Withdrawn Traces

by Sara Hawys Roberts

  Richey’s guitar playing did make it onto the record – some tentative strokes for the opening number, ‘Sleepflower’ – to fend off those constant jibes that he was ‘not a musician’. But the reality was that Richey’s role was markedly diminished; a fact openly acknowledged in interviews at the time.

  ‘There’s no way I’d be allowed to be in any other band in the world,’ he told Select magazine. ‘But James would never come into my bedroom and say, “I think you should play your guitar a bit better!”’

  ‘It’s about being intelligent about what we do,’ Bradfield explained. ‘And not letting our egos get in the way. A band should be a positive division of labour; people should do what they’re best at. I’m not going to let Richey try a solo just because I think it’ll do his self-esteem a load of good.’

  Continued belief and investment in them by management and record company gave the Manics some reassurance. But it also meant they were about to toe the line and construct a more polished, consumer friendly end-product. This included recording at a top-end, super-expensive studio.

  Located at Hook End Manor in Checkenden, Oxfordshire, Hook End Studios was described by Marillion’s Steve Hogarth as ‘England’s most luxurious recording studio’. Built in 1580, and having served as a monastery in Tudor times, the property had recently come into the hands of rock’s nouveau riche. Ownership passed from Ten Years After front man Alvin Lee, who had originally built the studio, to Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, and part of Pink Floyd’s 1983 album The Final Cut was recorded here. Hook End Manor was rumoured to be haunted, and Gilmour and his wife Ginger moved out after a series of so-called supernatural events.

  When the Manics arrived in January 1993, they knew Pink Floyd’s giant inflatable pig was stored in a nearby outhouse, and that the Manor’s previous recordings included The Cure’s Disintegration and Morrissey’s Bona Drag and Kill Uncle albums. The band’s label had presumably forked out for the best resources to try to persuade the bruised Manic Street Preachers to play the game the proper way.

  The decision to record at Hook End Manor, and the choices made during that period, would weigh heavily on the band’s conscience. Richey endured the new regime through gritted teeth, nonetheless making plain his feelings both in the choice of title for the album and through his writing.

  Lyrically, the new album would be one of the tamest of the Manics’ career. The few chosen targets for venomous insights betray Richey and Nicky’s nagging obsessions. ‘Drug Drug Druggy’ was aimed squarely at the growing trend for illicit drugs as a badge of rebellion and retro authenticity for nineties youth. The media had recently been awash with tales of Kurt Cobain’s heroin addiction and reports that Courtney Love had allegedly been using while pregnant. Possibly still reeling from having their thunder stolen a year before, one line appeared to offer a very Richey-flavoured, razor-sharp dig at grunge’s celebrity couple.

  Revelling in their signature untimeliness, the Manics spelt out how they felt drugs are a weapon used by the global oligarchy to control the masses. Standing pretty much alone in the face of an era of Ecstasy-fuelled faux-utopian hedonism, the Manic Street Preachers’ contrariness offered a rare glimpse of something approaching unpalatable truth.

  Drugs arose again in ‘Nostalgic Pushead’, a clinically descriptive vilification of the kinds of music industry figures the band found in London. Middle-aged owners of the music scene relived their past vicariously through the young, sang the Manics. Some lines referencing Soho Square, Paul Smith and Gaultier appeared to fall just short of naming actual individuals.

  James commented, ‘It’s a bit of a recurrent theme, of loss of innocence, just the nature of being in a band. We are used to a new bourgeoisie now, certain people that we know, in “our” industry, which sicken us.’

  The word ‘slavery’ is repeated 24 times. Any personal sly digs would not have gone down well at Sony/CBS Records housed on the aforementioned Soho Square. On one of Richey’s personal tour itineraries from this period, next to a list of Sony’s A&R men, we discover he has written across one page in large letters, ‘Love: none! Care: none! C.B.S. = Cold Blank Stare.’

  At Richey’s instigation, each new Manics album came accompanied with a new visual aesthetic. Among his archived materials, we find that each of the first three albums has its own designated A4 folder, filled with scribbled notes. There are also numerous sketches for cover art concepts, all decorated with circular coffee-mug stains, burn-holes from cigarettes and more than a few splashes of blood.

  The Generation Terrorists file had contained endless pages bursting with existential hellish boredom, ambition and anger, politics and passion. For Gold Against the Soul there was far less textual content. But what really stood out was the sheer volume of visual material, including cut-outs from magazines, newspapers and posters.

  Sadie Frost, Ethan Hawke, Brian Jones, pages from the graphic novel The Crow, Emma Balfour, The Clash, Tom Jones, Christine Keeler, John Hurt, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Oldman playing Oswald in JFK, The Black Crowes, Nick Kent, Mia Farrow, Brad Pitt, Kate Moss, Linda Evangelista, James Dean, Elvis, Mickey Rourke, Ian Curtis and Brian Epstein feature among the pages and pages of cut-out images.

  Creating collages was one of Richey’s favourite pastimes, but now the images were deliberately pasted and interwoven alongside his latest crop of lyrics and ideas. It arguably suggests he anticipated presenting the Manic Street Preachers as occupying the same cultural terrain as the most universal media icons of the age.

  Those recipients of Richey’s earlier, enlivening and politically motivated letters could have been excused for wondering whether he and the band had effectively sold out, and so soon.

  ‘Is anyone out there angry?’ asked the NME’s John Harris in a piece titled ‘From Sneer to Maturity’.

  Do you feel cheated by the fact that a band who once said their music would make 15-year-olds want to burn down banks are now dealing in existential introspection …? You shouldn’t be … They were built on the flurry of myth-making that occurred during their first burst of interviews; when they created an alluring legend: … the Manic Street Preachers were four working-class desperados who’d never left their home town … Rock and roll was the only alternative to working in the local Pot Noodle factory, so they would steer their way to a major label contract, release one album and split up, returning to South Wales as self-created missing persons. What a story!

  But Richey was still immersed in that story and the myth he had woven around himself as the main protagonist. In accusing the Manics of once having planned to become ‘missing persons’, John Harris was referring only to their insane, masochist game-plan to down tools after only one album. But had thoughts of suddenly and dramatically departing the scene in fact grown, and become more acute, in the mind of one of the band members? Weighed down with a deep desire to enter the pantheon of rock star immortality, Richey may not have let the idea die.

  ‘Rebel. Rocker. Idol. Vanished.’

  Tagline for Eddie and the Cruisers

  The idea of the rock star vanishing in order to achieve immortal status wasn’t an entirely original one. Twelve years before Richey’s disappearance, the 1983 film Eddie and the Cruisers had already told the story of a 1960s rock and roll band and its lead singer, lyrical genius Eddie Wilson, who vanishes after a dispute with his record label over the band’s second album.

  Twenty years after his disappearance, television reporter Maggie Foley (played by Ellen Barkin) interviews the surviving band members to gain more insight into Eddie’s mysterious disappearance. Believing she has uncovered the keystone to the entire puzzle, she resurrects the story by examining his references to the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Maggie believes that by naming the album A Season in Hell, after Rimbaud’s seminal work, Eddie was deliberately planting clues that he, like the poet, would also disappear, and survive in exile.

  Rimbaud revolutionised poetry, and his legend would impact the rock and roll world, his life and works heavily influ
encing countless artists of a literary mindset, with Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and Patti Smith all namedropping the mythic poet who disappeared.

  Although Eddie and the Cruisers doesn’t make for easy viewing thanks to its clumsy script and the appalling lip-synching music performances, the film does try to capture the mechanics of rock mythology, and what it takes to gain immortal status in such a sphere. Both P.F. Kluge’s 1980 novel upon which the film was based, and the portrayal of Eddie Wilson by actor Michael Paré, very blatantly drew much of their inspiration from an earlier and real-life concoction of the Rimbaud myth – that of the life and ‘death’ of the Doors front man, Jim Morrison.

  Rumours of Morrison faking his own death and completing a successful vanishing act from Paris in 1971 have become part of his posthumous legend and helped immortalise him to rock god status, due in part to the 1980 Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman.

  ‘Talking to a musical and literary aficionado like Richey, you knew he was well aware of the Morrison myth,’ says Alan G. Parker. ‘Not only had Richey read all the books, but most people on the rock scene were aware of the mystery surrounding Morrison’s death and how there’s been no official testament of anyone ever actually seeing his body. Not even Morrison’s own family.’

  ‘We have read all the books. But I think all the best bands have. I think they’ve always been really aware of what’s gone on in the past.’

  Richey Edwards, The Beat, ITV, 1993

  Throughout Richey’s teenage years and up until the end of his time with the band, he referenced Rimbaud continuously, and would have been acutely conscious of elements of the poet’s disappearance spilling over into rock and roll terrain. Despite Hopkins and Sugerman suggesting that Morrison had faked his own death, no rock star had yet officially been bestowed the status of ‘missing in action’. Richey’s mission statement was ‘to do what no band had done before’, and what better way to achieve that, maybe, than to leave fans and critics alike with a perpetual conundrum.

  Neither alive or dead, neither existing or not existing, the idea of a man and his life as a question mark hanging in thin air becomes the perfect rock and roll fairytale all too worthy of legendary status.

  With Generation Terrorists having fallen way short of the band’s boastful plans, Richey had seemingly gone along with being reined in artistically, hoping at least to achieve proper mainstream success with Gold Against the Soul. And yet his perennial narrative, that an abrupt ending and accompanying inevitable immortality were just around the corner, continued unabated.

  ‘We’re under no illusions with this album,’ he said. ‘At some point people will stop listening. And when they do we’ll know it’s time to stop. It might well just happen with this album.’

  Photos from mid-1993 show Richey holding a copy of a paperback book, peering over it suggestively to the camera, as though signalling its significance. Some light magnification reveals it to be Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the novel in which the title character fears losing his intense physical attractiveness as youth fades. To retain his good looks, he sells his soul, in a pact closely resembling the Faust legend.

  Richey knew the power of Faustian mythology in Western culture, selling one’s soul to the devil in exchange for new powers. Passed down through Marlowe and Goethe, it also famously plays a part in the mythology of blues music, and rock after that. When Richey flags up favourite novels like Dorian Gray or Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita based on the Faust legend, does he deploy them to help us decipher his difficult relations with the industry, as well as his final decision in early 1995?

  Even the title Gold Against the Soul spoke to the Faust legend, which entered Blues mythology in the notorious story of singer Robert Johnson and his pact with the devil at a Mississippi crossroads. In the Johnson legend, he sells his soul for success; a trope since done to death by generations of musicians. While Richey’s fellow band members were apparently more willing to accept the rules of the game, and to play it the industry’s way, it soon became clear that Richey’s spiritual stand-off with the devil in corporate dress would come to a head. ‘Failing fills us with dread,’ Richey confessed to Select. ‘This album is the best thing we can do. If it fails, we deserve it, we’ll be totally humiliated.’

  Gold Against the Soul was released on 14 June 1993. However, after several subsequent months of touring and intensive publicity, it had fallen even flatter than its predecessor. And if Richey was experiencing humiliation, the last months of 1993 would conspire to test the strength of his personality to its very limits.

  One contributing factor to his blackening mood came when Nicky Wire got married to Rachel Bartlett. Wire had played his part in the band’s early rock ’n’ roll indulgences and debaucheries, but he now called time on all that, setting the tone for much of his life in the years to come – domestic, routinised and conservative.

  Richey knew his earlier closeness with Wire would never be recovered. The onus was now on him to catch up with his three bandmates and get a relationship of his own. His then 18-year-old sometime companion Jo was the likeliest candidate for that role. Yet a conversation she had with Rachel Edwards later revealed Richey’s lingering attachment to Wire and the impact of the inevitable new distance between them. ‘Jo said, “I can’t explain why, but I think Richard was in love with Nick,”’ remembers Rachel. ‘Apparently, Richard was in a terrible state at the wedding, walking around the tables, picking up drinks and crying uncontrollably. I don’t know if it’s because he felt he was losing his closest friend, or if he felt in competition with Nick because he wasn’t able to have that kind of close relationship with a partner.’

  Terri Hall, wife of manager Philip, saw Richey openly boasting that he would not be left behind in the love stakes. Commenting on BBC2’s Close-Up documentary, she said, ‘Richey didn’t know how to live and how to be happy. I remember him saying he was gonna be married by the end of the year. It was like, well, have you got a girlfriend, Richey? And he felt that, because me and Philip were happy, or his parents were happy, then – happiness, let’s get married! I mean, there was no girlfriend.’

  The fact that Terri Hall was at the time unaware of Richey’s quasi-relationship with Jo spoke volumes. His failure to commit, due to his own sense of inadequacy, jealousy and a pessimistic view of monogamy, meant he kept Jo on the periphery throughout 1993.

  Jo wrote to Rachel Edwards in the months after Richey vanished: ‘He was terribly jealous of the others. Nick being married, Sean’s girlfriend and James being a bit of a lad. He understood ideology, concepts, theory, philosophy completely, but when it came to his own feelings, his own thoughts, expressions, he couldn’t cope.

  ‘Emotionally immature isn’t quite right because there was no logic to his feelings. He was convinced I was seeing every man I spoke to, even though he knew it was rubbish, but he could still manage to convince himself that the ridiculous was in fact the truth. I mean he could do it easily. I mean, you can tell yourself it’s just self-pity, self-indulgence. I think he did genuinely feel worthless, just useless and no amount of persuasion could change his mind.’

  Jo’s letter echoes the sentiments which Richey had admitted to in his correspondence with Claire Forward during his university years: insecurity, envy and, most of all, inward resentment for feeling that way.

  ‘Deep down he was really traditional,’ recalls Claire, ‘and I think if his insecurities exacerbated with age as they can with many people, I can imagine he would have felt trapped in a really lonely place. He used to be so shy and embarrassed talking about how he felt with me. It’s hard to explain those kinds of feelings to people without them thinking you’re possessive or controlling, which is why he must have felt so insecure and worthless, and needed that almost constant reassurance. It seemed Rich longed for a relationship but it could never live up to the expectations in his head.’

  Shortly afterwards, one of Richey’s closest school friends, Richard
Fry, underwent a life-changing experience and came out as gay. He made the first efforts in some time to reach out to his old confidant.

  ‘We’d been out of contact for four years, so I wrote Richey a letter. I don’t even know if he received it as I didn’t hear anything back, but Graham’s attitude towards me changed ever since I put that letter through the bungalow door.’

  Fry believes Graham Edwards found his news difficult to deal with. ‘I was gay, and Graham was old-fashioned. After I came out in that letter, whenever I bumped into him in Blackwood, I didn’t get a very good reception. Graham was always great with me before that, and I used to love going over to Richey’s house. But Graham’s not to blame in any way, shape or form; that’s just the era he was brought up in. Graham was a man’s man and I don’t know how difficult that was for Richey when he was growing up.’

  ‘I’m too much like my Mother. Too sensitive. Not enough like my Father.’

  Richey notes, 1994

  Fry last set eyes on his old friend a couple of months later, when he spotted Richey outside Virgin Records on Cardiff’s Queen Street, signing autographs. ‘I didn’t speak to him; I was afraid of what reception I would get. At first I didn’t recognise him because he had lost so much weight. That was the last time I ever saw him, and you always think – if this, and if that. It’s the biggest regret I will ever have.’

  Those surrounding him spotted how Richey’s nerves were frazzled by the year’s events. He was booked into a health farm that summer, accompanied by Martin Hall, who had become more involved in managing the band due to the increasingly poor health of his brother Philip. Among Richey’s archive are photographs of the pair at the spa, including one as they sit in individual steam capsules. Enclosed up to their necks, we see only their half smiles, relaxed yet seemingly reluctant to be snapped.

  Within a matter of months Martin and the band would be devastated by the tragic and untimely death of Philip. He was 34 years old. Philip Hall had guided the Manic Street Preachers to the kind of success their teenage selves should never have realistically expected. Through the last two years of his time with them, he had done it all while battling lung cancer; which was a testament to his commitment to them and the other artists he stewarded, but which placed significant weight on the Manics’ conscience to repay his efforts with increasing sales.