will release concert document ‘The Holy Bible Live’ on October 23rd.
Released in 1994, ‘The Holy Bible’ remains one of the most extraordinary rock records ever made. Lyrically unflinching, the music is daring in complexity yet wholly immediate, a torrent of energy from the deepest labyrinths of the soul.
Back in December 2014, the Welsh group took ‘The Holy Bible’ back out on the road, daring themselves to live up to its searing majesty.
The shows went down as some of the band’s finest – now a three-piece with the absence of talismanic lyricist Richey Edwards, the sheer energy has gone down in fan lore.
Captured for posterity, Manic Street Preachers closed the tour with three nights at the Roundhouse in London, performances that form the basis of this new concert document.
Out on October 23rd, ‘The Holy Bible Live’ will be available as a 2 x 12” and 3 CD deluxe edition, 2 x blue marble 12” vinyl, CD+video BluRay and on digital platforms.
In addition to this, each format will be accompanied by Kieran Evans’ cancer film Be Pure, Be Vigilant, Behave, and a new Steven Wilson spatial audio mix of the original album. Pre-order it here.
The band’s “I wanted to prove that we were still a band tough enough to play The Holy Bible. I wanted to prove to people that being on stage and hammering it through together like a military unit was still part of us. We still have that muscle memory, that badge of honour. We knew there would be a reflex reaction to doing something like this – people looking at the record and your performance through a prism of the past. ’It’s not quite got the spark I was hoping for.’ Proving those people wrong – disproving cynics- massively powered me on.”
“I never had any doubts when we rehearsed the songs in the studio. The most important part of doing something like this is to get back in the groove, find that muscle memory, find that reflex, and go into rehearsal to prove to yourselves that you can still do it. I never doubted that we could do it again even though we knew that it was an incredibly hard album to play.”
“I’d had really bad flu at the Roundhouse shows. I’d lost my voice, and the night of the first Roundhouse show I was on steroids. Remarkably, my voice just kept coming back enough as I reached the stage. I don’t know if there was some kind of weird, Venom-esque adrenaline shot that I was getting from the fear of doing The Holy Bible with injured vocals, I don’t know where that adrenaline came from, but it was something almost supernatural.”
“When we played the album, I felt like I was wearing a different mask. I didn’t feel as if I had to completely connect with all the lyrics, I just needed to mainline into the energy of it all. And that felt good – it felt good for us to be a piece of rock ’n’ roll theatre. It felt good to be close to that power again.”
“ took a long time to arrive at a place where we felt we could reinvestigate the songs, after years of simply letting them be, letting them grow, letting them unfold. It almost felt like we had become a little disconnected from the songs themselves.”
“I was more than a little reticent about the physical, technical and emotional demands they brought with them. As a collection, the songs required a particular state of mind: a kind of ferocious discipline that I wasn’t sure I still had inside me.”
“When the idea of playing the album in its entirety arrived, we were riding high on a critical wave after the release of . Touring that would have been easy, and yet our thoughts turned back to . What it was, what it meant. We knew they would not be easy songs to play together. We’d never had more than five or six of them in a live set before, even when the record had just been released. But the idea grew, and then it was a tour. became part of the second set, and was the savage, ruthless opening.”
“James was much more up for the challenge than I was. He seemed to thrive on the amount of willpower, control and horror he had to go through and relearn in order to make it all work. That was never clearer than at the last Roundhouse show, when James lost his voice to a flu bug. On stage, he just charged through the whole thing. There’s an edge and a rawness in his voice that makes the whole thing complete.”
“One of the deciding factors in playing from start to finish was wanting those lyrics – Richey’s genius, really – to be heard by a mass audience and to see how those words still resonated with a crowd who had grown up with them. Maybe this live record documents the last time that we – as a band, as friends – could really occupy ’s particular state of mind. Listening back, I’m incredibly grateful that we did.”
“After playing the gigs, we got to see what Kieran Evans had been working on after shooting every gig on the tour. It’s incredible – intimate, oppressive and weirdly joyous at points. That said, as much as it’s a a film, it’s also Kieran occupying the same state of mind that we were were in.”
