Ed Holden. Photo: Helen McAteer

Ed Holden, who has performed as part of Pep Le Pew and Genod Droog, recorded six tracks with children from around Blaenau Ffestiniog, telling the stories of Noah, Jesus and David and Goliath, among others.

"Before I began this project, I didn't have that much interest in the Bible," said Holden. "I always thought that it was something for true believers, until I created a rap version of Zacchaeus' story. After this my opinion changed completely.

Rapio'r Beibl

"It's a lot of fun to introduce these stories to the children and then re-vamping them in a modern and interesting way, especially for the new generation, because rap is a cool thing."

Rapio'r Beibl is available to download now from Sain Records.

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Spirit In The Room, the follow-up to 2010's successful Praise And Blame, has been largely well-received, with The Independent giving it 4/5: "Continuing the association with producer Ethan Johns that proved so fruitful on Praise And Blame, Tom Jones's 2010 exploration of American blues and gospel modes, Spirit In The Room takes a decisive step forward by focusing instead on a more modern repertoire."

The Guardian (3/5) comments: "Ultimately, you conclude, Jones's golden voice was built for hooting, hollering and hubba-hubba-ing at the ladies, not mulling things over."

The Telegraph (3/5) concludes: "When Jones really connects with the material the results have undeniable emotional heft, with an elegiac delivery of Paul McCartney's (I Want To) Come Home and a brooding interpretation of Blind Willie Johnson's dark blues Soul Of A Man. The album has to be judged a late-period triumph, even if I am not entirely convinced The Voice's avuncular judge is quite as deep as the material demands."

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The Joy Formidable with Andy Wallace

The Joy Formidable

The as-yet-untitled follow-up to The Big Roar was recorded at a studio in Maine, and in their tour bus as they journeyed around the States.

Talking to Spin magazine Ritzy Bryan said: "We've just been really excited about moving on artistically. I think it's been a very natural stride forward. [Rhydian and I] are from a classical background, but we've never scored or composed for instruments before so I think we found ourselves quite challenged by allowing our musical palette to grow. That's always kind of exciting about the music that we're making, that it can catch people off-guard in different ways."

Ritzy believes that working with Andy Wallace has given the upcoming record "a greater sense of dynamism and clarity than...The Big Roar. The thing with Andy is, he makes great sounding records. It's not always about everything being technically correct. It's about keeping all these little nuances. It's about making the most out of the music that's there. [Andy] allowed moments in the songs to flourish beautifully."

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64 Bar Music label head Pete Griffin

"We are putting together a soundtrack for the games that reflects the passion of sport and its inherent link with the joy of music," said 64 Bar Music's Pete Griffin, aka DJ Kovas.

"We wanted to mark the Olympics with a mix that defined how people were moved by sport, and what the games mean to them.

"The music that is made will reflect the feelings we have when we watch sport. It might be joy through victory, or the melancholy taste of defeat.

"There could be the essence of hope in the music, a sense of pride, of determination, or of drive."

Griffin believes this to be their most ambitious project to date, with over 150 countries participating in the London games. "We're calling for submissions today,' he said. "Tunes have to be sent in by the end of the closing ceremony on 12 August 2012.

"There is no restriction on style or tempo, but tracks must be 64 bars in length."

Contributing producers can use a dropbox to submit a track, or get in touch with 64 Bar Music directly through the contact page.

The mix album will be released on 19 August via the label's website.

Lostprophets - Weapons

BBC Music
"Because of its compact form and committed performances, Weapons is a release that burns brightly. Its cause is aided by the fact that Lostprophets are a quite fabulous band in motion, one equipped with not just power but also nuance."

Kerrang! 4/5
"...the majority of Weapons showcases a band every bit as hungry as the one that blasted out of their Pontypridd rehearsal room a decade ago."

NME 5/10
"We Bring An Arsenal oozes gang chants worthy of a lads' holiday and Better Off Dead includes vocally-manipulated rapping, which isn't as unappealing as it sounds. But as a big comeback for these Welsh titans, it's more lost than prophecy... "

Rock Sound 8/10
"Weapons does indeed mark a new beginning for Lostprophets. Where in the past they specialised in instant hits, now they're aiming for something larger and more long-lasting."

Uncut 5/10
"Another Shot adds tension and atmosphere but a tendency toward the derivative comes to the fore..."

Q 2/5
"Heart On Loan, Another Shot and Jesus Walks save this record from the sonic doldrums because they're driven by bristling, big choruses and power riffs, proving that Lostprophets should stick to what they know."

The Guardian 4/5
"On We Bring An Arsenal, it means blending Auto-Tune, a mariachi football chant and a non-specific-but-disgusted lyric - a crudely effective concoction that captures the feeling of being 16 and looking for the meaning of life."

Punktastic 3.5/5
"It's perhaps a little strange that Weapons sees Lostprophets drawing further on influences from bands that they themselves inspired over the last decade (not least from some of their Welsh contemporaries in The Blackout and Kids In Glass Houses), but if taken for what it is (a pop rock record) it's a great listen with a few non-fatal flaws."

"It's hard to say the members of Lostprophets themselves perform badly here - all do their respective jobs well enough without ever becoming brilliant or more than mildly interesting at any point. It's really the songwriting, and a seeming allergy to experimentation, that brings Weapons down to the level that it occupies."

AltSounds
"Lostprophets still have a career and they've done well to sustain it, they've adapted to the changing times and they've gotten themselves an entire new fan base along the way. They've still got their style, they just don't have any substance left."

Theartsdesk
"This is a band that knows where its strengths are - in simple, fist-pumping choruses and ferocious riffs. It's not to say that they don't play with the formula... but the songs that step back a little are the ones that us newcomers are unlikely to be humming in the morning."

Stereoboard
"I've used the words "anthemic" and "epic" a few times in this review, but they're words that epitomise the sound of 'Weapons'. It's clear that Lostprophets have put their heart and soul into this album, and are proud to be releasing something that they've worked so hard on... A very welcome return for one of Britain's best rock bands."

Rockedup.co.uk
"As sad as it is to say (I grew up listening to fakesoundofprogress religiously) but Weapons just might be the final nail in the coffin for anyone holding out hope of Lostprophets ever being relevant again."

Plant-loud.com 8/10
"However, for all the middle-finger, we're not going away attitude of the band in 2012, dig underneath it all and you find a band who still love writing catchy rock songs."

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With a capacity of 74,000, the stadium held enough people to take the song into the top five if everyone bought a copy.

Half the audience purchasing the charity single would bring it to the top 10. However, twice the capacity of the stadium would be needed to almost guarantee a chart-topper.

Lauren Kreisler of the Official Charts Company said: "We wouldn't speculate as to how the song will do, but it's an interesting story. You'll have to wait till 4pm on Wednesday when we publish our midweek charts to find out how it's doing."

Paul Child told the Western Mail: "It's an idea which came about because we wanted to get as many fans involved with the single as possible and Bread Of Heaven is famously sung on the terraces and throughout the stands so what better song to choose as the Grand Slam single.

"But ultimately it's a celebration of this year's tournament. It's a way for fans to thank the team, letting them know how grateful we all are and how proud we are to get behind them."

Cwm Rhondda/Bread Of Heaven is available in physical form at Tesco stores in Wales and on download sites. All proceeds from the single will be donated to the Welsh Rugby Charitable Trust.

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The single, released by Music Wales Studios of Bridgend in conjunction with the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU), will feature 'Wales' as the credited artist: the first time an entire country has been the performer of a work.

Child told The Western Mail: "The aim is to get Bread Of Heaven into the top 20 in charts and played on Radio One. Ultimately it's a celebration of this year's tournament. It's a way for fans to thank the team, letting them know how grateful we all are and how proud we are to get behind them."

Profits from the single will be donated by the WRU to the Welsh Rugby Charitable Trust.

Craig Maxwell of the WRU said: "To make Wales' 2012 Championship extra special, we're calling on the support of all our fans to get hold of their copy of the official WRU single and get the traditional sound of Welsh rugby at the Millennium Stadium into the music charts for the first time."

Evil (Is Going On) cover

Evil (Is Going On) is coming out next weekend on White's Third Man Records. Only 100 copies of the 'tri-coloured' seven inch will be available to purchase, all through Cardiff's Spillers Records.

Spillers, reputed to be the oldest record shop in the world, will only have one day to sell the record, but I'm sure that'll be more than enough for all the copies to shift.

Speaking to The Western Mail's Dave Owens, Spillers owner Ashli Todd said: "The first we heard of the release was one of our Twitter followers suggested to Third Man Records on Twitter that Spillers should get the honour of selling the exclusive version of Tom's new single.

"A few weeks passed and Forte, who are the distributor for Third Man's releases here in the UK, sent me an email to say that they had proposed Spillers for the exclusive. We were sworn to secrecy as the logistics of us stocking the release were batted back and forth."

It was worth the wait for Ashli, though. "In terms of interest, it's been quite overwhelming. We've had people from all over the country ringing up about the release and even an email from a man who is coming over from Italy to get a copy."

Evil (Is Going On) goes on sale on Saturday 3 March, priced £15. Spillers opens at 9.30am, and is located at 31 Morgan Arcade in Cardiff. The standard black vinyl is available from all independent record shops from Monday 5 March.

A further 50 copies of the tri-coloured single will be randomly inserted into orders from the Third Man website.

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Gavin Butler and Neil Starr

Ghosts & Echoes, an acoustic 10 track record by Gavin Butler of The Blackout and Neil Starr of Attack! Attack!, will be released on 1 April.

I caught up with the duo prior to the recording, to find out more about this self-released album.

"I'd had songs written for The Blackout's album Hope that didn't really sit with the vibe of the album," says Gavin. "So I took them on the road with with Neil's other, first, band Dopamine in December. I had a great time playing them, it was so a new and challenging for me. I thought it's pointless having these songs and shelving them. Then Neil asked if I wanted to to a split and I thought, why not, I've literally got nothing to lose."

Neil: "For me the idea came about after Dopamine had Gavin come on tour with us in December. I've written songs in the past which i deemed 'not right' for Dopamine or Attack! Attack! and I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for us both to get a release out, not having enough songs on our own to release albums on our own yet.

"Gav and I have been mates for years and years. I got to hear his stuff for four nights in a row on the Dopamine December tour and loved it. I dropped him a text in the new year and said would he be up for it and he was. It was lucky we could work it out with the busy schedules of our bands!"

Gavin Butler

How would the men describe their own sides? Gavin is influenced by Britpop royalty: "I'm not the most technical of guitarists, so I rely a lot on simple but interesting chords. One of my favourite song writers is Noel Gallagher and I think he's been a big influence on me.

"Wonderwall is one of the most uncomplicated songs ever written yet one of the biggest and best. There's a beauty in simplicity. That is until I learn how to shred then it's all about tapping and acoustic pinched harmonics."

"My side are songs which were written on acoustic guitar and therefore have a much more laid-back feel," says Neil. "There is a lot more emphasis on the melody and lyrics rather than the music behind it . A lot of my stuff is a finger picked style."

And how would they describe the other side? "Neil has one the best voices in the 'biz'," says Gavin. "He took an old The Blackout song which was pretty metal-ish and totally reworked it into an amazing acoustic song."

Neil Starr

"Gavin's songs are more focused on the strumming then the picking but again are all acoustic based tracks," says Neil. "I think the two sides will blend together nicely. We are recording them with [Dopamine and Straight Lines member] Todd Campbell at the same studio so that'll help with the overall feel too.

What are the mechanics of the release of Ghosts & Echoes?

"It's the epitome of DIY," reckons Gavin. "Self-funded, self-released; I even did the artwork. We're kind of lucky that the Internet can provide a ridiculous platform for us. If it was 10 years ago we'd need distribution and labels to get CDs into shops. Now we can sell and ship a CD to anyone in the world on our own."

Neil agrees, and embraces the self-reliance necessary in a release like this. "We are funding it on our own, we are recording it on our own and we will be the ones sat around my dining room table packing and posting them off after we have signed them.

"We are only pressing 1,000 CDs so it'll be limited edition from that point of view. With the power of social networking sites we can easily reach out worldwide: we have already received orders from all over the world. It's great!"

The duo have an eight date tour in support of the release in April, so what should people expect to see when they appear live? Any duets?

"We might do a sneaky collaboration, who knows?" says Neil. "The tour is still in its early stages of preparation but i know I will be doing some Dopamine and Attack! Attack! songs in my set too."

Gavin: "On the last Dopamine tour Neil and I did the cover of The Blackout song You And Me Vs The Revolution that I mentioned earlier. So there's always a chance we'll work on something, maybe a TenMinutePreview/Dopamine/Attack! Attack!/The Blackout medley."

Lastly, in an ideal world, who would they love to release a split album with?

"What you mean apart from Gav?" laughs Neil. "For me it would be Daniel Johns from Silverchair. He's a musical genius in my eyes and that would be a dream come true."

"That's a tough one," says Gavin. "[Faith No More frontman] Mike Patton is notorious for his side projects, one of them being one of my favourite bands of all time. He's always so left field and I think he'd just produce something that people wouldn't expect."

For more information, check out Gavin's Tumblr, Attack! Attack!'s official site, and The Blackout's official site.

And listen to Oli and Bethan of Good Morning Wales talk to Manics producers Steve Brown and Greg Haver, plus Samoans guitarist Daniel Barnett, who was influenced to take up the instrument after listening to the album.

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Manic Street Preachers. Photo: Martyn Goodacre

That simple fact is enough to make a lot of people exclaim something along the lines of, 'cor that makes me feel old'. Including me.

It wasn't their best-selling album, even though prior to its release they expressed a desire for it to sell millions before their imminent split.

Neither was it their most acclaimed album, that honour probably going to the caustic classic of psychological and political malaise, The Holy Bible.

So why celebrate this anniversary? Well, it provided six top 40 singles. It introduced four alien-looking, glammed-up Welsh punks to the world. The album's promotion put these eyeliner- and slogan-smeared young men, barely out of their teens, onto magazine front covers in an era in which 'shoegaze' and 'grebo' were genres of serious critical consideration. They talked antagonistically and passionately through a lens of well-read education.

Of course it was Richey's infamous '4Real' self-harm incident that brought them to wider public attention; luckily they had the musical and intellectual chops for this not to became their defining career point. It was a journo-baiting stunt of horrifying, cold, calculating clarity that was designed by Richey to prove a point.

That point was that they weren't a joke. Looking as they did, sounding like they did, it would have been easy to write them off as such. But no joke bands ever delivered a double album, 18 tracks long, that included Motorcycle Emptiness, Little Baby Nothing, You Love Us, Slash 'N' Burn and Condemned To Rock 'N' Roll.

As some of our interviewees admit, it's over-long and sometimes overblown, but it holds up as a Welsh classic. That's why, two decades down the line, we're devoting this week to Generation Terrorists.

• Manics biographer and music critic Simon Price on the album and its legacy
• Radio Wales celebrates Generation Terrorists
• Interview with Traci Lords, guest vocalist
• Interview with Steve Brown, producer of the album
• Interview with Dave Eringa, session music and Manics engineer
• Interview with Matthew Olivier, studio in-house engineer on the album
• Video and audio clips
• Interview with Sally Margaret Joy, Melody Maker journalist and musician
• Thoughts of Jarrad Owens, Welsh journalist and Manics super-fan
• John Robb on Generation Terrorists
• Adam Walton: Generation Terrorists And Me
• What the papers said

Thanks to Katherine Hinds-Payne, @manicstmania, Hall Or Nothing, Ben Marshall, Black Barn Studios and Jarrad Owens in assisting with these features.

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Watch a short clip of the band performing Motorcycle Emptiness on Top Of The Pops in 1992.

Watch the band perform You Love Us live in Blackwood in 2011.

Watch Radio 2's Jo Whiley talk to James and Nicky prior to their homecoming Blackwood show (advisory: low volume):

Listen to James and Nicky talk to Radio Wales' Jamie and Louise in 2011 about their career:

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Steve Brown

"I got the job with the Manics because they liked the work I did on the Love album by The Cult. I was working at the time in the States, so I'd not heard anything by them, although I had seen the press. On the record, I wanted to achieve what they wanted to achieve - and they wanted to be the biggest band in the world.

"They had full control of their creative direction, but I steered them on the singles front. Creatively, they were - and I think still are - very unique.

"It's not true that only James [Dean Bradfield] and Sean [Moore] recorded material used on the record. The whole band had a major input into the writing and playing of the album.

"I don't think the double album format detracted from the record; I love everything on Generation Terrorists, and so do a whole lot of other people!

"My favourite track on the record is Condemned To Rock And Roll, I think. There's nothing on the record I'd change and I'm very proud of my work on it. Lots of people have told me it's a classic.

"I'm glad it's regarded as being important in UK music history; we all worked very hard on it. I love the fact that I did it, and I least like the fact I'll never be able to do it again for them."

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