Manic Street Preachers - Picturesque

'Picturesque' featured on the 'God Saves The Manics' EP, which was a release limited to 3,000 copies and given away free at a gig at the Hammersmith Apollo on Tuesday 19th April 2005. Apparently, however, the boxes were left unattended and, as a result, the unscrupulous attendees took multiple copies, leaving most in attendance to miss out. This led to the band making it available for a time as a free download on the website. Further to add to the mystic around this unique release, there remains the belief that the three songs here were written and recorded with the intent of being released as b-sides on a third single from 2004's 'Lifeblood'. However, after the album bombed (still the only one of the band's studio albums to miss out on the Top 5 since 1992) a planned single was cancelled, and the songs emerged here instead. Annoyingly, they were not included in the 2024 re-issue of 'Lifeblood', though they were released on the Japanese version of 'Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of Manic Street Preachers', which received a belated release in the country in 2005.