Stronger Than Mensa- 25 Years of The Manic Street Preachers’ ‘The Holy Bible’

I was breathless and eighteen, twenty-two years ago, when I first heard the Holy Bible by the Manic Street Preachers. I was three years late to the party that would become the single most significant artistic influence on my life. Hearing the searing chorus of Faster for the first, with the lines “I am, stronger than Mensa, Miller, and Mailer I spat out Plath and Pinter” was like a bullet that highlighted the fact that EVERYTHING I’d ever listened to before was mediocre at best.

I first heard the Manics several years earlier. Coincidentally, I was in a car park of a motorway service station somewhere near the spot where Richey Edwards would be last seen a few years later. The radio was on. The song was ‘Suicide Is Painless,’ and I was too young to appreciate it fully. I was wrapped up in 2unlimited, or some other dance crap that passed as being cool at the time. It would take a detour through Grunge to come around to the Manics. 

And then Richey was gone. Being Welsh too, I could not escape this fact. News articles were playing excerpts of ‘Faster,’ and I wondered why I had never gotten into this band. They looked and sounded amazing. I was full Grunge by then. I was worshipping with the Cult of Kurt daily, and using all of my teen spirit, praying for a Leonard Cohen afterworld. Here was the Manics, though, another band that I had failed to get into. And now, just like with Kurt, I had to wait for their creative force to be dead before I could go off and enjoy their now-closed catalogue of music. But they were Welsh. Too close to home to be cool. Blackwood was no Seattle. So I stuck to my imported rock because we don’t deserve our own. 

But then they returned. I had widened my appeal and incorporated some British indie sensibilities in my tastes by then. And I devoured Everything Must Go. It was never for the singles, though, which were okay. It was the album tracks that I loved. The lyrics were not like anything else. Maybe they appealed to this awkward kid who overthought and read into every aspect of the world, finding too many connections between songs and art and politics and life, and seeing poetry where I had no business seeing it. 

A few weeks later, a boy from college slipped me a tape. He told me to listen to it. It was The Holy Bible. I don’t think I could ever listen to anything else in the same way ever again. It was the album that changed my view of music in a way that I had never imagined possible. 

This August, The Holy Bible turned 25 years old. A quarter of a century has passed by, and this album is still every bit as monolithic as it was back then. In the era of Trump, Brexit, social media, and climate fear, there is still as much importance in every lyric, riff, and beat. 

The album starts with Yes. The tenet of the song is that everything is for sale. We all sell ourselves; we are the products of our own consumerism. The song was so angular and raw. It literally felt as though it was carving straight into my teenage brain. I can still feel the rush today when I hear it. 

Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart could never be truer. In the time of fake news, how do we know who to believe? The Washington Post has a running tally of the number of times the current celebrity POTUS lies to his people. We freely debate the fact that the most influential media in the world lies, we elect bullshitters, but there is so much to distract us from that. From consumerism to triviality. Who needs the truth when you have coffee and cat memes? Yet the lies grow. 

The swirling riffs that underpin this song are cyclonic. They suck you in, just like the lies of the system. There is a military precision to Moore’s drumming that sets your brain into hypnotic obedience. The song feels Orwellian. Distraction leads to disinformation becoming the norm. The song crashes out with a gun control argument that echoes the future of the states, where mass shootings have become the norm. 

‘Of Walking Abortion,’ a song about right-wing totalitarianism reminds us today, that there is a worm in the soul of humanity. It is still there. With politicians who fan the flames of hate, in a sanitized manner. As the far-right amasses support from public opinion across the Western world, the warnings and reminders have always been there. But when it comes down to it, if the Trumps, Farages, or Tommy Robinsons of this world become the next Hitlers, the cry will come again ‘Who’s responsible? You fucking are!’. We’re all spectators of the most terrible moral atrocities. 

‘She Is Suffering’ takes the album to a more subdued place. It gives a bit of breathing space and tells us to shed our desires to attain something more in life. ‘Archives Of Pain’ returns us to the depths of the human soul, and looks at the fascination that we have with serial killers, and how we deal with the monsters in our society. 

‘Revol’ feels almost like a jaunty, happy song, after the depths of ‘archives.’ The chundering riff carries you through a list of hypothetical sexual preferences of some of history’s worst despots. It’s catchy, and it’s quick and offers a glimpse of humour in an otherwise desolate void.

John Hurt’s ‘Winston Smith‘ lets in the corrupt screeching of James Dean Bradfield’s masterful guitar intro to ‘Faster‘. And here we witness the finest three minutes and fifty-five seconds ever recorded. The screams give way to a crunching riff before Bradfield releases Richey’s tirade on the world. A song about self-abuse, it holds its protagonist above some of the greatest poets and thinkers of the twentieth century in an ironic gesture. The anger, self-confidence, and self-doubt crash into each other as the lyrics fight with one another before caving in like everything always does into the repeated phrase ‘man kills everything.’

‘Faster’ is about releasing anger. ‘Faster’ is about dealing with emotions that you can’t comprehend. It’s about being a dichotomy. And it’s a song that has helped me process lots in my life. It’s a go-to when I want to feel alive. It’s something I turn on when I need reminding of what it is to feel human. In the darkness of this album, Faster shines bright. And in its message of despair, I have always found hope. 

‘This Is Yesterday’ offers a gentle respite from the onslaught of the previous songs. One of my favourite lyrics opens the song.. ‘Do not listen to a word I say, just listen to what I can keep silent’ is probably a lyric that so many of us can find a universal truth in, so I don’t want to attribute it, particularly to Richey’s probable state of mind around that time. But the notion of hiding who we really are, and presenting a clean view of ourselves is an existential quandary that is at the heart of us all. 

The Manics took a very different angle for their subsequent albums. They still retained their cultural and political links, but they never stared into the abyss in this manner ever again. We could debate all day about the direction that the band may have taken if Richey had not disappeared, but one thing would be clear, they could never beat the creative highs and the philosophical troughs that they met within this album. What we are left with is a tarred and charred version of perfection.

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