Manics album covered up by supermarkets

15/05/2009

Jenny Saville sleeve artwork deemed "inappropriate"

The Manic Street Preachers' new album is being covered with a slipcase in supermarkets because its artwork has been deemed "inappropriate".

The cover for Journal For Plague Lovers, a portrait by artist Jenny Saville, was deemed to looks like the boy's face is cut and bloodied.

But singer James Dean Bradfield and called the situation "utterly bizarre".

"We just thought it was a beautiful painting," he said. "It is her brushwork," he said. "We just saw a much more modern version of Lucian Freud-esque brushstrokes. That's all we saw."

Saville also painted the cover for the band's 1994 album The Holy Bible. Bradfield said he was frustrated by the policy of the big supermarket chains, included Sainsbury's, ASDA, Morrisons and Tesco.

"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," he said.