9 Times Manic Street Preachers Proved They Were The Most Exciting Band On The Planet
4. They Didn't Care About Musical Trends
In 1994, the British music industry was full of optimism. Oasis's Definitely Maybe and Blur's Parklife both came out, kick-starting Britpop, and Wet Wet Wet spent 16 weeks at number one with their sickly sweet cover of The Troggs Love Is All Around. Into this cauldron of positivity, Manic Street Preachers released one of the bleakest and darkest records of all time, The Holy Bible. Lyrically obsessed with death and musically foreboding, it could not have been further from the zeitgeist.
"We were in the studio doing Revol when we heard Blur's Girls And Boys. And I thought, 'F***, we've just written a song about group sex in the Politburo and really the biggest thing out there from an indie band is about going off on holiday in Ibiza. Nicky Wire
There is arguably no good time to release a record about anorexia, war criminals, the holocaust, serial killers and self-abuse, but the late summer of 1994 was definitely not it. The Manic's didnt care that they didn't fit in though. In fact they positively revelled in standing out from the crowd, seeing the other bands out there at the time as fakes and phonies, only in it for the money.