ReviewsReview: Manic Street Preachers / The Holy Bible Live
“Last Night of the Nihilist Proms”
“We’re recording this, so we need you as loud as fucking possible please”, says Nicky Wire before “feel-good singalong anthem of the winter” ‘Mausoleum’. “Take it a-fucking-way”. An audience of Manics devotees at London’s Roundhouse responds magnificently. The chorus to ‘Mausoleum’, after all, is a humdinger. “NO BIRDS!” they scream as one. “NO BIRDS!” It’s probably the biggest, most naggingly infectious, poppiest chorus on the entire album. A knock-em-dead singalong. A moment of pure release delivered over a swaggering Chuck Berry groove. “NO BIRDS!” they yell, like an Oasis crowd doing the “sooooooo Sally can wait” bit in ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’. It’s not that, though. “NO BIRDS!” they sing, “NO BIRDS! … HOLY MASS … OF DEAD INSECTS!”
This is not, despite the chorus, a song about how women weren’t allowed in the snug of a 1970s Blackwood pub. There are no birds because that chorus is, in part, about visiting Belsen. Back in 1945 Allied soldiers, sickened to their souls, reported a strange lack of wildlife in Dachau, Belsen and Auschwitz. As if the horrors that had taken place there had disgusted nature itself. Later, a myth would persist — that birds still don’t sing around the camps. Bees don’t buzz. You can visit these places, left as memorials to an unspeakable atrocity, and be rendered speechless yourself. Or you can pose for a selfie, as some have done. In 1993 all four Manic Street Preachers visited Belsen and Dachau in the same week while on tour in Germany. Less than a month later, while in Japan, they visited the Hiroshima Peace Museum. Most bands would have gone bowling. No birds, but a strange tourism of death. It had quite the impact.
That chorus is an extraordinary release of the tension built by James Dean Bradfield’s breathless tumble through the preceding bridge: “…And blind, your success inspires/ And analyse, despise, and scrutinise/ Never knowing what you hoped for/ And safe and warm but life is so silent/ For the victims who have no speech/ In their shapeless guilty remorse/ Obliterates your meaning”. And breathe. “NO BIRDS!” Extraordinary writing. An extraordinary song. An extraordinary album. An extraordinary band.
The 2014 Holy Bible tour – in which the surviving Manic Street Preachers, alone onstage amid the camo netting and spite, performed their 1994 masterpiece in its entirety – was the first time the band had essayed ‘Mausoleum’ in 20 years. Much of The Holy Bible had been mothballed following a reconfiguration after Richey Edwards, the chief architect of much of the album’s lyrical horror, disappeared from his own life, never to return. Only ‘Faster’ remained a setlist perennial, with ‘Yes’ an occasional visitor. They’d done ‘Of Walking Abortion’ at their Millennium Eve show in 1999 (“the bar sold a million pints during that one”, cracked Wire afterwards), ‘Die In The Summertime’ at Glastonbury, ‘Archives of Pain’ at Reading. ‘This Is Yesterday’, the album’s elegiac moment of grace, still gets occasional outings. But ‘Mausoleum’? ‘Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart’? ‘4st 7lb’? ‘The Intense Humming of’ fucking ‘Evil’? Not a chance. The band of ‘You Stole The Sun From My Heart’ and ‘Your Love Alone Is Not Enough’ and ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’ didn’t need the lead weight of The Holy Bible distorting the rubber sheet of their setlist. It was a corner of their career they were hugely proud of, but one which remained profoundly difficult; personally, emotionally and, to be honest, technically. The songs here are taut, angular, propulsive, awkward, full of phrasing that would fit oddly in the most grotesquely deformed of mouths. There are time signature tricks and counter-intuitive riffs that make rubbing your tummy and patting your head at the same time a doddle in comparison. And that’s without the emotional weight of real tragedy bound up in the words. This was the sound of Richey Edwards’ unravelling emotional state processing every horror of late 20th century existence. Add to that the expectations of the most rabid and insufferable end of their fanbase and it’s no wonder they kept material from The Holy Bible to one side. Fuck that for a game of soldiers.
We’ll never do one. Live albums are always rubbish, they’re rip-offs
James Dean Bradfield
And yet return to it they did. Carried by the momentum of their best-reviewed album in years, Futurology, a match-fit Manic Street Preachers embarked on a short tour in December 2014 to perform the whole sordid, stinking mess of their masterpiece. The whole thing is presented here. The record entire. Beat by brutal, terrifying beat.
The Manics’ first ever live album (“We’ll never do one. Live albums are always rubbish, they’re rip-offs” – James Dean Bradfield, talking to NME in 1998), marking a belated 30th anniversary of The Holy Bible, is a bruised, cathartic reappraisal of the band’s darkest and most notorious work that reframes its bleak, propulsive horror as something communal and oddly celebratory. It leads to moments of odd juxtaposition, where a thrilled and exuberant audience yell out some of rock’s starkest lines. The first comes in ‘Archives of Pain’ with its gigantic scream of “STERILISE RAPISTS!” The most awe-inspiring are the traded lines in ‘Faster’: “I am an architect!” prompts Bradfield, “THEY CALL ME A BUTCHER!” yell the faithful. “I am a pioneer!”… “THEY CALL ME PRIMITIVE!” The oddest is surely the “NO BIRDS!” moment. It works. It really works, actually. It’s a reminder that, for all of its dark context, decoded cultishly over the years, The Holy Bible is also an album of absolute bangers.
Take ‘Revol’, Edwards’ impenetrable exploration of “group sex in the Kremlin” which the band always seemed rather embarrassed by (“It has to be one of the worst records anybody has ever made. It’s absolute dogshit” – Bradfield again, just four years after writing it), exiled from the setlist until a commitment to play all of their singles in one night at the O2 in 2011 forced its reemergence … at which point it was discovered to be a fists-in-the-air crowd-pleaser. Take ‘Die In The Summertime’, which, despite an opening line plea to “scratch my leg with a rusty nail/sadly it heals” has a danceable, doozy of a chorus. Take the moshpit thrill of the closing ‘PCP’, in which Bradfield can be seen on Kieran Evans’ accompanying concert movie grinning from ear to ear. The songs may explore both interior and exterior darkness, but here they’re blazing bright.
That’s partly due to an intensely invested audience that has obsessed over this record for decades, of course. There’s an energy carried through the crowd that clearly buoys the band. The mood in the room is jubilant, not bleak. A chant of “Nicky! Nicky! Give us a wave!” is hardly what you’d associate with the traditional cult-of-Richey misery that surrounded and sanctified the original album.
Mostly, though, the songs blaze because the three-piece Manic Street Preachers are blazingly good here. For Bradfield the effort is herculean; essays and essays of words scraped at 90 degrees across awkward riffs and licks, and he’s equal to all of them. He doesn’t drop a stitch. You try singing the outro to ‘4st 7lb’ while playing a completely different guitar solo melody. The rhythm section doesn’t have it easy, either. Forearms cramp in sympathy at Sean Moore’s thundering toms and brutal snare cracks on ‘Ifwhiteamerica…’ and ‘PCP’. There was a time when people would snark at Wire’s playing. There was a time when he deserved it (“As a lyricist [I’d rate myself] 5/5, as a bass player, zero” he once told Smash Hits). Such thinking belongs at the front end of the 90s. His playing is great, handling the zippy, melodic runs in ‘She Is Suffering’ and the growling anchor of ‘Archives of Pain’, especially vital as he supports the longest guitar solo in the band’s canon. It’s an impressive performance of military discipline (hence the outfits). The angular, martial bridges on ‘4st 7lb’ alone would tax bands half their age.
All of this is apparent thanks to a satisfying no-frills mix to the live record. With no second guitar, no keys, no percussionist (the Manics have, on occasion, employed one) and no playback aside from the spoken word samples, there is nowhere to hide. Occasionally you feel it. On the solos, and above all the long outro to ‘Archives of Pain’, there’s a hole that’s filled on the original record with more guitars. Here, though, Bradfield is out on his own. Those are the moments when the band sounds most exposed, and – perversely – the moments that feel most like The Holy Bible, far more so than any amount of shouting “NO BIRDS!”. This album is supposed to be difficult and uncomfortable, and here it audibly is.
It’s also something else, though. Because this mix of Holocaust pop, nihilistic self-analysis and doom has been dropped into an audience high on the nostalgic thrill of hearing their favourite band nailing an album beloved and treasured for years. The mix – guitar and bass nudged to either side, drums and vocals in the centre – mirrors the central dichotomy of the artefact (a fittingly awkward phrase for The Holy Bible): on the one hand, nudged into the right speaker of the soul, this is a brutally accurate performance of one of the starkest rock albums ever recorded; over on the left, the same performance is a celebration. A party. A band revelling in their greatest creative moment and enjoying that experience with their fans. It’s less emotional than you’d expect, all things considered, and more triumphant. The Holy Bible had never been that before. Positivity in the negative. Quite the accomplishment.
Steven Wilson’s mix manages to clean things up a little without losing the album’s bite.
That same spirit can also be found in the new mix of the original album from remixer-of-the-moment Steven Wilson (also doing the 30th anniversary remix honours for MSP tour buddies and similarly obsessed-over cultists Suede), in stereo and – and this raises some eyebrows – 5.1 and Atmos. That’s quite a choice — Wilson is known for bringing clarity, separation and breathing room to his projects. But The Holy Bible is an album which, according to conventional wisdom, sounds best played on a third-generation cassette on a single-speaker radio left behind by some builders. Its form mirrored its function, compressed and crushed to the density of a neutron star, all the better to realise its doomy, claustrophobic themes. Wilson’s mix rather disproves that idea, managing to clean things up a little without losing the album’s bite. Though the surround mixes haven’t been made available at the time of writing, the stereo version is really rather good. There’s less claustrophobia here, but there’s more scrubbed rawness. Guitars have a pinch more snarl, the stereo imaging wider. There’s less processing on the drums, and more of the sound of the room itself. Alongside some resurfaced keyboard parts, second guitars and backing vocals, the new mix adds a dash of life to tracks that might have dulled a little with familiarity. It allows the songs to excite you again. Not because the mix is drastically better, or drastically changed, but because it’s just different enough to grab your attention.
Getting hold of all of it is another matter, alas. The standard CD release pairs the live album with Evans’ film on Blu-ray, but doesn’t include the Wilson mix (the second set of hits that followed The Holy Bible each night isn’t here, and rightly so. This is about one album and nothing else.) The vinyl is simply the live album across two discs. The deluxe edition bundles that vinyl with the film on Blu-ray, the live album and Wilson’s stereo mix on CD, plus a 16-page booklet of lyrics and photos. Wilson’s 5.1 and Atmos mixes are confined to an SDE-exclusive Blu-ray, which also carries the live album, the stereo mix and a set of instrumentals – but not the film. Which means no single physical edition gets you the live album, the concert film, Wilson’s stereo mix and the surround mixes in one go. Only the live album is going to streaming. (And would it have killed them to put it out in one of those book formats they’ve used for 11 of their 15 studio albums? Some of us are physically pained when these things don’t match on our shelves, you know.)
As we said when reviewing Oasis’ Definitely Maybe a couple of years back, 30th anniversary packages are curious affairs. Doubly so when they arrive two years late. Most of the obvious stuff went on the 20th anniversary set, leaving compilers with the unenviable task of repackaging legacy material without asking for money for old rope. Manic Street Preachers, though, ever dedicated archivists of their own catalogue, have found a satisfying third way. The new mixes allow a little freshness into a room where the same air has been breathed in and out for three decades, while the live album gives a record that has always been more than a little bogged down with its own context a new sense of celebration.
Anyone who was at the Roundhouse in 2014 will remember how strange that felt. You’d have assumed that bellowing “STERILISE RAPISTS!” or “Who’s responsible? YOU FUCKING ARE!” would be an act of communal catharsis. An exorcism. It wasn’t, quite – not for everyone, anyway. Mostly those lines were being sung not because they were profound but because they were hooks. They may as well have been the nanananas at the end of ‘Hey Jude’. It was the Last Night of the Nihilist Proms. For two decades the legend of The Holy Bible – the disappearance, the cult that grew up around a missing man, the endless decoding – had stood in front of the record, and been treated by its most devout followers as if it were the record. By those 2014 shows, twenty years of familiarity had worn that legend thin enough to see what was underneath, which turns out to be a set of songs built to be shouted back. It’s why ‘Mausoleum’ and ‘Revol’ have aged better than ‘She Is Suffering’, the track that leans hardest into the idea of The Holy Bible as pure miserablism, and sounds rather stuck there. A song about the strange tourism of death has been turned into a singalong by the people who love it most, and the irony is real enough. But it also proves that the album was always sturdier than its mythology. For those of us who have obsessed over this record for a good chunk of our adult lives, The Holy Bible Live feels, like group sex in the Kremlin, perversely fun.
Review by Marc Burrows. The Holy Bible Live is out on Friday, 23 October. Final copies of the SDE blu-ray are available at the SDE shop.
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Tracklisting
The Holy Bible Live Manic Street Preachers /
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SDE Blu-ray
THE HOLY BIBLE LIVE [Stereo Mix]
- Yes
- Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit’sworldwouldfallapart
- Of Walking Abortion
- She Is Suffering
- Archives of Pain
- Revol
- 4st 7lb
- Mausoleum
- Faster
- This Is Yesterday
- Die in the Summertime
- The Intense Humming of Evil
- P.C.P.
THE HOLY BIBLE [1994 STUDIO ALBUM]
Steven Wilson Atmos Mix, 5.1 Mix, Stereo Mix, Instrumental Mix
- Yes
- Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit’sworldwouldfallapart
- Of Walking Abortion
- She Is Suffering
- Archives of Pain
- Revol
- 4st 7lb
- Mausoleum
- Faster
- This Is Yesterday
- Die in the Summertime
- The Intense Humming of Evil
- P.C.P.
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SDE Blu-ray
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