The Manics bring The Holy Bible Live to record

Three Roundhouse nights from December 2014, a Kieran Evans film and a Steven Wilson spatial mix of the 1994 original — pre-orders are open across every format.

Manic Street Preachers announced on 4 September 2026 that The Holy Bible Live will be released on 23 October 2026 via Sony. The album captures a complete performance of their 1994 record, drawn from three nights at London’s Roundhouse in December 2014.

The package spans several physical and digital editions: double 12-inch vinyl, a three-CD deluxe edition, double blue marble vinyl, a CD paired with a video Blu-ray and a digital release. It is accompanied by Kieran Evans’ concert film Be Pure, Be Vigilant, Behave and by a new Steven Wilson spatial audio mix of the original studio album. All formats were made available for pre-order with the announcement.

Bassist Nicky Wire said of the project: “The Holy Bible is a record that still sort of scares me at times as an investigation of the soul. A lot of the live album is a tribute to Richey.” Singer James Dean Bradfield looked back on the 2014 shows themselves: “I wanted to prove that we were still a band tough enough to play The Holy Bible.”

The album that defined a decade

Formed in Blackwood, Caerphilly, in 1986, the Manics — Nicky Wire and cousins James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore — became a central part of the Cool Cymru movement that carried Welsh music into the British mainstream in the 1990s. Generation Terrorists landed in 1992. Two years later The Holy Bible arrived as a sharp turn: leaner, darker, and still the record Wire describes as an investigation of the soul.

That intensity is why the 2014 Roundhouse residency mattered. Playing the album in full, two decades on, was framed by Bradfield as a test of whether the band remained equal to the material. Recording those nights and issuing them now preserves a moment when the group chose to meet their most demanding work head-on rather than leave it on the shelf. The live set is not a soft retrospective; it is the sound of a band still willing to stand inside a record that unsettles its own writers.

Between new records and the archive

The live set does not arrive in a vacuum. Critical Thinking was released in 2025, preceded by singles such as Decline & Fall and Hiding in Plain Sight in 2024, with Let the Light Return / Johatsu following. Sleep Next to Plastic came out in 2022 and The Ultra Vivid Lament in 2021. The band have kept writing; The Holy Bible Live package sits beside that run as a deliberate return to the catalogue’s hardest edge.

Steven Wilson’s spatial mix continues a recent thread. In 2024 the group issued 1985 in his Extended Eighties Mix. Applying the same care to The Holy Bible gives the original album a fresh presentation alongside the live document. Kieran Evans’ film Be Pure, Be Vigilant, Behave draws on the same Roundhouse nights. Taken together, the audio, the film and the new mix form a single window onto both the 1994 record and the band who still chose to play it in full twenty years later.

Release day remains 23 October 2026. Pre-orders are open across every announced format. The announcement did not set out further live dates tied to the album; for now the story is the record, the film and the mix — and a live Holy Bible that Wire still finds capable of scaring him.