Manics cover censored

Mon 18th May, 2009 in International News

Welsh mainstays Manic Street Preachers have managed to upset UK supermarkets with their ninth album Journal For Plague Lovers. The CD features a sleeve design painted by artist Jenny Saville, which has been deemed “inappropriate” by four of the six major supermarkets.

According to the Idolator blog, the powers-that-be thought the brushstrokes on the boy’s face looked too much like real blood. Sainsburys, Tesco, Asda and Morrisons have packaged the album with a – œslip-cover’.

“If you’re familiar [Saville’s] 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,” singer James Dean Bradfield told BBC6 Music. “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.”

Journal For Plague Lovers features lyrics and compositions written by Richey Edwards before his mysterious disappearance in 1995. Have a read of the FasterLouder review.