Manic Street Preachers Cover Art Banned In UK Supermarkets

The new Manic Street Preachers album, Journal For Plague Lovers, is being shipped to UK supermarkets without cover artwork, because the portrait by Jenny Saville is considered “inappropriate”. The band is annoyed at the setback, and singer James Dean Bradfield called the situation “utterly bizarre”. He told BBC 6 Music that:

“It is her brushwork. If you’re familiar with her work, there’s a lot of ochres and browns and reds and browns, and perhaps people are looking for us to be more provocative than we are being.”

Is “inappropriate” an unfair description? Let’s take a look at some of Saville’s other paintings:

A quick Google image search brings up hyperrealist artwork that, at times, borders on the grotesque. Saville seems to explore the human body’s possible states of contortion and mutation. There’s a common style present, and quite a few paintings resemble the Manic Street Preacher cover.

“We just saw a much more modern version of Lucian Freud-esque brushstrokes. That’s all we saw,” said Bradfield. “You can have lovely shiny buttocks and guns everywhere in the supermarket on covers of magazines and CDs, but you show a piece of art and people just freak out,” he said.

Jenny Saville also did the artwork for the Street Preacher’s 1994 album, The Holy Bible.

Nicola Williamson, Music Buyer for main UK supermarket Sainsbury’s, said: “We felt that some customers might consider this particular album cover to be inappropriate if it were prominently displayed on the shelf. As such, the album will be sold in a sleeve provided by the publisher.”

Journal For Plague Lovers will be released on May 18 and features lyrics left behind by former band member Richard Edwards, who inexplicably vanished from the Embassy Hotel in London in 1995.

The Manics posted on their website in March: “The brilliance and intelligence of [Edward's] lyrics dictated that we had to finally use them. The use of language is stunning and topics include The Grande Odalisque by Ingres, Marlon Brando, Giant Haystacks, celebrity, consumerism and dysmorphia, all reiterating the genius and intellect of Richard James Edwards.”

Bradfield said that the cover art will not be revised or modified in any way, and that it’s “bizarre that supermarkets actually think that that’s going to impinge on anyone’s psyche.”

As a customer, do you think the album cover is inappropriate?

Source: BBC