an attempt to understand why it was so important both to me and to everyone else who was moved to contribute. I write about the experience of hearing the album, rather than the experience of producing it; my perspective is that of the listener and the fan more than the musician. The album’s songs are discussed individually and in the context of the album, grouped vaguely by theme rather than in tracklist order. They are also discussed in the context of the world surrounding the album and the conditions in which it was produced. I will be drawing on my own background — that of a small-town teenage girl to whom music was everything — and on the associations and connections that made sense to me against that background. I am grateful for the contributions of other fans, some quoted here and some not, some of whose experiences resonate with me and some of which don’t. All these contributions have shown me that The Holy Bible attracted, entertained and inspired in contexts outside Britain and beyond the 1990s, and that it will continue to do so.