 Richey said of them: "On stage we are the greatest band ever. Apart from the Clash, and some Skids singles, no music has made any impact in my life. The music press just uninspired. June Brides changed all that..." (from a letter) More quotes on the band here: junebride.freeserve.co.uk/quotes.htm A tribute to the legacy of Richey Manic Saturday 3 September The Portland Arms, Cambridge, £5 A tribute to the legacy of Richey Manic (tbc) A benefit in aid of the National Missing Persons Helpline and Love Music Hate Racism. A selection of local and national talent perform their versions of the epoch defining songs and lyrics of Richey Edwards and Manic Street Preachers. Featuring The Intensely Humming Spectators of SuicideBaby69@hotmail.com (Manics tribute band including Seymour Glass, Matt Dupuy and more mega S*T*A*R*S) + Jazz of Right Turn Clyde + Greg McDonald of The Dawn Parade + Greg of Neo + AD / HD + Princess Drive + Jordan Hacan Ramone + The Virgin Suicides + Uncle Fester and The Wednesdays.   You're Richey! The spirit of the band (perhaps quite literally), you are everything they stand for: Death, anarchy, fuck the actual playing of this guitar thingy, surely that's irrelevant? Which Manic Streety Preaching thing are you? brought to you by Quizilla  You are Richey Which Manic Are You? brought to you by Quizilla  Sweet exile (Wednesday February 22, 1995) Is this music to die for? (Friday March 31, 1995) Mentions the letters sent to the Melody Maker after his disappearance. Read more at the BBC What are your memories of Richey Edwards and his music? Share them here Pitchfork - Buffalo News - This Is Cornwall NME Review/pic - Q Mag Review/pic high quality -- low quality I've added a few little extras which you'll find as you read through... Upcoming TV/Radio: Missing, BBC1, Monday to Friday, 9.15am This programme is mentioned in the Sunday Herald article Living with ghosts. Click the link above to read it. More info: Missing, which begins tomorrow on BBC1, follows the work of the Lambeth Missing Persons Unit, who handle 2500 cases per year in London’s most densely populated borough. The idea, says series editor Miles Jarvis, is to “show the natural tension involved in each story, and to empower the viewer in the sense of making them aware of these cases... the thing that really struck us, was the sheer variety of people who go missing”. The show’s slogan, repeated constantly by presenter Sally Magnusson, is that it can happen to “any one of us, at any time, for any reason”. Radio 1, 9pm, Steve Lamacq, Monday January 31st (according to the NME) the show includes a special Richey Manic anniversary documentary. Here's the link to his website: Lamacq Live  Extracts: The album will be rereleased early next month, packaged in a luxurious 10th anniversary edition and newly tagged as 'a triumph of art over logic'. Rock music may have caught up of late with some of the angular influences that form its musical bedrock - Joy Division, Magazine, Public Image Ltd - but The Holy Bible's lyrical aspect is still glorious and remarkable. Around 70 per cent of its words are the work of Richey Edwards, the member of the group whose unexplained disappearance in February 1995 left them as a reluctant trio. A political history graduate and voracious reader, he was outwardly in thrall to the standard rock archetypes - androgyny, excess, a solipsistic kind of angst - but his sense of what the group's music could convey (shared, it has to be said, by his co-lyricist Nicky Wire) was pretty much unprecedented. The Holy Bible's cast speaks volumes: within its songs lurk references to Lenin, Pol Pot, Myra Hindley, Winston Churchill, Shakespeare, Slobodan Milosevic and Michel Foucault. The band's lyrics, written by Wire and Edwards, were always the starting point for their songs and at that juncture, the latter was evidently on a roll. His first contribution was the lyric for a song entitled Yes, a raw mea culpa in which the Manics surrenders to music business protocol were equated with the more stomach-churning aspects of prostitution. Soon after, he came up with Archives of Pain, a treatise on the innate human need for revenge, built around such lines as Prisons must bring their pain and The centre of humanity is cruelty. "He told me, This a pro-capital punishment song - I think you'll love it" says Wire. "He smiled as he said it". As taboo-breaking were Mausoleum and The Intense Humming of Evil, both inspired by one of the group's chosen forms of on-the-road recreation. "On our days off on a European tour in 1993" says Wire, allowing himself a smile at the incongruity of it all, "we went to Dachau and Belsen. Most bands would get a load of skunk weed and lie around; we visited death camps". Two months before the album's release, the Manics served notice of the album's second visual aspect: a new band uniform of mix-and-match military apparel, decisively introduced when they played Faster on Top of the Pops. Every year, according to Wire, The Holy Bible unfailingly sells around 15,000 copies. Wire remembers when he first appreciated The Holy Bible in its entirety. He and the other Manics were travelling home from an appearance at the Radio One roadshow, and they listened to a cassette of the new record. "That was when the realisation came. It was, It doesn't seem like this is going to give us anything but trouble". The ensuing months rapidly blurred the distinction between the band's art and their collective life. "Richey started drinking things like Tennent's Super, which seemed to say, I've lost the enjoyment of drink; I just need it" says Wire. "By that time, he seemed weak, light, as if he was going to a different place". "Die in the Summertime is the most frightening song there, lyrically and musically, in that it does merge into prophecy. Obviously, it took six months longer than that - if he did die, or disappear, or whatever. But when I listen to it and when we play it live... lines like, A tiny animal curled into a quarter circle - they're amazing lyrics, but there's that idea that nothing gives you any pleasure any more; that, post-childhood, life has been utterly empty. I still find it chilling".  You were talking about themes for this record a little bit earlier. It's quite a reflective album. Nicky: It is, it's the most personal record I've ever done. I think Richey wrote much more personally than me anyway because he went to darker places but I find it quite hard to talk about such wonderful topics as death and solitude and misery but erm... I have on this one. I can still see you in the corners of dressing rooms. The first time I met you James didn't talk to anyone in the van on the way to the gig in Norwich - just sat on his own at the back. Nicky: The first thing we said to you was carving something into our arm; "nice to meet you". And what's this letter? (Nicky's holding a piece of paper) 
Nicky: Well this is a letter that they found in the archives. This is the letter me and Richey wrote to John Peel to get our first play.He reads out from it: "We are the obsolete commodities of state imposed Thatcherism". Nice, and he thought right, I'll play you. You see that's how great he was... Nicky: There was no pluggers there. With a line like that he thought "Oh, I'd better play them". He writes: Lifeblood is inhabited by spectres from the past... a subdued, mellow, melancholy, quietly lovely affair. Mortality and loss are recurring themes on this record. "This album is about death," Wire explains, "the 'trivialisation' of death. People talk about the sanctity of life, but I think the sanctity of death is as important. If someone wants to grieve for 10 years, and just sit in the corner and refuse to do anything, I think it's fair enough. I think we're victims of it ourselves, suffering delayed grief from 10 years without Richey. We've always been kind of, Come on, sod it, let's play Brixton Academy, he'll come back!" The smile is bittersweet this time. Wire's eyes well up whenever he discusses Richey for more than two sentences. Inevitably, Lifeblood, like every album since his departure, is haunted by Edwards, and at least one song (Cardiff Afterlife) is directly addressed to him. One wonders whether Wire will ever exhaust or exorcise the topic, or whether the Richey songs will always come. "This one came in a big moment," he says. "There was a splurge of two or three pages of vitriol which I had to edit down. Our albums have always been infused with bitterness, and for the first time ever, there might be a bit more love than hate. So I had to edit a lot of the bitterness out!" Bitterness towards people who try to claim Richey as their possession? "A little bit that, but also a little towards Richey himself. Which isn't fair, because a lot of it is driven by people outside. It is about reclaiming something. 'I kept my silence, your memories are still mine...' The idea that he's a friend first, not the rock myth". The specific pain of the Richey situation, like any unexplained disappearance, is the impossibility of closure. "It's the dangling man syndrome," Wire says. "You've got hope on the one side, and clarity or closure on the other. And sometimes you want closure, but to get closure you have to kill hope". And have you done that? "No. I don’t know why. It’s probably not healthy, because I have to have definites in my life - it's the kind of person I am. Doubt is not good for me. But until I find proof..." His voice trails off. He says something inaudible. The last spate of Richey Edwards stories came in 2002, the seventh anniversary of his disappearance, when he could legally be declared dead if his parents wished it so. "The family chose not to" says James, "and I don't blame them. But that's not a decision taken by us or anything. And it's not a decision I'd like to take". "There was cheap and nasty stuff in the papers," Wire recalls. "The family can get his money now... As if they would. It was the last thing on their minds". For the record, Edwards' songwriting royalties continue to be paid into a bank account which remains untouched. As for "Proof", there have been one or two close calls. "We were driving to a gig in Copenhagen once, and you get a phone message through saying they've found Richey's feet in the river". The decomposed feet in the Severn turned out to belong to some other unfortunate soul. In any case, they were wearing trainers Richey would never have deigned to wear. "Exactly. Diadora or some crap that Robert Smith would have worn. I know we always laugh and we're blase, but it really does make you shudder, stuff like that".  The Holy Bible is due for reissue in December, with the usual DVD extras. The album most associated with Richey's troubles, is bound to stir up... "The question of whether he's still alive?" James interrupts. No, but... a certain amount of picking at the scab, as it were. "Well, if anyone's picking at that scab, when they're past a certain age, they're necrophiliacs, for want of a better word. And I do want the album to be celebrated, because it's something which didn't reach its audience. It's just like I was saying to my dad - if all the people who told me they loved The Holy Bible had bought it, it would have sold more! And it's good to be proud of it, because it seems to have been inextricably linked with an era... You're made to feel you should forget it and move on". "Around that album I really felt we were the perfect band. Even the photos backstage, we look really amazing, and without looking like we're trying. Richey wasn't sucking the breath out of his body and going like THAT". He sucks in his cheeks. "Just natural and cool". For Wire, the motive for the reissue is purely artistic. "You know me, I enjoy the process of marketing, but I just wanted to show how brilliant Richey's lyrics are. Grace by Jeff Buckley and Definitely Maybe [Oasis] have had 10th anniversary editions, and I think it deserves to be in that company. It's fallen off the critical radar a bit". A decade since his disappearance, I wonder whether the Manics still, consciously or otherwise, seek Edwards's theoretical approval for everything they do. Bradfield admits that, "Up until a year ago, the answer would be 'probably': I used to get the Essence of Richey to do a spellcheck on everything". But times have changed. "I feel, to this day, incapable of going to the places that he went," adds Wire. "I was always scared of being irresponsible - he went to brave places. But I don't think he could do what I've done: be married for 11 years, have a baby daughter, clean the house..." Nicky: He's turned up! DJ: Richey's turned up. Nicky: Where ya been? You look different. Show us your arm. Play Cardiff Afterlife in full at XFM (free) Nicky: Cardiff Afterlife, it reminds me of There Is A Light by The Smiths. It's about the reclamation of your memory, the purity of good things, the idea that you shouldn't let everything become apocryphal or mythical that - the whole Richey thing with us is the idea that you know someone for 20 years; it's pretty much only the last 6 months that were dark and mental. Most of the time it was creative, intense or enjoyable playing cricket or football. So it's that reclamation, the idea of not letting outside forces ruin stuff for you. I think you can apply it to more than just our situation - the idea that Richey is a son to his parents and a friend to us; he's not... well he's certainly not a guitarist. But he's someone I actually sat down on a desk and wrote lyrics with. I don't think many people have had that experience in rock n roll you know; saying "that line's shit" and "that line's good" and stuff like that. It's very much a song about reclamation I think.  James: I felt lt it was an attack on revisionism basically. I always gotta be more guarded because I tend to try and make Nick's lyrics more bitter than they actually are. So I'll just keep quiet about this one. Nicky: I don't think we had a problem with that in the past it's just this time I tried to... James: Reign me in. Nicky: No, reign myself in. All the bad stuff I put in a separate diary and all the kind of constructive stuff I put into songs. Nicky: James plays harmonica on this which is also a very un-Manics thing to do. James: (tiny little voice) A very human thing to do. Nicky: (getting excited) James, Taxi Driver - bore us!! (click the link to go to imdb.com where you can watch the trailer)  James: When I wrote this tune I modelled the choruses on Taxi Driver. Where kind of... you have like the crescendos and almost like backward horns and stuff like that and the harp and I just kind of wanted that kind of confusion because when we went through Lipstick Traces and Forever Delayed I think we'd actually come through the mist, the fog of everybody else's opinions. The fog, just mist of... Nicky: The Fog Of War. James: The Fog Of War indeed. Everybody telling us what they actually thought the truth was and how we'd betrayed certain memories which couldn't be farther from the truth. In a mataphorical way, musically, I wanted to come through the choruses like in a Taxi Driver soundtrack almost as if you're coming out of a New York City mist into something beautiful (click the link to play samples at amazon.com, scroll down the page to find them)  Nicky: There was a magic moment 'cos we went out for a walk in New York and we left Sean and Tony Visconti - we were struggling with the chorus a bit, wasn't we? And Sean just found a really good harp sample - kind of Sean's bit of work actually. He got the actual soundtrack to Taxi Driver, played it to Tony Visconti, we came back 2 hours later and it actually sounded like what we'd been looking for. James: It's no accident the very last note of the album is us coming out of that chorus and it is like a metaphor of just coming out of the sadness and confusion that surrounded certain things, that's just actually finding the answer for once. Not having to look back for revenge against people. DJ: The song ends quite abruptly doesn't it? Just kind of... ends. James: Yeah, which means we're at peace with everything. "The main themes are death and solitude and ghosts. Being haunted by history and being haunted by your own past". Edwards is the heart of Cardiff Afterlife, the unspoken shadow behind I Live To Fall Asleep, a song about suicide and relief. "Sleep is beautiful for me. I hate dreaming because it ruins ten hours of bliss. I had a lot of bad dreams when Richey first disappeared. Not ugly dreams, but nagging things. Until we wrote Design For Life, it was six months of misery". Lifeblood doesn’t seek to exorcise Edwards’s ghost, though, just admits that "there are no answers". When one of your best friends disappears and you haven't got a fucking clue what the answer is, the bad feelings never diminish. I don't know about that word closure, either. I think we've all been watching too much of The Sopranos. The problem with the keepers of Richey's flame was that some of them decided that they knew him better than we did. The last NME review I read was a pie chart assessing how cold or otherwise we'd been to Richey on the greatest hits package. That's the kind of crap that makes you feel like killing someone.  Play Cardiff Afterlife in full at XFM (free) Has faded away Left in the rain Scratching at the stains The paralysed future The past sideways crawl I must give up on this It makes no sense at all In the Cardiff afterlife We sensed the breaking of our lives And yet I kept my silence Your memory is still mine No I will not share them Acquaintance through denial For I witnessed splendour And evil that no-one saw And I felt kindness And vanity for sure In the Cardiff afterlife We sensed the breaking of our lives In the Cardiff afterlife We sensed the making of our lives Is Cardiff Afterlife a reference? (to Richey) Nicky: Yeah it's a very - in my mind anyway - a poetic, nice reference. It's the idea of keeping memories very pure and very close. The idea that I remember Richey as much for playing football with him for 10 years. It's not a Rock Myth to me, it's a very personal thing, the same to his parents. I grew up on this, I'm not an idiot, Ian Curtis, Jim Morrison were important to me, the Rock Mythology, but as people we have to separate the reality from the kind of apocryphal nature of it all.  On February 1 1995, Richey Edwards, their chief lyricist and strategist, left his London hotel and never came back. His still unsolved disappearance is the central tragedy of the Manics' career, and it casts a shadow over every Brit award they've won, every arena they've filled. "We are haunted by ghosts," says Wire. "We're haunted by the way we looked - the symmetry - the four of us - everything was perfect." The Manics have always been a band apart. At the height of baggy and shoegazing, they presented a bold, if somewhat cackhanded, collision of Guy Debord and Guns N' Roses. In the year of Parklife and Definitely Maybe, they released an apocalyptically extreme screed called The Holy Bible. Bradfield will not apologise for what some still regard as the Manics' cardinal sin: not breaking up after Edwards vanished. "Why can't people accept that there was a massive loyalty between us?," he says forcefully. "You know, we weren't left with a goodbye card or a set of instructions."  Two years ago, the Daily Star reported that a pair of trainers containing bones, possibly those of Edwards, had been discovered in the Severn. "I think it hurts us a million times more than we would ever let on and even realise ourselves," says Wire. Bradfield is more emphatic about the Star's failure to forewarn Edwards' parents: "Cunts. Fucking cunts." This was around the seventh anniversary of the disappearance, when Edwards' family declined to have him officially declared dead. Some commentators reacted with a distasteful mix of voyeurism and gleeful impatience. "You get that a lot if you're jumping in a cab round here," says Wire. "They say, 'How's that boy of yours, then? You know where he is, don't you?' It's the blankness that you have to deal with. Cardiff Afterlife deals with the feeling of being kept dangling. There's not a body, there's not a grave, but there's hope. You know in Superman, when the baddies expel people from Krypton and they're in bubbles, just floating around? It's felt like that sometimes." Bradfield can't stand what he calls "the B-movie questions". "They want him to be stood in front of a TV shop window, with a beard, watching us on TV, saying, 'Good on ya, boys'. Then he walks away back to his fishmonger's job. End of film."  None the less, he acknowledges that producing a 10th anniversary edition of The Holy Bible, their last record with Edwards, has raised some painful questions. "Were there things we could have done differently?" he asks, his brow creasing. "Definitely. But we were taking all the decisions together at the time. And we were young. It's a cliche but, God, I wish I knew what I know now. I think closure's for people who want to wash their hands of the guilt they feel." James on Cardiff Afterlife: I got my harmonica out and started playing in certain parts of the song. I could see straight away they were thinking Oh My God not that corny representation of something that's soulful and real, in terms of Bob Dylan or whatever, and I was like, no, no, no, it doesn't have to be like that, you know, it can be like Johnny Marr playing the harmonica with Matt Johnson in The The... Richey's drinking, self-harm and eating disorders spiralled out of control. By the time The Holy Bible came out, he'd been admitted to The Priory and, in a chilling porten, the Manics played T in The Park and Reading without him. On December 21, with all of them at breaking point, they played London's Astoria and smashed their equipment; the proper expensive stuff. It was a significant moment. It was Christmas and they'd had enough. "You couldn't get a more fitting or a more dramatic ending than that night" says Wire. "There was nothing indulgent about it, it was our way of saying... Too Much. We did some demos after that and then that was it. That was the last time we saw Richey" (he wasn't declared legally dead like it says)  (enter M*o*o*r*o*t*i*c*a) Since his disappearance in 1995, MSP have been reluctant to address the fate of Richey Edwards, their former guitarist and lyricist. But the band's forthcoming album talks about him in song. The track Cardiff Afterlife forms the cornerstone of an album that Manics spokeswoman Terri Hall says "finally deals with" the tragedy. The song's chorus runs: "In the Cardiff afterlife we sensed the breaking of our lives ... And yet I kept my silence/Your memory is still mine" Edwards - who battled alcoholism and anorexia - vanished in 1995 after leaving his Vauxhall Cavalier close to a well-known suicide spot by the first Severn Bridge near Chepstow. Over the years, innumerable sightings of Edwards have proved unfounded. However, the guitarist's family have rejected the option of having him legally declared dead. The song title signifies his bandmates' belief that Edwards is with them "in the ether" James talking to icWales: As a band I think we seem more at ease with ourselves, with each other, with the music and also, with Richey (Edwards) and how we remember him and what he meant to us. And we feel we do it in the right way in the human way as Nick does in the words to Cardiff Afterlife. It goes, "And yet I kept my silence and the memories are still mine". In that song we sensed the breaking of our lives.  August 2004: Blue Cat Records Out Of The Blue compilation is available now (on Mary & Viv's label - ex Terrible Beauty editors) Click the link for a page on all the artists involved, which are: Sing The Body Electric, Desolation Angels, Haven, The Amelies, Lee Griffiths, Sara Hawley, Hawthorns, Hannah, Mug, The Ghosts, The Bug, Isobel Heyworth, Stuart Avery, Tom Hingley and The Lovers. bluecatmusic.co.uk |
