Even today there are probably still some people who wish Richey Edwards the best. That he is, as some fans had hoped, living a simple, pastoral life, probably managing a bookstore that gets maybe three customers a week but somehow sustains itself. He may live under a new name, with a healthier body mass index, his intelligence that inhaled books like air liberated from the strictures of the career he escaped. The legal declaration of his death in 2008 is a mere technicality, a courtesy to the people he left in limbo when he disappeared 13 years earlier. Either way, those well-wishes would go unheard.
When Edwards skipped out on US press tour obligations for his band Manic Street Preachers on February 1, 1995 to never be seen again, it may have seemed of a piece with his reputation of the time. It came in the wake of battles with anorexia and depression, numerous concert absences, and one notorious final performance when Edwards smashed his guitar and damaged venue property in the middle of their early anti-anthem “You Love Us.” This is to say nothing of his already provocative persona. The man who once carved “4 REAL” into his forearm, who was the focal part of a band known for declaring that they “hate Slowdive more than Hitler,” was, as we may say today, committing to the bit. That bit went on for two more weeks, where Edwards was spotted, supposedly, in various parts of his native Wales before his abandoned car was discovered back over the border in South Gloucestershire, near a bridge known for its suicides.
After the martyrdom arc and the redemption arc, rock critics and historians have a fondness for what may be called the “purge-and-pivot” arc. A band loses, by whatever means, a member who takes with them a significant chunk of their creative identity. Rather than break up, the surviving members adjust accordingly and continue, often to greater success. There are a few notable examples: Syd Barrett’s and Peter Green’s acid-hangover departures from Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac respectively, Ian Curtis’s suicide that turned Joy Division into New Order, the splitting off of Erasure from Depeche Mode, Metallica was twice hit by firing Dave Mustaine and the death of Cliff Burton.1 Add to this the Manics, who regrouped as a power trio and found, at least in Britain, the chart success that had eluded them through much of the ‘90s. The legacy of Richey Edwards, in that light, was a grim coda to a dark and confused period.
The Manics seemed, on the surface, like the runts of ‘90s rock, and of ‘90s British rock in particular. Everything they did put them at odds with their contemporaries. Unlike Blur, Oasis, Elastica, and Pulp, the Manics eschewed the inward-turn into a sort of national, or at least anti-American, sound, embracing instead very American elements of hard rock and grunge. Yet neither did they, like Bush, totally kowtow to American sensibilities that parroted our angsty dirges, preferring instead a lyrical and conceptual vision that combined socialist agitprop with high literature and artistic transgression.2 It was a formula bound to repel. It is better to say that they were Brit pop’s and bubble grunge’s miscreants. If Blur and Pulp where the angry young men, the Manics were the situationists, making praxis out of theory, putting the art back into pop, making a spectacle of society, and making good copy for the press.
Much of that identity was forged by Edwards and bassist Nicky Wire. Edwards was a rudimentary musician, but like Wire he was the shaper of the band’s philosophy and aesthetic, in addition to being a gifted lyricist. If Wire brought the Fabian polemics, Edwards brought the erudition and the poetry. Wire and Edwards wrote lyrics in advance to be arranged later by chief songwriter and vocalist James Dean Bradfield. If the elements seemed disparate to most listeners, it also exemplified a purely democratic creative dynamic. The band’s tongue-in-cheek flaunting of glam excess was offset by a process that made centralization and cults of personality practically impossible. The Manics were a unit or they were nothing. This changed in 1994 with The Holy Bible.
In terms of method, The Holy Bible is not much different from its predecessors Generation Terrorists and Gold Against the Soul: a pastiche of influences. But the similarities end there. The album trades in Guns n’ Roses and Alice in Chains for Wire, Public Image Limited, Magazine, and other British post-punk. The resulting sound is spikier, colder, more rigorous; the production less polished, more constrictive, and less volume-heavy. If the first two albums were invigorated by existential and romantic posturing, their third album was stiffened, sonically, by anxious restlessness, countered by a despairing but not decadent lyrical vision. It is the most coherent record of their early career, and one they would never successfully repeat for an important factor.
Even without subsequent events influencing it, The Holy Bible stands as Edwards’s record. Not simply because he contributed more than half of the lyrics for it, but that he provided the most unified thematic thruway from song to song. Individually, songs run the gamut of the commercialization of the body and of sex (“Yes”), the disillusionment with revolution (“Revol”), murder obsession and the justness of the death penalty (“Archives of Pain”), domination by the state (“Of Walking Abortion” and “PCP”), eating disorders (“4st. 7lb.”), bitter nostalgia (“Die in the Summertime), the Holocaust (“The Intense Humming of Evil”), and the chaos of modern life writ large (“Faster”).
The album’s opener “Yes” best encapsulates the themes and the tonal shift. It begins with uncharacteristically subdued, almost background-noise, chords, as if they’re coming our of a radio, over which two voices give their accounts of sexual commodification. One voice is the seller: “He’s a boy, you want a girl so tear off his cock/Tie his hair in bunches, fuck him, call him Rita if you want.” The second is the sold: “The only certain thing that is left about me/There’s no part of my body that has not been used.”
Whereas in earlier albums, Edwards and Wire had favored chanted, almost sloganeering lyrics, The Holy Bible is comprised of narrative set pieces, verbal tableaux in their own atrocity exhibition. They deploy a variety of devices. There’s the Jacobean jeremiad of “Archives of Pain” (“A drained white body hanging from the gallows/Is more righteous than Hindley’s crochet lectures”), the confessional monologue of “4st. 7lb.” (“Mother tries to choke me with roast beef/And sits savouring her sole Ryvita”), the lament of “Die in the Summertime” (“My heart shrinks to barely a pulse/A tiny animal curled into a quarter circle”), the satiric invective of “Revol” (“Brezhnev, married into group sex/Gorbachev, celibate self importance/Yeltsin, failure is his own impotence), and the stream-of-consciousness howl of the album’s linchpin “Faster”:
The first time you see yourself naked you cry, Soft skin now acne, Foul breath so broken, He loves me truly this mute solitude I'm draining, I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing
The songs are of such verbose erudition and vivid description that Bradfield seemed at times to struggle to do justice to the message within the constraints of pop song meter. Indeed, few rock albums have been more in need of footnotes; references range from Miklós Horthy to Vladimir Zhirinovsky to Myra Hindley to the Brady Act. Boris Yeltsin is mentioned at least twice. One telling reference is Tipper Gore whose PMRC, by virtue of the Manics’ commercial nonexistence in the United States, let slip by lyrics of an intensity that few “shock rockers” could equal. Perhaps because shock was not the operative effect. Shock requires a degree of emotional detachment that the Manics were unwilling to entertain. Whether lines were sung in anger, like “If man makes death then death makes man/Tear the torso with horses and chains” or in unflinching candor, like “My vision's getting blurred but I can see my ribs and I feel fine/My hands are trembling stalks and I can feel my breasts are sinking” they were sincere and not designed for the perverse revelry of the most feral Cannibal Corpse or Marilyn Manson fan.
Taken as a collection of songs, The Holy Bible has earned a reputation as one of the darkest albums ever made. (Indeed, when making that very ranking, NME put it at number one, possibly the only distinction of that kind it has ever garnered.) But taken entire, as a work, The Holy Bible is a dystopian document, released three years prior to Radiohead’s own, and far more unrelenting.
OK Computer trades on a kind of middle-class discontent: of overmedicating, over-consuming, cynical McJobbers who blandly support an independent Tibet, appreciate the Chapman brothers, and hold their noses while they vote in Tony Blair. It is an Oxfordian slant on how the personal is, like, political and stuff. The Manics, quite unlike the Brit-poppers, were not as reconciled to (or in the case of Noel Gallagher, enchanted by) New Labour. The coal region of southern Wales, from which the band originated, was effectively excluded from the Blairite future. Exclusion—or for that matter progress without consent—offers clarity where simple angst allows only opacity. In The Holy Bible, the political and the personal were irrelevant compared to the post-Cold War modernity that was melting the political and the personal into entirely unrecognizable, ultimately horrifying forms.
Mired as it was in the particulars or its time and place, the broader vision of The Holy Bible is closer in spirit to the 21st century. The album’s world is enflamed by information overload and by the the disintegration of a coherently polar politics. Though the Manics came to regret the “right-wing” tone of “Archives of Pain,” it anticipates both the morbid voyeurisms of 21st-century consumers and the conservative-coded morality that is emergent amid the atrophy of liberal consensus, of which the band were clearly cognizant even amid its apparent triumph:
Words discoloured, bow to the bland Heal yourself with sinner's salt Doctors arrested for euthanasia Kill smokers through blind vanity If you're fat don't get ill Europe's gravestone carved in plastic
The Holy Bible did not suffer unduly at the hands of critics. In fact, the album may have cursed the Manics for a time as a “critic’s band.” The distinction would not have been unfair. The album was too cerebral for a wider youth market and too prurient for a mature one. They were at once too severe and too trivial; overly serious yet not serious enough. Such a paradoxical fate tends to fall on social rejects and cultural isolates. It is probably not a new condescension for a band from Wales. But such condescension only loses its force when the rest of the world sinks so low as to take on Welsh contours and adopt a psychologically Welsh frame of mind.
For all of its stylistic mordancy and narrative versatility, The Holy Bible delivers a straightforward message. Stability is an illusion; that illusion fosters complacency. Once acceleration can no longer be ignored it is impossible to control. Attempts to control it will be the source of misery and moral collapse. Everything will, in fact, be for sale. The album proposed a steep downward, and very messy, trajectory.
Having no concept whatever of the emergent internet, the Manics nonetheless pre-empted the cultural and emotional anarchy that dominates it today. They were the first intellectual collage artists, the first shitposters, and the first doomers. Had digital culture been as advanced and as prevalent in 1994 as it is now, there would be nothing stopping them. Yet they will have to settle, as Ted Kaczynski has had to (and then some), with the dubious status of prophets.
Not that any welcome is guaranteed, for even with all that groundwork they laid, the Manics are still more than digital culture deserves. It is a culture that is in the truest sense both too serious and not serious at all; it is at turns terminally ironic and suffocatingly self-righteous. It celebrates the horrific forms wrought by the churn of modernization—or at least is able to post through them.
I don’t accept that the intent of The Holy Bible was to engage in a black mass of oblivion, or simply to subvert, in the spirit (but not the letter) of Wilde, basic moral precepts for the fun of it. Acknowledging a turn toward nihilism, and rendering it vividly, does not at the same time presume resignation to it, let alone admiration for it. In fact it indicates the opposite. The Manic Street Preachers of The Holy Bible believed in nihilism, which is distinct from believing in nothing. They were true believers. “Sometimes,” Keith Cameron wrote for the 10th anniversary of the album, “it seemed that the one thing that held their records together was a colossal reserve of sincerity.”
Beneath the provocation, beneath the slogans, beneath the play of signs and signifiers, beneath the balaclavas and whatever else, and at their very core is a grasp of meaning that is otherwise difficult to get hold of today. Meaning as to both definition and intention. They knew what they were and where their songs came from: not a sparsely furnished luxury flat planted over a bulldozed council estate.
And they meant what they said, for good or ill. So did Edwards. That is the absolute most you can say. When he committed self-harm for the press to prove that he meant it, he meant it. When he smashed his guitar and left everything behind, he meant that too. But when he wrote “Too weak to fuss, too weak to die/Choice is skeletal in everybody's life,” only those without care could think that it meant nothing and came from nowhere.
There are also examples where this didn’t work, such as when Ozzy Osbourne’s fall from Black Sabbath did not necessarily propel the rise of Dio. And every history has its alternate historian. Paul Morley speculated that had Ian Curtis lived, Joy Division would progress into an abrasive sound closer to Throbbing Gristle. This would be news to Curtis’s bandmates who look on U2 with not a little white hot envy.
The Manics wanted, among other possibilities, Andres Serrano’s Immersion (Piss Christ) on the cover of their debut album Generation Terrorists as opposed to the generic image of Edward’s tattooed arm and crucifix-bearing chest.