The first time I heard The Holy Bible was on a cassette a friend had made from his brother's cd copy. I'd borrowed it and, for reasons I can't remember, his walkman too and played it for the first time on a bus for a school trip. I can't remember where we were going, but I distinctly remember pressing play as we sat on the bus just outside the school gates.
Cassettes are a horrible medium. I've always associated them with murky, inaccessible music. The two main reasons for that are this album, and Bleach by Nirvana - both albums I listened to on cassette and found initially impenetrable. One of the many problems with the format is that the only way to know what song you're listening to is keep counting and compare to the tracklisting. In this case, someone had messed up the recording of the cassette, so I had the full tracklisting but was missing two songs from the latter half of the album - Faster and This Is Yesterday. In a lot of ways, it's not a great way to hear an album for this first time, but appropriately difficult for such a difficult album.
I can't remember exactly when that school trip was, but I think The Holy Bible would have been the second Manics album I heard, after becoming a fan on This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. I say this, because I got Generation Terrorists a full year later, and my own copy of The Holy Bible two months after that. I have a strong memory of listening to that same taped copy in a tent in my friend's back garden, discussing the songs, and that can't have been between October and December as that would have been too cold. I had been wanting to dig into their back-catalogue for a while, and I suspect it was the classic "this album is their best, try this one". Interestingly, when I finally bought my copy of Generation Terrorists, the girl at the counter said that Gold Against the Soul was her favourite even though no one else agreed. I love that album now, and probably play it the most these days.
A few of my initial thoughts of the album have stuck with me: I was amazed that there was nothing I'd consider a "single" (which possibly helped with that murky, impenetrable feeling - had my cassette included Faster I suspect I'd still have thought this); 4st 7lbs was haunting; the bass on Archives of Pain was excellent; the opening duo of Yes and Ifwhiteamerica... said so much about the band and the fact that this wasn't a pop album; PCP felt much more accessible somehow, and was a strangely light and upbeat (musically) way to finish such a dark album. I remember feeling distinctly uneasy at the lines "Conservative say: there ain't enough black in the Union Jack / Democrat say: there ain't enough white in the Stars and Stripes" having not quite heard the start of each line. They let themselves off the hook a minute or so later when they reverse the sentiment and start them with "And we say", but for a short while I did panic that my new favourite band were openly racist. Of course now I know that thought to be ridiculous, but the fear of that stayed with me and I think of it nearly every time I hear the song.
23 years have now passed since The Holy Bible came out, and over the years it has been held up as a classic, which it is. For me, it still holds some of that early inaccessibility, probably by design. It is a classic, but for reasons entirely different to the ways in which I consider the others classic - Generation Terrorists has the bold arrogance and timeless songs, Gold Against the Soul is the forgotten gem, Everything Must Go is the huge comeback, and TIMTTMY was the pop breakthrough; The Holy Bible on the other hand, was a treat for the fans who wanted the band to exorcise their darkest corners, which they did (arguably far too well). It is so vastly different to the other albums, that it's hard to compare it in the same light. I enjoyed reading all the fanfare around the 20th anniversary, and it's impossible to not agree with it all.
For Record Store Day 2015, the US version of the album was pressed onto vinyl for the first time and available in record shops in the UK. The US, however, got the original version on a picture disc with the original artwork. The album was available as a picture disc when it was first released, but I'd never bothered to pick one up - they always seemed readily available on eBay. The US RSD version differs as it has "20" after the title, and "original mix" at the bottom. Last year I was in Boston and found this copy in the Harvard branch of Newbury Comics, a shop I'd fallen in love with in my early teens. The exchange rate is appalling these days, so I only bought this record, which had luckily been reduced to half-price - $14 from $28 - probably as it had been sat on their shelves for a year and a half. I was very pleased to add it to my collection.
Format: 12", picture disc
Tracks: 13
Cost: £12.20 new
Bought: Newbury Comics, Boston
When: 14/10/16
Colour: picture disc
Etching: none
mp3s: no
