In 1994 I was thirteen. Unlucky for some. In the moribund middle of the 1990s, the only place in my town which sold records was Woolworths. In August of 1994, I tried to preorder a copy of The Holy Bible there. My enquiry was met with the same look of horror-struck uncertainty with which my mother, that same year, asked whether I’d been in a punch-up (I hadn’t, my Rimmel eyeshadow palette and I were in our ill-advised experimental period, but the mistake was understandable). A few weeks later, I returned to Woolworths and left in triumph, the album clutched under my coat like a samizdat publication.
The album taught me words I didn’t know, mostly in order to describe it adequately. I needed words like ‘scabrous’ and ‘abrasive’ to express its magnificently tense and claustrophobic atmosphere, to do justice to James Dean Bradfield’s furniture-chewing Rottweiler growl. The music felt frantic, jagged, viciously melodic. Guitars prowled and skittered, lashing like the tail of a cornered animal or buzzing like a trapped cloud of flies. And the lyrics! A Burroughsian cut-up, as with previous albums, still a plethora of names, references, politics and history, illuminating a world beyond my own – but somehow concentrated and distilled, individually focused rather than their early scattergun sloganeering spread interchangeably over several songs…