Wednesday 23 August 2017

BOOKS/MUSIC: Triptych - The Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible

“The album was written with an almost academic discipline... We sat down and gave ourselves headings and structures, so each song is like an essay." - James Dean Bradfield


“If the Holy Bible was meaningful to you then I wouldn’t recommend spending six months thinking and writing about it” - Daniel Lukes (co-author of ‘Triptych’)


Triptych is a book published earlier this year comprising 3 dissertations on the Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible.  If any album deserves a book like this it is The Holy Bible.  The Manics always invited analysis of their lyrics, but The Holy Bible is the only album that demands it.  Richey Edwards’ words are dense and just listening to the words isn’t enough because it’s too much to take in with the speed of delivery.  


It’s a powerful album, critically acclaimed and compelling. The album’s subject matter takes in prostitution, political extremities, anorexia, the Holocaust, nostalgia, self-mutilation, a yearning for innocence and the morality of the death penalty.  And it mainly manages to get it right - done badly, an album covering these subjects would have been immensely embarrassing (‘Revol’ doesn’t get it right and has always been embarrassing).


I came to the Manics long after Richey’s disappearance - I heard ‘Design For Life’ played alongside contemporary Britpop singles from Blur, Oasis, etc then immersed myself in its parent album.  We had a ritual in my family of going to the library every couple of weeks to rent CDs for 20p a pop and taping the ones we liked.  I saw the The Holy Bible and we played it in the car on the way home.  It was a little bit different - my Dad hated it.  My Mum, who always encouraged getting into different things like The Prodigy and Joy Division, probably wasn’t keen on the music but was reading the lyrics in the passenger seat and said they were very good.  I’ll always remember that first exposure to the confrontational nature of the album for everyone and the way it demanded an immediate response.  It wasn’t, and isn’t, background music.




‘Triptych’ is confirmation of the importance the album holds over people.  Rhian E Jones, in the first essay, compares listening to the Manics now to thinking of embarrassing exes, which I very much relate to.  That said, she goes on to say that in a world where our generation is the first to be poorer than the previous one adolescent angst shouldn’t be confined to adolescence.  Her essay is the most personal, using her own experiences to make sense of the album; it’s also the most straightforward, putting it in a post-Thatcher, pre-Blair context and examining the political obsessions of the day.


Daniel Luke’s chapter is extremely interesting, and in theory a good idea - to read all the books that inspired Richey and Nicky’s lyrics. This includes sections on The Waste Land, Sylvia Plath, Hubert Selby Jr - the Richey Edwards reading list.  The obvious downside to this from his point of view is that it takes a lot longer to read pages and pages of bleakly themed books than it does to listen to 50 minutes of an album. By the end of the chapter, understandably, he seems worn down by the task he has set himself and it peters out, finally beaten by trying to ‘get’ Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition in the incongruous setting of waiting to pick his daughter up from ballet.  


The third essay by Larissa Wodtke which deals with Derrida’s notion of ‘the archive’ I will have to re-read to understand, as I began to feel out of my depth.  That’s not a criticism - it’s rare that reading a book about a rock album makes you feel stupid. I liked the way that instead of cutting off after Richey’s disappearance and ignoring the Manics’ post-Bible work, she examines its effect on their later career.  It ends with her seeing their 20th Anniversary shows for the album, where the book returns to its opening approach of personal experience.





Most bands only get one album in their career where everything they stand for is coalesced into a whole if they’re lucky, and for the Manics’ The Holy Bible was undoubtedly their finest hour.  The first two authors admit to growing out of the Manics, which is something that happened to me - a band that meant a lot just stopped being crucial at some point.  I started by saying it’s a powerful album, and it is, but anyone not in their teens who really related to it I’d actually be vaguely concerned about.  Having said that, the point raised by Jones mentioned above bears repeating - given the current political climate, the insecurities and everyday emotional instability we experience as teenagers are not necessarily things most of us leave behind when we become adults these days.

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