Richey James Edwards, the complex trail of the rock star who disappeared | Culture

Welsh band Manic Street Preachers’ plan was to release one record and disappear. With the arrogance, ambition and naivety of every great new artist multiplied by a hundred, the alternative band proclaimed their debut Generation Terrorists (1992) would be “the greatest rock album of all time”, they would release it on the biggest label, sell 20 million copies and then disband. Despite Sony’s intense campaign, the group’s goals, which in 2024 are still active and preparing their fifteenth studio album, were clearly not met. They had plenty of determination.

After another delivery, Gold Against The Soul (1993), which went commercially unnoticed, Manic Street Preachers called their third work The Holy Bible because “everything about him had to be perfect.” Rated by the specialist publication New Musical Express (NME) as “the darkest album in history”, The Holy Bible It was released on August 30, 1994, the same day that a British debut album appeared that did mark a new era: Definitely Maybeby Oasis.

With singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield (Pontypool, Wales, UK, 55 years old) at the front, his cousin Sean Moore (ditto, 56) as drummer and Nicky Wire (Blackwood, 55) on bass, Manic Street Preachers were dominated by the media projection of a fourth member, Richey Edwards (Blackwood, disappeared in 1995 at the age of 27 and legally dead since 2008), who served as rhythm guitar, although he did not play well and barely recorded anything. Edwards was the one who most effusively sought the interest of the press in the early years, through insistent letters and scandals. The most illustrious episode in this sense took place in 1991, when, in front of NME journalist Steve Lamacqhe carved “4 REAL” (Really) into his arm with a razor to dispel any doubts about whether his public image was a pose. In the hospital he received 18 stitches.

Richey Edwards, who also self-harmed onstage, could be seen as the band’s Sid Vicious, but he was much more. “To some extent, he may have been the frontman,” says Pitchfork critic Joe Tangari. “I think he set the tone for them, from the way they dressed and their taste for slogans to the lyrics (which he wrote with Nicky Wire). I don’t think he had much to do with how they sounded, but he did have a lot to do with creating their image and persona.” As well as being a rock star, he was an outstanding student, a reader of significant scholarship, an amateur poet and a left-wing intellectual with a degree in Political History. He was also someone with significant mental health problems, suffering from, at the very least, severe depression. An admirer of the dark sounds and sensibility of Echo & The Bunnymen, The Smiths and Joy Division, Edwards hoped that Manic Street Preachers’ music and messages would provoke a near-generational shift in consciousness.

The then soul of the group was emptied into The Holy Bible, which his colleagues say he wrote at 75%. In 1994, Edwards spent time in two psychiatric hospitals and attempted suicide in the summer. The album, which covers topics such as prostitution, fascism, mass culture, imperialism, mental illness and murder, came at a time when fans preferred to listen to other things, as demonstrated, in parallel to its failure, by the explosion of Oasis. “It was very much an album out of its time,” says Joe Tangari. “While some bands britpop“While the likes of Blur satirised society, the Manics were much more direct. No one else in the UK was tackling these issues. The music was also very far removed from what was happening in Britain – the guitars had a very nasty tone and the drums rarely kept time in a conventional way. It had the potential to reach the US, but American alternative rock was much more about individual suffering and turmoil.”

The cover of the album was the triptych Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face), by contemporary artist Jenny Saville, which shows an obese woman from three perspectives. References to writers such as Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath and Harold Pinter also peppered the lyrics. The band’s visit to Nazi concentration camps during their 1993 European tour inspired the songs. Mausoleum and The Intense Humming Of Evil. On the other hand, Edwards’ problems were evident in the chronicle of her anorexia. 4st 7lb (i.e. 29 kilos, the weight considered the limit for the death of a patient) or in Die In The Summertime, which seemed to announce his plans for summer suicide.

Asked in 2014 how they had failed to realise the gravity of what their author was talking about, Nicky Wire explained on BBC Radio 4’s Mastertapes: “We told ourselves that I was writing about these dark things in a journalistic way, for example imagining the point of view of an anorexic person.” Faster, first single which was taken from the album, ended up becoming one of the band’s classics. Regarding its abstract but powerful content, a self-affirmation where the first person defines himself as “architect”, “pioneer”, “purity” and says phrases like “I have been too honest with myself, I should have lied to myself like everyone else”, his companions admitted to being confused.

A season in hell

On February 1, 1995, Richey Edwards vanished. Declared legally dead in 2008, his body was never found and his fate is unknown. James Dean Bradfield went to his hotel room in London that morning to pick him up to travel to the United States to promote The Holy Bible, but it was empty. According to the reception, he left at seven in the morning. In the room, he had left a box, presumably intended for his friend and ex-girlfriend Jo, with the message “I love you” and several books, including Royal Road (1953), by Tennessee Williams, The Antichrist (1895), by Nietzsche, or Equus (1973), by Peter Schaffer. Although Bradfield was assumed to be the last person to see Edwards, the band reported that he had been visited the previous evening by a woman named Vivian, whom the family has never been able to identify.

According to the band’s story, he tried to get her to keep his passport, in mimesis with the legend of Novel with cocaine (1934), one of the books that obsessed him: its author, M. Ageyev (recognized in the nineties as the Russian Mark Levi), was said to have disappeared after giving his passport to a friend. Edwards’ subsequent journey is unclear. He is believed to have driven to Cardiff and passed by his flat, where his passport, his medication and a receipt for a 2:55 a.m. toll on the Severn Bridge, which crosses the Anglo-Welsh border, were found. Although for more than two decades it was assumed that this time was after midday, in 2018 the chronology changed when Sara Hawys Roberts and Leon Noakes, authors of the book Withdrawn Traces: Searching For The Truth About Richey Manic (published in 2019 and unpublished in Spain), carried out in collaboration with the missing man’s sister, showed that the ticket was issued at 2:55 in the morning. Thus, the book postulates that either Edwards left the hotel well before seven in the morning (between twelve and one, at the latest) or there was at least one other person involved in his disappearance.

Yes ok Withdrawn Traces, At times it lends itself to conspiracy theory, but as an indirect exercise in exhaustive biography and cultural criticism it is fascinating. Based on the widespread hypothesis that Edwards, alone or accompanied, with or without the intention of committing suicide, planned his disappearance in advance (the farewell gift to his ex-girlfriend, the bank statements confirming that for two weeks he had been saving up money and withdrawing £200 a day from his account), the writers Roberts and Noakes delve into his artistic legacy, his diaries and readings in search of meaning, of clues that could indicate what the author of songs with lines like “I want to walk in the snow and not leave a footprint” had in mind.

The investigation draws a character interested from a young age by the idea of ​​voluntary confinement and the romantic trope of disappearance. Edwards grew up captivated by the mystery of his great-aunt Bessie, who lived in absolute solitude and refused to interact with anyone for decades, until her death in 1994. Literarily, he was attracted to the figure of Kurtz, the man who goes into the jungle and lives like a demigod. Heart of Darkness (1899), and claimed to envy the isolation of JD Salinger, who devoted most of his life to writing and reading without contact with the outside world. In his last months, he posed in promotional photos in front of a glass with a quote from Solomon Northup – the author of 12 years a slave (1853), whose final destination was never known – or with clothes printed with verses by Arthur Rimbaud, the man who cut himself off from everything and stopped writing poetry to set out to sea and travel to remote lands. It could be deliberate. Or it could be that when you want to see something, you see it everywhere.

Richey Edwards is portrayed as a quixotic rock figure, with an identity forged from references and mythology. Already in high school he was determined to become famous, writing false biographies or having a classmate photograph him to document his beginnings for history. Not without a certain messianic complex, he was interested in the legends about Brian Jones, the ill-fated founder of the Rolling Stones who died in strange circumstances, and there is talk of the resonance that Kurt Cobain’s suicide had on him. He also idolized Bobby Sands, the IRA martyr who died at the age of 27 after a hunger strike: he said that his was “the best possible statement, because it was against himself.” Before he disappeared, he became so interested in religion – he tattooed fragments of The Divine Comedy (1472), reading the Gospels, expressed interest in travelling to Israel – his sister sought him out through monasteries in the United Kingdom.

Edwards’ trail goes back to 17 February 1995, when his car was found abandoned, battery dead, on the Severn Bridge, with a final parking ticket dated the 14th and signs that someone had been living inside it. He then moved on to the status of icons such as Elvis, with disparate sightings in India and the Canary Islands. Manic Street Preachers found the massive success that had so eluded them with Everything Must Go (1996), an album that, from its title, functioned simultaneously as a catharsis, a farewell and a change of direction. The band ended up building a long and solid career, with a softer sound compared to its beginnings, but maintaining a high political profile. (If You Tolerate This Then Your Childen Will Be Next, His best-known song is about the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades.

From the open mystery of Edwards, Rosie Dunn, a woman who met and befriended the musician during his stay in a psychiatric hospital, pointed to another possible clue in Withdrawn Traces: how often he quoted the BBC series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976), about a dissatisfied forty-something who fakes suicide to start a new life under a different identity. “Richey kept mentioning it to me, as if he wanted me to keep it,” Dunn said. “I don’t know if he did that or if he just thought it was an attractive idea. Maybe that’s what he wanted people to think of him, regardless of what really happened to him.”