Recording
According to drummer Sean Moore, the band felt they had been "going a bit astray" with their previous album, 1993's Gold Against the Soul, and so the approach to the follow-up was for the band to go back to their "grass roots" and rediscover "a little bit of Britishness that we lacked". Singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield recalls the band feeling they had become "a bit too rockist we had lost our direction". The band stopped listening to American rock music and returned to influences that had inspired them when they first formed, including Magazine, Wire, The Skids, PiL, Gang of Four and Joy Division.
Epic Records had proposed that the album be recorded in Barbados, but the band had wanted to avoid what Bradfield called "all that decadent rockstar rubbish". It was bassist Nicky Wire's idea, says Bradfield, that the band "should not use everything at its disposal" in recording the album. Instead, recording began with sound engineer Alex Silva at the low-rent, "absolutely tiny" Sound Space Studios in Cardiff. The album was mixed by Mark Freegard, who had previously worked with The Breeders. "She Is Suffering" was produced by Steve Brown. The recording took four weeks.
Bradfield has described the recording of the album as preventing him from having a social life and Alex Silva attributes the break-up of his relationship with his girlfriend at the time to the long hours involved in the recording. Guitarist Richey Edwards attended recording sessions, but would, according to Wire, "collapse on the settee and have a snooze" while the other band members did all the recording. He was drinking heavily and frequently crying. "Inevitably", says Bradfield, "the day would start with a 'schhht!'; the sound of a can opening."
The album was constructed with "academic discipline", according to Bradfield, with the band working to headings and structures "so each song is like an essay".
Read more about this topic: The Holy Bible (album)
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