‘Another Invented Disease’ dared to suggest that the AIDS epidemic was a deliberate attack, a suggestion also made by conspiracy researcher Milton William Cooper and Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. Yet rather than Richey endorsing such conspiracy theories, his allusions were more likely shrewdly embedded provocations.
Musically, Generation Terrorists flagrantly pinned much of its strategy for success on co-opting the Guns N’ Roses sound. The band confidently expected to win over hordes of sleaze/glam-metal fans across the world. They were more than aware of bands like L.A. Guns, Mötley Crüe, Poison and Ratt via their considerable T-shirt sales in the Valleys of South Wales, and saw their fans as sitting-duck targets.
It was a calculated route-one strategy, but would it work? If they dragged these unsuspecting punters in with the music, the album’s content would certainly make them think. Listeners were left to make sense of pithy quotes from artists, philosophers, novelists and poets, including Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Confucius and William Burroughs.
It all set out the parameters of the band’s playing field and threw down a challenge to the London music scene. London may be big in a British context, said the Manics, but it is provincial on the world stage, as is its current guitar music. The message, Don’t judge us on your paltry terms, we intend to step over your heads, was delivered with disarming bravura.
For the album’s front sleeve, there was a basic photo of Richey’s chest and upper arm. Its iconic, Warhol-ian simplicity hinted at future classic status.
As purportedly the Manic Street Preachers’ only album, Generation Terrorists was released with a bang. Alan G. Parker recalls that during the London launch party, ‘Philip Hall was running around the crowd, telling everyone when to shout FUCK OFF during the chorus of “Stay Beautiful”. Sony spent a lot of money that night, on 4 REAL make-up compacts; Richey gave me loads to take home. And, of course, all the newspapers were there, the music writers from the mainstream press. The band had gone beyond basic NME reach, which is exactly what they wanted.’
The Manics’ audacious amalgam of ‘lowly’ pop music with more ‘serious’ concerns such as philosophy, economics, poetry, literature and academia created an ironic distance between the band and their art. For those able to decode it, Generation Terrorists was not just a great rock record, but a meta work of art, analysing and subverting the genre even as it joined its canon.
Advertising, celebrity, consumerism, cheap mass culture – the Manics were willingly allowing themselves to become subsumed by their environment; by the conditions of postmodernity. U2 arguably did a similar thing with their Zoo TV tour but offered only a passive, non-critical embrace. The Manics were on the hunt for a position from which to take pot-shots.
Richey demanded his bandmates read Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, an exploration of shared threads linking 1970s punk to 1960s radical intellectual groups such as the Situationist International. The Situationists developed a range of strategies to criticise all-consuming capitalism. One was ‘détournement’, in which familiar artefacts from the consumer environment were transformed, turning their original message inside-out – billboard posters were subverted to reveal hidden truths. Richey’s vision for Generation Terrorists was a ‘détournement’ of the standard American rock form into an incendiary report on the modern human condition.
In 1992, not everyone recognised the timeless portent in Generation Terrorists. Yet as we wrote this book, over a quarter of a century later, strangers contacted us online, imploring us to delve into the ‘hidden history’ of the Manics’ early material. Perhaps a new generation, raised on internet conspiracy theories, is now able to read more into Generation Terrorists than its original fans.
They pointed us towards the album sleeve. The back cover carried a photograph of the European flag set aflame – is it totally fanciful to imagine the ever-prescient Richey prophetically anticipating Brexit and the collapse of the entire EU project? There are interesting symbols on the front cover, too. Richey’s tattoo, a rose, and hanging against his chest, a cross. Did these universal signifiers contain more than they did at first sight?
Conspiracy theorists see the manipulating hands of the Illuminati-Rosicrucians-Freemasons in every corner of society. Given that Rosicrucianism’s symbol is the Rosy Cross, was Richey, typically responsible for choosing cover art, firing a cryptic broadside at a so-called New World Order?
By the early nineties, rock groups posed no threat to the order of things. Multinational corporations would gladly repackage and sell absolutely any rebellious forms back to us. Here was where Nicky Wire and, particularly, Richey felt their auto-didacticism and academic nous could play to their advantage. Knowing how the modern world was composed, they knew which buttons to press.
Many online conspiracy researchers feel that a penchant for conspiracy-oriented content runs through the Manics’ history. Early single ‘Motown Junk’ introduced the band’s worldview, involving rock mythology, cultural iconoclasm and dark allusions to political conspiracy.
At a superficial glance, the line about laughing when John Lennon died seemed one of the dumbest lyrical sentiments ever. It was, however, a reference to the interpretation of the Beatle’s death in Fenton Bresler’s book Who Killed John Lennon? (1989). Bresler rejected the theory that Mark David Chapman acted alone. The Manics were not scoring cartoon-punk points by gloating over Lennon’s death, but referencing this assassination hypothesis. Bresler could be forgiven his laugh; he was convinced Lennon’s death was the work of the CIA.
Nicky Wire has spoken of two coexisting Manics histories – the known, public one; and another, submerged, only glimpsed or hinted at. For the Manic Street Preachers, but particularly Richey, conspiracy theories, and the CIA specifically, were a source of great fascination.
Alan G. Parker is the co-author of the 2003 book John Lennon & the FBI Files. Becoming friends with Richey through 1991–2, he saw up-close his fixation with stardom and rock legends, and his mission to insert his own name among them. Richey was intrigued that Parker had stayed with Sid Vicious’s mother, Anne Beverley, while researching for his 1991 book Sid’s Way: The Life & Death of Sid Vicious. ‘Richey was into the mythology, the myth that Sid became. And I’d tell him, “Yes, it’s great in parts but don’t lose yourself in it. Rock and roll has always been a silly place to live.”’
Yet the will to lose himself in the mythology, in rock immortality, was the mainspring of Richey’s mission. His years of bedroom meditation, soaking up life-affirming music and culture and dreaming himself into its maw, were a gestation period. Now the vision was to metamorphose.
To what degree was Richey familiar with conspiracy material? The most notorious early nineties musician subsumed in that world was Public Enemy’s Professor Griff, who was cast as the group’s Minister of Information.
As a voice against the New World Order and the Illuminati, Griff has been a prominent contributor to rising debate about the influence of secret societies in the music industry. For most people such theories are preposterous, but some hold them to be established fact, including, apparently, artists who are now household names.
There is a deep and long-lasting narrative describing the tragic fate of countless musicians at the hands of the all-powerful. Richey’s name never appears on the list of artists supposedly sacrificed by an evil corporate elite, but this only makes his story’s applicability to such theories more intriguing.
Conspiracy peddlers talk of ‘blood sacrifice’: to pass beyond a certain threshold, an offering must be made, and someone usually must die. Richey’s favourite band, Joy Division, saw this same mythic trope woven into their own history, having supposedly signed their first contract in their own blood.
When Richey notoriously spilled his own blood for the NME, was he consciously acting out his role in a Faustian deal for wealth and fame? Just six days after the blood-strewn ‘4 REAL’ incident, the Manic Street Preachers signed a record deal with Sony. A photo
showed them lined up behind a desk, offering ironic grins and handshakes to their new bosses, Richey’s arm still in bandages.
Released in February 1992, Generation Terrorists reached number 13 in the UK. Sony Records took unilateral measures to ensure it sold better in the States, removing or remixing some tracks, rearranging the running order and changing the sleeve as they aimed the Manic Street Preachers fair and square at the US college radio circuit that had propelled The Clash and Guns N’ Roses to superstardom. The band were not consulted on any of these changes.
Two months later, the band finally reached the land upon which their widescreen dreams were projected. Their meagre six North American dates included New York’s Limelight Club, The I-Beam in San Francisco and LA’s Whisky a Go Go. They were not huge venues but lent a flattering, fleeting fingertip brush with fame.
However, for Generation Terrorists to attain the desired multi-platinum sales levels, timing and the cultural climate would be crucial. The band’s boast of having a collective finger nearest the historic pulse needed to be true.
While they were in the US, news reports were dominated by sudden massive urban upheaval in California. The April/May LA riots were triggered by the trial of LAPD officers for a brutal assault on an African-American man, Rodney King. The trial exonerated the officers but sparked urban warfare as (mainly) black protestors began rioting, looting and shooting. It was all broadcast live to a world audience newly conjoined by satellite television.
Flush with legends of the turbulent sixties, of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, of the UK’s own urban riots immortalised in the very naming of The Clash, surely the Manics were tailor-made for this moment? Their LA debut should have been the perfect soundtrack for the chaos engulfing parts of the city. And yet, despite a decent response to their shows on Sunset Strip, the band was despondent.
The NME accompanied Richey on a lazy daytime shopping trip down Melrose Avenue, boycotting the trappings of sleaze rock and buying a jacket, a postcard (‘I Shop Therefore I Am’). However, it was clear that, despite the ongoing societal meltdown, the Manics and their album were of little consequence. Local radio stations played the Manics’ track ‘Slash ’n’ Burn’, but Richey was not deluded – the band were not in contact with the social upheaval.
‘In terms of something explosive,’ he remarked, ‘I don’t think it will happen. People just aren’t interested any more. They’re too selfish.’ Only a couple of months out of the starting blocks, an air of anti-climax already engulfed Generation Terrorists.
As the Manic Street Preachers toured the album around Europe, Richey took every chance to disabuse the record-buying public of their wrong-headed fantasies about the touring lifestyle. After a while it was, he insisted, a routine as bad as any other; ‘Wake-up, travel, sound check, gig, wake-up, travel, sound check, gig’.
Rory Lyons, the band’s tour manager from 1991 to 1994, documented this repetitive regimen in a batch of paper files containing itinerary details from each Manics tour. Rachel Edwards shows them to us, and as we flick through, several pages pique our interest.
Lyons has decorated blank pages with funny clippings from tabloid newspapers. One cartoon is a Gary Larson ‘Far Side’ strip, but Rory has Tippexed out the original speech bubble and replaced it with an in-joke. A bespectacled man hangs out of a house window, with a megaphone: ‘Hey! Rat race! My name is Rory Lyons and tomorrow I’m moving to an island in the South Pacific where I’m going to sit on a beach, sip coconut milk, and watch the sun go down! Kiss my butt goodbye, human cesspool! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!’
Beneath details for a date in Trier in Germany, Rory writes: ‘No support. Today, your other tour manager is 34. All washed-up in Brazil.’ On another page, covering a stay in Munich, he scrawls: ‘Get the promoter to take you to the Hofbrau Haus. It’s where that man started planning that thing we’re not allowed to mention.’
Lyons’s words were salutary. It was on the road that Richey seemingly began further to develop his growing sense of personal alienation and became estranged from the rest of the band. His core truth seemed to be that even the beginning of his desperately craved musical career could not cure his profound feeling of isolation.
‘Get in the van, and it’s like four people with CD Walkmans, Sega games, just sitting like that,’ he was to comment. ‘It’s an existential nightmare! Our lives haven’t changed at all.’
There were early, occasional dalliances with groupies, but this was not really Richey’s way. Cast adrift on the road, he began to pine for one particular person who was playing an increasingly large role in his life and psyche.
Richey was always eager to spell out in countless publications his preferred type – thin, blonde and androgynous, much like Kate Moss in her early nineties adverts for Calvin Klein. Yet Jo, the London girl he was seeing, was a dark-haired, curvy 17-year-old of mixed-race heritage.
The extensive correspondence that was to pass between the pair, and that we have been shown while researching this book, suggests a close and heartfelt relationship. In later years, Jo was to share with Rachel Edwards photocopies of a precious batch of letters from Richey. A constant theme was that Richey longed to be with Jo rather than languishing alone in some hotel room in the middle of nowhere.
‘You are the first person to make me feel safe, even if I never express myself very well. Just being in your bedroom makes me feel more secure than a thousand concerts or TV shows …’
Richey, letter to Jo, 1993
Chapter 7
New Improved Formula
‘A lot of people in Japan took all the “one LP and then quit” business very seriously,’ Richey smiles. ‘They had us down as this Hara Kiri Mishima kind of character who believes in making your own moment of greatness and then Suicide Central here we come!’
‘Going 4 Gold’, Metal Hammer, July 1993
The very concept of a fleeting rock moment, of the band that rises high to explode on a vast scale, creating its own self-conscious legend, was core to the Manic Street Preachers. And so, following what were to prove to be disappointing sales of Generation Terrorists, they were forced into a very public climb-down.
Apparently, they really would now become just another band in the racks. For Richey, it was an unthinkable compromise, humiliating and excruciating. For the following year, he bit his lip as the Manics examined where they had fallen short, and gathered their resources for another hubristic grab at corporate glory, this time with their aptly titled second album, Gold Against the Soul.
During their early notoriety, and before the decision had been made to record a debut double album, they had considered releasing a quick-fire standard two-sided long-player, described by Nicky Wire as ‘an album of Motown Junks’. The conscious shift-change, from the punk stylings of these early singles to the slick MTV rock of Generation Terrorists, had blatantly sought to widen their appeal.
Yet little did the Manics realise that a fresh form of ‘punk’ was about to break into mainstream America. In retrospect, the release date of Generation Terrorists and its densely packed nature were poorly judged and badly timed. But nothing they could have done would have countered the rise of a generation-defining new album and genre set to captivate music fans across the world.
Generation Terrorists was destined by fate to be completely eclipsed by Nirvana’s Nevermind, released just four months earlier, and the arrival of ‘grunge’. Seattle birthed something the Manics had openly craved for years – a new movement, informed by punk and metal, that was generation-defining and seminal. It all conspired to make the Manics’ plans appear deeply flawed.
During Richey’s university years, Guns N’ Roses’ energy, attitude and swagger had transfixed the indie-obsessed boys from Blackwood. But 1988’s ‘most dangerous band in the world’ were, by 1992, looking slightly passé. While Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain was famously revelling in taking the piss out of Axl Rose, the Manics were lumbered with flogging a carbon copy of the Guns N’ Roses sound around
the venues of North America. Their genius war plan had misfired.
‘The first album was meant to be a full-stop,’ Richey told Kerrang! ‘It was also supposed to be a 20-million [selling] full-stop!’
The Manics’ original plan to call it a day after hitting superstardom with their debut would have been a quixotic statement. But the album’s low sales meant there would be very little interest even if the four did disappear back into obscurity as planned. In a 1993 interview with 1.FM radio, James commented: ‘It couldn’t help but miss the target, so to speak, because we set ourselves a higher target. So, some people think we have eaten a lot of humble pie since.’
For the time being, the Manics ploughed on, as though embarking on the kind of decades-long career Richey had decried so many times. Nicky Wire said, ‘We are real fans of pop music and rock music throughout history, so we will always go out of our way to make something which we think is really commercial. To please ourselves, not to please other people.’
Generation Terrorists went gold in the UK, but sold only 32,000 copies in America. Their second album appeared far more intent on infiltrating the mainstream. Gold Against the Soul took great pains to convince, and to appear less conspicuously clever to, the average music buyer. It appeared not so visibly constructed, and less postmodern.
It possibly felt the need for less Richey Edwards. It seemed to be moving away from his deft handling of rock music as a studied art form, and away from the objective sensibility that had made Generation Terrorists such a profound lyrical and stylistic statement. In place of cultural studies, textual gamesmanship and foreground, the band’s streamlined second offering was that of Album Orientated Rock.
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