TW: self-harm, anorexia, suicide
“I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.”
― Arthur Rimbaud
It started with a series of little cuts, lines in serial, to test the flesh and prove a point: you can take it, there is meaning in willing yourself to overcome pain. You wonder out of the front door, leaving the party behind, closing it behind you, pulling back on the handle with one arm, to be undisturbed, to be left alone. in the other hand you hold onto a serrated kitchen knife after a few moments of indecision: the wrist; torso; mental hesitation marks, you carve a star five ways into your left shoulder, it’s mostly skin, it bleeds a lot, you place the knife onto the ground and go to the toilet to find a bundle of tissue,hoping it won’t soak through. You wear a T-shirt all summer, refusing to take it off even when the sun is at its highest, changing plasters every few days. It leaves a mark. People still ask you about it, you don’t know what to say, it was a long time ago, it all happened to someone else.
In 1991 Richey Edwards carved ‘4 REAL’ into his arm and posed for a notorious NME photo—exposing a very private and personal act, unleashed as a performative and sensational gesture. A response to journalist Steve Lamacq questioning the sincerity of Manic Street Preachers, it signaled a downward trajectory where Edwards pushed further against the grain to assert control of the mind over the body in a chaotic universe that would gradually overwhelm him. Your heart leapt, not at the voyeuristic image or the visible depth of the garish razor wounds, but at the brutal commitment of the act. Arriving a few short years later, the lyric: “Scratch my leg, with a rusty nail, sadly it heals.” from ‘The Holy Bible’s ‘Die In The Summertime’ speaks to a sense of history, outside of time and beyond the flesh.
The first Manic Street Preachers album I bought on release was 1998’s ‘This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours’. Only four years apart, I quickly discovered ‘The Holy Bible’ album, its excoriating power, politicized outrage and nihilistic introspection marked it as the work of a different band—rejecting notions of commercial potential and critical approval. In a mixture gesture of affectation and teenage isolationism I was one of a generation who absorbed the uncompromising vision of ‘The Holy Bible’. Seeing only conflict, cruelty and suffering in the world around him Richey Edwards’ unyielding gaze dominated the record as he internalized the damaged bloodline of the 20th century into a personal crisis. With penetrating insight Edwards and Nicky Wire delivered a relentless staccato of racing thoughts where righteous anger, depression and self-loathing went hand-in-hand. Projecting a state of continued existential dread, akin to life under a nuclear cloud, this became a condemnation of the chattering, helpless masses, as the closing chant from ‘Of ‘Walking Abortion’ becomes a mantra against a life of bliss ignorance: “who’s responsible? You-fuck-ing-are!”
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This dark streak of moral outrage chimed with one of my earliest memories of television, watching news reports at the start of the Bosnian War in 1992: faceless buildings with their windows blown out, snaking crowds of refugees funneled through streets of rubble before the next assault on an already ruined town. Throughout Bosnia and Herzegovinia heinous human rights abuses were committed, largely by Bosnian Serbs seeking to exterminate Muslims and Croats, through rape, concentration camps and mass executions.
Across the 90s the white tanks and blue helmets of UN troops stood out against military camouflage, just as Manics drummer Sean Moore would sport a UN beret for many of ‘The Holy Bible’ photoshoots. UN forces seemed ubiquitous rolling in and out of troubled ‘conflict’ zones on peacekeeping missions as situations of total war accelerated into ethnic-cleansing and mass displacement.
‘IfWhiteAmericaToldTheTruthForOneDayItsWorldWouldFallApart’ aligns American protectionism as another form of imperialism, reeling off a litany of flawed interventions: “Granada, Haiti, Poland, Nicaragua”. The fallout of post-Communist decline highlighted the fragmentation of the political spectrum and exposed the inner weakness of Western Democratic states and the NATO coalition as a bulwark against tyranny. Enter Francis Fukuyama’s now notorious statement about ‘the end of history’ in 1992, where he prematurely argued for a post-war world, incidentally predicting the rise of neoliberalism. Instead we would see humanity repeating its mistakes, hounded by returning echoes of Edwards’ threat for the incoming “horrors of World War Five”.
The Holocaust is a dominant theme across ‘The Holy Bible’. The decadent death drive of “She Is Suffering”, a rejection of beauty doomed to fade, and the elegiac body horror of “4st 7lbs”; express the dilemma of Richey’s anorexia, mirrored in images of holocaust victims forced into starvation. The author David Evans noted: “Like Sylvia Plath, Richey runs together personal traumas and world-historic tragedies, often in the same lyric.” where she used the image of a “Nazi lampshade” (made of human skin) in her poem Lady Lazarus, Edwards employed lyrics of barking SS men: “Raus raus, fila fila” and sampled of 1945 Nuremberg Trial on ‘Intense Humming Of Evil’, meant to serve as testimonials against Nazi spectacle, they verge on exploitation.
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The album serves the populist view that places the high death toll of Nazi atrocities as the arbiter of evil, where emphasis on the Jewish tragedy which birthed the slogan ‘never again’ threatens to lose perspective and neglect contemporary genocides of the present. A student of politics, Edwards would lament a 90s pop-culture that seemed to have forgotten the Holocaust, relegating it to the past, while people indulged the emergent views of academic Holocaust-deniers who sought to cast doubt on the concept of extermination camps.
Nicky Wire noted a streak of contrarian extremism in Edwards’ lyrics, shifting from right-wing conservatism before leaning into vicious Libertarian satire.The heavy metaphor of music- industry-as-prostitution in ‘Yes’ twists into a tirade against the corruption of forced gender politics with parents choosing their child by design: “He’s a boy/You want a girl so tear off his cock.” ‘PCP’ riots against censorship, political correctness and moral hypocrisy, mocking ineffectual P.C. plods while making a conservative call for the good old days of ‘bobbies on the beat’.
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On ‘Archives Of Pain’ Edwards vents his frustration at the celebrity treatment of death and murderers in the ironic work of the Young British Artists, who turned serial killers such as Hindley and Brady and Peter Sutcliffe into post-modern icons, while the Manics would realise its antithesis in ‘The Holy Bible’s cover art Strategy (South Face / Front Face / North Face) by Jenny Saville. Edwards condemned the lenient sentencing given to murderers and rapists; a new inequality that seemed to place the rights of criminals above their victims. Instead, he called for punishments that fit the crime: citing execution of criminals pulled apart by horses and forced sterilization. This feeds into the album’s attacks upon liberal elitism; a moral relativity I was growing into as a teenager, reading about Chomsky and ideas of a redistributive society.
Edwards referred to ‘The Holy Bible’ as a work of truth compared to the hypocrisy of organized religions’ sacred texts, he stated the alternative: “to walk around with a plastic bag over my head”. Being too awake to the wider toxicity of man’s inhumanity to man easily became inverted into violence against the self—where the manifestation of physical and mental illness seem an appropriate reaction to the horrors of the world. Photographs from 1994 show Edwards, exhausted and statuesque, his own St Sebastian, fragile but resolute in his beliefs. In a late interview Caitlin Moran finds Edwards doe-eyed with nicotine stained teeth, “beautiful in spite of himself” it returns us to his favored image of the purity of the child’s eye corrupted by life.
A very serious form of growing pains, my version of ‘rightness’ became a blinkered outlook of hopelessness. Slipping into “the realm of the unwell” and the peculiar stillness of depression: you make non-choices and things happen to you—becoming a spectator in your own life. The poet Dan Duggan, himself sectioned for many years at Beckenham Hospital, referred to this austere position as “the luxury of the dispossessed”, feeling intensely but held at a distance, as if everything is happening to you.
For me, not eating became a revolt against the work done of chewing and swallowing, where force-feeding yourself exposed the functionality of living. You don’t eat because you feel sick; you feel sick because you don’t eat—it was hard to admit to such broken logic—your body draws breath; you sigh in response. Drinking more, I empathized with Kurt Cobain who told himself his heroin addiction was a necessary cure for an undiagnosed stomach complaint. I too, self-medicated: Rennie’s, Pepto-bismol, kaolin and morphine mixture, fluoxetine, citalopram, cocodamol; anything to numb the angry stomach and smother that nagging feeling. You burn, bleed and scream without noise; the mirror dances—tell yourself it’s not a pose—there is meaning in control, witness the pained self-regard of ‘4st 7lbs’: “I eat too much to die, not enough to live. I’m just waiting”. Overturning the idea of illness as metaphor, these self-inflicted wounds paint you into a corner, to be a source of worry, talked about in the third-person—we circle the problem like a spider washed about a sinkhole. There is a famous photo of Edwards by Tom Sheehan. Wearing a boiler suit with the prologue to Rimbaud’s A Season In Hell scrawled on the back: “Once, if I remember rightly, my life was a feast where all hearts opened, and all wines flowed […]” Edwards added his own final line: “One who mutilates himself is surely damned, isn’t he?”
Troubled moods fuel suicidal ideation—to dream the final freedom of death—the big nothing. Co-host of the Backlisted podcast, Andy Miller noted the twin escapism in Nicky Wire’s 1996 song lyric ‘Australia’. written in the wake of Richey’s disappearance, Wire himself retreated to the other side of the world as a form of recovery. It speaks to Edwards’ own version of gradual exile; to opt-out from the pain of life. You half-smile, now, at the surreal image in ‘Yes’: “Just an ambulance/At the bottom of a cliff”, an anti-Catcher In The Rye riff, which highlights the difficulty of supporting people with mental health issues, for some it always arrives too little, too late.
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Nicky Wire’s lyrics to ‘This Is Yesterday’ return to Manic themes of emergent memory, sounding old before his time, it marks disappearing reflections of childhood slips further away. At recent gigs it has become a tribute to Edwards and the raw brilliance of youth, while trying to resist the temptation to keep looking back when forced into a position between nostalgia and regret, flipping the philosophical paradigm between existence and emptiness: “why do anything/when you can forget everything?” The bombastic guitar solo arrives both ridiculous and sublime, but it cures my dry throat from the verse: “houses as ruins/and gardens as weeds/ I repent/I’m sorry, everything is falling apart”, it becomes a moment to pause and an invitation to breathe.
You wanted college to be the place where things came together, but in reality only some things changed for the better. The Manics’ shameless intellectualism encouraged me to study philosophy at sixth-form and later at university. I embraced the burn-bright precociousness of ‘The Holy Bible’, particularly the rapid-fire name-checking of ‘Faster’, a machine-gun syllabus which balanced high and low culture against ‘Revol’ and its roll call exposing the private lives of politicians and dictators.
I was inspired by the immortal line of “Libraries gave us power” from 1996’s ‘Design For Life’ adapted from a 1984-esque stone engraving in Newport library (“Knowledge Is Power”), it also overturned the slogan from the gates of Auschwitz: “arbeit macht frei”, used in the lyrics to ‘The Intense Humming Of Evil’, with stark irony: “then work came and made us free”. Reverberating throughout stadiums and young minds, bedroom-bound in claustrophobic, small towns, the Manics were always about lifting up working class listeners, never beating them down further. Despite my atheistic household, I really connected with religious philosophy, where questioning the existence of God was really a search for meaning. This was brought into further relief reading Albert Camus’ The Rebel, where the gears of pure reason seemed to stall against the banality of cruelty.
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In interviews Richey Edwards—sexy, dangerous and vital—praised the almost-Poet Laureate, Philip Larkin for living “a great life”. From his self-loathing domesticity, Larkin saw through the veneer of home, which “stays as it was left” and lamented the twin mediocrity in leaving his home town of Coventry for the adopted city of Hull. Perhaps it was the comfortable security of a respected writer that Edwards admired, a kind of happiness you felt could never be yours, where contentment, “some kind of nothingness”, was for other people.
In his final TV interview in 1994 I watched and re-watched as Richey struggles to answer the last question about next plans, with a depthless sigh: “the future—that’s a big, nasty word, isn’t it”. A heavy statement of foreshadowing, this manifested in his refusal to accept life in the world as it is, with all of its necessary contradictions and compromises: indulging the bad to eclipse the good. Referred to by one BBC critic as “a triumph of art over logic”, I see ‘The Holy Bible’ as a work of wounded genius, with all of its flaws making it seem all the more human, revealing the tragedy of brutal sincerity witnessed in ‘Faster’: “I’ve been too honest with myself/I should have lied, just like everybody else.”
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Adam Steiner studied philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, he has written for Spin, Louder Than War and the books Silhouettes And Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (2023) and Into The Never: Nine Inch Nails and the Creation of The Downward Spiral [2020].
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