Returning Welsh rock legends Manic Street Preachers have walked straight into a row, after a number of supermarkets refused to stock the band’s graphic cover art on their new album.
Sometimes to move forwards you have to take a step backwards. Homely, but true, it seems that Manic Street Preachers agree, using lyrics left by their missing guitarist Richey Edwards on their forthcoming album ‘Journal For Plague Lovers’.
Edwards disappeared in 1995, but his iconic visage has looked over everything the band have done since. The Welsh lyricist’s family declared him legally dead last year, and the group obviously feel that now is the right time to put his words to music.
New album ‘Journal For Plague Lovers’ is imagined as the band’s follow up to famously dark masterpiece ‘The Holy Bible’. The new album uses cover art designed by Jenny Saville, the award winning artist responsible for the design of ‘The Holy Bible’.
However Saville’s painting has not won admirers in Britain’s supermarkets, some of whom are stocking the album in blank sleeves.
Speaking to BBC 6Music lead singer James Dean Bradfield said “we just thought it was a beautiful painting. We were all in total agreement.”
“If you’re familiar with her work, there’s a lot of ochres and browns, and reds and browns and perhaps people are looking for us to be more provocative than we are being. We just saw a much more modern version of Lucian Freud-esque brushstrokes. That’s all we saw.”
Supermarket chains such as Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Asda and Morrisons have all refused to show the cover.
Sainsbury’s music buyer Nicola Williamson said: “We felt that some customers might consider this particular album cover to be inappropriate if it were prominently displayed on the shelf. As such, the album will be sold in a sleeve provided by the publisher.”
However James Dean Bradfield countered this by saying “you can have lovely shiny buttocks and guns everywhere in the supermarket on covers of magazines and CDs, but you show a piece of art and people just freak out.”
Manic Street Preachers are set to release their new album ‘Journal For Plague Lovers’ on May 18th.
