BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Supermarkets cover up Manics CD.
Words fail me.
The new Manic Street Preachers album is being shipped to supermarkets in a plain slipcase because its artwork has been deemed “inappropriate”.
Concerns have been raised that the cover for Journal For Plague Lovers, a portrait by artist Jenny Saville, looks like it is splattered with blood.
Singer James Dean Bradfield called the situation “utterly bizarre”.
“We just thought it was a beautiful painting. We were all in total agreement,” he told BBC 6 Music.
The frontman disagreed that Saatchi favourite Saville, who also painted the cover for the band’s 1994 album The Holy Bible, had intended to depict a bloody face.
“It is her brushwork,” he said.
“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.
“We just saw a much more modern version of Lucian Freud-esque brushstrokes. That’s all we saw.”