Decades on, James Dean Bradfield’s relationship with ‘Revol’ seems to have swung full circle. What he once dismissed as ‘dog shit’ now earns his respect. In 2014, he told the NME: ‘I think I fell back in love with “Revol” because it’s one of those songs that actually becomes a tiny bit more relevant as time passes. You can’t live in the age of Berlusconi and not actually find a tiny bit of relevance in “Revol”.’ However, such ‘damning with faint praise’ may highlight Bradfield’s desire to play down the far more contentious aspects of the song, which perhaps Richey originally sought to expose, and which have assumed a far deeper relevance in the years which have followed Richey’s disappearance.
‘I think I’ve said to you before about what he said if he left the band. They wouldn’t care, they’d carry on. He just said it straight – he wouldn’t be missed.’
Jo, letter to Rachel Edwards, 1996
During 1994, Richey’s bandmates had to dispel the notion that some of the album’s sentiments could be interpreted as politically conservative, even fascist. The music press also noticed that Richey was taking an interest in the Quran and Sharia law, while his notes outlining plans for the ‘Faster’ single suggested that its front cover depict a gold Star of David against a black background with the word ‘Jude’ emblazoned beneath. Operating in an industry famously populated with Jewish movers and shakers, it appeared that Richey was being deliberately provocative.
How much had Richey’s contrary, bloody-minded ‘political incorrectness’ begun to generate in-camp difficulties? What was at stake, in his mind, was the freedom for artists to speak on any manner of topics, without censorship. During the band’s notorious trip to Bangkok, Richey had told Barbara Ellen how much he hated both ‘political correctness’ and censorship. ‘Shutting down the BNP could lead to so much [that is bad],’ he said. ‘If you give any government the power to silence a political power [BNP], however dodgy, they will end up abusing that power.’
Is it reasonable to suggest that certain lyrics on The Holy Bible were deliberately and provocatively politically incorrect? Further evidence of Richey’s apparent obsession with the perceived evils of political correctness could be found on the songs ‘Yes’ and ‘P.C.P.’
‘P.C.P.’ and ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’
‘Schindler’s List – The most dangerous film ever made – that man was a bastard, pure and simple. He exploited Jews.’
Richey Edwards, ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’, The Face, June 1994
Contributing to the overall sense of mischievous provocation, ‘P.C.P.’ went to the heart of the nature of power in the Western democratic world, where liberalism dominated the social-political landscape.
Traditionally, rock music culture could be said to celebrate the freedoms of the liberal West; to explore all opportunities for individual self-expression. Yet ‘P.C.P.’ implied that liberal freedom is shallow freedom. We are not permitted to speak truth to power.
‘You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretences of your civilisation which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilised world.’
Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Gardens
– quoted on the album sleeve of The Holy Bible
Presented with what ‘P.C.P.’ called ‘systemised atrocity’, liberalism’s greater concern with the use of inoffensive language only fosters impotence in the face of unaccountable power. Richey’s reference to ‘stiff upper lip’ conjured memories of the morality that the British Empire foisted upon the world. The implication is that imperialism continues to exist, but we are not allowed to discuss its new forms; obligated to remain silent because ‘we are free’.
‘P.C.P.’ located its sympathies with Europe. Having studied modern political history, Richey confidently diagnosed what he considers to be the modern malaise; Europe cannot express strenuous objection to American culture and American agenda, cannot tell the truth and forgets the past as a point of principle. Discourse is straitjacketed.
For the casual observer, the band’s interest in the Holocaust, and other Jewish-related issues, may have added up to nothing more than a thoroughly politically correct revulsion at the horrors of twentieth-century history. After all, the band were known to have visited concentration camps on their European tour earlier in 1994, inspiring the Holy Bible songs ‘Mausoleum’ and ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’.
There was evidence of James being anxious about the content of The Holy Bible and how it might affect their reception in the US. Asked if he ever objected to the lyrics he was obliged to sing, he responded, ‘I didn’t think the first draft of “The Intense Humming of Evil” was judgemental enough. It’s a song about the Holocaust and you cannot be ambivalent about a subject like that. Not even we are stupid enough to be contentious about that.’
James’s misgivings about some of the lyrics had apparently demanded modifications from Richey. Among Richey’s Holy Bible papers are drafts of ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’, including one headed ‘James’s copy’. Two lines are crossed out, and replaced, but not in the manner typical of most of Richey’s corrections. The final couplet has been very heavily scribbled out, almost blacked out, suggesting their urgent removal by James himself? The redacted lines were replaced in the final draft with a couplet about Churchill’s duplicity.
On closer inspection, and some deft work with Adobe Photoshop, it is possible for us to read some of the lost content, which suggests that the first several missing words may have involved something positive in relation to Nazi Germany:
(…………………………) … Deutschland
How we long to be ruled and loved.
Richey’s bandmates may well have been justified in wanting to weed out overly provocative lines. Elsewhere in the Holy Bible lyric drafts, Richey drew a diagram, possibly an idea for cover art. In a childlike scrawl he sketched four flowers, their long stems meeting at the centre, to form a cross. Adjacent to these was a swastika, and written alongside, in block capitals, B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L.
Richey clearly wanted to be an agitator here. He appeared to know exactly where the boundary of political correctness lay and knowingly dipped a toe over its border, as if demonstrating ambivalence where decent opinion demands steadfastness.
While some may speculate that Richey was using ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ to make an inconclusive statement on the suffering brought about by religious persecution, he was contrarily more likely to be viewing the issue through the lens of class inequality rather than taking a religious standpoint. His university studies had made him overtly aware of the level of mutual hypocrisy between the opposing factions during the Second World War. In interviews before the release of The Holy Bible, Richey spoke of his disgust for the film Schindler’s List, while his earlier academic studies subscribed to the erroneous notion that many rich Jewish factions profited from the war by funding both sides while the poverty-stricken Jewish population were exterminated in their millions.
Utilising the re-written couplet which had apparently proved so troublesome, Richey ends the song by highlighting the level of duplicity which was prevalent in the behaviours of both Hitler and Churchill.
Next, targeting another revered institution, Richey set about exposing the British Empire as driven by profiteering and greed. British involvement in India resulted in savage exploitation and the extermination of millions of Indians, many at death camps. He argued against the injustice of certain atrocities being conveniently ignored, while other acts of genocide can be referenced when it suits an agenda.
Richey’s lyrics for The H
oly Bible are often seen as confusing or just plain confused; their supposedly random mix of references and moral indignations can be seen as hinting that he may not have been fully compos mentis during the writing. However, a counter-argument holds that Richey knew exactly what he was doing and that, armed with knowledge of the boundaries of liberalism, he knew precisely how to dare reviewers to accuse him of being something he was not.
In 1993, Richey had listed his ‘Top Ten Men of the Year’ in Melody Maker. It included Dr Hassan El Turabi, a Sudanese politician whose impact saw a rise in the execution and torture of political opponents. This is how Richey explained his selection: ‘I quite like what he’s doing. Islamic fundamentalism scares the West, and makes us examine our own moral ambiguity. There was a programme on him the other night where a western journalist was condemning him, but he said: “We only amputate one per cent of the thieves we catch. One per cent may be a lot where you come from, but to me, one per cent doesn’t sound like many at all.” I know it’s very easy to congratulate that from a distance … but I AM from a distance.’
It is not as though this reference was a one-off. In a fanzine interview from the same period, Richey stated that meeting Dr Turabi would have been a fitting end to the year for him. It’s difficult to come up with an explanation for this bizarre devotion. He was to admit that he ‘had a very childlike rage’, a fact supported by close friends who note that he could be difficult and subtly provocative. His apparently contradictory statements and lyrical sentiments find some unity in being interpreted in this way; that is, as a form of protest or personal lashing out, rather than as a philosophical agenda.
‘I’d be sat next to him when he played devil’s advocate in college,’ remembers Adrian Wyatt. ‘He’d love winding people up, and I recognised that sort of playful antagonism in his lyrics. He was out to challenge opinions in whatever way he could.’
The genius of The Holy Bible stemmed in part from its vast range of references, but also from its sprawling disjunctions, scattershot outrages and sheer cryptic messiness. Listeners may have had difficulty in sewing the disparate elements together, but they knew those words were authentic, a genuine snapshot of Richey’s mind.
Speaking to Melody Maker in January 1994, Richey commented, ‘When we write lyrics, sometimes we’ll come up with something that we think is really good, and works really well with James’s melody. And I hate having the thought in the back of my head, that we can’t possibly print this in a lyric sheet, because people will misunderstand it.
‘Look at American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. It was completely misunderstood by the media. And they probably knew why they were doing it, but they just chose to ignore it. When I read it, I didn’t find it cheap at all. I found it frightening, and very moralistic.’
Adroitly positioning his lyrics directly in the firing line of mainstream reaction, Richey expected that some of The Holy Bible’s subject matter would challenge dogmatic thinking – and not just in relation to political correctness. The Manic Street Preachers were about to attempt their own devastating critique of something closer to home – the music business in London.
‘Yes’
‘There’s new songs about snuff movies, and if you write about that you’ve got to go into some kind of graphic detail …’
Nicky Wire, Melody Maker, January 1994
World history and current affairs were the main target of the album’s anger, but The Holy Bible began with a more immediate target. ‘Yes’ reflects on Richey’s experiences in the music business, and the verdict is damning. As he wrote in the Manics’ Holy Bible tour programme: ‘Prostitution of The Self’, the majority of one’s time is spent doing something you hate to get something you don’t need. Everyone has a price to buy themselves out of freedom. ‘Say Yes to Everything.’
The band had planned on releasing ‘Yes’ as a final single from the album, and had got as far as having the artwork mocked up. Its cover read: ‘MSP – The Band that likes to say YES. 100% hypocritical guarantee’. This was a play on a then familiar TV ad – ‘TSB, the bank that likes to say Yes’ – and the re-use was telling. Richey was disenchanted with prostituting himself for mainstream success. ‘Yes’ was a scathing put-down of the obvious hypocrisy in adopting a radical leftist surface layer while having willingly signed one’s life over to its opposite.
In 1994, Nicky’s own explanation for ‘Yes’ was in sync with Richey’s: ‘It looks at the way that society views prostitutes as probably the lowest form of life. But we feel that we’ve prostituted ourselves over the last three or four years, and we think it’s the same in every walk of life.’
Further explaining the song, Nicky reminded fans of the indulgences available to recording artists. ‘There’s a line in there: “Tie his hair in bunches, fuck him, call him Rita if you want.” You do get to a position when you’re in a band where you can virtually do anything you want, in any kind of sick, low form. It’s not something we’ve particularly indulged in, but it is a nasty by-product of being in a group.’
The band made clear their revulsion at the depraved entertainments sometimes dangled before them. Richey certainly did. ‘The thing that pisses me off about all these charity appearances by pop stars is that the minute they come off stage, they’re counting their record sales, pissing off to Brown’s and snorting cocaine out of some six-year-old boy’s backside.’
Whatever his prior experiences with groupies, by 1994 Richey was prepared to cross a hugely taboo boundary. One of The Holy Bible’s most controversial features saw Richey daring to draw public attention to the levels of corruption and hypocrisy entrenched in certain sectors of life in the British capital, particularly the entertainment industry’s abuse of vulnerable children.
As this book was being researched, Operation Yewtree was forcing Britain to confront damning revelations about certain sectors of society. Representatives of the establishment, including politicians, members of the judiciary, the clergy and the entertainment industry, were being exposed for the systemic abuse of children over the previous decades. Their involvement was well known within certain circles but had been kept hidden from the broader population up until this point. Within the entertainment industry, police were investigating allegations of historic abuse against Jimmy Savile, Max Clifford, Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter and others.
Details from one horrific report from this time appear to have an astounding parallel with lyrics on The Holy Bible. In 1991, French police charged five people in Paris with possession of extreme child pornography, including a ‘snuff’ video of an eight-year-old British boy being murdered.
Clearly having been assembled using a significant budget and professional filming equipment, what became known as ‘The London Tape’ allegedly had a particular notoriety and popularity in those depraved circles. Among the description of its contents, certain details have an uncanny overlap with Richey’s own description of a child snuff movie.
Throughout his time in the band, Richey was in the habit of speaking out against the levels of immorality and corruption that he discovered were inimical to life in London. As far back as 1992 in an interview with Smash Hits magazine, he alluded to ‘pervy judges’ in an apparently off-the-cuff comment. Sordid lifestyles existed in Wales too, of course, but not on the scale of debauchery tolerated in the English capital. In ‘Yes’ Richey castigates a society where money offered the opportunity to buy anything up to and including paedophilic snuff films.
The ‘London Tape’ snuff film reportedly contained footage of the British child having his penis removed with a scalpel, his killer then raping the remaining cavity. We could dismiss this similarity as mere coincidence were it not for the fact that the detail correlates so exactly. It is possible that Richey Edwards may simply have imagined a scene, whose detail just happened to describe the most harrowing scene from what was the most notorious of child snuff films.
However, bearing in mind his propensity to use his lyrics to report first-hand conversation verbatim, including h
ome truths others might prefer never to hear, another possible explanation arises. Could it be that the song dared to share shocking information that Richey had actually been privy to, and with which he could taunt or scare whoever had shared such details with him? After all, ‘Yes’ was a song about prostitution, which took direct aim at the music business.
Interviewer: ‘I find that, again, extraordinary – the chorus [of ‘Yes’]…. Where’s it coming from?!
Dutch Radio, November 1994
A characteristic that made the Manic Street Preachers stand out was their evangelising for a greater sense of humanity. Central to their narrative was the idea of their struggle against a social-cultural environment hell-bent on dehumanising and disempowering us all. The band contrasted so vividly with others of their era, whose whole style and approach articulated a voice that was barely human any more; crushed and animalised to the brink of insanity. For the Manic Street Preachers, the Sex Pistols represented a defiant display of greater humanity rather than lesser. They were, in Richey’s words, ‘One of the most intense and sensitive groups there’s ever been, which always gets overlooked, I think.’
As reports of paedophile cover-ups began to fill the news, the media also carried the story that, at the peak of the Sex Pistols’ fame, John Lydon had dared to speak out about a certain highly regarded BBC television personality. ‘I’d like to kill Jimmy Savile. I think he’s a hypocrite,’ said Lydon in a recently discovered but unaired BBC Radio interview in 1978. ‘I bet he’s into all kinds of seediness, that we all know about but are not allowed to talk about. I know some rumours! I bet none of this will be allowed out, but nothing I have said is libel.’
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