Manic Street Preachers - Albert Hall, Manchester 10/12/14

Nicky Wire spoke to The Quietus’ John Doran last year, and told him that Manic Street Preachers had been offered handsome sums of money to play The Holy Bible in its entirety in 2014, to mark its twentieth anniversary. The possibility seemed scant then, though, with Wire sounding seriously reluctant; “the minute we do it, it’d kind of feel like that’s it - we’re irrelevant now.”

But here they are, and early indications suggest they haven’t done things by halves; the stage is decked out in camouflage netting, and the band take the stage dressed not dissimilarly to how they used to back in 1994 - Wire and Sean Moore are in camo gear themselves, whilst James Dean Bradfield resurrects one of his old sailor suits. The Manics diehards have genuine reason to crave these gigs, and you can only assume - financial considerations aside - that it explains the decision to bring this album back to life. “That’s why we have a problem playing songs off The Holy Bible,” Wire told Doran. “It’s a complete state of mind. You have to be so well drilled; you have to literally hate your audience.”

NME called The Holy Bible the darkest record of all time a few years back, and whilst both the vagueness of that adjective and that publication’s irrepressible appetite for hyperbole are both worth taking into account, they still didn’t draw that particular conclusion lightly. The third Manics record is a thrillingly vicious exercise in misanthropy matched neither by their peers nor those they’ve influenced. Both Richey Edwards’ claim to being one of Britain’s great lyricists and the degree to which this album is ghoulishly measured against his disappearance are probably fair game, given the record’s content, but it’s the former that seems the most pertinent point when you revisit the album.

The strange thing is, with one obvious exception, this is not Unknown Pleasures; The Holy Bible never necessarily sounded all that bleak, and perhaps that’s why it isn’t tied to Edwards’ legacy to the point that it’d make this evening’s performance gauche. What remains of the Manic Street Preachers do the record musical justice tonight; ironically, when set against the compressed album masters, the live incarnations of these songs sound like the definitive versions. Bradfield tears through each track with a ferocity that displays scant discrimination between lyrical topics; “Yes”, told from a prostitute’s point of view, is a stinging way to open, and “4st 7lb” - Edwards’ documentation of his own anorexia - is relayed for only the second time in a decade in a fashion raw enough to match its unflinching narrative.

There’s a closeness between the intent of the original cuts of these songs and their live counterparts; “This Is Yesterday”, a woozy ode to nostalgia, remains the one point at which the album’s suffocating tautness lets up for a second, whilst “Mausoleum”, recalled after a two-decade absence, is similarly untouched by the intervening years, jagged and belligerent. The spoken word samples that provide the record’s spine are present and correct, too, and never more necessary than on “The Intense Humming of Evil”, where the album peaks in terms of both its atmosphere and its sense of dejection.

Like Wire said, there are songs on The Holy Bible that you couldn’t just drop into the middle of a standard set, and this is one of them; written after trips to the remains of the Dachau and Belsen concentration camps, it doesn’t capture the fear, or the anger, or the shock generated by the Holocaust - simply the horror. The opening minute or so, dominated by a monologue from a Nuremburg documentary, is a gut punch; you almost don't want them to play it. The crowd have been animated all night, but they don’t cheer at the track’s close; in fact, stunned, they barely applaud. Manic Street Preachers are a mainstream rock band, and yet they remain capable of provoking that kind of reaction.

When 65daysofstatic played their ten-year-old debut in full across town a couple of months back, they compensated by stuffing the second set exclusively with tracks from their latest album; The Jesus and Mary Chain, meanwhile, toyed with the format a fortnight ago by playing their ‘encore’ first, before a full rendition of Psychocandy, an album that - like The Holy Bible - saw its original promotional shows routinely consumed by chaos. There’s no such tampering from the Manics tonight, though, and when they re-emerge as a five-piece after a swift costume change - Bradfield suited and booted, Wire in his signature modified blazer and sailor cap - they kick off with a genuine classic, “Motorcycle Emptiness”. Anybody hoping that the show’s latter half will live up to its billing of ‘Futurology, Curios and Hits’ will be disappointed if they’re looking for equal representation; their latest album’s “Divine Youth” makes its live debut, whilst the instrumental “Dreaming a City (Hughesovka)” is dedicated to Magazine, but it’s the big hitters that reign supreme.

“If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be NExt” blows minds by reminding the crowd that once upon a time, a song this politically-charged could make it to number fucking one on the singles charts, and whilst “Your Love Alone Is Not Enough” sorely misses the recorded contribution of The Cardigans’ Nina Persson, the closing one-two of “You Love Us” and “A Design for Life” is exhilarating. The argument from dogmatic Holy Bible-ites, insofar as the Manics’ post-Edwards output goes, is that it doesn’t live up to the complexity and intelligence of his writing, but this is very much a show of two halves; the gaping space stage right during the first set reminds us of the engimatic guitarist's brief but brilliant contribution to modern rock music, but the second stands as a testament to how much the Manics went on to mean without him. The last great British rock band? Debatable. Will a mainstream British rock band ever make anything as raw, as visceral, as blindingly aware as The Holy Bible again? Don’t count on it.