My first encounter with Manic Street Preachers I hated them — before even hearing a note of their music. I saw a photo of them — the press shot used for The Holy Bible — it must have been in the NME or Melody Maker, in summer of 1994, while I was in the UK for the holidays. I blacked out their faces with marker. They were pretty boys with cheekbones: they looked arrogant. I hated a lot of British bands with pretty boys in them in those days: Blur, Placebo, Suede. I had liked Take That briefly, earlier on, but something had changed. Thin, good-looking guys: how could they speak for me? I was fat, felt ugly, hated myself, not just my looks but my social inability, my abject failure with girls, my difference: I felt I was different from everybody else.
When I was a teenager I discovered my voice through Nirvana: I came into being through the pain of Nirvana’s songs. I was full of self-hatred at the time: not just an almost constant feeling of misery, but this sense of being a miserable old soul that came through so well in the music of Nirvana. I knew that Kurt Cobain understood what I was going through, I was not alone. When I heard he was dead and had killed himself it was like a punch in the gut. I blacked out pages in my diary in mourning, and after a while, went in search of more music like Nirvana. I was on the hunt for it, and that’s what I did in the summer of 1994. Cobain’s death had created a void I needed to fill with more music. I was discovering rock, pop and rap, but that stuff, the music of pain, held a special place for me: Stone Temple Pilots, Tool, Alice in Chains, Nine Inch Nails, Melvins. The darker the better: it needed to be music that was dark and was about suffering, made by miserable men singing about their misery and sadness and confusion and pain. It was one of the few things that provided some respite.
So it was autumn or end of summer of 1994 when, back in Italy where I was growing up, I saw the “Faster” video on Videomusic, and fell mesmerized by it almost immediately. Wow. That song, that video, understood those feelings within me. I watched the video and I was reading the words, the key words of the text, the fragments of lyrics printed up on there. So strange to hear such words in a pop song: “acne” for example. Soft skin now acne. Yes, I had acne: as many teenagers do. I was conscious about it, I had spots on my nose; kids in my class mocked me, called me a witch. But this song, this band, knew about acne, and were singing about it, in the context of a body lived as a horrific thing. A burden of everyday misery, felt deeply, overwhelmingly at the level of the body. They may have been beautiful pretty boys, but they knew about the horror of life, and so their beauty was not so much forgiven, but irrelevant. Their beauty had been ugly to me, offensive, but they knew about it, so of course they were friends now.
Who were these guys? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they knew about it. “Faster” interpreted and gave voice to — gave words to and put into words — these searing emotions that I had been carrying around with me. It spoke to me in that special way where I was being interpellated, called upon, directly addressed by a kindred spirit who knew. The loneliness, the pain, the misery, the yearning, the agony. When you are an angsty miserable teenager living in a world of pain, these are the moments you live for, the ones that make a difference.
So I fell in love with “Faster” and The Holy Bible with a devouring passion. It became my nightly bible, to listen to and pore over in bed before going to sleep. I had found what I had been looking for. And it was something more than the lazy apathetic languor of Beck’s “Loser”: this was urgent, this was awake, this was fury and anger and clear-sightedness, and determination — to do serious damage, against the self and everything; to enjoy that damage, and the brutality and destruction of truth. The lyrics, and their delivery, merciless in their bludgeoning of the self and everything else, which are the same thing when you’re in that teenage monad world. There is nothing but my pain. To me “Faster” made perfect sense. I was waiting for it and it spoke to me when I needed someone speaking to me in that way.
Mensa, Miller, Mailer, Plath, Pinter. I had no idea who they were talking about. I mean I had heard of some of them, but what were they doing here? I needed to find out. Actually, some years before, I had been to a garden party where Harold Pinter had read out a poem about his cock. I remember my mother disliking Plath for some reason, which surely made her work all the more appealing to me. The Bell Jar managed to worm its way into my life, and what a shocking, revelatory experience it was for me. How cruel and brutally exquisite it was to suffocate in silence alongside Sylvia Plath in the reading of that book. I remember riding into school in February, the day after finishing it, still reeling from the iron-gloved blow it had dealt, in awe that there was someone out there who understood. And then, killed herself, in February. Years later, I’d stay at the house of a friend of my dad’s, in Chalk Farm, in the winter, right near where she died, and frequently cross the bridge where Ted Hughes once encountered a man with a baby fox under his coat. I heard what sounded like cats killing each other outside in the gloom there one night.
Around the same time that I discovered The Holy Bible I was also getting into literature, moving beyond the children’s books on my bookshelf — like Leon Garfield’s Devil-in-the-Fog, which I read in June 1994 — toward edgier stuff, like Ira Levin: I pulled an all-nighter reading Rosemary’s Baby. Rock music helped to open up adult literature for me, the literature of disgust and sex and transgression: I recall a review of AmRep band Cows’ Orphan’s Tragedy album that compared the band’s sick and twisted sense of humour to that of Hubert Selby Jr. I remember reading about the “cruelty” of Ian McEwan, and picking up Black Dogs and The Innocent, and being hooked. Baudelaire, Bukowski, Burroughs all followed. I was attracted to literature opening up forbidden scenarios, and with The Holy Bible I was starting to realize that the sick truths contained in my rock music songs were also there for the taking in literature too. The Holy Bible was my awakening, in many ways, my education. It set the ball rolling: it was a gateway drug.
Literature can be big and scary and boring and towering and intimidating, but in the context of a shouty rock song like “Faster” the Plaths and the Pinters are brought down to size, and I’m so grateful someone did that for me, made literature cool to me in that way. I would have got there anyway perhaps, but The Holy Bible certainly helped, setting a precedent by which literary recommendations from rock stars would then carry much weight for me: Tool’s Maynard James Keenan recommending Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory back in 1998, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor recommending Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in 2006. What The Holy Bible did is collapse the artificial distinction between literature and rock, high and low culture, serious business and mindless rubbish. The Holy Bible showed me I could love both, and that literature could be as cool as rock. That rock could puncture a hole in the literary fabric and catapult me into that world, and that I needed literature as much as I needed rock.
In the section that follows I’m going to try, and surely fail, to do two things. The first is to explain what The Holy Bible meant for me, and why it was so important. This is doomed to failure: twenty odd years have gone by, and it’s not easy to remember exactly what I was feeling as a miserable, angsty teenager, and what The Holy Bible did for me, no matter how many times I listen to “Faster” or re-read my old diaries. Secondly, I will attempt to read and discuss the books that are referenced by and were an influence on The Holy Bible, reading them through the album and in turn the album through them. Some I haven’t picked up in twenty years, others I’ve re-read over the years, some are new to me. How did these books and writers influence The Holy Bible? How does The Holy Bible treat its literary sources, how does it select them and how does it read them selectively? How does it recommend and disseminate, cite and construct itself as a patchwork assembly of literary references? How does it use literature as a way of staving off horrors personal and historical? Why does it choose certain literary texts to make certain points? Why does it hang its observations on literary precedents at all?
At some point during the process I realized with dismay that I had set myself an impossible task. For each book I read, countless others opened up. Eight months in and I’m still swamped by books I haven’t read: twenty years in and I still haven’t read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead — some books invite you in, others turn you away. The books pile up around me: I can’t wait to sweep them back to their shelves and libraries, put them out of sight again. It’s not just a matter of quantity: it’s also the content. Books related to The Holy Bible are a gloomy bunch, and reading this type of material over a matter of months takes its toll. Reading about Richey’s disappearance, about rock musicians and writers and suicide; reading about Sylvia Plath and Primo Levi’s last days; reading about the Holocaust for weeks on end. It was February, I was cold and miserable, and I had to put it all aside for a while, for my own sake.
What follows then is a chronicle of what I read. It’s neither impartial nor exhaustive. I’ve gotten distracted, gone off on tangents, seduced into thinking not just about books, but also about films and other records to compare with The Holy Bible. As I read and read with The Holy Bible and Richey’s story in my mind as central organizer of all these texts, I felt two movements occur. The first is a depressive deepening of some the album’s themes, a pulling inwards and downwards, a morbid extension of the album’s malignant spirit back onto the texts that had inspired it: they were innocent before; now, read back through The Holy Bible, they seem corrupted, their inner corruption drawn out. The second has been an outward movement, a sense of fragmentation and multiplicity, an opening up to so many other texts, so many avenues to disappear down: I watched Pinter films repeatedly, obsessively; I put myself through Mike Leigh’s Naked. I listened to Joy Division and New Order and Throbbing Gristle with new ears. I fell back down into a hole that was my 90s self, and found the experience awkward and discomforting — I wanted to get out and be free to read other things again. I felt I could keep going and never stop, but the path was tightening, my readings constrained and limited by The Holy Bible’s narrow remit.
As I disentangled songs and lyrics, a sense of fragmentation set in, a feeling that The Holy Bible gathers these fragments against its ruin, pulls together disparate (and desperate) texts; it struggles to make sense or a totality of these fragments of texts, it knows it can’t, not really, it’s all too overwhelming, the horror, the pain, the misery, the despair. That’s part of its appeal, surely: this unresolved struggle, this gathering everything together, the Important Books of the Twentieth Century, but the centre cannot hold. The album’s formal structure, its framework, organizes everything admirably, but cannot quite contain itself, cannot stuff into its tight suitcase all the screams of the twentieth century. The Holy Bible struggles, and convulses, and squirms and explodes, and it cannot, it just cannot keep the lid on its flood of voices, its overflow of pain-driven energy, no matter how much it tries to affix that flood with fragments like shards. The holy unity of the book and all books has been shattered, and what’s left are sharp pieces you can see yourself reflected in or cut yourself on. The Holy Bible cuts up literature to cut up the world and you. It steadies itself on these shards of literature, balanced between being overwhelmed by the weight of their indictments and falling into its accelerating overflow of words. On some level it might be a cautionary tale of the overly literary life, the life lived too bookishly and by the books. The life taken too literally, too by the letter.
The Holy Bible shines through its fragments. “The whole is the untrue,” writes Theodor Adorno, “The fragment is that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality” (45). Modern art displays a “compulsion toward disintegration […] in the surplus of organization and regimen.” In this spirit of fragmentation, my section that follows is a collection of fragments, linked by the act of reading with The Holy Bible, itself a collection of literary fragments shored against its and our ruin, a little library for dark times.