Manic Street Preachers weren’t the first, and won’t be the last rock band for whom literature and books are of fundamental importance. They came at a point in which popular music had fallen out of love with literature again. “Richey’s time as a prolific artist,” writes Stuart Bailie in his 2002 Mojo cover story, “was book-ended by Shaun Ryder singing, ‘I don’t read, I just guess’ and Liam Gallagher admitting that he’d only ever read one book, The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe. In contrast, Richey and Nicky used their library tickets with intent” (78). Manic Street Preachers were from the start a fiercely bookish band, peppering their lyrics and album artwork with snippets from the big guns: Friedrich Nietzsche, Primo Levi, Albert Camus, George Orwell. The Holy Bible is their most literary work: an album named after the most influential book of the last two thousand years of Western history. It is arguably the case that never before and never since has a rock album so brilliantly put into practice T.S. Eliot’s famous line at the end of The Waste Land (1922): “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Not just a concept album, but also a book of books, The Holy Bible functions as a work which demands to be read as well as listened to. “It’s not enough just to listen; you also have to read,” says Mick Middles, in his 1999 book Manic Street Preachers (129).
The early 90s had their fair share of rock albums envisioned as altars to pain, and I consumed them avidly: Nirvana’s In Utero (1993), Tool’s Undertow (1993), Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral (1994), Therapy?’s Troublegum (1994), Korn’s self-titled (1994). The crucial difference between The Holy Bible and its (mostly American) counterparts is that many of those albums’ musical odes to pain, depression and misery were often expressed through a wide-reaching and generalized sense of numbness and confusion at the world — Kurt Cobain has a political conscience, but frequently seems to genuinely not know what the fuck is going on. The Manics took a different route, dissecting the misery of modern life with the discipline and rigour of an academic dissertation. The Holy Bible politicizes pain, making it blossom into forms of self-awareness through a meticulous work of contextualization, carefully stitching together its genealogies not merely from the interior world of the self, but from the words of other witnesses: the insight, misery and catharsis of other writers, artists and thinkers.
Literary rock and pop are nothing new. Led Zeppelin put Tolkien to music, Kate Bush adapted Wuthering Heights, and Joy Division turned J.G. Ballard’s voice into gloomy, stilted anthems. The Holy Bible takes its own literariness to a different order. The Manics had employed literary cut outs since their inception as witty sloganeering glam-punks (I wasn’t there to see it in real time), but on The Holy Bible they structured an album around twentieth-century literature in a newly comprehensive way. According to Nicky Wire, Richey was reading “five books a week” at the time of its creation: in its artwork, its samples and its lyrics, the album gives us snippets, suggestions, acting as seminar in album form.
Jeremy Deller’s The Uses of Literacy, first an exhibition (1997) then a book (1999), gathers Manic Street Preachers fan art and contributions, and illustrates the extent to which fans of the band constitute a community of people who share a cultural framework, which is defined in part by a particular set of texts. The item “Books that have been acknowledged by the Manic Street Preachers as being influential, subsequently collected and read by Donna Marshall” (which includes Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems, William Wharton’s Birdy, Henry Miller’s Black Spring, and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man), comprises a particular canon of twentieth-century literature across fiction, philosophy, drama and agitprop. That Deller’s project references Richard Hoggart’s 1957 book of the same name — a founding work on cultural studies, working class youth and mass culture — underscores the proliferating nature of the intertextual uses that the Manics’ works lend themselves to, offering themselves as a bibliography or library of suggested readings.
Brought to life through an interview sample on the song “Mausoleum,” J.G. Ballard had with The Atrocity Exhibition explored literature as manifesto: unequal parts shock tactics, para-academic objectivity and black humour. Following Ballard’s lead, The Holy Bible presents itself as unconventional bibliography for the twentieth century, summarizing and passing judgment on it in the form of a document which groups together key twentieth-century texts linked not by logic or the rigid categories of genre, but according to a sensibility or worldview defined by sensitivity to historical and personal atrocity and disaster. The album is an atrocity exhibition, a collage of jarring and disjointed fragments that collude to produce a picture of ultimate pain and despair. The signs it posts throughout perform an act of political collage, and assemble an armour of charms against evil. Visually, between its covers, images of religious icons, tombstone angels, totalitarian aesthetics and childhood innocence accompany and illustrate the lyrics like postmodern versions of medieval manuscript illuminations. The Holy Bible belongs to the genre of the anti- or para-bible. A desacralized book of songs; book of books. Though it doesn’t mention it by name, one book it resembles is Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1308–21), also the story of a young man who has lost his way in life. Into its own judgmental Inferno it casts dictators and serial killers alike, in an indictment of our worship of strength, violence and domination.
Its contribution as a work of literary criticism lies in its textual juxtapositions, sculpting between decadent literature and social critique the idea of truth as a kind of cruelty. Bookended by a quote from Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden (“You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation…”) the album channels Foucault’s explorations of how the modern world leads us to experience our enslavements as pleasures. The Holy Bible’s cruelty is desacratory, desacralizing, a tearing down of the sacred cows of democracy, capitalism and individualism performed through a militant dysphoria: a calculated rejection of contemporary modernity from a place of a political, aesthetic and personal total dejection, forging an ideological purity that cannot but collapse in on its rotten self. Gazing sadly on the burning scrap-heap of twentieth-century history, The Holy Bible forges a bond through an aesthetic performance of pain between band and fan, embodied in the humanized trinity of the cover art: Jenny Saville’s obese woman contemplating herself, and looking out at the world.
Musically, The Holy Bible saw the Manics step up and finally become a great band. Sharply canning the polished glam rock gloss of Gold Against the Soul, their third album brought the quartet home. Sonically as well as conceptually, the Manics looked to classic British punk and post-punk: The Clash, Wire, Magazine, Gang of Four, the metallic din of Killing Joke, the gaunt and stripped-down alienations of Joy Division, PiL’s dubby explorations, the industrial smear of Throbbing Gristle, who had also flirted with paramilitary aesthetics in their war on civilization. The product of a regime of hardship and discipline, its sonic framework was tight and coiled, grimy and thrillingly raw.
The alignment of its form and content, the apparent seamlessness of its influences, musical and literary, into a vision coherent through its own fragmentation, are what enables it to be such a compelling teacher of literature. Its impassioned, often euphoric performance is an act of interpretation which brings twentiethcentury literature to life in new ways, for new ears and eyes. It sent my teenage self off on all kinds of investigations, effectively allowing me to discover for myself the voices I came to need. I have come to see the textual community of like-minded souls that The Holy Bible sets up as a necessary antidote to the dangers of depressive solitude and isolationism.
The section that follows is an attempt to re-visit some of those investigations, purposefully reading too much into The Holy Bible. It is also something of a thought experiment: an attempt at reading the album as if it were a book. If The Holy Bible were a book, what kind of book would it be? Perhaps a novel, an experimental novel, in which a tortured young man loses his way, inhabits a variety of characters and voices, tries to find his way again through books, scraps of texts, that tell him of great horrors taken place. He orders them sadly, and looks upon this ruin. A warm, nauseous breeze begins to blow the fragments away; a storm is coming but he can hold on, just a bit longer, just enough time to sketch out a plan, to make of them a meaningful and beautiful message. A set of instructions, a mad idea perhaps, but worth a try. A device, a tool for historical, political, aesthetic and self-knowledge. Even, dare I say it, a moral compass in a mad world.