Manic Street Preachers - Journal For Plague Lovers (2009)
Journal for Plague Lovers was released on 18 May 2009, and features posthumous lyrics by Richey Edwards, rhythm guitarist and lyricist, who vanished on 1 February 1995, and was presumed deceased in 2008. The band used Jenny Saville’s 2005 painting Stare for the cover. Inspired by a newspaper cutting, the painting depicts an androgynous girl with a large birthmark on her face. But when presented with the image on a CD cover, Britain’s main supermarket chains saw something else entirely. Thinking that the image depicted a young buy with a bloodied face, they deemed the cover “inappropriate” and refused to carry the album unless it was shipped in a plain slipcover. Bradfield regards the decision as "utterly bizarre", and has commented: "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."