Four major UK supermarkets have censored the new Manic Street Preachers album cover after they deemed it too offensive for their customers.

The image used is a 2005 painting by Jenny Saville called 'Stare' and depicts a young boy with a birthmark on one side of his face.

But Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys and Morrisons will sell the record with a slip cover as they're worried the red on the painting looks like splattered blood.

James Dean Bradfield from the Welsh trio says they're baffled and angered by the decision.

He tells BBC6music: "(The decision) is utterly bizarre... It's 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.

"We just thought it was a beautiful painting. We were all in total agreement. We just saw a much more modern version of Lucian Freud-esque brushstrokes. That's all we saw."

The 40-year-old continued: "You can have lovely shiny buttocks and guns everywhere in the supermarket on covers of magazines and CD's, but you show a piece of art and people just freak out.

"It's the first time ever that we actually feel controlled by the idea, which basically stemmed from Richey (Edwards)'s words. So we're not going to censor it or anything, because it is what it is.

"It is bizarre that supermarkets actually think that that's going to impinge on anyone's psyche."

The Manics used Jenny Saville's painting 'Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face)' on their defining 1994 album 'The Holy Bible'.

(by Scott Colothan)