Withdrawn Traces

by Sara Hawys Roberts

  ‘I’ll never forget when I visited him in Swansea and we went to the pubs on the Mumbles Mile. Two girls pointed him out and one said, “Oh my God, he’s fucking gorgeous. My fanny is dripping for a fucking tonight!” Richard was absolutely appalled. Me and Simon and Dan were laughing and could see the funny side of it, but he just couldn’t. It really upset him that people, especially girls, would lower themselves to that base, animalistic level.’

  Mark shares a letter written on a mock exam paper from an innocent sounding Richey, where he describes the best night of his life watching indie band The Primitives, and his joy at meeting one of his biggest crushes – the lead singer, Tracy Primitive.

  During his first year at Swansea, Richey became fixated on a petite, red-haired English girl named Clare. He would often speak of his unrequited love for her. She was dating a tall, leather-jacket wearing boy named Dominic, viewed on campus as the archetypical cool guy. The exact opposite of how Richey viewed himself.

  ‘Rich reminded me of boys in high school when they’d just discovered girls at 13 or 14,’ says Simon. ‘He’d put them on pedestals like they were a different species. He’d always use the word classic to describe girls. He’d tell me I was lucky to have Sorelle as she was “classic girlfriend material”.

  ‘He’d go on about Clare being his first love and how he was the total opposite to Dominic, because he saw himself as short and ugly. He’d spend a lot of time styling his hair every morning, parting it over the spots on his forehead. I remember him having a giant can of hairspray and never having a single hair out place, but it didn’t help his confidence at the time.

  ‘There’s a great photo I had of Rich and Dan on my bed together, when Rich was blind drunk and Dan had written this sign to put in his hands saying “I love Clare”. We always joked that one day we’d show her.’

  When Richey started university he told his fellow students he’d never drunk before, a statement that he stood by until his later years with the Manic Street Preachers. Simon remembers taking Richey down to the Union bar and buying him what was meant to be his first alcoholic drink.

  ‘I sometimes look back and feel guilty because I remember buying him his first pint,’ he says. ‘I recall thinking it was mad at the time – an 18-year-old who’d never had a drink before. I do sometimes feel guilty that I introduced him to alcohol by buying him that first pint.’

  Yet Blackwood friend Adrian Wyatt dismisses the notion of Richey being a naïve teetotaller on arrival in Swansea. ‘That’s Richard all over,’ he laughs. ‘He had a charming vulnerability that he could play up to at times. He knew how people reacted to it, and that’s one thing he did do quite well around the age of 18. He was good at it with girls too, they’d find his innocence charming. I think he’d say certain things to endear himself to them. He knew how people would react to the things he said and did.’

  In the late spring of 1987, Richey’s infatuation with Clare ended, when she cut her hair into a style that he didn’t like. He also finally plucked up the courage to talk to her, and discovered that her voice was ‘too nasal’ for his liking.

  ‘It’s like that Billy Bragg lyric,’ says Adrian. “She cut ’er hair and I stopped lovin’ ’er” – it was something that simple that ended this almost year-long infatuation. He got over it pretty quickly, and said he could justify it because he was always only looking from a distance anyway.’

  Something far more significant was to happen only a month later, when Richey received an unexpected visitor on the evening of 8 June 1987. Graham Edwards had driven all the way down from Blackwood to deliver the heartbreaking news that Richey’s beloved grandmother Kezia Edwards had died earlier that day.

  Richey had continued to visit Kezia in Church View until just before her death. When he returned to his devastated family home late that summer evening, he heard the sound of his father breaking down in tears through the bedroom walls.

  Graham Edwards was an old-fashioned man, displays of such raw emotion were rare and, of course, there was the need to stay strong for his grief-stricken wife and two teenage children. However, this incident of hearing his father cry for the first time, and realising that Graham Edwards felt he needed to do such a thing privately, is something Richey would spend a lot of time deliberating on in his later life. By contrast, Rachel recalls Richey’s outpouring of grief at Kezia’s funeral.

  ‘It was the first time he’d set foot in church in years, and when the service was ongoing, he was crying his eyes out,’ she says. ‘We were all obviously upset, but he was inconsolable. I don’t know if with the death of our nan, he perceived that as a loss of his youth and innocence. I think of the lyrics he wrote for “Die in the Summertime” and how then, such an integral part of childhood had, for him, been extinguished forever.’

  Soon after Richey returned to university following the funeral, Adrian Wyatt visited him for the weekend. He was to witness Richey self-mutilating for the first time.

  ‘We were sat in his room and he was at his desk, and he started drawing and stabbing on his leg with a compass through his jeans,’ he says. ‘I asked him what he was doing and he made some throwaway remark to me about needing to feel in control. The blood was spurting out of his jeans, and I found it odd, but it wasn’t sinister. The way he explained it away made me think it was more of a quirky, punk thing to do. The idea of self-harm as a way of coping was totally unknown to me.’

  This demonstration of self-harm coincided with his nan’s passing. During his later, turbulent years with the band, one counsellor diagnosed his need to self-harm as stemming from this period in his life, and the grief he experienced at her death.

  The statistics for self-harm and its link to unresolved grief are high. Psychologists view grief as an energy which, when unresolved, is sustained inside the mourner. Self-harmers go to great lengths to disperse this energy, and Richey learned to deal with his unresolved emotions in one of the most destructive ways.

  ‘Despite his intellect,’ says Richard Fry, ‘there was something at the heart of him that ate him up. That first year of university changed him somehow, he wasn’t the laid-back person I used to know. I don’t know whether it was the inability to cope away from home, or what happened to his nan, or because as time went by his internal problems began to amplify inside of him.’

  ‘As so often with unusually intelligent people, Edwards had a simple side, so pronounced it was tragicomic. He couldn’t work out how to use the washing machine in his Cardiff flat, so he took his dirty washing to his mum’s. Talking to him was like chatting with a mini Rain Man. He could be describing in minute and obscure detail the corruption of Winston Churchill, only to become distraught at the prospect of missing his favourite television soap opera … As a student, Edwards discovered that if he cut himself, it helped him concentrate. That’s how he got through university, and that’s how he got through life.’

  Emma Forrest, ‘Cut and Run’, Independent, 1996

  In September 1987, Richey began his second year at Swansea and moved into a six-bedroom house at 3 Mirador Crescent in the Uplands area of the city, with friends Dan Roland and Nigel Bethune. Brighton-born Greg Noble, one of his History class-mates, also joined them, bringing along two others from the Home Counties, including his childhood sweetheart, zoology student Jemma Hine, who would occupy the room next door to Richey’s.

  ‘When we were making living arrangements I remember Greg telling me this really, really clever bloke was going to be living with us,’ she tells us. ‘So I was expecting to be greeted by a bit of a geeky, bespectacled type, but when I met him I was surprised to see Rich was this very good-looking boy. He was totally unaware of it too, which made him that much more endearing. When we’d all go out together, it was Rich that all the girls would look at.’

  Jemma’s fond memories of living with Richey are typical of many students who co-habited during that era. Lunchtimes were spent watching Neighbours and evenings viewing EastEnders, with Richey sitting on the couch eating tinne
d beefburgers in onion gravy.

  On special occasions, the housemates would visit Martha’s restaurant in the city centre and treat themselves to a four-course meal for £5. Jemma’s photographs show a birthday celebration, with the housemates sharing a Mississippi mud pie by candlelight. Another photo captures Dan Roland washing dishes after a rare, shared celebration at the house, marking the end of the term before their Christmas break, as a smiling Nigel in a Christmas cracker crown photobombs the picture. The last of her photos shows Richey on the house landing, hovering between his and Jemma’s bedroom doors, dressed in an ill-fitting suit on the evening of Swansea University’s Christmas Ball. Jemma stresses this is not representative of how Richey looked during his time at Swansea.

  ‘Oh gosh, I remember him getting a pudding bowl haircut after he moved in! We were teasing him about it the whole time, saying he looked like something from the first Blackadder. Thankfully, he got rid of it soon after that.’

  Despite these photographs showing his more sociable side, housemate Greg Noble recalls Richey missing out on the bigger events on the student calendar, preferring to spend his time alone in the house.

  ‘He was quite insular and isolated most of the time,’ he says. ‘He and Nigel didn’t always come out for meals with us. He wasn’t a natural friend-maker. It didn’t come easy to him like it did to someone like Dan. It took a while to get to know him, because he wasn’t very extrovert or very public, which was the same for Nigel, and that could be why the two got on so well.’

  At Mirador Crescent, Richey grew closer to Dan and Nigel, and the other housemates often called the trio ‘The Three Musketeers’.

  ‘If you met Dan alongside Richey,’ says Jemma, ‘Dan was always centre-stage, chatting 19 to the dozen, and I’d wonder if Rich had such an extroverted friend because he was so shy and it helped bring him out of himself. You could see why Rich got on with Nigel, because he was another very shy character. But Rich was much more optimistic about the world, whereas Nigel was quite a glass half-empty guy.’

  The housemates’ memories of Nigel are of an intelligent and insular young man with a dry sense of humour. He rarely bothered with his appearance and met most situations with an apathetic shrug of his shoulders. Jemma, who now works for the Royal College of Psychiatry, feels Nigel may have been clinically depressed at the time.

  ‘Rich’s skin was clearing but Nigel’s was terrible,’ she recalls. ‘We’d go to the chippy and Nigel would eat greasy chips and gravy and I’d be telling him how bad it was for his skin, but he would say he didn’t care about his appearance. Nigel would never speak about family at all or anything going on back home. He didn’t seem to have any passion about anything and was normally quite flat. But when you got to know Rich, he’d be really passionate about missing his family, especially his sister and his dog, Snoopy.’

  All of Richey’s university friends recall that he would often mention his family life in Blackwood. Could this apparent emphasis on looking to home suggest that Richey failed to throw himself into student life and all its extracurricular possibilities? Did his drinking begin as a way of adapting to a new way of life, away from the family home?

  In later interviews, Richey told the music press that he began drinking at university, especially alone before bedtime to aid sleep. Those around him remember a different version of events. Richey getting drunk was such a rarity that Jemma recalls a striking image of him waking up with a hangover after a heavy night out drinking.

  ‘I’ll never forget opening the door and seeing he’d been sick in several of his record sleeves. They were his pride and joy, and they were all arranged neatly on his shelf. He’d taken the records out, tossed them on the floor and used the sleeves like a bucket. He felt so awful, he had such a headache the next morning. He was like, “Jem, I just ruined my albums. You know how much I love my albums, and I’ve been sick in them like envelopes.” He had no recollection of doing this.’

  Was Richey adept at hiding his drinking habit from his housemates, or did he simply play up these aspects of his university life to the press? There is an undeniable disparity between the statements he gave to the media over the years, as Richey Manic, and the Richard Edwards known to people in Blackwood and Swansea.

  Richey’s archive includes two large, glass-plated collages documenting his time in the first and second years at Swansea. Two photos stand out: a selfie of Richey taken during RAG week in 1987 showing him dressed as a sperm, wearing white face paint, and a ginger Richey posing for the camera after an unsuccessful attempt to turn his hair blond with Sun In Lightener. Surrounding these pictures are many others of himself, Dan and Nigel – everywhere from the beach to the pub – frozen in time, a poignant demonstration of the affection he felt for his two close friends.

  Back in Blackwood, Richey would continue to drink with his old Crosskeys college friends, while also developing new friendships that would shape his future. Nicky Wire joined Swansea University after transferring from Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1987. Described as a ghostly figure around the campus, and rarely seen at lectures, he preferred to spend most of his time back home in Blackwood. ‘I never saw him actually spending much time up here,’ remembers Simon Cross. ‘A lot of people thought he’d dropped out at one point.’

  In the summer of 1988, Richey, Mark Hambridge and Stephen Gatehouse would travel 20 minutes to Risca, between Blackwood and Newport, where Nicky also went to visit his girlfriend, Rachel Bartlett.

  ‘Richard would come back from university and Stephen, Adrian, Richard and I would go up to see Byron Harris in Risca,’ remembers Mark. ‘Rachel Bartlett knew Byron, so we all hung out in a pub called The Cuckoo. Rachel had a friend also from Risca, called Claire Forward, who Richard developed a crush on. They eventually started going out, and I think that was what he considered his first proper relationship.’

  Mark puts us in touch with Claire, now living in Derbyshire. When we speak on the phone, she reminisces fondly about the boy she considers her first love.

  ‘We knew each other back in college, but we were both so shy we never spoke to each other,’ she says. ‘I remember thinking he looked so different to other boys in Blackwood. He had a natural androgyny that really appealed to me.

  ‘In the summer of 1988 he plucked up the courage to talk to me in The Cuckoo, when he’d had a drink. I used to wear this floaty, flowery vintage dress on nights out, and once Richard noticed I wasn’t wearing it, so he came up to me and asked me where my lovely dress was. I remember thinking it was so sweet because he must have known that dress made me feel pretty.’

  Richey and Claire began dating in the summer of 1988, and he would buy her cuddly toys and literature, including Kerouac’s Big Sur and a book of Shakespeare’s love sonnets. He introduced her to the works of his favourite poets and writers: William Burroughs, Arthur Rimbaud and Remy de Gourmont. During their brief three months together, she viewed Richey as the ideal boyfriend, except for wishing he could overcome his intense self-consciousness which became more apparent as their relationship went on.

  ‘He was so passionate about everything. The world, his ideals, but most of all a real passion for me, which I’d never experienced from a boy before,’ she says. ‘He’d write me these long letters with all this energy jumping off the page. I’d only got letters like “today I went to the pub” from boys before that. Rich’s just blew me away at the time, and still do when I look at them today.

  ‘The only thing was his self-esteem. It crippled him. He used to talk about not being as good as the other boyfriends I had, and how I deserved better. He had trust issues, and thought I was looking at other boys all the time. It really wasn’t in a nasty or brute-ish way, it was more of an inward, almost masochistic thing that just made him hang his head low and want to go home. He would always say I was going to break his heart.’

  One evening Claire and Richey were joined in The Cuckoo by Nicky and his partner, Rachel. Nicky had biked there from football practice, changing from his football k
it into the tightest of cycling shorts. Richey was horrified at his friend’s show of immodesty, and accused Claire of ‘checking out’ Nicky’s crotch.

  ‘Once he got an idea into his head it was hard to convince him otherwise,’ she says. ‘I kept telling him I wasn’t interested in Nick, but he’d made up his mind. He left really upset and I remember thinking how prim and prudish he was. I guess it made sense as he’d grown up with a grandmother who was from the Victorian era, and that’s maybe why he was quite old-fashioned in a lot of ways.

  ‘He was still a virgin when we were dating, and although we were both very passionate together, we never consummated our relationship. He’d always stop it before we could go all the way. He’d tell me all he had left was his innocence and he couldn’t just give it away unless he was sure about it.’

  Claire never visited Richey’s house, and had the feeling that Richey preferred to keep his family and love life separate. However, he would often visit Claire at her family home in Risca. Her sister Alice, a keen photographer, took some photographs of the couple together on the front porch.

  ‘Getting him in the pictures was like pulling teeth,’ recalls Claire. ‘He kept telling us he believed it when the Native Americans would say photographs would steal your soul. We finally got him to do it because I told him I wanted a photo of us together before I went off to au-pair in France for two months.’

  Claire had planned to do a gap year in Paris, where she would au-pair for the children of a wealthy family. Before she left, Richey tried to break up their relationship by telling her she’d only grow tired of him eventually, so it was best he protected his fragile feelings by ending it first. Claire reassured him that she would never do anything to hurt him, and the two began a long-distance relationship via telephone and letters.

  Richey’s letters to Claire during this period show how much he missed her. ‘Look,’ he once humorously suggested, ‘why don’t you suffocate the children, or kick them about a bit so you’ll be sent home early and we can be together?’ His many letters and calls, declaring his undying love for his ‘Babey Claire’, were so passionate and persuasive that after only four weeks Claire decided to pack in the au-pair job and come home to reunite with her pining boyfriend.