Between the announcement of Withdrawn Traces in 2016 and the time proceeding its release in March 2019, there was a fair amount of discussion about its content, and after seeing various posts and discussions on its intent as well as comments and videos about its claims, I decided I wanted to read it in order to potentially write a short review. Initially, my intent was to write a small review and a quick-and-dirty summary of the book for those who didn’t want to spend money on it because of the controversy surrounding its content. I wrote most of the chapters 1-4 summary/review sections in winter 2019, but in 2020 the occurrence of various global events meant I pretty much forgot about this endeavour entirely. I picked the project back up in 2022. As I reread the book, I noticed more and more problems with the content, both factual and interpretive, and my intent changed. This ‘writeup’, as I have been calling it, became a chronological summary of the book with critique, commentary, and debunking included as I made my way through. I also tried to give slightly more summary or context to non-Manics outside sources that were referenced in Withdrawn Traces than what is supplied in the text. Obviously, I originally thought it was going to be much shorter, but this project has become quite long and I’ve essentially written a book by accident, so it is divided into titled subsections for somewhat easier reading and will be posted in six parts. I’ve also scanned in all the glossy inserts from Withdrawn Traces itself and included some other supplemental images for context as well, and put them in a separate post here [supplement], and I will also place links to this images page at pertinent points in the text. Similarly, my citations are on a separate page which will be linked at the bottom of each part.
Withdrawn Traces: Searching for the truth about Richey Manic was made available for pre-order in late 20161, 2 to be released in March 2017, and it was published March 2019 after a number of delays. The hype surrounding it was a) that it was authorised by and “with the co-operation of”3 Richey’s sister Rachel Edwards, and b) that it contained “new evidence”4 regarding his disappearance. It also purported to be a celebration of Richey as an artist and a person. The book was written by Sara Hawys Roberts and Leon Noakes with a foreword by Rachel Edwards. It was published by Virgin Books, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House publishing company and multi-industry company Virgin Group, which mostly focuses on publishing nonfiction.
Before I begin, I think a good indication of the research quality of this book is the fact that hardly anyone close to Richey during his time with the band was interviewed for it. None of the management, none of the journalists or photographers that were friendly with and travelled with the band, very few members of bands they toured with, and none of the actual band members themselves were interviewed. Of the few people that were interviewed who were around Richey regularly in 1994, at least two of them remain anonymous. A number of individuals have spoken out about being misquoted in the text or being portrayed in anecdotes that are false. This book is also riddled with inaccuracies, and more than half the sources quoted or used in this text are uncited. The more quotes, dates and sources I double-checked, the more manipulation and fabrication I found, some likely accidental, some possibly more deliberate. In September 2023, just as I was finishing the last edits on this project, Sara Hawys Roberts published “Withdrawn Traces: a Retrospective”,5 in which she attempted to explain some of the “inaccuracies and oversights”6 within the text. I have gone back through my text and addressed her comments from this retrospective where they are pertinent, as well as inserting an addendum near the end which addresses content I could not easily fit into my already-written piece.
Guy Mankowski, in an interview with Sara Hawys Roberts in February 2019, noted that “anyone criticising the book has to take on the complex premise behind a book that was intended to [document Richey] but also to try and help find him”. 7 This is my attempt to do that, because I truly was disappointed by this book’s failure to follow through on those intentions with any level of respect towards Richey as an artist or person, or to his bandmates, or in any way that doesn’t get this book shelved in with more far-fetched ‘true crime’ or conspiracy books. As previously stated, this project initially began simply as a summary of the Withdrawn Traces for people who didn’t want to buy it, but as I reread it I found I had more and more issues with the content, and this piece grew exponentially. This final form still follows the book chronologically, but it is more criticism than summary and more of an effort at commentary or debunking than a simple run-down of the book’s more questionable contents.
Who Are The Authors?
In searching for any history the authors might have had regarding the band, the only Manic Street Preachers-related piece of writing by Sara Hawys Roberts that I could find was something titled “Would He Tolerate This?,”8 an online article written in 2010 about a “psychic” using the persona of Richey as a “spirit” that talks through her. The article describes the psychic and the way she incorrectly portrays Richey, and points her out as a fraud. The writing is fairly amateurish and to be quite honest when I first read it in 2015 I thought it was fiction, or at least highly embellished. I could find one other article9 on the same psychic; that article references Roberts’ piece very briefly. This is the article that connected Roberts with Rachel Edwards, according to an interview with WalesOnline.10 Author Guy Mankowski referred to Roberts as his “writing partner” in an interview in 2020, as they are working together on a book about Kristen Pfaff.11 Roberts is also credited in A Version Of Reason, Rob Jovanovic’s 2010 book about Richey’s disappearance. She is thanked in the acknowledgements as having “always provided helpful advice,”12 though as far as I could find she’s not mentioned in the main body of the book, and there’s no indication of the nature of her participation in the book’s creation. However, she also has a history of speaking pejoratively about the remaining members of the band, including personal insults towards them, accusing them of using Richey’s name as a “cash cow”,13 and questioning their honesty about Richey’s disappearance.14-17 Rachel Edwards allegedly had or has an FDForum account of her own, and therefore potentially had knowledge of Roberts’ online comments and opinions.
I could find very little information about Leon Noakes, aside from the fact that he helped in writing this book and that he wrote a play with Roberts in 2014.18 He’s listed as a co-author of Withdrawn Traces and yet he did not participate in any interviews about the book or any other publicity in which Roberts is quoted. He has no online presence, no previous publications, and seems to have no previous relation to the band; his name doesn’t come up in any search about the Manic Street Preachers or Richey, except in the context of being credited with helping to write this book, and if he was active in the fan community, it was not under a recognisable name.
Early Days
The foreword by Rachel Edwards is earnest, emotional, sweet and sad. She talks about the grief of a missing loved one, how different it is from having a loved one who has died because there’s still potential and hope through the loss. She describes how she wants Richey to be remembered as “an artist and as a person and as a dearly loved and missed family member”1 rather than just the member of a band, and explains that Sara Hawys Roberts was the first person she met who “got it”2 in regards to how she wanted to frame her brother’s story. She goes on to talk about how Richey’s disappearance has left so many questions and an unknown end, her frustration with how the authorities handled the case, how she now believes the original timeline is wrong, and that she wants this book to be something that encourages the public to continue searching for Richey and come forward with any potential new information. There’s nothing revelatory or unusual in this introduction, and for the most part it is tinged with a desire to know what happened or for a spark of hope. Rachel says more than once that she wants to portray Richey as an artist outside of just his work with the Manics, and that she believes not only that Withdrawn Traces portrays Richey “in a sympathetic light”3 but also that “the authors reveal my brother as I knew him.”4
The main text of the book begins with an introduction that summarises Richey’s life in general as well as a quick overview of the trajectory of the band from university days to a band with three albums, in order to transition into a summary of their intentions for writing Withdrawn Traces and theories and claims contained within. These authors waste no time regarding their chosen angle, as the third page focuses on his disappearance, pointing out specifically the books he read, referenced, and recommended to fans or the press as revealing a pattern that “suggests a possible life in exile.” From the start, this seems like a fairly shallow theory to use as a jumping-off point, as the two books the authors select to illustrate their point are Catcher In The Rye and Heart Of Darkness. There are many lists online of books Richey referenced, but the ones he listed in interviews,5 including the two mentioned above, were mostly books that people are made to read in school. The majority of Richey’s literary selections are not unusual or unknown books; many are popular classics or texts that people have to study at some point in their academic lives. But the authors work on the assumption that he read them because they have to do with disappearance and exile, or that they provided inspiration and planted the seed years before he took any action, even as far back as his school days. It is with this theory that the authors first establish their claim which runs through the whole book, that Richey was planning a disappearance for many years.
Roberts and Noakes claim that they want to show another part of Richey’s story, and include this quote early on in the chapter: “We have interviewed many crucial people who knew Richey during different stages of his life. Most are speaking publicly for the first time.”6 A number of people who were interviewed by the authors have since come forward to say that they were misquoted; a few people who were quoted were not interviewed at all and were surprised to learn they were portrayed in this book. Most importantly, the authors didn’t speak to his bandmates, the people who spent the majority of time with him, and who were present during many of those critical moments in his life. The remaining band members have, as far as I know, not acknowledged this book. It will be more apparent further on, but the “crucial” people interviewed and quoted seem to be mostly Richey’s university friends and Jo, the girl to whom he left the box at the Embassy hotel. However, Jo refused to be interviewed for Withdrawn Traces, and only gave permission for the authors to use the letters she had written to Rachel in the mid-to-late 90s,7 though the correspondence between Rachel and Jo seems to have ended before 1999.
The introductory chapter poses 5 things that this book intends to explore:
-That Richey’s disappearance is more complicated than imagined.
-That Richey made plans to disappear early on, long before the final months of 1994.
-That he was willing to go as far as possible for the band’s success and fame.
-That he “has not received the recognition he very likely would have following a confirmed suicide.”8
-Finally, that this book is a tribute to Richey’s life and to him as a “unique artist, visionary, friend, son, brother, and profound human being.”9
Before we get into the first chapter proper, there are already discrepancies. Many of the chapter titles in the book are subtitled by a quote relevant to the chapter’s main subject. The quote subtitling the introduction header reads, “You’ve got to reach out on a massive level. Once we’ve done that we’ll fade away. You’ll never hear from us again,” and is attributed to Richey in 1991.10 The excerpt is from the band’s first ever front cover interview,11 published in Sounds. However, that final sentence is not included in the article, and the only results upon searching that line are this book. The heading of chapter one is also subtitled by a quote which is attributed to Richey in 1991:
“The Welsh are the most melancholic people in the world. Where we come from, there’s a natural melancholy in the air. You’ve got the ruins of heavy industry all around you, you see your parents’ generation all out of work, nothing to do, being forced into the indignity of going on courses of relevance. Everybody, ever since you could comprehend it, felt pretty much defeated.”12
In fact, this quote is not only not from 1991, it’s also two quotes combined. The first sentence comes from an interview with Deadline in July 1993,13 while the rest of the quote is from a 1994 Melody Maker interview.14
The start of the second chapter also has this problem. Its chapter subtitle is a quote allegedly found in Richey’s archive of notes which the authors have attributed to Kinky Friedman: “A happy childhood… is the worst possible preparation for life.”15 However, this quote appears in Friedman’s humourous quote book Cowboy Logic, which was published in 2006.16 Rather than Friedman, the quote was likely recorded by Richey without attribution from Josephine Hart’s 1991 novel Damage, in which a passage reads, “Might not a happy childhood be the worst possible preparation for life?”17 If you search for the quote on the internet without any attribution, the Kinky Friedman quote is the first to appear. It seems as though the authors searched the quote and assumed the first result was the correct one, without checking when the quote by Friedman was published and if there was any earlier occurrence of a similar one.
The content of first chapter doesn’t actually start with Richey himself. Instead, it talks about the history of Richey’s family, and the history of their hometown of Blackwood. The historical significance of various Blackwood landmarks are explained and the working-class, socialist history of the town recounted. Richey’s extended family history gets an airing, starting with his great-grandparents on his father’s side and moving forward through the generations, mostly pointing out specific traits that might reflect a parallel with the author’s theories. Richey’s great-aunt Bessie was somewhat reclusive after caring for her shell-shocked brother until his death, and her story fascinated Richey as a child; she passed away in 1994, though they were not in contact with each other when he was an adult. The chapter also mentions that Richey’s great-grandmother died of alcoholism, briefly recounts his father’s childhood, military service, and hairdressing career, and informs us that in the 1960s Richey’s uncle Shane went off to America and didn’t visit home for five years. Richey’s parents Sherry and Graham were married in August 1966; Richey was born sixteen months later.
Moving not so swiftly along, the second chapter reviews many of the already-known facts about Richey’s childhood and early years, with quite a few extra details and a good deal of speculation. It discusses his childhood playing with his cousins who lived in the same neighbourhood, how close he was with his grandmother Kezia, the fact that he became a big rock music fan by the age of 10, and that he was meticulous in school even as a child. Quotes, paraphrases and commentary in this chapter all point out that Young Richey’s personality was very different from Adult Rockstar Richey’s personality and behaviour. This includes a quote from Rachel wondering “what would have happened if he went to Monmouth school [the comprehensive Richey could have gone to had he not decided to stay with his friends at Oakdale]. Would a place like that have made him more positive about the future? Would it have made any difference at all?”18 Speculations like this are scattered throughout the first few chapters, but they’re also accompanied with quotes, anecdotes, and commentary about how even from a very young age, Richey was nostalgic for and obsessed with the innocence of childhood, and that in general he disliked adult life. The decision to dwell on Richey’s school choice is strange, because whether he’d gone to Monmouth or not, he still would have had to grow up, participate in adult life, experience adversity or disappointment, and leave the innocence and idyllic images he was obsessed with behind. In 1994, Richey told Martin Hall that he thought “he probably would have ended up the same way, regardless.”19 And in 2015, Rachel was asked if she thought the music business made Richey’s problems worse, to which she answered, “Who knows? Those symptoms might have manifested themselves if he’d been working in a bank.”20
The chapter recounts Richey getting his dog Snoopy, his family moving out of his maternal grandmother’s house, his love for comic books, and the oft-referenced discussions of Richey’s claim that he had greatly disliked Sunday school. Regarding the commentary on Sunday school and religion, Rachel says she “never observed any signs that it visibly bothered him at the time.”21 This prompts the authors to speculate about any sort of incident that might have “changed the carefree young boy into such a troubled adult.”22 Rachel posits that “[…] something could have happened to him, a trauma he didn’t tell the family about. Some people keep those things to themselves.”23 This would be a good place to stop all this speculation. It may answer the question about why Richey felt terrible after the age of about thirteen, but whatever it was, he kept it private and unspoken.
But this book isn’t content to stop there. Instead of realizing that Rachel probably answered her own question with that single statement, the authors dismiss it and keep digging. Rachel describes an incident in which Richey was terrified and shaken by something he saw in the woods at age ten, but says that she wasn’t sure if it “was an incident”24 and moves on to describe his normal adolescence. The story seems inserted into the section as an attempt to find a traumatic origin to Richey’s problems that comes up without any sort of definitive answer, despite mental illness not always being caused by childhood trauma. Some studies say that mental illness often doesn’t manifest until puberty or even adulthood, and also that its onset isn’t always necessarily related to a single traumatic experience, but to genetics, brain structure, or even hormone changes associated with puberty.25, 26 Nicky Wire thought a similar thing about Richey, observing that rather than a traumatic experience as a child, it was the thrust towards adulthood that was the catalyst, because “he had such a blissful childhood; that’s the thing that fucked him up, because when he came to adolescence, the responsibility and everything else, he could never kind of shake that off.”27 Nicky recalled that “he always said to me that he loved his childhood, then it hit him.”28 In 1992, Richey was already talking to the press about the difference between childhood and adulthood, romanticising the freedom and innocence of being a kid and being unaffected by the reality of capitalism, politics, and responsibility.29 In 1994, he expressed the sentiment that “a lot of people had terrible childhoods, but personally up to the age of 13, I was ecstatically happy. People treated me very well, my dog was beautiful, I lived with my nan and she was beautiful. School’s nothing, you go there, come back and just play football in the fields. Then I moved from my nan’s and started a comprehensive school and everything started going wrong. In my 20s, there’s nothing that’s been that spectacular since.”30
Much of the chapter goes on to summarise Richey’s school days and projects, his life as a young student, his interest in history, words and writing, and his creative endeavours including drawings, short stories and essays for class. Richey’s childhood friendship with Nicky Wire, James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore is barely mentioned, claiming that Richey only met them as a pre-teen and “that there was no notable interaction between them until [Richey’s] later adolescent years.”31 This contradicts with the band’s early interview anecdotes about being friends since childhood, which the authors claim the band fabricated because it “would make a good story for the music press.”32 However, whether or not it is embellished or exaggerated doesn’t negate their friendship as students or as adults and their closeness later on as a band. It’s doubtful that a narrative of childhood friendship would have made enough impact on the 90s music press to get them much more attention than what they had already gained.
The authors have an unnerving ability to take regular life experiences and turn them into clues and evidence that things in Richey’s life are all connected together, like a crazy wall covered in papers connected by red strings. An excerpt:
“Time and again, a page is turned and content pours from his early-teen mind which seems to link with his later life. Were these premonitions of what would follow? Or do these pages more likely give testimony to Richey’s authenticity, in showing that themes repeat throughout his life to the end?
One 1982 exercise book contained a list of words for Richey to look up in the dictionary. It’s remarkable how many later turned up in Manics lyrics – cauterise (from ‘ifwhiteamerica…’), transitory (‘Removables’), opulent (Journal For Plague Lovers).”33
It seems the authors haven’t given thought to the idea that people are one continuous experience of life and therefore build on themselves. Personalities and interests repeat themselves not necessarily because of symbolic themes, but because that’s how humans work, and that’s how learning works. People connect new experiences to old ones in order to gain perspective, they remember inconsequential and apparently useless information from childhood (like vocabulary, or some specific lesson in class, or a scene from a film) and may end up using it later in life. Not to mention there is evidence of many famous musicians and writers continually keeping lists of vocabulary words or phrases to use later, as well as the tendency of artists to return time and again to certain themes or ideas. Richey was also an avid reader, so there is no reason not to assume he encountered these words again as an adult. While the authors do acknowledge that it might just be Richey’s “authenticity”34 as an artist which sees certain ideas return in his work, the way that they continually frame his teenage works as “chilling”35 or “startling”36 emphasises their bias towards interpreting these literary devices and vocabulary words as “premonitions.”37
Leafing through the stories and essays Richey wrote in comprehensive school, the authors pluck out words and themes that apparently indicate Richey’s future plans. Richey wrote about a narrator observing characters in a hospital, in which a man is having stitches removed and a pennyroyal plant is growing in a pot; the piece contains several unusual words that make it seem as though Richey was using that vocabulary list for practice. Somehow they connect this mention of pennyroyal written by Richey in 1982 with Nirvana’s 1994 song ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ as “such an early use of subject matter that would arise again in the early nineties,”38 and the stitches mentioned in the story with the 4-REAL incident that would occur nine years in the future. The connection they’re trying to make here seems dubious; there’s no clear way any of these things connect to each other except for coincidentally being about similar subjects. “Were these premonitions,” they ask, or do these simply show that Richey’s art is really for real, because “themes repeat throughout his life to the end?”39 In another story, Richey talks about the Severn bridge. [image] Rachel notes that “the fact that he always had the image of the Severn Bridge in his head at such a young age is quite something. […] That even then, when things got tough, he saw crossing the Bridge as a means of escape.”40 It certainly shouldn’t be a surprise. The old Severn Crossing was essentially the only way out of Wales over to England across the Severn. The M4 Severn bridge wasn’t built until 1996. Of course the Severn Crossing was going to be seen as a means of movement or escape in the head of a young child or teenager. Bridges are means of movement and accessibility to a place that is otherwise inaccessible. If you’re a kid from a small town in Wales and you’ve been over to England via the Severn Bridge multiple times but that’s the only way you’ve gotten over, you’re going to have that image in your head. Not everything has to indicate a secret, long-lasting conspiracy.
The authors go on to describe another piece of short fiction by adolescent Richey called ‘The Rebel,’ [image] in which a geneticist expresses bitterness at the government for withdrawing funding for his research, and is then kidnapped by a man in black. The scientist is instructed to hold a Labour MP hostage so he can be flown to South America and be safe in a “sparkling new hospital, [with] all the latest technology,”41 animals to test on, and doctors, nurses, etc. The scientist does what he has been told to do, then the MP is rescued by the SAS and the kidnapper is revealed to be a previous Labour MP who had been replaced by the one held hostage. It’s a political story created by a teenager who’s already very politically conscious and interested in writing. The authors say that the short story’s themes “firmly place Richey’s imagination in the early eighties but what shouts most loudly is the act of social transgression culminating in a plan to escape and live on in freedom abroad. And this, in Richey’s mind at the age of 14.”42 What shouts most loudly to me is the political awareness and the cognisance of corruption, not the desire to live abroad. But considering what was being talked about in the news in 1981-82 when Richey was presumably writing this story – high levels of unemployment, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and subsequent IRA hunger strikes and bombings, various strikes across the UK, widespread closures of coal pits, waves of mass protest against racial violence and economic problems, and the Falklands War, for instance – it is likely that there was plenty of inspiration to take from what was happening directly in front of him on the television and probably on his own streets as well. All this during his early teenage years, a time period that would be instrumental in the development of his political consciousness.
Some of the anecdotes are nice little snapshots of Richey as a teenager. There’s discussion of Richey having a wry sense of humour and being goofy and generally taking the piss out of his teachers. Nicky’s recollection of Richey playing an Einstürzende Neubauten tape – an industrial noise rock band famous for its use of scrap metal and power tools as instruments – for the class during a school trip is included here. An excerpt I underlined shows Richey’s wit: “Asked to write ‘My Encounter with a Strange Animal,’ he described coming face to face with another person: ‘Alas, a human being is an animal. Don’t believe? Check with the biology department.’”43 There’s also a scan of an essay he wrote in which he filled up half a page saying “Another possible reason is that we have essay after essay after essay after essay [written another 26 times] given to us by a teacher named ? I think you guess.”44 [image] This is a very good example of how many things Richey probably wrote with tongue firmly in cheek (or at least with a grin on his face) which people maybe took more seriously than he meant. He had a clever sense of humour, which the band has mentioned many times, and it is nice to see early examples of it here.
There is also a claim that Richey “won a prestigious national art prize which was submitted through his art and design class.”45 The authors don’t describe the competition or Richey’s art piece, or provide any other information. If said “prestigious” prize is the one pictured in the photo inserts, [image] it was actually a submission to the 2000AD comic book and published in the ‘Nerve Centre Extra’ – a page of reader letters and art submissions that occasionally held contests – in the 7 August 1982 issue #276, for which Richey received £3.46, 47 Due to the context provided, it seems almost as though they have presented Richey’s submission to a popular comic book as “prestigious” by omitting clarifying information in order to make him seem precocious in a wider variety of subjects.
Discussing Richey’s time at Oakdale Comprehensive, Rachel compares her feelings that the school had “little positive impact in helping Richey facilitate his dreams”48 with Nicky’s praise of the school. Perhaps Nicky got something different from the schooling there; just because it wasn’t the best fit for Richey doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good experience for Nicky. Richey is described by a friend as going through a “goth phase”49 while at Oakdale, which his teachers disliked. Next, the chapter describes Richey’s friendships at school, recollections of his teenage behaviour of acting daft, playing tricks on his friends, purchasing records at Spillers, reading Marx and Russian history books. The authors describe Richard Fry, a friend of Richey’s at Oakdale, as “universally ignored”50 and “grateful”51 that Richey was friends with him, and claim that the two of them “walked their dogs around Pen Y Fan Pond”52 together, and that Fry “only had one other friend in the whole school.”53 Somehow they interpret Richey’s walks outdoors and the photos he and Fry took as 16-year-old Richey “trying to emulate and recapture the innocence of his fading childhood.”54 They also claim that Richey was insecure about his looks and skin, to the extent that at school trips he would sleep with his pyjamas on over his clothes or shower after everyone had gone to bed because he was so self conscious.
These are all contested in a now-deleted YouTube video posted by Richard Fry, in which he reads these specific passages in order to point out their inaccuracies.55 Fry also mentioned all of this in his own book, lamenting that “in good faith I had tried to help the authors and Rachel with their book and in return they appear to try and tarnish my character and belittle my friendship with Richey.”56 It’s a bit odd and very cruel to describe someone – especially someone who was interviewed for your book – as “universally ignored” and “whom nobody else would talk to,” knowing they will likely read said book. Fry also mentions that he gave the authors a few photos of Richey that he had taken, and that he was not credited for their use, nor were they returned to him, including the photo used on the back of the book jacket, which shows “Richey and his dog Snoopy among some ferns.”57 Allegedly, Leon Noakes contacted Fry by phone and told him that the disparaging remarks about and unkind descriptions of Fry were “not of his doing”58 though it seems he did not elaborate on who exactly was responsible for including the unfavourable commentary. In her 2023 publication of “Withdrawn Traces: a Retrospective”, Sara Hawys Roberts claims that the disparaging quotes were taken from a quote by Jonathan Medcraft in Melody Maker magazine, and that they had “asked those close to Richard [Edwards] who the boy Medcraft mentioned in the magazine, and they believed it to be Richard Fry.”59 She says that this assumption was confirmed “when Fry told us in the first call about not having many friends and being grateful that Edwards sat next to him in Chemistry.”60 However, Roberts claims that she did not have a recorder on her phone during their first call with Fry, and “wrote down notes during the call”,61 so this information was not recorded verbatim.
The chapter moves on to describe the political and social zeitgeist of Richey’s teenage years: Neil Kinnock, Thatcherism in South Wales, the miner’s strike, and the general political atmosphere in early 80s Britain. Richey would have been about 15 or 16 at the time. The authors ask, “In such an atmosphere, any hint of ambivalence was pounced upon. Was there a pressure on Richey, the son of two business-owners, to make clear his political persuasion?”62 Richey was a teenager by then, so he had likely developed his own sense of political leaning. Around the age of 15 or 16 is when teens start to really develop their own opinions politically, when they start looking around at the world and forming their own conclusions independently instead of just following what their parents say. This book has already observed in an earlier chapter that Richey had formed opinions about Bobby Sands and the Maze prison hunger strike in 1982. In a time as politically intense as 1980s Britain, formation of independent political opinion likely happened rapidly and with more intensity due to heightened awareness of politics in every day life than if things had been more calm and stable. Political awareness and opinion is just par for the course if the world around you is going through political upheaval. And if he was reading Lenin and Marx in his spare time as his friends attest, that’s more than a small hint as to his autodidactic political education and good indication of the direction in which his political persuasion was leaning.
In yet another instance of poor research and lack of proper editing, when discussing the connection between politics and young music fans, they refer to the song ‘Margaret On The Guillotine’ from Morrissey’s 1988 album Viva Hate as a song by The Smiths.63 Not terribly important in the grand scheme of things, but this could have easily been caught by either authors or an editor.
Roberts and Noakes seem to use this chapter to establish the suggestion that every little thing in Richey’s life from his teen years onward was somehow planned out and connected, that his use of vocabulary words, themes common to his locale and current events in the UK, and unique, creative, and frankly almost ‘edgy teenager’ type responses to various schoolwork prompts were somehow prescient of his future mental health issues and experiences in hospital to an impossibly exact degree. Unfortunately, this does not let up for the entire book.
Chapter 3 moves on to Richey at Crosskeys College in 1984, and much of it is a summary of well-known parts of Richey’s history, with occasional elaborations or anecdotes from his uni friends. It goes quite in depth about Richey’s friendship with a college mate called Mark Hambridge, who was at first reluctant to talk to the authors but eventually told them about their friendship and showed them around Blackwood. Hambridge mentions Richey’s obsession with childhood and innocence, and the way that his desire for innocence meant that others saw him as “gay” or weaker. Other uni friends of Richey’s were interviewed, and they remember going out with Richey and enjoying the same music. Apparently, Rachel went to the Manics’ first Little Theatre gig (with Flicker) in October 1986 by herself, as Richey was more interested in watching television, a piece of information they seem to include in order to imply that Richey was not friends with the band and not interested in joining.
Jumping backward in time momentarily, they mention that the death of Bobby Sands in 1981 had a profound impact on Richey as a political statement because it was “against himself.”64 This, among other current events, gave him the political interest that informed his autodidactic tendencies later on and pushed him to focus on his studies. A letter from Richey to his girlfriend at the time, Claire Forward, is reproduced, in which he describes how everyone hated him at college because he went against what was expected and was more invested in his education than his peers, but he was glad that they disliked him because he felt superior. Somewhat ironically, the authors include a disparaging remark from a classmate who explains that “James and Nick went through this phase where they decided that they didn’t like anybody else. People would try and talk to them and they’d blank them,”65 and seem to be trying to imply that Richey would never be aloof or show superiority to others. James and Nicky joined Crosskeys College in 1987, when Richey was in his second year. Around this time, Richey’s interest and investment in music had increased, he was going to concerts more often, and he was coming into his own in terms of his strong leftist political opinions and social views.
Chapter 4 begins with a summary of the two days in mid-January 1995 when Richey went missing, only to show up later saying he needed some time alone and had gone to Swansea. It then jumps back in time to the late 80s and goes on to talk about Richey’s time at Swansea university, his shyness when living in a dorm setting, his dedication to education and disappointment that his classmates didn’t care as much as he did, and the fact that he seemed more working-class than many of his classmates, which set him apart. Most of the stories about his days at Swansea are fairly well known to fans: dressing up as a sperm for rag week, going to music shows, his creation of the White Noise meal – rice, jacket potato, and corn on the cob. Many of these have been mentioned in previous books about the band, or in interviews given after 1995, though this book ricochets between all of Richey’s years at Swansea without indicating when various events happened. They mention Richey’s notes and writings in uni, his study habits and earnest desire to learn and to record all he could. Like a good boy, he took notes on everything and was basically constantly writing things down, and many of the political and historical notes he took would end up subjects of songs. All of Richey’s essays and lecture notes are handwritten, and the authors observe that the margins are full of doodles and song lyric quotes. And, apparently, “splashes of coffee, and what might be blood?”66 This phrasing is fairly sensationalising for a book that claims it’s written as an appreciation of Richey and rejection of his portrayal as a tragic myth.
Something else to mention because I’m encountering it here: Withdrawn Traces rather unprofessionally refers to all interviewed and mentioned persons by their first names rather than last. This makes it fairly difficult to know who is being spoken about or quoted because there are multiple Richards, Marks, Simons, etc. More than once while reading, I had to flip back a chapter or more to recall which commonly-named person was being referenced and who they were in relation to Richey or the band.
Quotes and anecdotes from classmates and friends describe Richey’s troubles with girls. He was shy and appeared to have a more old-fashioned idea of dating compared to his friends, seeming disturbed by female sexuality or by women acting in ways that seemed prurient or immodest. This is not surprising, because Richey’s confusion/conflict regarding women and romantic relationships in general came up fairly often when he spoke to the press, and the band or others who knew him have mentioned it in interviews for a long time. A quote from classmate Simon Cross illustrates Richey’s difficulty with the opposite gender: “Rich reminded me of boys in high school when they’d just discovered girls at 13 or 14. He’d put them on pedestals like they were a different species.”67 This section mainly illustrates the ways in which Richey was rather fickle and immature when it came to women; these general observations of awkwardness and uncertainty are supported by Richey’s own comments when he discussed women in interviews.
While he was at uni, Richey’s grandmother Kezia, with whom his family had lived when he was young, passed away. Not only was he very close to his grandmother and therefore extremely grief-stricken, but her funeral was also the first time he’d set foot in a church in years. Rachel wonders if “with the death of our nan, he perceived that as a loss of his youth and innocence.”68 Anecdotes from Richey’s school friends recall Richey lamenting the loss of youth and innocence quite a few years before then, but just after this event in his life, the first instances appear of Richey’s friends seeing him self-harm. This could easily have been a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back trauma on top of the stress of school, his social life and growing up.
The next page contains another direct quote from Richard Fry that has been disproved. In his Youtube video, Fry reads aloud the quote, in which he apparently talks about Richey having “something at the heart of him that ate him up”69 and that “the first year of university changed him somehow.”70, 71 Fry says that this quoted piece was something he never said. It seems as though the authors of this book may have decided to fabricate things and put words in people’s mouths so that Richey’s youth appears to hold more clues to his future actions.
The authors also extensively quote or summarise comments from a university friend of Richey’s, Jemma Hine, who lived in the room next door to Richey during his second year at Swansea. Her memories of Richey also include memories of Richey’s friend Nigel, and she contrasts their introverted and extroverted personalities, as well as commenting on Richey’s insecurity about his appearance. She also recalls being shocked at Richey drinking enough to become hungover and sick into one of his record sleeves. However, it seems she was also misquoted or her comments removed from context by the authors. There is a one-star review72 by a person called ‘Jemma Kwint’ on the Goodreads page for Withdrawn Traces – the same review has also been posted to the book’s Amazon page by someone with the username ‘JK’ – that reads,
“Very disappointing. I am (mis)quoted extensively over 3 pages in this book. No effort was made to check details before publication. Makes me completely sceptical about all the other quotes and so called facts. What a shame! It would have been so easy to check with me and presumably others. I knew Richey for a year at university and this lets him down.”73
Sara Hawys Roberts claims in her retrospective that she “tried numerous times to make contact in order to gain clarity with regards to where she feels she was misquoted in the text”74 and that she has gone over the recording of the interview to try and see where Jemma Kwint may have been misquoted. Roberts explains that due to word count restrictions, “material gathered during interviews sometimes had to be contracted”,75 meaning that they combined disparate stories together at some points. Roberts does concede that “the episode of Richard, Nigel and Dan being called ‘the three musketeers’”76 was erroneously attributed to Kwint. Roberts also explains that if the authors asked interviewees a question and they simply answered ‘Yes’, that answer would instead be written as a full quote containing the sentence of the question as a statement. She gives the excuse of these mistakes of paraphrase and misquote being “the novice of first-time writers”.77 That seems like something about which one might want to go to an editor in order to ask for advice; evidently the authors did not do that.
Richey’s friends from his time at Swansea University offer their recollections about him, discussing his friendship with housemate Nigel, about how often he spoke of his friends and family (and Snoopy) back in Blackwood, and about the increase in his drinking. The authors consider that Richey possibly embellished his tales of drinking a lot at uni, because his friends from those days don’t remember him drinking much or being hungover often. They wonder if he was “adept at hiding his drinking habit from his housemates, or did he simply play up these aspects of his university life to the press?”78 Richey’s own words answered that question, when he specifically explained more than once how he would drink alone at night in order to sleep,79, 80 and considering the fact that some people don’t experience hangovers as intensely, especially when they’re younger, I’m not sure his tales of drinking are easily contestable. The motive of shrugging off the anecdotes of Richey’s alcohol use in uni as possibly falsified is unclear; does it make Richey’s later alcohol abuse more shocking if he didn’t drink much at university? Do they think he played up that aspect to the press in order to excuse his drinking?
Briefly, the authors mention that Nicky joined Richey at Swansea University, but take only enough time to point out that he was never on campus and people thought he had dropped out. Nowhere is it mentioned that Richey and Nicky lived together in student housing in Swansea,81, 82 which is how they became closer friends and started writing together. Unfortunately, I don’t think there are many sentences about Richey’s bandmates in this book that aren’t tinged with negativity.
The writers then report that they were put in contact with the first girl Richey dated, a woman named Claire Forward. She recalls that they were both very shy, until he found the courage to ask her out. Most of her recollections are that he was very nice but very, very self-conscious and he had terrible self esteem and trust issues that made him jealous of other boys she talked to. This seems to have remained a problem for him throughout his life; in his last interview, published in Music Life magazine in 1995, he told journalist Midori Tsukagoshi,
I think when you really love someone you become trapped in jealousy. I think that’s hard and painful for anybody. I’ve never wanted to be in love with an unfaithful person. Not just physical, but in intellectual, spiritual aspect of things too. For instance, say you’re watching television with someone you love. An incredibly attractive person appears on the screen. For me, finding that person on TV appealing is being very unfaithful. So then you start to think the other person must feel that way sometimes. Most people are much more mature about things like that, but I just can’t do it yet.”83
However, the anecdotes by Claire Forward continue, saying that Richey tried to break up with her before she left to au pair for two months in France, thinking she’d grow tired of him, but she reassured him that everything was fine. Then, apparently, he pined so insistently in his calls and letters that she quit her au pair job early and returned to Swansea, where he broke up with her when she arrived. They dated for less than a year.
The majority of this chapter is full of similar examples of Richey’s inadequacies or insecurities around women, including an anecdote he related in a letter to a uni friend, which describes Richey going on a date and getting mocked for his inexperience by a bunch of other young men in the group, and his date eventually leaving him for the “gang of males” [the authors’ phrasing, not Richey’s]84 who have been laughing at him all night. At that point, Richey apparently gave up on women and decided instead to focus on music.
Oddly, despite mentioning the new focus on the Manic Street Preachers as Richey’s “way out of [his] relationship impasse,”85 the development of his friendship with the other members of the band is barely touched upon. References to Richey’s relationship with his bandmates are shadowy-brief and shallow, glancing asides that say only enough to imply that the other three barely knew Richey at all, which seems to contradict nearly every piece of media in which they have recounted their friendship and the origins of the band.
Generation Terrorists
Chapter 5 discusses Richey joining the Manic Street Preachers as an already-formed band, and briefly gives an overview of the history of the early lives of Nicky Wire, James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore. This section is mostly information that is general knowledge about the members’ life history, such as James and Sean growing up together, Sean’s classical music talent, and Nicky’s football aspirations, as well as various iterations of the band before the addition of Richey. It also summarises in a paragraph Nicky and Richey growing closer in university and starting to write together, and expands into multiple paragraphs Richey’s growing role in the band from combination roadie/unofficial manager to proper onstage member of the band. The section also looks at Richey’s last year at university, highlighting his focus on WWII and fascism in his studies, and the way the stress of school affected him.
Throughout Withdrawn Traces, chapters are broken up at random by short quotes that are centre-formatted and italicised in the body of the text, as if they are pull quotes one would see in a magazine article. However, these quotes do not reappear in the main text like a pull quote might; they stand alone and are used either to emphasise a theme or to indicate some sort of transition in the chapter. Some are taken from Richey’s personal archive of writings and notes, and some have been sourced by the authors themselves.
A pull quote within the text of chapter 5 reads “Apollo without Dionysus may indeed be a well-informed, good citizen but he’s a dull fellow. He may even be ‘cultured’, in the sense one often gets from traditionalist writings in education… But without Dionysus he will never make and remake culture.” This excerpt is attributed to American psychologist Jerome Bruner.1 While it is indeed found in his 1996 book The Culture of Education,2 Bruner is in fact quoting Irish educational philosopher Kieran Egan’s 1988 book Primary Understanding,3 which he has cited both by name in the body of the text and in a footnote. The quote, attributed to Bruner, is also one of the first results that pop up in the image results when one types ‘quote about Dionysus and Apollo’ into a Google search.
Richey, Nicky, James, Sean, and a few of their mutual friends were all hugely influenced by a Channel 4 documentary about the birth of punk, which inspired them to start a creative movement within their social circle called The Blue Generation. The usual topics which make up the earliest days of the band appear here: Richey lacking the ability to play guitar, the claim that they were going to become an overnight success and then self-destruct, and Richey’s dedication to doing research and creating a plan to drum up publicity and catch audience/record label attention as he and the Manics began to build ideas for the future. At this time, Richey began to have frequent letter correspondences with other rock fans and music zine-writers, and his activity in the world of music was becoming more enthusiastic. Because he now had more than one major interest –history and also music– but was still so shy and academic, the authors imply that he was living “two separate lives”4 as he neared the end of his time at university. Allegedly, it was his getting a 2:1 rather than a first that truly compelled him to abandon academia and turn to music instead.
However, there also seems to be an attempt to exaggerate Richey’s influence on the band and early participation in their endeavours before becoming an official, performing member. The ‘Blue Generation’ collective of friends was led less by Richey than by Nicky Wire’s older brother Patrick Jones, who provided the inchoate Manics and their friends with literature and creative encouragement.5
Though the authors acknowledge Richey’s early role regarding the band was driver, roadie, and PR man, they neglect to mention that the Manic Street Preachers wrote, recorded and released their first single, ‘Suicide Alley’, in June 1988,6 before Richey was officially part of the band. Instead, they imply that Richey was part of the single’s creation, citing a letter written by Sean and James to Impact magazine in May 1988,7 which lists off seven members of ‘The Blue Generation’ collective, including Richey, and contains a call to action to “come and watch the Manic Street Preachers and witness us kickstart the youth into the purest state of ignition ever seen.”8 But Roberts and Noakes imply that Richey was ignored and his contribution left out regarding the single’s creation: “Despite Richey being listed as a Manic Street Preacher, their self-financed debut single ‘Suicide Alley’, released weeks later, showed only James, Nick and Sean on the cover.”9 The photograph on the sleeve of the album was taken by Richey, who received photography credit.10 It was this song, written and produced without Richey, that was reviewed almost a year later in Beat The Street fanzine in January 1989,11 and in Maximum Rock n Roll zine in May,12 and subsequently got a review in the NME as Single of the Week in August 198913 and it was this NME review alongside the band’s many letters which sparked enough interest for the press to come to their next gigs. It would be a few more months until Richey became an official performing member of the band at the end of 1989.
Any form of art, writing, or news became a source of inspiration for the Manic Street Preachers. An early piece of inspiration was the Francis Ford Coppola film Rumble Fish. Roberts and Noakes claim that it was this film that inspired the band to use their working class background as a “a source of inspiration; a foundation for realness”,14 and a starting point to build their story. The band’s propensity for self-mythologizing and narrative-building is established not through quotes from the band themselves or any new examples of their early lyric writing, but through excerpts of diary entries written by Richey’s uni friend Mark Hambridge, whose creative writing Richey had encouraged. In his writing, he describes his observations of aspects of life in Blackwood that Roberts and Noakes say show the “atmosphere surrounding the early Manic Street Preachers – bleak, insular, yet hopeful and romantic”,15 such as working class neighbourhoods being replaced by shopping centres, or he and his teenage friends expressing themselves through music and writing and discovering themselves through literature with the freedom to drink, dream and hang out without parental supervision.
It is Richey’s early ability to inspire his friends that the authors see as an indication of a “masterly grasp of how gripping narratives work”,16 which meant that the band’s ambition then was comparable to that of a “heroic odyssey worthy of the world’s attention.”17 Roberts and Noakes believe that this enthusiasm is far deeper than the energised yearning of a group of small-town young men dreaming of bigger, more exciting, more fantastical and inspired futures the way so many creative young people dream of something different from the lives of those around them. They reference “a music press article published just weeks before Richey’s disappearance”18 – though there are no quotes from any of its contents – which they claim showed how in-depth the band’s knowledge of mythology and gripping narratives was because it referenced The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. It is unclear exactly what music press article they’re referring to, and unfortunately this book’s bibliography is woefully incomplete. There are no articles I could find from late 1994 or early 1995 about the Manic Street Preachers that mention Campbell or any of his books directly. I found only two articles published within that time frame that even mention the word ‘myth’ or ‘mythology.’ They were an article by Stuart Maconie in Q magazine19 and one by Hector Prole in Sun Zoom Spark,20 both published December 1994. Both are solo interviews with James, who mentions the “mythic rock n’ roll lifestyle” and creating “self-myth,” and Richey’s awareness of mythology’s role in the way that the public views musicians or groups. I have found no interviews with the band from the indicated period of time that mention Campbell or his works. However, music journalists Simon Reynolds and Joy Press did publish a book in January 1995 called The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ‘N’ Roll in which they mention The Hero With A Thousand Faces while talking about the Manics’ self-mythologizing and the “master plan”21 for their first album.
Roberts and Noakes claim that the band’s story and Richey’s life trajectory “has a peculiar applicability to Campbell’s outlined structure”22 of the hero’s journey. They explain that “in Campbell’s own description, there exists a ‘monomyth’ whose structure is remarkably similar across countless incarnations”,23 which they summarise thus: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man”.24 The band’s apparent awareness of Campbell’s theories of myth lead the authors to conclude that “the implication is that Richey’s disappearance may itself be seen in the context of myth-building – inviting us to consider whether the scope of his ambition, and ability to do what others could not, might range far beyond what would normally seem feasible.”25
Leaving aside the fact that Campbell’s theories are based on Jung’s unproven idea of the collective unconscious and that his exceedingly cherry-picked examples of myths and folktales in The Hero With A Thousand Faces poorly support or even directly contradict his own theories, I’m not entirely certain how Richey’s life fits into the hero’s journey as proposed by Campbell,26 [image] as it skips over a majority of the requirements of the myth structure, unless one is willing to really shoehorn some real life events into certain symbolic spaces. If Richey had attempted to deliberately build a himself into a rock n’ roll myth using Campbell’s structure as the authors imply, it’s likely each component would be clearly identifiable, as Campbell specifies that “whether the hero be ridiculous or sublime, Greek or barbarian, gentile or Jew, his journey varies little in essential plan. […] There will be found astonishingly little variation in the morphology of the adventure, the characters involved, the victories gained.”27 Not least is the problem of Richey’s disappearance, since “the full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the [boon] back into the kingdom of humanity, where [it] may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.”28 If they really wanted to categorise his life as a hero’s journey using Campbell’s structure, it would only fit into that of “the saint or ascetic, the world-renouncer,”29 a figure that is mentioned only at the very end of Campbell’s book, who abandons entirely his life or journey and retreats from the world. Campbell emphasises that this type of hero’s story is close to pointless and that there is little to be examined or learned from it. He states that, “Beyond life, these heroes are beyond the myth also. Neither do they treat of it any more, nor can the myth properly treat of them. Their legends are rehearsed, but the pious sentiments and lessons of the biographies are necessarily inadequate; little better than bathos.”30
In 1997, James Dean Bradfield did express an opinion on Richey’s awareness of rock ‘n’ roll mythology, expounding on the idea that Richey was too obsessed with all the little details of music myth as a whole to create his own; his awareness of all the different rock legends and tales and the details that made up the stories of others meant he wasn’t making any conscious effort to join the ranks of music myth because “at the end of the day, the massive difference is that Richey was a tapestry of mythology, he was all too aware of any kind of mythology. […] Whether it was fasting or the Nietzschean Dionysus thing, Richey was too in love with mythology, too wrapped up in it all to realize he was becoming [a mythic figure] himself.”31
Moreover, reducing Richey’s life to that of a mythical storyline is dehumanising, as though his experiences are nothing but a story to read. Regarding legends about real historical figures, Campbell states that “the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world’s greatest heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned with such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found. On the contrary, the tendency has always been to endow the hero with extraordinary powers from the moment of birth,”32 and “if the deeds of an actual historical figure proclaim him to have been a hero, the builders of his legend will invent for him appropriate adventures in depth.”33
Wasn’t the entire point of this book supposed to be reclaiming and rectifying the general portrayal of Richey so that he is no longer “defined by his illness and as a tortured genius”?34 Didn’t Rachel’s foreword say that this book was an attempt to portray Richey in a sympathetic light and to “reclaim him as a brother, a friend, a son,”35 and also “as a poet, a thinker, a gentle person”?36 Claiming his life story fits perfectly into a framework meant for fictional heroes seems like yet another instance of turning him into a symbol, an icon or an ‘artistic genius’ archetype, drawing him as a fictional heroic figure rather than acknowledging him as a real person who was living in the world, who had a life and all the rounded-out, fleshed-out, flawed and human things that come with it. It sets the reader up to be accepting of wild speculation in future chapters, to be okay with the portrayal of Richey as something like a fictional genius with near magical capabilities or a master manipulator of everyone and everything around him. Unfortunately, something to this effect will continue to be implied throughout the rest of Withdrawn Traces. Rather than humanising him, portraying his life as mythical so early on allows for the rest of the book to slowly yet surely build a second, more dramatised Richey out of baseless interpretations, exposure of private details, and wild speculations.
And so the authors dive right back into their strange fixation, claiming that the themes of rebellion and exile which appear in the stories Richey wrote as a teenager – a pair of feelings quite common for teenagers to feel, and not uncommon in teen-centred media – should in fact be seen as potential planning for a future disappearance. They apply this theory elsewhere, asking “was, for instance, his semi-detached relationship with his allotted instrument an outer sign that he knew he would not be attached to it for long?”37
Do they really believe what they’re writing? Firstly, the band’s original desire was to get hugely successful ludicrously fast, then retire from the music industry as one-hit wonders; that doesn’t mean Richey was already planning to quite literally disappear at such an early point in the band’s career. Secondly, Richey could get by on being a basic rhythm guitarist (or not playing at all) because James and Sean were able to be the musical keystone that held everything together onstage, while the offstage chemistry of his partnership with Nicky built the lyrical columns of the songs. The Manics emphasised division of labour, and the whole point of having a band with this kind of organisation was to utilise everyone’s different talents. Richey didn’t have to care about his guitar or have an attachment to it; it was a prop to allow him to be the spokesman and aesthetic leader for the band, despite his dearth of musical ability. Nicky Wire was in a similar boat at that point in time in terms of skills, in those early days. In 1992, James responded to a question about Richey’s improvement on guitar with a sharp retort about why Richey’s talent as a writer was what the band needed more than his musical capability: “I think that question is a non-starter. You should be asking me if he’s getting any better as a lyric writer. He means more to this band than anyone with his looks and lyric writing. If he does improve as a guitarist, it will be a bonus. But, if he doesn’t, it doesn’t matter.”38 Richey was a talented writer with soundbite flair, he became the band’s ‘minister of propaganda’ alongside Nicky, coming up with outrageous ideas and statements to get noticed; his aesthetic sense, knowledge of the music industry, and lyrical talent were more important than his ability to play more than basic rhythm guitar.
Rachel believes that “he could have joined any band and got them signed to a major label.”39 I think an important aspect the Manic Street Preachers had that other bands don’t is an extremely capable and talented lead guitarist/vocalist and a talented drummer who were willing and able to take on most of the instrumental work both onstage and off. If they had not had that, the band would have been written off as knock-off Sex Pistols who couldn’t play well and likely would have been for the most part ignored by major journalists and labels. Richey’s skills as a guitarist didn’t matter to the Manic Street Preachers, but it certainly might have mattered in some other band with more traditional ideas of what makes up a musical group. He was talented at PR and at crafting interesting or provoking sound-bites and creative lyrics, but if the music had not also been interesting, they would not have gotten far. The fact that James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore were able to remain musically steadfast while the less musically-inclined Richey and Nicky created chaos, aesthetics and entertainment around them was what made them unique.
A tone-setting pull quote in the body of the chapter features a line from academic Andreas Huyssen’s 2003 book Present Pasts: “The only monument that counts is the one already imagined as ruin.”40, 41 The authors credit Huyssen as an “American academic”; however, Huyssen is German and works in the comparative literature department at Columbia University. This quote, coincidentally, was also used as a chapter subtitle in Triptych, the 2017 book examining The Holy Bible album from three separate angles. In Triptych, the quote subtitles the first chapter of Larissa Wodtke’s essay “Architecture of Memory: The Holy Bible and the Archive.”42
The end of the chapter blazes through the band’s early gigs. Roberts and Noakes claim that Richey played his first show “at Swansea University in spring 1989”43 at the “Mandela Student Union bar.”44 However, the Manic Street Preachers did not play a show at Swansea University until autumn 1989, and a date at Mandela Bar specifically is not recorded until October 1990, with the band supporting Attila the Stockbroker on 15 October45 and Mega City Four on 31 October.46 In a thread on Forever Delayed Forum, titled “Gigography.”, Sara Hawys Roberts asked if there was an earlier show that Richey may have played at Swansea University because “Simon Price’s book claims Richey played his first gig with the band in Swansea Uni but the first gig in that venue (according to the gigography) was 1990? Is there a chance the index may missed an earlier gig?”47 After some discussion by others about the cloudiness of the band’s early set dates, the admin of the site replied that he found an earlier date of “November 25th 1989 at Swansea Uni Mandela Bar whilst supporting Mega City Four.”48 However, there is no indication that Richey played a show in spring 1989, and there is no record of any shows played by the band at Swansea University that early in 1989; the earliest dates any other source gives for Richey’s first gig all remain in the latter half of the year. The recorded dates here are definitely wobbly regarding Richey’s first show, but the 22 September 1989 show at the London Horse and Groom predates any recorded claim of his first gig. The authors also record the wrong date for the Horse And Groom show; they say 2 September 1989, when the actual date was the 22nd.49
The chapter ends by summarising some of the band’s early gigs and the various soundbite statements from Richey and Nicky about wanting to “do what had never been done before”,50 and their proclamations that they were going to get huge and then self-immolate on Top Of The Pops. They emphasise Richey’s apparent need to prove his authenticity, concluding on the question of whether or not he was serious about going out in a blaze of glory, if “his commitment to propelling himself into immortal status [was] greater than his peers?”51
In Chapter 6 the band’s early label trajectory is summarised. Like the last chapter, for the most part it recounts information that most Manics fans already know, including their partnership with Hall Or Nothing Management, their relationship with Philip and Terri Hall, their sloganeering and tactics of going against the grain of the music scene, antagonising for attention, and their signing on with Heavenly.
The 4 REAL incident gets a special spotlight, with some extra sensationalising in the form of Rachel Edwards producing for the authors a “maroon leather washbag”52 inside which are “blister packs of Prozac tablets; unopened packets of Durex, dated 1989; French Paradox pills [red wine extract in capsule form]; mascara and foundation…and a small pack of double-edged razor blades.”53 I question why Rachel would have that at the ready; even more I question why Richey would have hung on to these things for so long, since the implication seems to be that these items are from these early days of the band’s upward movement. The presence of the Prozac, however, seems to indicate that the bag and its contents would be from 1994, but it’s pretty obvious that they want the reader to assume the ensemble is from 1991, around the time of the incident with Steve Lamacq.
Also doubtful – and in fact entirely untrue – is the claim that “it was only after Richey’s bloodletting incident that the major record companies came calling. Before long they had signed to CBS/Sony Records.”54 The 4-REAL incident occurred 15 May 1991, and the band signed a deal with Sony on 21 May 1991, less than a week later.55 That means talks with the label would have been going on behind the scenes long before 15 May, since negotiations before signing must go through legal channels, adjustments of contract, copyright and licencing, distribution, promotion, etc, with both the Hall Or Nothing management and the band’s current label, Heavenly Records. The band would not have been able to sign on to a major label in just one week. Richey even pointed out people’s inaccurate assumptions about the band signing to a major label, noting that “people still think we happened overnight, but for two years we wrote a hell of a lot of begging letters.”56
The narrative trajectory of this chapter is suddenly broken by the inclusion of an anecdote that is allegedly false. “Manics fanatic”57 Alan G. Parker recounts a story in which former NME journalist and founder of Loaded magazine James Brown wanted to go to Blackwood to “sample first-hand the bleak caricature”58 of the area where the Manics had grown up and what influenced them. Parker says that Brown contacted him and “begg[ed] for the pair to take a trip to the Valleys”59 because the band’s backstory so captured his imagination.
According to a pair of Twitter posts by Brown, who wrote the Manics’ first NME cover story in early May 1991,60 he and Parker have never met.61, 62 Not only that, but Parker also claimed in a now-deleted Tweet to have been “completely misquoted” as well.63 I reached out to both Brown and Parker about this anecdote; while Alan G. Parker did not respond, James Brown did. Brown explained that he “was never interviewed” and that the passage which talks about him and his relationship to the band is “full of factual mistakes.” He also reiterated with regards to Parker that “I’d not only never spoken to this bloke, I’d never heard of him or met him nor been anywhere with him.” Brown didn’t even know he was mentioned in the book, he told me, until he “picked it up in a book shop and was glancing through and found that bit and was just shocked.” In her retrospective, Sara Hawys Roberts claims that after Parker claimed to be misquoted, the authors phoned him “in June 2023, asking why he was spreading this misinformation”64 and “he apologised for his tweets, and told us Withdrawn Traces was apparently one of his favourite books”.65 Roberts refuses to elaborate on “the reasons he claimed he had to tweet certain untruths about the book, as these are personal to him”.66 Roberts does not acknowledge James Brown’s claim that the story is false.
The contextual placement of this short account is strange too, as it goes nowhere, interrupts the discussion of the Manic Street Preachers’ move between labels, and hasn’t much to do with any of the topics explored in the chapter.
The subject returns to the details of the band signing to CBS/Sony and working on the double album of Generation Terrorists. After mapping out a general overview of the lyrical themes of the album, with the usual buzzwords of ‘high and low culture’ and ‘advertising, celebrity, consumerism, cheap mass culture,’ and mentions of Guy Debord, they briefly describe the content of only two of the eighteen tracks on Generation Terrorists – ‘Natwest Barclays Midlands Lloyd’s’ and ‘Another Invented Disease’ – in order to illustrate the record’s “sensitively wrought, insightful and compelling portrait of the nation’s political and social predicament.”67 They specifically bring up “conspiracy researcher Milton William Cooper and Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam”68 while discussing ‘Another Invented Disease’, a pair of references that will be important in the future – the former in just a few paragraphs, the latter in chapter 9.
Once more, the authors return to the topic of Richey’s guitar-playing abilities and lack thereof. This time, Roberts and Noakes theorise that Richey’s insecurity about his skills might not have been real. Instead, they posit that his lack of musical ability was actually his deliberate attempt at keeping a distance between himself and the manipulation of the alleged Faustian deal they believe the 4-REAL incident to be: “Legend has it that musicians sell their souls to ‘the man’ for success. So did Richey’s consciously continued non-playing in fact advertise his determination to keep his soul intact; to play the game on his own terms?”69 They do not clarify whether they believe that Richey actually could play guitar but pretended not to, or simply refused to learn but didn’t feel badly about his lack of skills.
Describing the band taking inspiration from Greil Marcus and situationism to combine “’lowly’ pop music with more ‘serious’ concerns such as philosophy, economics, poetry, literature and academia,’”70 the authors emphasise the timelessness of the album, which was released 10 February 1992, as an “incendiary report on the modern human condition”71 through the vehicle of Guns ‘n’ Roses-esque hard rock music. But apparently there is more to this album, hidden meanings and messages not previously uncovered by any other surveys or analyses of the band’s work. As Roberts and Noakes were writing this book, they explain, “strangers contacted us online, imploring us to delve into the ‘hidden history’ of the Manics’ early material.”72 What strangers? How did they contact the authors? How did they know a book was being written about Richey without any official announcements? What hidden history? The answers to these questions are not contained within this book, but the theories are increasingly unhinged as Roberts and Noakes make their way through the albums. The red flag waves high in the next paragraphs, as they state that “conspiracy theorists see the manipulating hands of the Illuminati-Rosicrucians-Freemasons in every corner of society,”73 and claim that “perhaps a new generation, raised on internet conspiracy theories, is now able to read more into Generation Terrorists than its original fans.”74
The first aspect of Generation Terrorists that apparently needs closer examination is the album sleeve, the back side of which features the flag of the European Union on fire. This prompts them to ask, “is it totally fanciful to imagine the ever-prescient Richey prophetically anticipating Brexit and the collapse of the entire EU project?”75 The European flag was adopted in 1955 by the Council of Europe and by the European Communities in 1986.76 Richey was very politically conscious and very well-read in terms of history and its cycles. And indeed there was an upward tick of scepticism about the UK’s membership in the EC in the 90s. But was he psychic? Could he have predicted Brexit over 20 years on? Was he so politically in tune he could predict political fluctuations and euroscepticism for decades in the future? He certainly could have predicted political strife or conflict, but considering the EU wasn’t even the EU as we know it now (or knew it up until recently, as it were) until late 1993, I’m not sure he’d have predicted Brexit in 1991. New Art Riot, the band’s early EP released in June 1990, also featured a very similar image of the European flag on the front cover, intact rather than in flames.77
The next sentence ratchets the wild theories up another notch from political clairvoyance to targeting the occult:
“There are interesting symbols on the front cover, too. Richey’s tattoo, a rose, and hanging against his chest, a cross. Did these universal signifiers contain more than they did at first sight? […] Given that Rosicrucianism’s symbol is the Rosy Cross, was Richey, typically responsible for choosing cover art, firing a cryptic broadside at a so-called New World Order?”78
The cross Richey wears in the front cover of the album is not a Rosy Cross, but an ornate stylised Orthodox crucifix. His rose tattoo is a ‘flash’, a pre-drawn design that shops display for anyone to pick out, with a blank space built in for the customer to choose their own text.
But Roberts and Noakes are eager to find conspiracy theories in the work of the Manic Street Preachers, claiming that “many online conspiracy researchers feel that a penchant for conspiracy-oriented content runs through the Manics’ history.”79 The concept of a New World Order generally hinges on certain beliefs generated by “a body of historical and political pseudoscholarship that purported to explain major events in terms of the machinations of secret societies. They, rather than governments, were said to be the real holders of power.”80 The modern belief is that “a cabal of powerful elites is secretly implementing a dystopian international governing structure that will grant them complete control over the global populace.”81 Popular subjects that fall within the scope of this theory are the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Freemasons, and the Illuminati. The term ‘New World Order’ is commonly – but not always – an antisemitic term used that is associated with far-right rhetoric.82 Roberts and Noakes have steered clear of blatantly antisemitic conspiracies and instead focus on the Rosicrucians, a secret society usually associated with esoteric knowledge, metaphysics and the occult. However, the way in which they phrase their claim that Richey was “firing a cryptic broadside at a so-called New World Order”83 is extremely vague in terms of its object or its angle. It is unclear whether or not they are implying that Richey was targeting people who believed in these antisemitic conspiracies, or if he himself believed in them and was attempting to provoke a reaction from some New World Order secret society he thought existed. This phrasing is vague enough that readers can place whatever they want in the spaces it leaves undefined and interpret them depending on which direction they personally lean; those who are conspiracy-minded are able to buy in to the idea of Richey targeting the New World Order, while more pragmatic readers can dismiss the theory as ridiculous.
It is difficult to fathom how Richey wearing a cheaply made cross on the cover of an album might be an attack on anything. Some really intense reaching has to be done in order to combine the tattoo and a cross into the idea of a secret Rosicrucian message, or to assume any secret society would care about the cover of a minor rock band’s first record. Generation Terrorists was an album made up of slogans and references to things Richey and Nicky had learned at university and in their own independent ventures into literature and history. Nicky Wire called it “a total statement of twenty years of our lives.”84 Subtlety and subtext is not a goal of this album, and a look at any of the lyrics, sleeve quotes or interview soundbites will tell you that Richey and Nicky were not interested in being cryptic at that point in time. The band did not live or write in a vacuum and their influences, ideas, and opinions were made obvious not only in their lyrics but in their choices of quotes on the sleeves of their albums. They as a band are the product of collaging other people’s ideas together in order to express their own, but without any attempt to hide the presence of the collage in any way, and in fact making it part of their art.
Richey was in charge of the aesthetics for the record and the design of the album’s sleeve. Initially, his desired images for the cover were ‘Piss Christ’ by Andres Serrano, which features a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine, or an image from Marilyn Monroe’s last photoshoot with Burt Stern, which she had defaced by scratching the film.85 Unfortunately, both ideas were nixed by the label for various reasons of cost or permission, so the band had to think of something else, as they were running out of time.86 The final artwork still captures similar themes of eroticism and commodification that Richey’s two original ideas expressed. Displaying a delicate traditional tattoo flash of a rose and an ornate crucifix, juxtaposed with a nihilistic slogan like ‘Generation Terrorists’ and to top it off, a bare nipple, the album’s final artwork is a sort of DIY collage version of the themes present in the famous artworks initially desired. It may also have been a potential reference (intentional or not) to the cover of Appetite For Destruction, the Guns ‘n’ Roses album that clearly inspired Generation Terrorists‘ sound. Richey said in an interview with Canadian channel MuchMusic in 1992 that he wore the crucifix because “Jesus is the ultimate icon, the ultimate useless fake symbol of all time. […] The more he gets turned into a Coca Cola tin, the more happy you’ll be.”87 Paired with the ‘sexual’ image of a bare nipple and the “generation terrorists” slogan, the religious image of the crucifix becomes a commodified shock factor.
The conspiracy train chugs on, coming in next with the theory that the infamous “I laughed when Lennon got shot,” line from ‘Motown Junk’ (a single that does not appear on the Generation Terrorists album) is a reference supporting the conspiracy theory that Lennon was assassinated by the CIA rather than by a former fan suffering from a psychotic episode. The authors support this theory by claiming that a considerable amount of people online believe that the Manics’ lyics contain conspiracy-related content, and by claiming that Richey himself believed Lennon’s death was a CIA operation, despite Richey’s own statement that the line was meant to “show the hypocrisy that you can say anything about anybody, but don’t criticise a pop star.”88 The authors also mention Public Enemy’s Professor Griff, saying that, “as a voice against the New World Order and the Illuminati, Griff has been a prominent contributor to rising debate about the influence of secret societies in the music industry.89 Griff has made numerous homophobic and blatantly antisemitic statements during his career with Public Enemy as well as more recently in 2020 during an interview with Nick Cannon.90-92 In an interview with Kerrang! in 1992, Richey expressed shocked incredulity that Griff “actually believes that Jews carry out experiments on babies in South Africa.”93
The next stop on the conspiracy line is the concept of some sort of deal or pact made with a secret, pervading power, similar to the legend of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil. Roberts and Noakes write,
“There is a deep and long-lasting narrative describing the tragic fate of countless musicians at the hands of the all-powerful. Richey’s name never appears on the list of artists supposedly sacrificed by an evil corporate elite, but this only makes his story’s applicability to such theories more intriguing.”94
This doesn’t make any sense. It is absurd to assume that because Richey doesn’t appear on this alleged list despite the applicability of his story, he is the one whose experiences are potentially truly authentic. Their explanation for this theory is that “conspiracy peddlers talk of ‘blood sacrifice’: to pass beyond a certain threshold, an offering must be made, and someone usually must die.”95 In this instance, no one died. Instead, it seems as though they believe that Richey undertook an actual blood sacrifice deal during his conversation with Steve Lamacq.
“When Richey notoriously spilled his own blood for the NME, was he consciously acting out his role in a Faustian deal for wealth and fame? Just six days after the blood-strewn 4-REAL’ incident, the Manic Street Preachers signed a record deal with Sony.”96
If not for the dramatic claim that the record deal with Sony was suddenly signed “just six days later”, this might be taken as a metaphor for a dramatic act done to drum up publicity. But within the context of all the other preceding conspiracy theories, it seems as though the authors are genuinely suggesting that Richey’s act of self-harm was a “blood sacrifice” that magically granted them a deal with Sony from nothing in just six days. Yet again, the wording is just vague enough that the reader can interpret it as genuine theorising or as metaphorical depending on their preconceptions. As I pointed out before, talks between labels and management would have already been in motion weeks or months prior in order for the band to sign six days after the incident. It was likely just a PR stunt acted out with the knowledge of the upcoming signing, although Richey may also have been acting in earnest regarding his inability to get through to Steve Lamacq; but a “blood sacrifice” in order to manifest an as-yet unscheduled record deal is an absurd notion.
It’s not as though Richey’s motivations remained completely unexplained; journalists asked him about it a fair number of times through the years. Though he didn’t admit to a publicity stunt, in many interviews he explained his actions, saying that “I didn’t know what I could possibly say to him to make him understand. Other bands hit journalists and it’s very macho…I would never want to do that”97 and “I would rather cut myself, because I feel I can justify that, whereas I can’t justify hitting him.”98 Rachel Edwards implied in an interview in 2020 that she didn’t necessarily think it was a stunt or that anyone could have anticipated the photo of Richey after the incident becoming such an iconic image.99 Regarding Richey’s actions, she noted that she “[didn’t] know if that was a statement in itself”100 because he later clarified that he used self-harm to calm himself and that he thought the 4-REAL incident was “a shit thing to be remembered for.”101 Richey expressed in multiple interviews that he felt he had a right to his own body and could justify its harm, whereas he had no right to harm others and he felt that to hit another person would just be to provoke a defensive reaction. On the other hand, when the band did sign to Sony, in the photograph that appeared in the music press, Richey shook hands with Sony’s UK chairman Tim Bowen with his left hand so that the bandages covering his arm were on display for the camera. Whether his actions were a PR stunt, a genuine emotional outburst, or combination of both, and though he later seemed to regret it, they became something even Richey exploited at the time. Either way, both interpretations seem far more likely than an apparently literal Faustian deal for wealth and fame.
The strange and extreme theories steadily become more outlandish and absurd as the book progresses. The number of dumbfounded underlining and incredulous margin notes I made in my copy of Withdrawn Traces increases exponentially with the page numbers from here on out.
For the most part, however, the rest of this chapter simply details the Manic Street Preachers’ first tour in America and Europe, the failure of Generation Terrorists to be successful in the USA, and Richey’s disillusionment with the whole idea of touring being at all exciting or fun. Apparently tour managers are now predicting Richey’s disappearance: they describe a doodle by tour manager Rory Lyons, in which he has edited a Far Side cartoon to show a man talking about how he is going to move to an island in the South Pacific and leave humanity behind. The authors use Lyons’ drawing to illustrate Richey’s “growing sense of personal alienation”102 and how he “became estranged from the rest of the band.”103 According to Roberts and Noakes, already, in 1991 when they were still choosing to be together during their downtime, “go[ing] back to Richey’s house or [James’] house, […] watching really good Seventies films, or talking about boxing or rugby, or watching overblown music movies,”104 Richey was starting to dislike his bandmates. It wasn’t the touring or the disillusionment about the music industry he was starting to feel negative toward, according to the authors, but the actual people he was writing and touring with, despite him repeatedly telling music press in 1993 how much he liked the friendship and company of his fellow bandmates,105 and that the “best thing about being in the Manic Street Preachers” was that they “enjoy being around each other” and didn’t “have so many personal hang-ups about really stupid things.”106 The only direct quote from Richey the authors give to support this theory is a comment from an NME article in 1992 documenting the band’s tour of North America: “You get in the van, and it’s like four people with CD Walkmans, Sega games, just sitting like that. An existential nightmare! Our lives haven’t changed at all.”107 However, the context of the original quote is specifically that of discussing the entire band’s general malaise regarding touring the US and their collective disillusionment about making a massive, world-changing statement with the album. Another problem with this quote is that the second sentence, “our lives haven’t changed at all,” comes from a separate, earlier section of the interview, answering an unrelated question. Again, the authors have manipulated interview quotes while claiming to represent Richey authentically.
The authors then mention that “there were early, occasional dalliances with groupies, but this was not really Richey’s way.”108 While Richey’s relationship with groupies definitely petered out after 1992, there were plenty of comments and rumours from fans as well as Richey himself109-113 about his sexual habits at the time. Most of Richey’s comments did reflect a rather distanced opinion of sex,114, 115 so it’s likely that many of his actions in the early days of the band were performative more than anything else, but that doesn’t negate that there seem to have been enough sexual engagements with groupies or strangers that “occasional” would be inaccurate.
The chapter ends with the first proper mention of the mysterious Jo, to whom Richey addressed the box he left at the Embassy Hotel in 1995. The two met in 1991 or early 1992 (the exact year is unclear) when Jo was about 17, and the authors say Richey began to “pine for”116 her during his time touring North America. Jo and Richey exchanged letters beginning in 1992, and she has allowed Roberts and Noakes some access to photocopies of these correspondences from him, as well as the letters she sent to Rachel Edwards in the mid- to late-90’s. Unfortunately, most mentions of Jo are summaries of or excerpts from her letters to Rachel rather than any recent direct quotes from her, as she declined to be interviewed. So little information is given in this manner (and some of it is so odd) that it’s difficult to believe or know what Jo may or may not still think, what is true and what is manipulated or embellished by the authors.
A Critical Analysis and Review of Withdrawn Traces, Part 2 →
Supplement: Scans of the photo inserts in Withdrawn Traces + other images for context
Squash Writes 