Richey added a personal touch; a photograph of Lamacq with the line ‘Cheekbone Charisma’ scribbled alongside it. Years later the band would describe their approach as ‘quite clinical. We were like magpies, collecting information, keeping dossiers on journalists and learning how to manipulate them.’
Interestingly, also pasted into one of the books is a letter from Richey’s bank manager in Blackwood, desperate to speak about his increasing overdraft. In keeping these small, minute details, you wonder whether Richey was already deliberately documenting the band’s pathway to fame. As in the teenage mountainside photographs taken by Richard Fry, where Richey posed like someone who believed in his pre-ordained stardom, he clearly had a narrative for himself already mapped out in his mind.
Meanwhile, giving the band’s shot at the big time all he had, he even wrote some of Nicky’s final year essays to free up his friend’s time to practise. He also applied for membership of the Musicians’ Union on behalf of one Nicholas Jones.
‘He used to do a lot in terms of organising the band,’ Mark Hambridge recalls. ‘I remember he’d come over mine and use my double tape deck to copy the “Suicide Alley” demos. He’d put them in a DIY album sleeve with glued-on newspaper cuttings and send them out to journalists, radio stations and management agencies.
‘He’d add a photocopied press release or a letter when he posted them. We’d go out and have a drink after, and I remember a hilarious night when Nick wrestled Richard’s shoes off him outside the Red Lion and hung them up on a street sign. Richard being much shorter than Nick couldn’t reach that high, so he was drunkenly running and jumping through the air to grab them.’
Most pertinent was Richey’s own personal transformation. He’d flirted with the idea of different names since he first became The Blue Generation’s Ritchie Vee, then corresponding for a short time as Richey Zero. He knew the next step was to re-imagine himself in readiness for the quest ahead.
While in university, he studied the Situationists and Guy Debord’s seminal work The Society of Spectacle. With Richey’s knowledge of the construction of music mythology, he would have been acutely aware of how Malcolm McLaren applied Debord’s ideas when he created the Sex Pistols, and the birth of British punk.
Richey knew the Manic Street Preachers would be a deliberate throwback to the Paris riots of 1968 and the punk movement of the 1970s, where youth culture and radical politics were intertwined. He sought to capture fans’ imaginations by replicating the cultural influence that bands and writers wielded at that time.
‘Punk didn’t achieve anything, it was a brief flirtation with a youth movement,’ Richey told the Welsh press in 1990. ‘When they got tired of being punks, they quickly decided to move on to something else. The only difference is, we mean it.’
‘Media stars are spectacular representations of living human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles. Stardom is a diversification in the semblance of life, the object of an identification with mere appearance which is intended to compensate for the crumbling of directly experienced diversifications of productive activity. Celebrities figure various styles of life and various views of society which anyone is supposedly free to embrace and pursue in a global manner.’
Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle
‘When Richard was in university, and when he first joined the band, he used to tape bands off the television,’ remembers Rachel. ‘He’d sit and study their live performances and their interviews religiously. The main two bands he’d record were the young Rolling Stones and Guns N’ Roses. He’d buy a leather case for the videos and put a collage on the front of the bands contained on the tapes. He’d sit and focus on them with the same concentration he’d study for his exams.’
‘We all decided that from the start, me and Richey can’t write music but we can write lyrics and look pretty tarty. Richey’s the spirit of the band.’
Nicky Wire, 1991
Moved by The Blue Generation’s spirit and Richey’s enthusiasm, in 1989 Mark Hambridge took a trip to America with the intention of living the Beat dream. ‘Richard inspired me to go,’ says Mark. ‘I wanted to do the whole Kerouac On the Road thing, and Nick’s brother Patrick was already out there, so I decided to do it as I’d only be young once.’
Having graduated from Swansea University with a degree in American Literature, by the late eighties Patrick Jones was already living that dream. Writing and teaching literature in Tennessee, his pioneering odyssey to the Deep South, and later Illinois, was evidently of huge inspiration to Mark and the young Manic Street Preachers. Patrick’s Blue Generation nickname was ‘Rusty Blueheart’ – after Rusty James, a character in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film Rumble Fish.
From the very outset, the Manic Street Preachers advertised that they took as much inspiration from other art forms as from music itself. Novels and poetry were of great importance, but there is no question that a driving force powering them along their journey was their love of certain films – most of them American. After the public downsizing South Wales had just received, and the barely articulable yet deeply felt death of its previous identity and narrative, it fell to certain inspirational films to get hearts in the Valleys pumping again. As the young Manic Street Preachers discovered, great sustenance could be drawn from an analogy between post-industrial English-speaking South Wales and dramas portraying the tragedy and humanity of proletarian America.
Rumble Fish has been longer and more often associated with the Manics than any other film. It is clear how the young friends from Blackwood might see in it a glamourised reflection of their own lives. The story revolves around a group of adolescents stuck in the small post-industrial backwater of Sapulpa, Oklahoma. Caught in provincial hellish boredom, their entertainment comes in the forms of gang fights, or ‘rumbles’.
The lead character, the Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke), has legendary status among the youth, a former gang leader imbued with strange charisma. Local teens are fascinated by the fact that the Motorcycle Boy has successfully managed the impossible, and broken out of their dead-end existence; fascination in him is deepened by the fact that he is absent, having exiled himself to the relatively glamorous California. And the mythicising aspect of a sudden disappearance is a crucial component – the Motorcycle Boy has been gone for two months, leaving without explanation, or promise of return.
Sold as an existentialist movie for teenagers, Rumble Fish has as its main character an adult, contrasting with the youngsters populating most of the action; he is world-weary, wise and broken. When the hero returns to Oklahoma, he has visibly changed, and is jaded by his former life and reputation. Of immense appeal to the young Manic Street Preachers was this character’s objectivity, and what his father (Dennis Hopper) describes as his ‘acute perception’. The Motorcycle Boy is a romantic figure; an enigma to those around him, and foredoomed.
Before Richey’s disappearance in 1995, James Dean Bradfield knew well which reference to draw upon in fleshing out the mythic dimensions of it all. ‘Richey was always much more into books and films than rock ’n’ roll,’ he said, ‘and I think those art forms are much more idealised. I think they influenced the way he viewed life, and the way he thought it would be.
‘Whenever I talk about Richey, I think of that quote from Rumble Fish: “He’s merely miscast the play; he was born on the wrong side of the river; he has the ability to do anything he wants to do but he can’t find anything he wants to do.”’
There is little doubt that director Coppola worked on Rumble Fish very consciously as a film inspired by the recent punk/new wave movement in pop culture. The Motorcycle Boy was a hybrid of The Clash’s Joe Strummer and the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, an effect encouraged by the superb soundtrack created by The Police’s drummer Stewart Copeland, and featuring vocals by Stan Ridgway of post-punks Wall of Voodoo. Locations used even included Cain’s Ballroom, the Tulsa venue that hosted a notorious Pistols gig in 1978. For four pu
nk fanboys in the blighted Blackwood of the mid-eighties, Coppola’s masterpiece had tremendous pull.
Topping it all was the extremely seductive visual aesthetic. Coppola shot in black and white, drawing inspiration from European avant-garde cinema and literature. The South Wales Valleys could now easily be re-imagined as the set of an existentialist film noir drama; little wonder then that the Manic Street Preachers continued to reference this work for years, both verbally and visually.
As Richey told MTV in 1993, ‘I think all great art is based on the politics of boredom, completely. When there’s nothing around, you’ve got nothing in your life, you can just solely concentrate on what you’re trying to say and what you’re trying to do, which is definitely what happened with us.’
With the power of great humanising and rousing works of art like Rumble Fish, the band’s backwater beginnings could be transformed into a source of inspiration; a foundation for realness.
Just before Mark Hambridge’s departure for America, Richey gave him an empty notebook, covered in his signature collage work, with instructions inside to ‘Write a bluebeat novel. Write your soul.’ Mark used the book to document his trip across the States.
Describing Richey as ‘an encourager’, Mark shows us another paisley-covered notebook, onto which Richey had etched the dedication ‘Denny Blue’. Inside is an inscription: ‘Happy Christmas 88# Den. Make this the best songbook ever, get your band going. Love, Richey x. BLUE TOO’.
Instead, Mark wrote 20 pages of diary entries and observations from life in Blackwood; a rare first-person testimony recording the atmosphere surrounding the early Manic Street Preachers – bleak, insular, yet hopeful and romantic.
We walked through the town, a cold town, an old town, my town. I felt a lot of affinity with it, but in a matter of two weeks things had begun to happen – sad town. The Council had opened their cheque books – dust threw everywhere – and decided to make it a new town, a modern town, a fast town, a moving town – no, a BULLSHIT town. Full of repression and money-grabbing bureaucrats. I’ve seen them already as I waited for the No. 6 bus. They speak with accents, and work like Robots – another towncentreshopping precinctmarketsquare. No thought or care, ‘thrown it up’, ‘the sooner it’s up the sooner we can make more money and get fatter and have an heart attack’ – Sooner the fucking better!! My town already has a reputation, but I really think the younger generation are going to have more places to fight, drink and generally enhance the reputation to a pitch where my town is going to be a battleground and my affinity will disappear. I was raised here and in years to come I don’t want to frown when I talk of where I lived.
It was cold that night, although I wasn’t complaining. As soon as I’d got some of that crisp fresh air into my lungs and I was side by side with my friends I felt as if there was a glow sheltering us as we walked through our town. We talked and laughed freely, walking towards the terraced house where Tea and Toast was plentiful, normally until 3am. Many times I had felt the need to talk and that terraced house, in which I had heard many songs that had cause to inspire me, was always where I headed and always where I felt wanted, and more importantly for me, a part of everything.
The drummers burned drumming. Makes of kits, ‘hardware’ and prices were swapped. The writers and musicians scored and talked about friends that had gone on trips to places near and far. The kettle didn’t stop boiling and a third of a bottle of whiskey together with a large bar of chocolate also disappeared. I took a back seat and breathed-in both conversations, paying some attention to the music in the stereo.
The walk back to my house was exciting. J—was drunk and was mad and was burning. I retired to my bed in the knowledge that this was going to be the start of something good.
Well before they won recognition outside their immediate circle, the Manic Street Preachers and their accomplices had begun building the narrative later consumed by millions. Mark’s up-close testimony offers a good outline of the self-mythologising, self-creating story that The Blue Generation and the Manic Street Preachers embedded themselves in. Immersing themselves in music, art and literature, they incorporated these sources to construct a world within which they could be the protagonists in a thrilling story, designed to eject them out of their dead-end existence, and onto a voyage into rock mythology. Mark was one of the first to be affected and energised by their deeply aesthetic vision.
We talked about music and books and I became interested in the writers that my friends sought comfort in. I read their works and found for the first time I was living these books. As I read, I was in them, doing their everyday things, drinking in their bars, walking their hometown downtown streets. And I asked myself, Why am I doing it their way? Why aren’t I doing these things myself with my rucksack and my money in my time?
I used to feel quite alone, but now I have realised wherever my friends are we’re all under the same sky, and we were linked by our pens and our bluehearts and blue ideals under the immense oh so immense blue sky. So no longer did I yearn for Rusty B., Nicky Wire and Richey Zero because they were with me every minute of the day.
Mark’s writing echoes the sentiments familiar to many thousands of the band’s fans. A dedication felt by so many, often misunderstood and derided by onlookers. Could Mark Hambridge be described as the Manic Street Preachers’ first proper fan?
Talking to Mark about his American trip makes two things clear. First, the enormous impact that Richey had on him personally; and second, the huge ambitions harboured by the Blackwood group, to embark upon a heroic odyssey worthy of the world’s attention.
Of great interest to us in considering Richey’s disappearance is the fact the Manic Street Preachers from the outset had a masterly grasp of how gripping narratives work, and the role of the striving individual at their heart.
In a music press article published just weeks before Richey disappeared, this objectivity, the band’s insider knowledge of the working of heroic narratives, was made public and explicit, when reference was made to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. A study in comparative mythology, its central premise is that a ‘hero archetype’ may be found throughout human history, literature, culture and society. In Campbell’s own description, there exists a ‘monomyth’ whose structure is remarkably similar across countless incarnations:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
The Manic Street Preachers’ story, but particularly Richey’s, has a peculiar applicability to Campbell’s outlined structure. That Richey was well versed in this work might help shed light on his later actions, not least for the fact that he and the band repeatedly emphasised their mission to forge a new and unprecedented ‘rock myth’.
‘We had this evangelical desire,’ said Nicky Wire in 1996, ‘to start the revolution and be absolutely fucking massive. It didn’t just mean getting a record deal. It was all-conquering, psycho, egotistical.’
He would go on to admit that Richey’s ambitions were at a higher level altogether. Mainstream music success was not enough for him; Nicky described him as ‘aiming for the Pulitzer Prize’. The implication is that Richey’s disappearance may itself be seen in the context of myth-building – inviting us to consider whether the scope of his ambition, and ability to do what others could not, might range far beyond what would normally seem feasible.
Without question, rock mythology and immortality held great fascination for Richey. In another school exercise book from his early adolescence, he wrote:
Thin or fat? Shrivelled by the sun, his face looked like tanned leather. Nobody believed that such a puny creature could have such reserves of strength. No one ever laughed at Kirk because they were scared of him and did not know what he would do because he was quite mysterious. Kirk was always a jump in front of everyone else because he alway
s anticipated everyone’s move and made sure that he had the best chance in any game they played. The qualities of a born leader are to be always out in front and whenever there is anything important to be done then the leader should do it best. A born leader should have a ‘magnetic’ personality and should be able to make everything he says seem believable, honest and sensible. A typical born leader is Robert Nesta Marley. Kirk was rebellious and did whatever he felt like doing. If he got into trouble he was never caught.
The repeating theme in those early teenage stories, of revolt and exile, was even viewed in the context of music demigod immortality. Going with the hypothesis that this was a pattern of thought and feeling Richey carried over into his years with the band, a keen eye should be kept for discerning whether his actions support a pre-planned vanishing, a deliberately constructed mystery. Was, for instance, his semi-detached relationship with his allotted instrument an outer sign that he knew he would not be attached to it for long? Was it, moreover, evidence of his having placed his talent and focus outside of mundane guitar-picking, and that his sights were set on where the real rewards lay?
Richey Edwards played his first gig with the Manic Street Preachers at Swansea University in spring 1989. Dan Roland’s membership of the Entertainment Society secured them a gig in the Mandela Student Union bar. Richey waited in the wings as the band played their first few songs before joining them on stage for the remaining three.
‘I wasn’t there for the gig, but I remember him preparing for it,’ says Adrian. ‘He had a white denim jacket and he wanted me to draw a military stencil on the back. So he bought some fabric paint and made me draw on the back of it when he was wearing it. When he took it off he said it wasn’t “scuzzy” enough, and made me go over it again and again until it looked rough enough for his liking.’
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