The Holy Bible (album) - Aesthetic

Aesthetic

James Dean Bradfield has described the album as representing "the most definitive period for us visually as well as the songs we were writing and the record we've never been scared to admit that".

While touring in early 1994, the band visited army surplus stores and bought clothing to wear on stage, in a homage to The Clash. This military image was used consistently by the band during the promotion of The Holy Bible, including in their videos and television appearances. A performance of "Faster" on the BBC's Top of the Pops in June 1994 resulted in a record number of complaints—over 25,000—due to Bradfield wearing a paramilitary-style balaclava.

The album cover, designed by Richey Edwards while hospitalised, features a triptych by Jenny Saville depicting three perspectives on the body of an obese woman in her underwear, and is titled Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face). Saville gave her permission for use of her work for free after a discussion with Edwards in which he described each song on the album. The back cover features a photo of the band in military uniforms and a quote taken from Octave Mirbeau's book The Torture Garden. The typeface on the front cover featuring the letter 'R' backwards is copied from Empires and Dance by Simple Minds from 1980.

The lyrics booklet features various images including Christian iconography, photographs of the gate at Dachau concentration camp and a plan of the gas chambers at Belsen concentration camp, a photograph of Lenin's corpse, an engraving depicting an execution by guillotine in Revolutionary France, a picture of an apple, a photograph of a woman with a parasitic twin, photographs of each of the Manic Street Preachers as children and a photograph of a group of British policemen in gas-masks. The booklet also contains a Buddhist saying from the Tripitaka alongside a dedication to the band's publicist, Philip Hall. He had died in 1993.

The title "The Holy Bible" was chosen by Edwards to reflect an idea, according to Bradfield, that "everything on there has to be perfection". Interviewed at the end of 1994, Edwards said: "The way religions choose to speak their truth to the public has always been to beat them down I think that if a Holy Bible is true, it should be about the way the world is and that's what I think my lyrics are about. doesn't pretend things don't exist".