Withdrawn Traces

by Sara Hawys Roberts

  Richey did think about it, and in the Priory kept an A4 folder that documented his wariness about the Twelve Steps process and other matters. Its many dense pages capture a mind hurtling towards a deep existential crisis, fast losing faith in all around him.

  ‘The bottom line is doubt,’ James Dean Bradfield would say in 2009. ‘When you’re a teenager it’s all about nihilistic anger and then that anger turns to disgust, and the big hurdle is what does that disgust turn into? And for him, I think it just turned into doubt on every level: personally, politically, idealistically, whatever. This was the first time I became aware of perhaps how Richey failed to deal with things. He didn’t have any perspective. His anger turned into disgust, turned into just doubt. And that left him flailing.’

  ‘And new philosophy calls all in doubt,

  The element of fire is quite put out,

  The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit

  Can well direct him where to look for it.’

  John Donne, ‘An Anatomie of the World’

  – quoted in Richey’s Priory notes, 1994

  ‘It was an intellectual crisis. Not in a highfalutin sense, but in the sense of a total collapse of the mind in terms of not having faith in any kind of belief system,’ says Rachel. ‘Although he was reading a lot, and taking everything in around him, his thoughts were scattered. He’d lost faith in what knowledge, thoughts and sensations were real to him and nothing held any true essence for him any more.

  ‘He was exploring everything and came to no conclusions. When you look at people he quoted like Camus, who used to argue that the only question worth asking in life was whether to kill yourself or not – it seemed like Richard too was seriously deliberating the futility of everything around him.’

  ‘Then came human beings. They wanted to cling but there was nothing to cling to.’

  Albert Camus

  – quoted in the music video for ‘Love’s Sweet Exile’, 1991

  In Jo’s letters to Rachel she recalls Richey’s fascination with suicide: ‘He always talked about it. We would always argue about it, he would always justify it, we spent hours arguing over it. It’s hard to explain but if I talked about getting old he’d just say, “Oh, I’ll either live until I’m over seventy or I’ll kill myself.”

  ‘It wasn’t said dramatically or childishly, or like he was trying to provoke, but just matter of fact. I mean, you can tell yourself that it’s just self-pity, self-indulgence. I think he genuinely felt worthless, just useless, and no amount of persuasion would change his mind. He said it was the only act of free will.’

  In February 1994, Richey gave an interview to a Sheffield local radio station, which highlighted his deteriorating state of mind prior to his hospitalisation. It was later transcribed by the fanzine Counter Language, and has since gained a reputation among Manics fans as being the bleakest interview of Richey’s career.

  By then, he could no longer reconcile the outside world with his own interior worldview. The interview shows him discrediting moral values, disproving vast beliefs and punishing himself with his unflinching commitment to life’s harsh truths. ‘I think Richard had stripped back life to such a degree that everything seemed futile,’ says Rachel. ‘He was suspending his judgement on a lot of fundamental things, not just in terms of morals and ethics, but becoming sceptical in every conceivable sense.’

  ‘All sensations are FAKE. Keep left finger under a cold tap, another right finger under a hot tap. Put both hands in a toilet bowl – left finger is hot, right finger is warm simultaneously. How can the water be hot AND cold? Object the same and senses lie. If non-complex objects lie, what of man?’

  Richey’s archive, Priory notes, 1994

  Sceptical theory dates back to 360 bc and encompasses the belief that certain knowledge and fundamental truths are impossible for human beings to attain. One of the first noted sceptics was the Ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis, who is cited with creating Pyrrhonism – the first formal approach to scepticism in Western philosophy.

  Frustrated by the Dogmatists, a school of philosophers who claimed to possess certain irrefutable knowledge and truth, the Pyrrhonists main epistemological argument was that no belief, theory or view could ever be supported or justified rationally because there would always be doubt. Their answer to living life under this unquestionable doubt was to suspend all judgement and belief, neither affirming any thoughts, feelings or sensations as true, or denying them as false.

  Inspired by Socrates’ belief ‘I know that I know nothing’, Pyrrho believed that by suspending his judgement, and by asserting no definite or concrete mind-set to the world around him, he could escape the complexities of everyday life and achieve peace of mind. During Richey’s time in the Priory, he wrote of his own moral dilemma with coming to terms with fundamental truths, pertaining to subject matters like good vs evil, natural law vs civil law, lust vs love and questioning their very foundations and stability within the human psyche.

  Pyrrho and many sages since have claimed that when one realises the fragile nature of truth, and the fact that it can never fully be attained, all that is left to do is to achieve a form of enlightenment known as ‘ataraxia’ – a state of tranquillity that comes from the suspension of all beliefs.

  ‘I can see that some of Richard’s writing on The Holy Bible was teetering towards that kind of scepticism,’ confirms Rachel. ‘When you get lines talking about “Mensa”, “Miller”, “Mailer”, “Plath”, “Pinter”, it may have been him developing that sage wisdom away from Western ideals and dispelling all notions of what was considered intellectual.

  ‘There was also the line about believing in nothing, and to me that can be seen in a negative or positive light in terms of how he felt at the time. Could he have succumbed to that emptiness and felt quite isolated and alone in that nihilistic space, or could he have attained some semblance of peace as time progressed? Was that why he was getting into Ecclesiastes by the end and finding a way to reconcile himself with this all-consuming futility he felt?’

  ‘You take an onion and peel it and peel it right to the heart and there’s nothing there. There must be something, you believe there must be. You take another onion and start peeling it. Keep on peeling. At last, nothing. Do you understand the sadness of this monkey?’

  The Saga of Dazai Osamu

  – quoted in Richey’s Priory notes, 1994

  On 1 August 1994, a few days into Richey’s stay at the Priory, ‘Revol’ was released as the second single from The Holy Bible and reached a disappointing number 22 on the UK singles chart. More pressing was the fact that Richey’s hospitalisation was about to hit the headlines. Media reports claimed he was suffering with ‘nervous exhaustion’ – the usual celebrity cover-all for anything from drink and drugs to depression and anxiety.

  To fund Richey’s considerable medical bills, James, Nicky and Sean continued with most of the band’s scheduled performances. Playing their first gig as a three-piece on 30 July in Scotland’s T in the Park festival, James gave the music press an insight into Richey’s state of mind: ‘It wasn’t a breakdown. It was much worse than that. If you have a breakdown it sounds like the kind of thing you give someone a couple of Valiums for and then they’re OK again. Richey went bonkers, something just flipped in his head. It was dramatic.’

  Despite The Holy Bible’s disturbing lyrics – including several of an unmistakably autobiographical nature, and examined at length in the following chapter – the other band members failed to draw any real inferences that things might have been about to come to a head. Asked how they could not link Richey’s lyrics with his state of mind, they said that their songs were not usually about themselves, and that if Richey was sending out distress signals among the new songs, they had failed to make the connection.

  Onlookers could view the band’s previous canon – which included titles such as ‘Suicide Alley’, ‘Spectators of Suicide’ and their cover of ‘Suicide is Painless’ – and wonder whether The H
oly Bible was merely carrying on in much the same vein. Years later Nicky Wire would confess to Radio 4’s Mastertapes that he didn’t take Richey or his problems at face value. ‘I probably blanked it out,’ he admitted. ‘We told ourselves he was writing about these dark things in a journalistic kind of way, writing from the point of view of an anorexic, and so much of our stuff was loaded in that way …’

  The band played as a three-piece throughout the remainder of August, appearing at festivals in Germany and the Netherlands, and ending the month on the main stage at the Reading Festival. Richey’s notes from the Priory show that he was deliberating joining them there but decided against it at the last minute, for reasons unknown. He stayed in the hospital. ‘He’s having these intellectual battles in there right now,’ Nicky Wire said at the time. ‘He knows what they’re doing, all these questionnaires: “You can’t trick me!” He’s on some sort of prescribed drugs and shit-loads of therapy and he’s even doing fucking drama classes. There are obviously things that Richey will not do; I can’t see him putting up with that “I am a cushion” stuff somehow.’

  Adding to his discomfiture, Richey and the others on the Galsworthy programme had to gather twice weekly for individuals to share their own life story. Each session centred on one member of the group who would document their memories as far back as they could, in the hope that they would reaffirm their past values and connect with one another on a deeper level.

  ‘I was there when Richey did his life story,’ remembers Rosie Dunn. ‘He felt uncomfortable about it, so he asked me if I’d read out some of the lyrics to his songs instead. One of them was “4st 7lb”, so in my opinion, an eating disorder did form a part of his mindset when he was in hospital.’

  This session was attended by a patron of the Priory, guitar legend Eric Clapton. Clapton had spent time as a patient in Roehampton recovering from drug and alcohol addiction in the 1980s, and came in to support the occasional group workshop. Clapton’s former fiancée Alice Ormsby-Gore (daughter of Lord Harlech – Britain’s ambassador to the US during the Kennedy administration) was also in residence during Richey’s stay, being treated for heroin addiction, and the two formed a friendship. In his autobiography Clapton mentions that Alice had ‘disappeared’ while in France months before, resurfacing some time later ready to accept Clapton’s offer of treatment at the rehabilitation centre.

  ‘After I’d read Richey’s lyrics to the group, Eric came up to us and congratulated him on the album,’ recalls Rosie. ‘He said it was absolutely brilliant and that the lyrics were “just amazing”. He recognised Richey’s talent with words and was really gushing over him like he was one of the biggest superstars on the planet. Although he was brilliant in there, a nice man and very supportive, Richey didn’t seem enamoured by the fact Eric was a rock god. He liked him and got on with him, but Richey always had this normality about him, and he wasn’t star struck by Eric, unlike a lot of people in the group.’

  Later on, Clapton popped his head around Richey’s bedroom door and asked if he should bring his guitar so the two could jam next time he visited. Richey would later tell James, ‘Just what I need. I’m going to be confronted by God, and God’s going to realise that I can’t play the guitar!’ (God being a nickname bestowed upon Clapton by fans of virtuoso guitar playing.)

  In a 2004 interview in The Word magazine, the remaining band members wondered whether Richey had embellished or even invented the story. They hoped it was true for its obvious comic effect. Yet why would they have doubted Richey’s story in the first place?

  ‘I sometimes exaggerate when expressing an opinion or something I experienced, but it’s more to frame my own experience or points of view, and I would never deny if or when I am exaggerating. Exaggeration promotes understanding.’

  Patient, Borderline Personality Disorder Central website

  Richey had been at the Priory for two weeks when he was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. This was still a relatively unknown condition within NHS hospitals. When Richey left Whitchurch it was with the understanding that he was suffering with severe depressive disorder and a secondary diagnosis of non-dependant use of alcohol and substances.

  The term borderline was originally coined because it was thought that the afflicted were on the ‘border’ between psychosis and neurosis. It is an umbrella term used by mental health professionals. The sufferer presents severe personality disorganisation, with instability in self-image, mood and behaviour, plus disturbance in patterns of thinking and perception. They can indulge in destructive and impulsive behaviour, form intense but unstable relationships and, and are prone to ‘meltdowns’ when their fragile defence structure crumbles.

  Central to borderline personality disorder is the sparse sense of identity coming from intense feelings of emptiness and loneliness. When patients describe themselves, they often paint a confused and contradictory self-portrait. They fear abandonment, yet actively push others away to avoid the pain of their imagined rejection. Sometimes, to overcome their indistinct and negative self-image, the borderline will make like an actor, and place themselves in good or entertaining roles to fill the void in their identity.

  Many adapt like chameleons to their environment, and assume some traits that are present in those that they admire so as to gain a more tangible sense of self. Throughout Richey’s archive, from university onwards, he would write out – sometimes repeatedly – quotes from favourite books, films and albums in order to memorise them off by heart. Like many borderlines, he often felt that others could define his thoughts and the contradictory opinions that inhabited his mind more succinctly than he could himself.

  The lure of hedonistic experiences, whether through drugs, self-harm or other means, is often known to give a semblance of identity and feeling back to the borderline patient. During intense periods the sufferer can turn to drugs, alcohol or meaningless sexual encounters as coping mechanisms. It is thought that when their struggle to find an identity becomes intolerable, the solution is either to lose any sense of self altogether, or to receive a semblance of identity through pain and numbness.

  Their emotional instability means frequent mood swings from an empty, depressive state to one of anxiety, irritability or anger. They can feel suicidal with despair, only to feel positive an hour or so later. In the 2005 documentary No Manifesto, Nicky would comment: ‘Some people like chaos in their lives, and we don’t. When we had Richey, Richey was chaos. A more disciplined chaos than a lot of people, but still chaos. I mean it in intellectual, nasty, brutish, tender, loving, emotional extremes all in one day syndrome.’

  ‘Being a borderline feels like eternal hell. Nothing less. Pain, anger, confusion, never knowing how I’m gonna feel from one minute to the next. Hurting because I hurt those whom I love. Feeling misunderstood. Nothing gives me pleasure. Wanting to die but not being able to kill myself because I’d feel too much guilt for those I’d hurt, and then feeling angry about that, so I cut myself or take an overdose to make all the feelings go away.’

  Patient, Borderline Personality Disorder Central website

  One of Richey’s favourite books, Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, is based on five sisters with borderline tendencies, who are impulsive, reckless and sexually promiscuous. The book ends with their suicides, and the narrators, their ex-lovers, are left only with a sea of stories and theories and the possessions of the girls they loved. They feel they never knew them as well as they thought, nor will they ever know the motives behind their suicides.

  After Richey’s disappearance, Nicky Wire admitted that it felt like he and the band may not have been as close to Richey as they had once believed. ‘I mean, I thought I knew Richey, but maybe I didn’t.’ Later on he would postulate, ‘There was the possibility Richey just didn’t like us any more.’

  For the borderline, identity disturbances, such as confusion about their friendships, career choices, sexuality and values, happen almost daily, along with the deep-seated notion that one is flawed, d
efective and bad at the core. They often go to extremes in their daily thinking, feeling and behaviour, and under considerable stress the borderline can detach from reality completely and suffer from various dissociative states. These can include depersonalisation and derealisation – a sense that the self and the world are not real – and, more rarely, fugue-like states where sufferers completely shut down, forget their identity and assume a new sense of self.

  When considering Richey’s own family history and the life and death of his great aunt Bessie, is it possible that there was some familial predisposition to Richey’s behaviour? Bessie John had once been living among friends and family, engaged to be married, and holding down a steady job. However, she would go on to shut out all those she had previously shared her life with, and pursue a solitary existence until the end of her days.

  Rosie Dunn says Richey was unperturbed by this diagnosis. ‘We both thought Borderline was a really lazy diagnosis. He knew the doctors wanted to slap a label on him as fast as they could. He asked me, “What does a personality disorder actually mean? You’re not functioning like the average man on the street?”

  ‘He knew it wasn’t right to feel the way he did, but he also thought it was absurd how others could just ignore all the problems in the world, and certain inevitabilities that came with life and getting older. He never reconciled how those who felt really deeply were labelled as having some sort of deficiency, nor how other seemingly “normal” people could deny another level of complexity to themselves and carry on walking around selectively blind to what they did and didn’t see.

  ‘It wasn’t like he was snubbing the idea of help, because he tried to engage with the physicians there. But because he was so clever, there was not one person in there that was going to unravel his mind. You can tell a psychiatrist anything they want to hear if you’re clever enough. I don’t think being hospitalised bothered him at all; it was probably an interesting chapter in his life. There was none of this “I don’t want to be here” or “this sucks” like a lot of other patients. He took what was on offer, but he was a very questioning, intelligent – and most of all extremely complex person. By the end I don’t think he felt there was a way to normalise his foundations and to separate his problems away from what made him Richey at the core.’