The Holy Bible is the third studio album by Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers, released on 29 August 1994 by Epic Records. While the album was being written and recorded, lyricist and rhythm guitarist Richey Edwards was struggling with severe depression, alcohol abuse, self-harm and anorexia nervosa, and its contents are considered by many sources to reflect his mental state. The songs focus on themes relating to politics and human suffering. The Holy Bible was the band's last album released before Edwards' disappearance on 1 February 1995, consequently becoming their last studio album as a four-piece band.

Although it reached number 6 in the UK Albums Chart, initially, global sales were disappointing compared to previous albums and the record did not chart in mainland Europe or North America. It was promoted with tours and festival appearances in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands and Thailand – in part without Edwards. The Holy Bible received widespread acclaim from critics and has sold over half a million copies worldwide . It has frequently been featured and listed highly on lists of the best albums of all time by British music publications such as Melody Maker, NME and Q.

Recording

According to drummer Sean Moore, the band felt they had been "going a bit astray" with their previous album, 1993's Gold Against the Soul, and so the approach to the follow-up was for the band to go back to their "grass roots" and rediscover "a little bit of Britishness that we lacked". Singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield recalls the band feeling they had become "a bit too rockist [...] we had lost our direction". After the band's first two albums had been dominated by influences such as Guns N' Roses and Alice in Chains, the band decided that the new material should be influenced by the artists that inspired them when they first formed, including Magazine, Wire, Skids, Public Image Ltd, Gang of Four, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and early Simple Minds.

Epic Records had proposed that the album be recorded in Barbados, but the band had wanted to avoid what Bradfield called "all that decadent rockstar rubbish". It was bassist Nicky Wire's idea, says Bradfield, that the band "should not use everything at its disposal" in recording the album. Instead, recording began with sound engineer Alex Silva at the low-rent, "absolutely tiny" Sound Space Studios in Cardiff. The album was mixed by Mark Freegard, who had previously worked with the Breeders. "She Is Suffering" was produced by Steve Brown. The recording took four weeks.

Bradfield has described the recording of the album as preventing him from having a social life and Alex Silva attributes the break-up of his relationship with his girlfriend at the time to the long hours involved in the recording. Guitarist Richey Edwards attended recording sessions but would, according to Wire, "collapse on the settee and have a snooze" while the other band members did all the recording. He was drinking heavily and frequently crying. "Inevitably", says Bradfield, "the day would start with a 'schhht!'; the sound of a can opening."

The album was constructed with "academic discipline", according to Bradfield, with the band working to headings and structures "so each song is like an essay".

Content

Lyrics

Whereas lyric-writing on the two previous albums was split fairly evenly between Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire, the lyrics on The Holy Bible were 70–75% written by Edwards, according to James Dean Bradfield. At the time of the album's 10th anniversary reissue Wire claimed to be largely responsible for "Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit'sworldwouldfallapart" (which cites the actor River Phoenix in the lines 'Big Mac / Smack / Phoenix, R. / Please smile, y'all') and "This Is Yesterday", contributing only titles to some of the other songs. However, on later inspection of his notebooks, Wire was surprised to find he had contributed more lyrics than he had previously remembered, having also written portions of "Of Walking Abortion" and "Mausoleum" and some lines from "Faster". He now believed himself responsible for around 30% of the words on the album.

The album's lyrics deal with subjects including prostitution, American consumerism, British imperialism, freedom of speech, the Holocaust, self-starvation, serial killers, the death penalty, political revolution, childhood, fascism and suicide. According to Q: "the tone of the album is by turns bleak, angry and resigned". The same magazine commented in 1994 that "even a cursory glance at the titles will confirm that this is not the new Gloria Estefan album".

Sean Moore has described the content of the lyrics as being "as far as Richey's character could go". According to Bradfield: "Some of the lyrics confused me. Some [...] were voyeuristic and some were coming from personal experience [...] I remember getting the lyrics to 'Yes' and thinking 'You crazy fucker, how do I write music for this?'" Critic Simon Price notes that the potential radio-friendliness of the song is undermined by its focus on the subject of prostitution and the recurrence of sexual swearing in the lyric.

Interviewed at the time of the album's release, Nicky Wire said that the track "Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit'sworldwouldfallapart" was "not a completely anti-American song", but instead was about "how the most empty culture in the world can dominate in such a total sense". The title of the song has been repeatedly attributed to Lenny Bruce without any clear source for this claim given. It is possible that an error of attribution has arisen as a result of the band's discussion around Bruce, free speech and 'PCP'.

"Of Walking Abortion" is about right-wing totalitarianism, of which Wire commented: "there's a worm in human nature that makes us want to be dominated". "Archives of Pain", dealing with the glorification of serial killers and seemingly advocating capital punishment, he said "was the song that me and Richey worried about most [...] the song isn't a right-wing statement, it's just against this fascination with people who kill". Later in 1994, Bradfield described the song as "one of the most important things we've done" but said it was also "very right-wing" and "miscalculated".

Wire described "Revol" as being about Edwards' idea that "relationships in politics, and relationships in general, are failures". "P.C.P.", he said, was about how "PC followers take up the idea of being liberal but end up being quite the opposite". He said that he was "completely confused" by "Faster" (some of which he had written), although Edwards had told him that it was about self-abuse.

"Mausoleum" and "The Intense Humming of Evil", Wire said, were both inspired by visits by the band to former concentration camps at Dachau and Belsen. A first draft of the latter song had been considered insufficiently judgemental by Bradfield, who had asked for a re-write ("you can't be ambivalent about the Holocaust").

According to Wire, "Die in the Summertime" and "4st 7lb" were "pretty obviously about Richey's state of mind". However, Edwards attested that the former song is actually about a pensioner wanting to die with memories of childhood in his mind. is the weight below which death is reputed to become medically unavoidable for anorexics.

"This Is Yesterday", according to Wire, is "about how people always look back to their youth and look on it as a glorious period".

Wire and Bradfield have both expressed a disliking for the lyrics to the song "She Is Suffering", Wire saying it suffers from "man-coming-to-the-rescue syndrome". According to Edwards, the "she" in the song title is desire: "In other Bibles and Holy Books no truth is possible until you empty yourself of desire".

Use of dialogue samples

Several tracks on the album are also complemented by samples of dialogue, in keeping with the themes of the songs themselves, as follows:

"Yes" contains dialogue from the 1993 documentary Hookers, Hustlers, Pimps and their Johns, by Beeban Kidron, about the prostitution trade. "Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit'sworldwouldfallapart" begins with a TV trailer for GOP TV's Rising Tide show. "Of Walking Abortion" begins with an extract from an interview with Hubert Selby Jr. "She is Suffering" on the US mix of the album begins with a sample of British scientist/philosopher John G. Bennett saying "It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering." This dialogue, previously featured on the title track to the 1979 Robert Fripp album Exposure, is not present on the standard album/single version of the song. "Archives of Pain" begins with the words of the mother of one of serial killer Peter Sutcliffe's victims from a TV report on his trial. "4st 7lb" begins with dialogue from the 1994 documentary about anorexia, Caraline's Story, by Jeremy Llewelyn-Jones about Caraline Neville-Lister. "Mausoleum" features a quotation from an interview with J. G. Ballard explaining his motivation for writing the novel Crash. "Faster" begins with dialogue from the 1984 film adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, spoken by John Hurt. "The Intense Humming of Evil" begins with an extract from a report on the Nuremberg Trials. "P.C.P." ends with dialogue spoken by Albert Finney from Peter Yates' The Dresser.

Musical style

Musically, The Holy Bible marks a shift from the modern rock sound of their first two albums, Generation Terrorists and Gold Against the Soul. It was described as alternative rock, post-punk, hard rock, punk rock, gothic rock,: "In mood as much as message, The Holy Bible was an intensely sombre record, overcast by the same stormy skies which darkened Van Gogh's last works. It was gothic and, quite often, literally goth: more than one song could easily have been early Cure, Sisters of Mercy or Bauhaus." and glam punk, with influences from British punk, new wave, industrial and art rock. During the recording of the album, the band was mainly influenced by post-punk bands such as Wire, Public Image Ltd, and Joy Division, and their new sound drew comparisons to similar artists such as Magazine, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Gang of Four.

The Jam was another influence; "This Is Yesterday" was inspired by the songs "In the Crowd" (1978) and "Ghosts" (1982), while the anorexia-themed "4st 7lb" featured a guitar riff influenced by "The Eton Rifles" (1979). "Of Walking Abortion" was described as a "punk metal assault" and was inspired by Magazine's "The Light Pours Out of Me" (1978), while "From Out of Nowhere" (1989) by Faith No More served as the template for "Faster". The latter and "Archives of Pain" have also been compared to the Buzzcocks and even heavy metal trailblazers Black Sabbath in what Louder than War described as "their hook-laden heaviness". The record's heavy style was also compared to that of popular industrial rock act Nine Inch Nails.

Aesthetic

James Dean Bradfield has described the album as representing "the most definitive period for us visually as well as the songs we were writing and the record [...] we've never been scared to admit that".

While touring in early 1994, the band visited army surplus stores and bought clothing to wear on stage, in an homage to The Clash. This military image was used consistently by the band during the promotion of The Holy Bible, including in their videos and television appearances. A performance of "Faster" on the BBC's Top of the Pops in June 1994 resulted in a record number of complaints—over 25,000—due to Bradfield wearing a paramilitary-style balaclava.