Manic Street Preachers, Roundhouse

Say what you like about the recent trend for anniversary album tours, but every so often it's bound to turn up one that you really shouldn't miss, and the Manic Street Preachers' forthcoming tour of their raw, outstanding The Holy Bible is surely one of those.
In December the Roundhouse will host your chance to experience an album that rightly holds a place in the firmament of modern British music. Since its release in 1994, the Manics have risen from bleak origins amidst the post-Thatcher doldrums of the Welsh valleys to true super-stardom, but they've never bested the haunting, jagged melancholy of Richey James Edwards' tormented introspection, over a sound lending more from post-punk and industrial rock than much of their later, more radio-friendly output.
The album's creative inception was infamous – TV and tour appearances courted controversy, the sleeve quotes Mirbeau's Torture Garden ('you live attached in cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise'), the cover artwork is an arresting Jenny Saville triptych – and at every turn their effort displays a leering nihilism of such authentic power as to leave contemporary Britpop releases (such as Oasis' Definitely Maybe and Blur's Parklife)feeling lightweight and trivial. Edwards was once challenged by an NME journalist as to the seriousness of his art – he responded by immediately carving the words '4 REAL' into his arm with a pocket razor.
It was Edwards too, in rehab at The Priory during the album's release, who famously disappeared just five months later, never to be seen or heard from again. Cast against this tragic loss, the album is not merely the raging, politically-charged high-water mark of the Manics' creative powers, but an astonishingly public outpouring of a man being torn apart from the inside by his struggle against anorexia, self-harm and depression.
You can be sure that the atmosphere within the Roundhouse will be electric when the remaining Manics step on stage to remember their lost bandmate (Edwards has always been one of the lesser-known members of music's '27 Club'), and to relive the visceral power of the album that has defined them ever since. Tickets are out now for three nights in mid-December – don't miss your chance to experience a genuine milestone in British music history.