Manic Street Preachers frontman James Dean Bradfield is baffled by the decision to censor the band's new album cover - insisting critics have misunderstood the artwork.
A number of stores in the U.K. are selling Journal For Plague Lovers in plain cases, because the original cover - a painting by artist Jenny Saville - shows a face that appears to be splattered in blood.
But Bradfield is annoyed, insisting the image isn't blood, and accusing store bosses of looking for controversy. He tells the BBC, "We just thought it was a beautiful painting. We were all in total agreement. It is her brushwork. 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.
"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".
It's not the first time the Manics have teamed with Saville - they used one of earlier paintings of an overweight woman in just underwear on the cover of their 1994 album, The Holy Bible.
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