The music on The Holy Bible, driven largely by James and Sean, was an attempt to enter avant-garde territory. They had been listening to the likes of Joy Division, The Pop Group, Public Image Limited and Wire – innovators in post-punk’s ‘make-it-new’ ultra-modernism.
In his notes for The Holy Bible, Richey penned instructions for composing the end to ‘Of Walking Abortion’: ‘Maybe end like Rage Against the Machine, “Killing in the Name Of”?’
Despite years of on-off guitar practice, Richey was still unable to attain a level of proficiency. Aware of his lack of musical prowess, Richey’s final year with the band was overshadowed by a crisis of confidence which would go on to further aggravate his psychological problems, and gnaw away at his sense of worth as a member of the band.
An appraisal of Richey’s lyrics and archive from The Holy Bible period suggests that the album was assembled as a deliberate incendiary device. He raised the stakes, often in arcane ways, beyond his bandmates’ comprehension, with an apparent design to take the Manic Street Preachers right up to the precipice of potential career suicide, in a kamikaze mission.
In this final artistic statement to the world, we looked for clues that might provide insight into his state of mind, a glimpse of his real or imagined future, and signs of any pre-planned exit strategy.
‘Ultimately, we wanted to be the perfect band that could make a record that sold globally, millions – and there’d be no need to make another record. All we’ve ever been interested in doing is making a record which encapsulates a mood and a time and then it can be a full stop – bye bye.’
Richey Edwards, NME Brat Awards, February 1994
Contained in Richey’s Holy Bible folder are copies of poetry he wrote in late adolescence. Having spent so long in the music industry he so disparaged, was he now seeking to draw inspiration from his earlier work, to try to reconnect once more with his authentic sense of self?
There were mutterings about Richey wanting to ‘do a Salinger’ as far back as Generation Terrorists, and there are certainly clues in The Holy Bible’s lyrics hinting that his later disappearance may have been pre-meditated. They deserve close examination.
‘Faster’
‘Most people in this business are totally insensitive. Most are downright evil. I personally don’t know anyone who is in a band that I respect. And no one at the record companies really care about the bands.’
Richey Edwards, last ever interview, Music Life, 1995
‘Faster’, the first single from The Holy Bible, was released on 6 June 1994. It begins with a sample from the film adaptation of George Orwell’s novel 1984: ‘I hate purity. Hate goodness. I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone corrupt.’ John Hurt utters these words as Winston Smith, 1984’s protagonist, a low-ranking citizen within the super-state of Oceania. Written as an everyman character, Smith represents the struggle of the individual under the boot of a totalitarian party and its oppressive regime.
He has realised that to overthrow the autocratic system in a country filled with orthodox and complacent citizens, there must be individuals who are impure and wicked in the eyes of the state. Only the ‘corrupt’ can oppose the party and its prevailing status quo to kick-start the revolution. By rebelling against a state that practises omnipresent surveillance of its citizens and persecutes individualism and independent thinking, Winston advocates that everyone becomes virtue-less and corrupt – for only then can they become the saviours of the state, and in turn themselves.
The lyrics of ‘Faster’ bewildered Richey’s bandmates. In August 1994, Nicky Wire told Melody Maker: ‘Frankly, a lot of it is all Richey again, and I was always completely confused by it. But when he wrote it he told me it was about self-abuse.’
However, in June of that year, Richey had told Raw magazine the actual meaning behind the song. ‘It’s about the sort of people who take their frustrations out on other people, particularly those who can’t defend themselves.’ He talked about dining with a record company executive in a plush London restaurant. ‘Oh God, it was pathetic. He caused a really big scene with the waiters, just because his fucking wine wasn’t chilled enough or something. It put me right off my food.’ These were unequivocally intimate, first-person lyrics inspired by direct personal experiences.
‘There’s a poem by Tennessee Williams called “Lament For Moths”, one of the first poems we ever read, which is about how the moths, the sensitive people, will always be stamped on and crushed by the mammoths – that really hit us, the sudden realisation that we were the moths of the world.’
Nicky Wire, Melody Maker, July 1994
Certainly relations between the band and their label at the time were not straightforward. A former Manics roadie told us of one encounter. ‘At the start of 1994, Rob Stringer came out of a meeting on the tour bus with the band. When I asked what was going down, he said “the usual power struggle” and laughed it off.
‘It happened again that autumn. This time Rob left the meeting ashen-faced, without the joviality he had the first time around. It seemed a lot more serious. He told me it was another “power struggle”, but the way it was implied was that this time, it was between Richey and the [rest of the] band.’
‘I think in early 1994, Richard, Nick, James and Sean stood fully aligned with their creative vision,’ says Rachel. ‘That “Us versus the world” mentality. I believe that deteriorated towards the end of Richard’s time with the band.’
Fighting the label, then pitched against the other band members, Richey may have found catharsis by documenting his own personal narrative and hurling it back at the record label in defiance and vindication. The lyrics of ‘Faster’ also appear to contain a pre-emptive strike against his bandmates.
The opening couplets juxtapose two aggrandised and opposing statements – ‘architect’ vs ‘butcher’ and ‘pioneer’ vs ‘primitve’ – against the backdrop of a savage, unrelenting and jagged guitar intro. In the first line of each couplet, Richey establishes himself, only for the second line to counter this with an accusation that seeks to paint him in a contradictory light.
In calling himself an ‘architect’, was Richey claiming credit for engineering the band’s initial success? Yet with his radical lyrics, and their use on The Holy Bible, he could now be accused of ‘butchering’ the band by alienating the public and their record label.
Political and socially aware lyrics in pop were out of favour, so Sony may have considered Richey’s provocations a retrograde step. Did the line about ‘cold made warm’ refer to the record company reneging on promises of supporting the band? Or was it a criticism of Nicky Wire defaulting on the Manics’ original anti-love pact and getting married? It’s possible that by this point Richey was feeling set adrift, having lost his former ‘Glamour Twin’ to domestic bliss and now standing alone in his faithfulness to the band’s early manifesto.
Richey fluctuated between hopefulness and hopelessness in most aspects of his life, and in the line referencing the ‘idiot drug-hive, the virgin’ could have been feeling the necessity to counter some of the band’s allusions to his lack of sexual experience and suggestions that he was a far heavier drug abuser than was generally known.
He also incorporated a conversation with Gillian Porter, a PR at Hall or Nothing. After he had opened up to her about his problems, she abruptly countered, ‘Self-disgust is self-obsession, honey.’ Publicly and defiantly Richey repeated her remark and retaliated on record, ‘and I do as I please.’
The chorus, which references ‘Mensa’, ‘Plath’ and ‘Pinter’, defiantly indicated that he would allow nobody to dumb him down intellectually. Other lines can be interpreted as the band’s movement away from their working-class roots. His record label paymasters had not reckoned with Richey bringing up controversial, hard-line ‘deep politics’ and setting them before the music-listening public. As he repeatedly said, the band’s whole purpose was to talk about things nobody else would talk about; the Manic Street Preachers were all abo
ut changing people’s lives through empowering them with knowledge.
One of the most seminal and oft-quoted lyrics on the album, about believing in nothing, may have been Richey maintaining that he still had a sense of personal identity within a version of ‘nothing’ that belonged to him, and to him alone. He would not reduce himself to an easily defined artist who could be used by Sony to pigeonhole the band as a more saleable commodity.
‘As soon they take the cheque that buys their identity, they become as processed and meaningless as the item they are promoting.’
George Monbiot, Guardian, 2017
Paraphrasing the Japanese proverb ‘The nail that sticks out gets hammered down’ in the next verse, Richey suggested that he was making a target of himself. Lyrics about sleep and shadows signified he was unwilling to sleepwalk through life, oblivious to the world’s chaos and corruption.
The talk of ‘false mirrors’ could be Richey promoting the Marxist theory of false consciousness. His favourite political commentators, the Situationists, based one of their main ideologies around this argument. Guy Debord claimed that the government, media and ruling elite erect ‘false mirrors’ which reflect back an unrealistic image that transforms the way people view and live their lives.
When ending the verse with a couplet about honesty, was he suggesting the people around him had complied with an Orwellian programme and performed like diligent, unquestioning robots?
The song’s finale comprises a stark mantra: ‘man kills everything’.’ The ‘man’ in question is probably ‘the man’ – a derogatory slang expression for corporate or authority figures. Was ‘Faster’ effectively ‘sticking it to the man’, i.e. a record label that attempted to restrict any radical strivings towards individuality or references to unsavoury or incendiary topics?
If viewed in this light, ‘Faster’ could embody Richey’s own resistance. Although he admits that it would be ‘so damn easy to cave in’, the very fact that the song and others on the album made it past the censors – due in part to deliberate lyrical ambiguity – meant that Richey had succeeded in bringing a personal critique of his predicament into the public domain.
‘I do think Richard underestimated the music industry,’ considers Adrian Wyatt. ‘He was highly intelligent but slightly naïve in thinking he could have any creative control in terms of how he and the band would be presented to and perceived by the public.
‘He miscalculated that big companies don’t care about the truth or how pure your motives are, or how quickly they and the press can turn on you. By the end, I believe, he’d got to the point where he wanted to take back as much control as he could, in terms of his image and output.’
‘I think because The Holy Bible wasn’t the commercial success Richard and the band had hoped for, they were forced to rethink their creative priorities with regards to what came next,’ says Rachel. ‘I think James, Nick and Sean reassessed their initial position and went on to stand shoulder to shoulder with Sony.’
In early 1995, just before he vanished, Richey told an old university friend he believed that without his initial input, the band would never have caught the eye of a major record label. One of the last works of art that he completed before he disappeared was a collage. It gathered photographs of various musicians, models, religious and cult figures, nestling together in a typical piece of Richey artwork. However, emblazoned in the bottom right corner of the frame were these bold, yellow highlighted words: THE MORON SPASTIC PREACHERS.
‘The Manics were such a wonderful dream but I fear I have utterly woken up. Now I am resting all my hopes on another band to resurrect that dream. But they’ll probably turn shite too and forget what they were all about to begin with, grow beer guts and swathe themselves in the flag of the nation they started out despising. They’re like a once great friend who has joined the Conservative party and keeps phoning you up to rub it in by extolling the virtues of the free market. Ah me, dumb flag scum anyone? I guess that’s Mr. Wire now.’
Phil Rose, REPEAT, Manic Street Preachers fanzine, 2002
‘Revol’
‘There were at least two sides to Brian’s personality. One Brian was introverted, shy, sensitive, deep-thinking. The other was a preening peacock, gregarious, artistic, desperately needing assurance from his peers. He pushed every friendship to the limit and way beyond.’
Bill Wyman on Brian Jones in Stone Alone, 1990
Following the release of The Holy Bible, Richey’s bandmates were at a loss to explain the meaning of ‘Revol’. It continues to baffle them to this day. After Richey’s disappearance, Nicky Wire commented ‘Revol?’ I just didn’t know what the fuck he was on about. All the weight of reference to Eastern Europe or Nazi culture and figureheads. Even Richey said afterwards that he didn’t know what it was about. It’s lover spelt backwards, or so he kind of tried to explain it. A decline in relationships … I don’t know.’
The song’s lyrical conceit is founded on the 1960s cliché that the ‘personal is the political’, making the connection between subjective experience and broader social structures. ‘Revol’ playfully utilised this idea to allude to what appear to be references to Richey’s life in the Manic Street Preachers, and his desire to escape it.
‘Revol’ could in parts be read as essentially a lyric about Richey’s plans to leave the group. The lyrics contain threads that refer to falling out of love, separation and exile. Did he use political analogies to trace his time with the band, and then, in the final verse, tell them how he is planning to disappear?
The song essentially tells of a one-time love/lover scenario that has been reversed: Richey falling out of love with being in the band, with the band members, or both? With the benefit of hindsight, the lyrics appear to contain coded references expressing a desire to disappear.
Specifically, in the second verse Richey names historical political figures whom Richey has sought to link together by virtue of common and definitive associations, including Che Guevara, Pol Pot and Farrakhan.
Guevara, a South American revolutionary, vanished into exile two years before he was killed by the CIA in Bolivia in October 1967, a matter of weeks before Richey was born. Guevara became a revolutionary hero, and his romantic image adorned the bedroom walls of generations of students and activists worldwide. A man of principled action and political intrigue, his iconic status was more typical of that bestowed upon a departed, beloved rock star. Before Guevara’s departure, he wrote a farewell letter wherein he severed all ties with his former Argentine comrades to devote himself to worldwide revolution, and changed his appearance drastically by shaving his head, as did Richey, prior to his own disappearance.
Pol Pot was the founder of a Maoist guerrilla group known as the Khmer Rouge who became the leader of Cambodia before withdrawing from public view in the early 1980s. He went on to live in isolation in Thai border country until his death in 1998. When ‘Revol’ was composed in 1994, Pol Pot was still very much a figure of mystery, existing in the shadows of self-imposed exile.
When Richey Edwards writes a lyric like ‘Withdrawn traces’, and then goes on, several months later, to withdraw all traces of himself, how can you not question the significance of the reference?
Louis Farrakhan was the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam. A separatist black nationalist, he advocated partition from the United States, to be funded by reparations compensating for the country’s history of use and abuse of its black populace. Again, this can be seen as having an association with Richey. Seeking to divorce African-Americans from the rest of the US, Farrakhan demands alimony. With the previous couplets referencing disappearance, exile and separation, the mention of alimony further suggests that Richey may have been considering going his own way.
The chorus includes four lines of German and Italian words – Lebensraum, Kulturkampf, Raus raus, Fila fila – and also heavily suggests a desire to separate and escape. Delivered as barked instructions, they consolidate the album’s recurring theme of domination and
totalitarianism.
‘Lebensraum’ (living space) was brought into the political lexicon by Imperial Germany, outlining its planned territorial gains after victory in the First World War. The word is more synonymous, however, with the territorial expansion aims of Hitler. But why should such references be deployed to form the central pillar in a song about failed relationships, and falling out of love?
The Collins dictionary entry for ‘Kulturkampf’ reads: ‘any serious conflict over values, beliefs, etc. between sizable factions within a nation, community, or other group’. Had Richey suffered a ‘serious conflict’ with people surrounding the Manics, or with the band members themselves?
‘Raus’ and ‘Fila’ can be interpreted as orders, with connotations of the commands delivered to prisoners of war in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Commanding somebody to ‘Raus! Raus!’ (Out! Out!) in context of Lebensraum and Kulturkampf suggests a person or persons being removed or purged, in effect a pogrom. But which side was Richey himself taking in this, if any? Fila is Italian for file; connoting forming a queue. Is Richey advocating that he, or others, proactively absent themselves from a restricting situation? Or was he the recipient of these orders, feeling pressure that ousts him from his current life in the music industry? Was Richey looking to find living space outside of the band?
Ultimately the lyrics are probably best understood by disregarding any notion of a broader ‘political message’ and by accepting the cliché that personal is political. It may also hold some significance that Richey posed in front of a mirror inscribed with the words of Solomon Northup (author of Twelve Years a Slave) when promoting the album. Northup vanished without a trace in the nineteenth century. His disappearance has never been solved.
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