A Critical Analysis And Review of Withdrawn Traces Part 3

The Holy Bible and ‘Secret Meanings’

Just like the previous chapter, chapter 9 is subtitled by an excerpt attributed to “Richey’s archive, autumn 1994”. No original sources have been given for the selection, which reads, “Greetings from a dead man. Don’t get off the boat. I will not be sacrificed to barbarians. Imitate February, then. This is February. I take a purge.”¹ These lines are from three separate sources. The first sentence is from the film adaptation of 1984² directed by Michael Radford, as is the third sentence. The second sentence is from Apocalypse Now.³ The last three sentences are lines picked from two consecutive pages of Eugene Ionesco’s play The Chairs.⁴ Again, there doesn’t seem to have been much effort on the part of the authors to separate original written work by Richey from the selections he recorded from other sources.

Chapter 9 begins by discussing the release of The Holy Bible on 30 August 1994, its imagery and inspirations, and the public reaction to the album – it reached top 6 in the UK but failed to chart in Europe or North America. The first six pages of the chapter mostly summarise already well-known and well-documented details about the album including the change in aesthetic and sound, the change in recording location, and the much darker political and historical subject matter. The record was “an ethical protest against inhumanity and barbarism,”⁵ with “deliberately confrontational”⁶ artwork and lyrical and visual confrontation of “life’s harsh realities.”⁷ Roberts and Noakes claim that Richey wrote 85% of the lyrics;⁸ the percentage reported by the rest of the band over the years has consistently been 70-75%, with James saying 80% once in 2006 in an interview with a German zine.⁹

That Richey wrote such a large portion of the lyrics means that “the obvious temptation is to dig into and dissect his lyrics; to find hidden context and new layers of meaning.”¹⁰ For Roberts and Noakes, this means assuming that he deliberately left clues to his disappearance hidden in his lyrics. They justify their inclination towards this version of analysis with a brief mention of the punk rock history book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus, an early Manic Street Preachers literary staple, saying that “the theory running throughout Marcus’ book was that threads can be found subconsciously and consciously throughout history – in culture and the arts – and can possess much greater significance if thought of in terms of cross-referencing and historical lineage.”¹¹

Lipstick Traces is about the generally ignored cycles of humanity and history, the effects capitalism had on said cycles (with Guy Debord’s The Society Of The Spectacle as a major reference point), and the universality of certain types of artistic, avant garde, or underground thought or experience. It is about the repetition of ideas or expressions throughout art and history rather than magical coincidences and or conspiratorial secret codes. Marcus’ work tracks the ancestral lineage of punk music as an inheritor of a story that “was so old and so foreign – a story about art and revolution”¹² that expressed “an unknown tradition of old pronouncements, poems, and events, a secret history of ancient wishes and defeats”¹³ which was “comprised of only unfinished, unsatisfied stories”¹⁴ in which artistic expression tried to subvert the spectacle only to become itself commodified. The ‘secret’ part of the “secret history” tagline isn’t about conspiracy or actual hidden messages, it’s about the common voice and repeating themes of subcultures, underground, or rebellious individuals and how that voice sometimes finally manages to find its way aboveground, only to be claimed by the culture industry and “swallowed by the chiefs who began the game.”¹⁵

Roberts and Noakes apply their interpretation of Marcus’ term “secret history” to the children’s book Masquerade by Kit Williams. Williams was challenged by a friend to do something new with children’s literature, so in 1979 he published a picture book about a rabbit attempting to deliver a gift from the Moon to the Sun, complete with paintings which held clues to the location of a real treasure he had hidden somewhere in England. The treasure was a little hare-shaped amulet he had made in gold and jewels, which he had hidden in a ceramic casket and buried on public property. It was widely searched for, although eventually it was revealed that the person who initially found it had cheated.^{16, 17} Even after it was announced that the treasure had been found, many people refused to believe the announcement and continued to search where they believed it had been hidden, because they connected the patterns in the book to a different spot and refused to change that belief. Williams’ assistant in hiding the hare, Bamber Gascoigne, observed that the “most determined of Masqueraders may grudgingly have accepted that a hare of some sort was dug up at Ampthill, but they believed there would be another hare, or a better solution, awaiting them at their favourite spot.”¹⁸

Instead of acknowledging that Lipstick Traces proposes that the “greater significance”¹⁹ of the threads that run through art are universal rather than individual, Roberts and Noakes use their interpretation of Marcus’ “secret history” and the story of the singular hidden message in Masquerade to posit that perhaps Richey placed secret clues and codes into his lyrics indicating what he was planning to do and why, and where he was planning to go.

Williams’ book forced readers to examine it closely in order to decipher its clues, rather than casually flipping through, and Roberts and Noakes compare those characteristics to the lyrics of The Holy Bible, wondering if Richey could “have had the same in mind, when laying out an album that still to this day baffles critics, fans and his bandmates alike?”²⁰ The rest of the chapter is a dive into the search for these clues within the songs. In 2009, James Dean Bradfield recalled that “as soon as I realised everyone was trying to do a Columbo on Richey, I stopped looking in bags for notes, I stopped looking for messages in lyrics because I knew they weren’t there. He wouldn’t be that crass.”²¹ Unfortunately, the authors seem to think Richey was willing to be less creatively discreet.

Rachel says she thinks that Richey “put a lot of work into condensing things he’d learned as far back as college, and making the band’s third album a statement that couldn’t be faulted in any way,”²² while a quote from James tells us that he “wanted to call the album The Holy Bible, because everything has to be perfection.”²³ Richey’s own statement in the end of 1994 acknowledges what this book points out about his desire to create a masterpiece, to compound all his knowledge into his lyrics. In November 1994, he told Swedish television channel ZTV, “I have a dream of writing a lyric which I think is flawless, really, that I think has got no broken edges, that makes sense – to me, not anybody else, but just makes sense to me. That, I think, in fifteen to twenty lines, I’ve written a lyric that sums up exactly how I feel about everything. Not just how I feel today, how I’ve felt all my life. Everything I’ve read, everything I’ve seen, everything I believe, that in those fifteen lines, you can just say it all.”²⁴

But giving the credit for the entirety of the album entirely to Richey is unfair and untrue. The Holy Bible is a unique masterpiece because of the way the band came together to work on it. Richey wrote pages and pages of lyrics; Yes was long enough that the band have since called its original state one of journalistic prose rather than lyrics.^{25, 26} But it took the skill of James Dean Bradfield, Sean Moore, and Nicky Wire to cut those long tracts into songs that didn’t suffocate James with words and lack of air whilst still communicating the essential idea and important or most impactful lines. That’s a challenging task which requires a great deal of thought and effort. James Dean Bradfield would stay in the studio until four in the morning, reworking songs over and over again to make the music fit the words. Richey’s lyrics were the catalyst, but “James worked unbelievable hours. He’s the voice on this album. It’s never sounded like that again. The way it reacts with the guitar, the different sounds on Faster, it’s as much his record as Richey’s, musically.”²⁷ What makes the album so intensely compelling, so powerful, is the way that the music feels as though it is one with the words. The Holy Bible is stripped down, but solidly constructed, the music wrapping itself around the lyrics like skin and muscle around bone. If the lyrics stood alone or were partnered with different music they would still be amazing manifestos and poems. But the work of the rest of the band transforms those lyrics from words on a page into a sonic structure that constructs an atmosphere which is intense, a claustrophobic experience that a listener can’t escape, the vehicle for the words which lends them the weight and feeling that puts hooks into the audience and doesn’t let go until the final gasping sample clip of ‘P.C.P.’ The effort by the band as a whole to successfully match Richey’s words with sound is what makes the album so perfect, so raw and yet so well-constructed, and it is insulting to the rest of the band to ignore the work they put in, the work that gives the album its body, puts flesh and muscle on the raw bare starkness of the words.

Roberts and Noakes have chosen five (although it’s more like four and a half) out of the thirteen tracks of The Holy Bible to analyse for “insight into [Richey’s] mind, a glimpse of his real or imagined future, and signs of any pre-planned exit strategy.”²⁸ They state that “there are certainly clues in The Holy Bible‘s lyrics hinting that his later disappearance may have been pre-meditated. They deserve close examination.”²⁹

Instead of beginning with ‘Yes’ like most books about the Manics do when they go track by track, Withdrawn Traces begins with ‘Faster’. First, they contextualise the audio clip selected for the beginning of the track, which is cut from the film Nineteen Eighty-Four starring John Hurt. In the scene from which the audio was clipped, Hurt’s character Winston is expressing his desire to “rot, weaken, or undermine” the Party whose control the state of Oceania lives under. Upon meeting his lover in secret for the first time, he tells her that he likes that she is corrupt and has slept with other men – specifically other Party members – because “simple undifferentiated desire […] was the force that would tear down the party”;³⁰ after they sleep together, he has the realisation their sexual intercourse was “a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.”³¹ In a Melody Maker article entitled “The Manics’ New Testament,” published in August 1994 while Richey was still in hospital, Nicky explained his thoughts on ‘Faster’, stating that “a lot of it is all Richey again, and I was always completely confused by it. But when he wrote it he told me it was about self-abuse.”³² The authors claim that instead, Richey had a different, “actual meaning”³³ in mind for the lyrics. They quote a June 1994 article from RAW magazine titled “Rant For Cover”, in which Richey explains that ‘Faster’ is about “the sort of people who take their frustrations out on other people, particularly those who can’t defend themselves,”³⁴ and that it was inspired by a music exec making a big scene out of a minor inconvenience at an industry dinner.

Though it is not quoted in this book, in the 1994 tour programme, Richey wrote liner notes describing the themes and meanings of the lyrics of each song. According to his liner notes, the concepts expressed in ‘Faster’ are “Strength through weakness. All morality sown in the soil of the ruling caste. Self-abuse is anti-social, aggression still natural. Society speeding up – finds worth in failure.”³⁵

Roberts and Noakes use the aforementioned RAW magazine quote as a strange jumping-off point for their next theory, which proposes that the relationships in the band were starting to seriously splinter and “the lyrics of ‘Faster’ also appear to contain a preemptive strike against his bandmates.”³⁶ This alleged lyrical jab at his fellow band members appears in the form of Richey calling himself an “architect,” which implies that he is claiming credit for the band’s success, and calling out people who would accuse him of being a “butcher” for alienating the public with his thematic choices.³⁷ The authors quote an anonymous roadie who says that Rob Stringer told him that there were “power struggles”³⁸ within the band, and that Stringer indicated these problems were between Richey and the others. Why the managing director of a company would tell a roadie something as commercially and administratively important as potential strife within a band apparently extreme enough to be upsetting seems unclear. While there was obviously a fair amount of tension during the latter half of 1994 during the tour, the band has always reported that the writing and recording period was a positive and united one, which would make this interpretation of lyrical references to discord within the group an odd angle to take. James Dean Bradfield says in the DVD interview for The Holy Bible 10^th Anniversary release that, “at that time, we were very insular, […] it was definitely us four against the world,” while Nicky in the same interview says that “there was no arguments, the playing was brilliant, the intensity was there,” and that they were “feeling utterly united.”³⁹ And in a number of interviews the band have said that the period of time in the studio “was a rather good-natured, happy session making the record”,⁴⁰ instead pinpointing the tour of Thailand post-recording as the start of the downward spiral and increasing unwellness and tensions.

Moving through the lyrics of ‘Faster’, the authors propose a further theory that the “cold made warm” line might refer to either the record company insinuating that their contract was in danger, or perhaps that it signifies Nicky’s marriage and his “defaulting on the Manics’ original anti-love pact”⁴¹ because Richey was “now standing alone in his faithfulness to the band’s early manifesto.”⁴² Was he? The previous chapters certainly seem to imply that he wanted to have those same kinds of relationships that Nicky had with his wife or that Philip and Terri Hall had, but that he struggled with the intricacies of romantic relationships. So was he deliberately maintaining a lack of romantic connection in order to stay true to the manifesto they had created at the start, or was it something he desired but had difficulty with? The theories in this book give mixed signals regarding Richey’s intentions and feelings, and seem to switch back and forth depending on whether they are talking about Richey as a member of the band or Richey by himself, whether they are framing their discussion through criticism of the other members of the Manics or through speculation of Richey’s intellect and myth-building intentions.

According to Roberts and Noakes, the line fragment “I am idiot drug hive / the virgin” is Richey trying to “counter some of the band’s allusions to his lack of sexual experience”⁴³ as well as implications that he was a much heavier drug user than people assumed. They acknowledge that the line about self-disgust was taken from a conversation between Richey and Hall Or Nothing’s PR officer Gillian Porter, but that the addition of “and I do as I please” was an expression of defiance on Richey’s part. “I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer / I spat out Plath and Pinter” was his statement against the record company’s wishes for the Manics to be more consumable, declaring that he would continue to write about controversial topics and refusing to be dumbed down. Similarly, the authors interpret the iconic line, “I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing” as a declaration of personal identity and a refusal to be artistically pigeonholed to become a “more saleable commodity”.⁴⁴

Continuing along the same interpretative themes, the “if you stand up like a nail then you will be knocked down” line, which is adapted from a Japanese proverb, also becomes a reference to his unwillingness to back down and follow the desires of the recording industry, and the “I’ve been too honest with myself, I should have lied like everybody else” line is a suggestion that “the people around him had complied with an Orwellian programme and performed like diligent, unquestioning robots.”⁴⁵ However, these two lines were both originally written by Nicky Wire, who went through his archives in 2014 while compiling ephemera for The Holy Bible 20th Anniversary album, and found that “in my notebooks there’s these phrases of ‘So damn easy to cave in, man kills everything’, ‘if you stand up like a nail you will be knocked down’, ‘been too honest with myself, should have lied like everybody else’, and the title. And then Richey filled in everything else.”⁴⁶

The most absurd part of this analysis of ‘Faster’ might be the interpretation that the “So damn easy to cave in / Man kills everything” line is not actually a pessimistic statement about “man” as in humanity, in a song about humanity, nihilism, and capitalism. Instead this line is now about “’the man’ – the derogatory slang expression for corporate and authority figures” and was Richey “effectively ‘sticking it to the man’”⁴⁷ by lyrically lashing out at “a record label that attempted to restrict any radical strivings towards individuality or references to unsavoury or incendiary topics.”⁴⁸ Likely not, because the line was another one of Nicky’s contributions; he explained in the Track By Track commentary supplied in the booklet for The Holy Bible 20th Anniversary that “I had this thing stuck in my head: ‘So damn easy to cave in/Man kills everything,’”⁴⁹ as well as mentioning that it was one of his contributions during the BBC Mastertapes interview.⁵⁰ In a 1994 interview with Melody Maker he mentioned that he “added some stuff about the regurgitation of 20th Century culture and the way that everything’s speeded up to such an extent that nobody knows if they’ve got any meaning any more.”⁵¹ Nicky also recalled in The Holy Bible 10th Anniversary DVD that the label didn’t bother them during the making of this album.⁵² They had control over the content of their music and how it was produced; in June 1994 Richey explained that there was “no involvement with the management or record company, and we wrote the songs very quickly.”⁵³ Nicky also recounted Rob Stringer’s encouragement and excitement when they showed him rough cuts of some of the songs, even saying “’Horses and chains, I love it’” about ‘Archives Of Pain’.⁵⁴ If the label was attempting to “restrict any radical strivings towards individuality or references to unsavoury or incendiary topics”,⁵⁵ it certainly wasn’t coming from Stringer. The album successfully manages to reference quite a few ‘unsavoury’ topics. To name a few that are blatant to most listeners without having to do research on specific references within the songs, the album talks about prostitution, the Holocaust, fascism, political correctness, American racism, English imperialism, self-harm, anorexia, serial killers and capital punishment. Those seem like pretty incendiary and unsavoury themes, and the album was released without pushback from the label.

Adrian Wyatt, one of Richey’s friends from university, thinks that “Richey underestimated the music industry”⁵⁶ and felt a lack of creative control, and that this album was him trying to take that control back. Rachel says that she thinks the failure of The Holy Bible to be commercially successful meant the band had to reassess their priorities and intentions, and that “James, Nick and Sean reassessed their initial position and went on to stand shoulder to shoulder with Sony.”⁵⁷ In 1995, the authors say, Richey “told an old university friend he believed that without his initial input, the band would never have caught the eye of a major record label.”⁵⁸

They describe one of Richey’s last collages, which includes photos of musicians, celebrities, and other religious or cult figures, with ‘THE MORON SPASTIC PREACHERS’ scrawled in yellow at the bottom.⁵⁹ The authors present this as an example of Richey’s frustration with or disconnection from the band. Perhaps it was a genuine expression of resentment. However, Richey, and the Manics in general, were quite good at taking the piss out of themselves, and “even in his darkest moments, Richey had an almost effeminate way of interspersing a sly little joke, just in the course of a day.”⁶⁰ A good example would be in the original lyrics to Me And Stephen Hawking from the Journal For Plague Lovers album, in which Richey has typed “Oh the joy me and Stephen Hawking we laugh / Missed the sex revolution when we failed the physical,” and beneath those final lines he includes a note: “hahahaha (joke)”,⁶¹ or their frequent joking reference to the slogan of TSB, changing it to “MSP – the band that likes to say ‘yes’”.

Roberts and Noakes are extremely preoccupied with the idea that Richey was either writing specifically about the music industry or deliberately planting clues to his own disappearance, and, it seems, nothing much else. This thematic fixation continues on through the rest of their lyrical interpretations. It is likely he had bigger and more interesting things on his mind at the time than what Sony did or didn’t want the band to be doing. His political and historical interests and opinions were clearly important to him, as was the expression and affirmation of his intelligence.⁶² The majority of the album’s references are outward-looking, towards history, politics, current events and social commentary, and while writing the album, the band “felt like the cruelty of humanity was going to be examined down to the finest detail, filtered through Richey’s amazing intellect.”⁶³ By all accounts the writing and recording process was an agreeable and collaborative one, and they were undisturbed by management; by the time they were touring the album, things were starting to slip and relationships becoming somewhat strained all around. Perhaps at that time Richey might have felt that way, but it seems as though the album’s creation was not burdened by direct pressure from the label or personal strife between the members of the band.⁶⁴

Considering the broad subject matter of the previous two albums, was Richey really one to focus in on only one music industry-specific subject? If all his lyrics are about refusing to be pigeonholed by the label or about pointing fingers at the music industry, isn’t that pigeonholing himself as well? Do Roberts and Noakes actually believe that a man who grew up during political upheaval, studied history and politics in school, and found inspiration in Situationism really thought that criticising the music industry was more important than the more universal and universally understood topics of social commentary?

Next, the authors move on to examine ‘Revol’, with an amazing logical reach which claims that “’Revol’ could in parts be read as essentially a lyric about Richey’s plans to leave the group. The lyrics contain threads that refer to falling out of love, separation and exile. […] The song essentially tells of a one-time love/lover scenario that has been reversed: Richey falling out of love with being in the band, with the band members, or both?”⁶⁵ The authors wonder if he used political references to review his time with the band, with the final verse a message that he was planning to disappear. They in fact only go through the last three lines of the final verse of Revol.

They begin with the reference to Che Guevara, a “South American revolutionary, vanished into exile, two years before he was killed by the CIA in Bolivia in October 1967. […] Before Guevara’s departure, he wrote a farewell letter wherein he severed all ties with his former Argentine comrades to devote himself to worldwide revolution, and changed his appearance drastically by shaving his head, as did Richey, prior to his own disappearance.”⁶⁶ They don’t attempt to touch the ‘you’re all target now’ portion of the lyric; the name is all they use for their interpretation.

Che Guevara left Cuba in 1964 not because he wanted to disappear due to mental health issues, but because he wanted to foster revolution elsewhere after he failed at his goal of financial reform of the country, and because he became disillusioned with parts of Cuba’s government and Castro’s leadership.⁶⁷ He then went on to do a tour of Africa, making fiery speeches that made the news, attempting to drum up revolution on the way. His failure in the Congo saw him return to Cuba in 1965; Guevara and Castro then planned his expedition to Bolivia.⁶⁸ The farewell letter that the authors mention was penned to Fidel Castro in April 1965,⁶⁹ after he returned from Africa, and marked the severance of his ties with Cuba, not Argentina, which “freed Castro and the Cuban government, as well as Che, of any official responsibility for any future actions of the guerilla leader.”⁷⁰ A year later, he had changed his appearance in order to enter Bolivia undetected so that he could plan and attempt to incite a “continental revolution.”⁷¹ Guevara’s attempts to provoke revolution in Bolivia failed mainly due to inadequate research on the country and to Castro rescinding his support for the endeavour and failing to maintain contact, “apparently [leaving] Che to sink or swim on his own”⁷² which resulted in Guevara revealing his whereabouts before he intended and being hunted by the Bolivian army.⁷³ The connection Roberts and Noakes are trying to make with this interpretation is flimsy and only works when the fragmented lyric stands on its own, but once you put it in context with the rest of the song as well as the rest of the specific line, it just doesn’t make sense.

They also briefly discuss the reference to Pol Pot, the leader of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot’s reign was overthrown in early 1979, after which he retreated with his followers and “went on to live in isolation in Thai border country until his death in 1998.”⁷⁴ The authors don’t make much of an analysis, except to note that Pol Pot was a “figure of mystery, existing in the shadow of self-imposed exile.”⁷⁵ It is here that they explain the reasoning for the title of their book. Examining the line referring to Pol Pot, they interpret it as an apparent reflection of Richey’s actions in 1995, asking “when Richey Edwards writes a lyric like ‘Withdrawn traces’, and then goes on, several months later, to withdraw all traces of himself, how can you not question the significance of the reference?”⁷⁶

Roberts and Noakes don’t go into much detail about the context of the political references in Revol, so I will. Pol Pot remained leader of the Khmer Rouge even after the regime was overthrown in 1979. In 1983, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer that affects the lymphatic system.⁷⁷ He continued to command the Khmer Rouge, but after a major Vietnamese offensive in 1984, was forced to move from Cambodia to a base in Thailand, where there were rumours and signs that Pol Pot was “preparing his succession.”⁷⁸ “It was a very gradual withdrawal” but he “no longer micromanaged Khmer Rouge policy as he had in the past,”⁷⁹ and he began to delegate responsibilities to his defence minister, Son Sen, and the President of Democratic Kampuchea, Khieu Samphan.⁸⁰ In September 1985, it was announced that he would be retiring, and that Son Sen would take his place as Commander-In-Chief, but that he would “continue to work in an advisory capacity.”⁸¹ With major fluctuations in the Cambodian government after the Paris Peace Agreement in 1991, the power of the Khmer Rouge began to crumble bit by bit, punctuated by repeated ceasefire violations and talks with the UN,⁸² although the major scramble to try and retain control wouldn’t occur until mid-1994, once The Holy Bible had already been released.⁸³ It is likely this act of slowly receding from power rather than conceding defeat that Richey is referencing here.

Another bizarre lyrical interpretation is pulled from the reference to Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam in the US. Roberts and Noakes state that,

“A separatist black nationalist, [Farrakhan] advocated partition from the United States, to be funded by reparations compensating for the country’s history of use and abuse of its black populace. Again, this can be seen as having an association with Richey. Seeking to divorce African-Americans from the rest of the US, Farrakhan demands alimony. With the previous couplets referencing disappearance, exile and separation, the mention of alimony further suggests that Richey may have been considering going his own way.”⁸⁴

Asking for reparations from slavery is not the same as deciding to leave a band and Richey would know that. The comparison is tone-deaf, and reaches a level of nonsensical crassness that seems beyond even the Manics’ most controversial lines. The authors already established Farrakhan’s association with conspiracy theories in Chapter 6. The shift in tone supporting this as a genuine theory conflicts with the slightly scornful way they referenced Farrakhan’s beliefs previously. Richey and Nicky were known for provocative statements in interviews and lyrics, but this interpretation seems pretty incongruous to the kinds of provocation they were engaging in. While Richey’s grasp on certain messages from American musicians of colour were maybe not always the most thought-through (see: his comment about Rage Against The Machine⁸⁵), this is a leap that seems doubtful he would be willing or stupid enough to make. He was well aware of the issue of racism in America and the inequality that especially affected black communities; the lyrics to ifwhiteamerica are a direct reference to American racism and the US government’s actions that specifically targeted African American citizens. Earlier in chapter six the authors described Richey’s girlfriend Jo as a “dark-haired, curvy”⁸⁶ woman “of mixed-race heritage.”⁸⁷ In light of this, the interpretation made about this line comes closer to unfounded insinuations of racism on Richey’s part rather than of simple tone-deafness. And while Farrakhan himself is a severely problematic individual, that doesn’t detract from the absurdity of the conclusion made by Roberts and Noakes.

Then the authors move on to the chorus’ shout of “Lebensraum,” wondering why a term mostly used to reference Hitler’s expansion of territory “should be deployed to form the central pillar in a song about failed relationships, and falling out of love?”⁸⁸ Likely because it’s not just a song about failed romantic or sexual relationships, but about failed politics. Each political figure named in the song ultimately failed at his goal in some form. About the song, Richey wrote, “All adolescent leaders of men FAILED. All love FAILS. If men of the calibre of Lenin and Trotsky failed, then how can anyone expect anything to change. Won’t get fooled again.”⁸⁹ Revol stylistically echoes the Dadaist and Situationist act of turning expectation on its head. It combines the “marriage of prank and negation” with the act of “sucking in all the trivia and rubbish cluttering up the world” so that “reappearing at the other end, everything [becomes] transformed.”⁹⁰ It takes the early Manics’ idea of “anti-love” to an extreme; it’s the sarcastic opposite of a love song, a song marrying the failure of politics and relationships/sex whose offspring is a failure to communicate.

Probing further into the chorus, Roberts and Noakes ask, does the cry of ‘Kulturkampf‘ – which they define from the Collins dictionary as “any serious conflict over values, beliefs, etc. between sizable factions within a nation, community or other group”⁹¹ – mean that Richey had “suffered a serious conflict”⁹² with management or the other members of the band?

In Richey’s original, unedited lyrics to ‘Revol’, which can be found on the front cover of the booklet included in The Holy Bible 20^th Anniversary box set, he wrote “Kulturkampf – conflict between Church + State”.⁹³ The Collins dictionary also defines Kulturkampf (in German, literally ‘culture war’) as “the struggle of the Prussian state against the Roman Catholic Church, which took the form of laws designed to bring marriage, education, etc. under the control of the state.”⁹⁴ Led by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the 1870s, Kulturkampf was a conflict regarding the powers of church and state during and after the unification of the German Empire, during which Bismarck attempted to limit the political influence of the Catholic church.⁹⁵ The anti-Catholic regulations increased in number but not necessarily effectiveness until the movement collapsed in on itself at the advent of the new pope, Leo X, in 1878. He was more interested in reconciliation and peace, and this interest, along with political changes, meant the conflict of kulturkampf “slowly faded away”⁹⁶ as “some of Bismarck’s punitive laws were rescinded, some not enforced,”⁹⁷ and by 1887 the conflict was considered by most to be over.

Next, Roberts and Noakes present a bewildering interpretation that since ‘raus’ is German for “out” and ‘fila’ means “file” in Italian, perhaps Richey was “advocating that he, or others, proactively absent themselves from a restricting situation”⁹⁸ or maybe he was “a recipient of these orders.”⁹⁹ This analysis stretches the theory beyond reason, appearing both confusing and far-fetched. Would Richey hide his complaints so deeply in his lyrics that not even his bandmates would understand their meaning? Is there any direct evidence that Richey felt so much antipathy towards his bandmates or management, that there was such a level disconnect even before the album was done being written and recorded? Aside from the remaining band members expressing anxiety in 1996 that “there was the possibility that Richey just didn’t like us anymore”¹⁰⁰ – a statement which the text of Withdrawn Traces never actually mentions – there is no direct quote from Richey expressing such a sentiment.

On the other hand, in late 1993, Richey mentioned that he liked being in the band because “I like them as people. I like their company y’know?”¹⁰¹ In 2020, Rachel explained that Richey “rarely spoke about the band [to people that he cared about]” because “he was a person outside the band.”¹⁰² Later on in the book, the authors claim that Richey’s friends from university knew him better than his bandmates. It is perfectly normal for a person to have different circles of friends that don’t overlap much, and that doesn’t mean they dislike one group of friends and love the others. No legitimate articles or interview quotes are supplied by the authors to defend this interpretation that Richey disliked his bandmates except for the statements by the anonymous roadie, nor are there any anecdotes by Rachel, the band’s management, or any of Richey’s friends to uphold the theory either. In fact, when James Dean Bradfield suggested that “being in a band just isn’t any good for him, we should just pack it in,”¹⁰³ Richey didn’t want that to happen. When the band and Manics’ management instead suggested that Richey simply write rather than go through the stress of touring, he refused to take that less grueling role and insisted on continuing to tour, because he felt it wouldn’t be fair to his bandmates for him to sit out.^104-106 It seems as though these assumptions that Richey felt negatively toward Nicky, James, and Sean are completely baseless, made entirely off the back of Sara Hawys Roberts’ previously documented dislike of the remaining band members and her history of insulting them online.^107-113

It is difficult not to feel that this book has portrayed Richey poorly and disrespected his intellectual efforts. These ‘interpretations’ of his songs as nothing but clues towards his disappearance or indications of conflict with the band feel insulting towards his intelligence, towards the work he put into educating himself both at university and after, and towards his strong interests and opinions on political and social matters of the past and his present. There’s such a clear awareness of politics, history and current events in this album. As James Dean Bradfield mentioned, it is true that there is “a lot of dark introspection there, but he was looking out towards the world as well. You can see him looking to that outward world and perhaps seeing how humanity is and reacting to it.”¹¹⁴ The sheer number of political and historical references – compared to both Generation Terrorists and Gold Against The Soul – should be an indication of the influence that world history and global events had on the themes and messages of The Holy Bible. In Richey’s own words, the album was outward-looking:

“If the Holy Bible is true, it should be about the way the world is, and that’s what I think my lyrics are about. They speak about the way the world actually is, it doesn’t ignore things, it doesn’t pretend things don’t exist. […] I think it’s perfectly natural to have an interest in the things that are going on around you. If I wrote lyrics constantly about relationships I would think I was walking around with a plastic bag over my head ignoring everything that goes on, pretending things don’t exist.”¹¹⁵

He explained that his reason for moving on to more global, political subjects with this album was because “I think that with Gold Against The Soul it was more individual. A lot was about one person’s feelings and that’s quite egocentric. I don’t know if we’re going to do that again. I just think that in this new record… the human condition in general is quite sad.”¹¹⁶ While talking about the album in late 1994, Richey “stressed the record’s political themes – chiefly that right-wing historians were questioning the authenticity of the Holocaust. He reminded us that Die In The Summertime was written from the perspective of an old man, and that 4st 7lb was about a girl’s self-image problems.”¹¹⁷

Richey did not have the Internet when he was writing these songs; Yahoo! search would not be rolled out for another year and Google search would not be created for another four, there was no Wikipedia, no DVDs or online video players with a precise seeking option, no ebooks with the ctrl+F function. The effort needed to find, read about and research the subjects referenced in these songs is impressive. The remaining members of the band consistently mention the sheer amount of media Richey was reading, watching and analysing, and in 2009 James noted that “if you’re consuming that much culture, I think he’d be pretty insane to connect everything to himself.”¹¹⁸ Perhaps a large portion of the lyrics were Richey identifying with and ’embodying’ the characters in his lyrics, perhaps they were in part quite personal. But to dismiss Richey’s interests in history, politics and culture only as vehicles for his secret message about a future disappearance rather than genuine intellectual endeavours, critiques, or observations on the world seems disrespectful to his art and to the obviously intense amount of thought and research he put into the lyrics on this album.

In fact, in the next paragraph, the authors reject Richey’s political and historical intelligence and interest outright, claiming that “ultimately, the lyrics are probably best understood by disregarding any notion of a broader ‘political message’ and by accepting the cliché that personal is political.”¹¹⁹ The authors seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the phrase ‘the personal is political.’ The idea became popular during the 1970’s second-wave feminist movement; the phrase was introduced by Carol Hanisch in her essay of the same name. Hanisch used the theory to emphasise that women’s individual experiences at home in the private sphere were often similar to each other because they were caused not by personal failings but by societal oppression that all women faced, and that female subjugation is a collective rather than individual problem, therefore “there is only collective action for a collective solution.” ¹²⁰ Personal struggles are inextricably linked to the historical/societal contexts and external forces that created the inequality or the oppression that perpetuates those hardships. What is important in Hanisch’s theory is the recognition of the ruling class as the source of the oppressive circumstances that cause these problems, which means the collective potential of the oppressed group to push for change is also recognized. ‘The personal is political’ was meant to emphasise that women were not simply suffering alone, but that they shared similar experiences or grievances with other women, and banding together to bring awareness to these struggles and the nature of their external cause was the best way to bring about change.¹²¹ A “broader political message” is inherent in Hanisch’s theory, since criticism of the political and social status quo is a major component, and the entire point is that the political is the cause of personal problems, and that anything that points out such societal oppression necessarily becomes a political message.

An important question here that goes unanswered by Roberts and Noakes is ‘why?’ Why is it important to ignore that this song, like the majority of songs on this album, contains references to politics and political history? What is the difference between ‘Revol’ and the other songs? Does this assumption that the political references are in fact obscure personal metaphors apply to all the songs? Do the authors think ‘Intense Humming Of Evil’ isn’t political? That ‘P.C.P.’ isn’t political? ‘Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart’ is political by the third word in the title. While it is impossible to write anything opinionated about politics without being influenced by the personal, it does not mean that any mention of politics looks solely inward and does not criticise or analyse the world outside of the self.

What Roberts and Noakes seem to be doing here instead is saying that ‘the political is personal,’ that Richey’s use or mention of various political figures, theories, or events are actually references to his own life, that he has inverted them, and instead of referencing them in order to look outside of himself and critique the social or political climate and its effects on himself or others, he has employed them as mirrors to reflect himself and his personal ideas, experiences, or desires about his own life. Perhaps, however, what they are trying to say, but failing to adequately express, is that in ‘Revol’ specifically, there is no difference between the personal and the political, an idea which is not the same as ‘the personal is political.’ Within ‘Revol’, failure of the personal effort – relationships, sex, love – is equivalent to failure of the political effort – revolution, policy, ideology – and vice versa. This would make sense, as the lyrics reference either literally or obliquely the personal and/or political lives of the historical or political names at the beginning of each line, pointing out the failures of the referenced leaders and rebels.

There is one more interpretation that the authors don’t consider at all, which is that ‘Revol’ easily could have been written to be deliberately silly. The Situationist “marriage of prank and negation”¹²² as mentioned above is usually enacted with a sense of humour, a mocking gesture, or a clever juxtaposition of themes or forms in order to spark a reaction. People often remember Richey winding up journalists, saying provocative things with a little smile, and this song could easily fit in a similar vein of rhetoric. The lyric was a last-minute addition to the album, written backstage in Portugal in December 1993.¹²³ In a 2009 interview with The Quietus, James Dean Bradfield recalls reading the lyrics to the song: “I said to him ‘You’re just making a load of despots get together aren’t you?’ And he said that was pretty much it.”¹²⁴ In the 20th Anniversary box set of The Holy Bible, he calls ‘Revol’ “one of the lighter moments on the record: imagined sexual proclivities of despots and leaders.”¹²⁵

James Dean Bradfield’s opinion on ‘Revol’ has changed and grown respectful as he has reevaluated the album over the past 25+ years of interviews, albums, performances, and temporal distance from the making of the album. He has likely realised that the song, which sounds like gibberish unless you do a lot of political research, is still interesting and compelling and fun for audiences to listen to and sing along to. The authors quote an NME interview in 2014 in which he explained that “I think I fell back in love with ‘Revol’ because it’s one of those songs that actually becomes a tiny bit more relevant as time passes. You can’t live in the age of Berlusconi and not actually find a tiny bit of relevance in ‘Revol’.”¹²⁶ Strangely, they describe this quote as “damning with faint praise”¹²⁷ and use it to theorise that it highlights “Bradfield’s desire to play down the far more contentious aspects of the song, which perhaps Richey initially sought to expose, and which have assumed far deeper relevance”¹²⁸ since the mid-90’s. It is certainly not the most controversial song on the album, and by far the one that is the least coherent in terms of a direct political message that might be contentious, despite its general political themes being understandable.

In the same paragraph as the ‘personal is political’ interpretation, Roberts and Noakes imply a significance in Richey posing for a promo for The Holy Bible which featured a quote from Twelve Years A Slave, whose author Solomon Northup “vanished without a trace in the nineteenth century.”¹²⁹ I am uncertain what this might have to do with the lyrics to ‘Revol’, or why it was included in this lyrical analysis segment of the chapter, as the quote the band posed with does not seem to have any connection to Revol’s themes. In fact, the Northup excerpt was included on the sleeve for the ‘Faster’ single;¹³⁰ the ‘Revol’ single’s sleeve featured an excerpt of the final paragraph from George Orwell’s Animal Farm.^{131, 132}

Next, another pull quote displays an excerpt of a letter from Jo to Rachel, which reads, “I think I’ve said to you before about what he said if he left the band. They wouldn’t care, they’d carry on. He just said it straight – he wouldn’t be missed.”¹³³ As pointed out in other paragraphs, behaviour like that and beliefs like those – the idea that you won’t be missed if you were to just go away one day – is a characteristic or symptom of depression. Depression can affect the way a person interprets how they think others feel about them, as their insecurities or anxieties overwhelm their perception. This does not mean that those things are true in the minds of others. This statement from Richey is not a statement on the other members of the band or their love for him – it is a statement indicating his own self-esteem and his own feelings of uselessness.

The next topic of interest is Richey’s seemingly wobbly political opinions, and the authors claim that “the music press also noticed that Richey was taking an interest in the Quran and Sharia law.”¹³⁴ Journalist Taylor Parkes explains these interests best in an article for The Quietus, pointing out that Richey’s thoughts seemed “less a political standpoint than the outcome of an internal argument, heard most clearly on ‘Archives Of Pain’, an awed hymn to capital punishment: “Don’t be ashamed to slaughter / The centre of humanity is cruelty / There is never redemption…”¹³⁵

Roberts and Noakes also claim that “his notes outlining plans for the ‘Faster’ single suggested that its front cover depict a gold Star of David against a black background with the world ‘Jude’ emblazoned beneath. Operating in an industry famously populated by Jewish movers and shakers, it appeared that Richey was being deliberately provocative.”¹³⁶ Besides the lack of evidence of any of these notes or design drafts – as the authors have not supplied scans of any rough versions of The Holy Bible lyrics – the claim that the music industry is “famously populated by Jewish movers and shakers”¹³⁷ is perilously close to an antisemitic dog-whistle claiming that Jews run the media.¹³⁸ This is the third reference made by Roberts and Noakes implying antisemitic theories in the course of this book, and it is not the last. These claims of antisemitic imagery or messages clash intensely with how vehemently vocal Richey was about his hatred of Holocaust deniers and his frustration with the ways in which it was trivialised by the media.

The authors then ask “is it reasonable to suggest that certain lyrics on The Holy Bible were deliberately and provocatively politically incorrect?”¹³⁹ Of course Richey was being deliberately provocative, deliberately non-PC. The band have tried to be provocative since the earliest days, and this album is meant to incite a reaction. Even Rachel noted that Richey would be deliberately shocking and would craft letters or revise for interviews and prepare quotes specifically in order to evoke a reaction.¹⁴⁰ This album was the Manic Street Preachers being deliberately contrary to the Britpop that was rapidly growing in popularity in 1994, whose top three bands were Oasis, Pulp, and Blur, who were radio-friendly, often fairly upbeat, commonly focusing on British life, mostly undistorted and in a major key. The band have frequently said that they were working to be the opposite of that.

Roberts’ and Noakes’ analysis of ‘P.C.P.’ is used to further talk about Richey’s criticism of “political correctness”¹⁴¹ as liberal shallowness used to the benefit of imperialism. Despite the song’s extremely British references and obvious condemnation of English imperialism specifically, their interpretation is that the lyrics are expressing Europe’s “modern malaise”¹⁴² in its position as cultural underdog and its frustrated inability to “express strenuous objection to American culture and American agenda.”¹⁴³ This interpretation goes no deeper, and doesn’t take the time to dissect any of the lyrics the way they did with the previous two songs, nor does it acknowledge the specifically British rather than more generally European references in the lyrics that emphasise English domination of British life.

Walking a very wobbly path, they move from the ‘political correctness as impotence of the underdog’ analysis of ‘P.C.P.’ to the examination of an early draft of ‘The Intense Humming Of Evil’. They transition into this next song by saying that “for the casual observer, the band’s interest in the Holocaust, and other Jewish-related issues, may have added up to nothing more than a thoroughly politically correct revulsion at the horrors of twentieth-century history. After all, the band were known to have visited concentration camps on their European tour earlier in 1994, inspiring the Holy Bible songs ‘Mausoleum’ and ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’.”¹⁴⁴ (Fact check: the band visited Dachau and Hiroshima in autumn 1993, not ’94.¹⁴⁵) Roberts and Noakes have structured this introductory sentence in such a way that it implies the Manics had ulterior motives for their interest in the Holocaust, ones that didn’t include disgust towards the Nazis or a desire to speak out against antisemitism.

James stated in an interview with Q magazine in 1994 that he thought an early version of ‘The Intense Humming Of Evil’ was not “judgemental enough”^{146, 147} and needed some editing in order to express a stronger, less ambivalent stance. Roberts and Noakes have allegedly produced an edited draft of the song from Richey’s archives, which is labelled ‘James’s copy’.¹⁴⁸ Because this edited version of ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ contains two lines that are “very heavily scribbled out, almost blacked out”,¹⁴⁹ the authors wonder if perhaps there was an “urgent removal by James himself?”¹⁵⁰

Considering that the method for the Manics has always been “[Nicky] and Richey would edit [them]selves, then James and Sean would edit, then James would edit”,¹⁵¹ then James and Sean would work on the music, I’m not entirely sure why the authors have decided that this is some sort of underhanded editing by James. The editing process has always been “such a crucial part of Manic Street Preachers”, and songs that started multiple pages long would end up a few verses and chorus.¹⁵² Likely this lyric is no exception, so I don’t see why a scribbled out line is a cause for shock.

The authors focus on this lyrical rough draft, claiming that “on closer inspection, and some deft work with Adobe Photoshop, it is possible for us to read some of the lost content”,¹⁵³ which they claim “may have involved something positive in relation to Nazi Germany.”¹⁵⁴ The lyrics they allege to have uncovered read, “(………) Deutschland / How we long to be ruled and loved.”¹⁵⁵ Since there is essentially zero context for this singular line, there’s really no way to interpret it as positive or negative. There could easily have been other lines attached before or after the selection, but the authors don’t elaborate on the lyrical context surrounding the allegedly blacked-out line, nor do they indicate an approximate location of the line in relation to the final lyrics, and they have not supplied us with an image of the draft. Many of the Manic Street Preachers’ lyrics could be misconstrued in some way if you separated a single line from the context of the rest of the song, and this line is clearly no exception.

Despite having three sections of glossy photograph/scan inserts of Richey’s school writing and personal notes from rehab, and an appendix in the back with scans of letters from Richey to his friends, these rough draft lyrics with apparently omitted lines are not included, nor are any rough drafts of any other lyrics, which means readers are unable to see for themselves the context surrounding the blacked-out lines.

The authors also describe a page found elsewhere in the lyric drafts for the album, in which “Richey drew a diagram, possibly an idea for cover art. In a childlike scrawl he sketched four flowers, their long stems meeting at the centre, to form a cross. Adjacent to these was a swastika and written alongside, in block capitals, B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L.”¹⁵⁶ Again, there is no example of this page supplied in the glossy inserts. (Also recall that the lyrics to early track Sorrow 16 includes a line spelling out the word ‘beautiful’.)

I don’t know how many different notebooks and revisions and drafts of these songs exist, but in the BBC Radio 4 Mastertapes interview from 2014,¹⁵⁷ the band mention that they kept all the notebooks from The Holy Bible‘s creation. Since the band were not involved in the writing of this book, the authors certainly didn’t get their hands on those copies. Perhaps there were others. If the draft labelled ‘James’s copy’ was a photocopy of an original belonging to James which was then scanned a second time into the computer, that would likely also affect the results of any efforts in Photoshop. I don’t doubt that something got scribbled out during an editing session. I do doubt that it was some sort of nefarious or desperate action by James.

Roberts and Noakes do not actually dissect any lyrics from the final version of ‘The Intense Humming Of Evil’ that fans are familiar with, nor do they acknowledge that it is “twinned”^{158, 159} with ‘Mausoleum’, its “brother/sister song”¹⁶⁰ which was “inspired in the same way” and conceived with similar themes of atrocity and human suffering in mind.¹⁶⁰ Instead, their interpretation is that the song is a critique of the Holocaust from a class-based angle rather than “an inconclusive statement on the suffering brought about by religious persecution”,¹⁶¹ because Richey was “overtly aware of the level of mutual hypocrisy between the opposing factions during the Second World War.”¹⁶²

The authors state that “in interviews before the release of The Holy Bible, Richey spoke of his disgust for the film Schindler’s List, while his earlier academic studies subscribed to the erroneous notion that many rich Jewish factions profited from the war by funding both sides while the poverty-stricken Jewish population were exterminated in their millions.”¹⁶³ No context is given as to what these “earlier academic studies” were, and the sentence is so vaguely constructed that it is hard to tell if they mean that he believed these lessons or simply that the literature was part of his curriculum. The belief that certain groups of Jewish people profited off the Holocaust is yet another antisemitic dog-whistle, most often appearing as the belief that the Rothschild family funded the second world war and profited from funding both sides.^{164, 165} Richey criticised Schindler’s List because he thought the film presented a “grey area” that gave “Schindler some level of humanity” regarding an issue that required “black and white” thinking, because the Holocaust was an event “so bad, you have to judge anyone who had anything to do with it on those terms.”¹⁶⁶ The real history that inspired the film was a situation of ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ made literal: Schindler’s employees were able to escape death due to his willingness to bribe SS officials using his position in the Nazi Party, as well as his powers of persuasion to be permitted to employ Jews regardless of gender, age, or fitness, so that their factory labour would be deemed ‘necessary’ for the war effort and they would not be deported to concentration camps.¹⁶⁷

It seems Richey ascribed to the belief that any Nazi was an evil, exploitative person, even if their position in the Party allowed them to employ and therefore protect thousands of Jews. In an article in the New York Times from 12 June 1994, author Diana Jean Schemo criticises the film because it emphasised an exception to the norm in terms of Nazi behaviour, which can encourage a “distortion of history” by “embrac[ing] the anomaly and call[ing] it history”,¹⁶⁸ allowing the masses to focus on the survivors and the very few people who helped them, rather than on the horror of the millions who were slaughtered. This is a view that Richey possibly seems to echo when he talks about “history that’s been made into myth”¹⁶⁹ and his belief in the danger of Holocaust debates encouraging the ‘denial’ side to speak up.

Roberts and Noakes theorise that the last two lines of ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ (which they do not supply in the text) highlight the “duplicity which was prevalent in the behaviours of both Hitler and Churchill.”¹⁷⁰ They compare the Holocaust to the partition of India in 1947, when the British Raj was dissolved and India and Pakistan gained independence, claiming that the lines highlight an argument against the idea that “certain atrocities [can be] conveniently ignored, while other acts of genocide can be referenced when it suits an agenda.”¹⁷¹

In the 2017 publication Triptych: Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible, authors Rhian E. Jones and Larissa Wodtke present a different interpretation of those final lines. Both Jones and Wodtke view the final two lines, “Churchill no different / wished the workers bled to a machine” as a comparison to the problems historically faced by Britain’s own working class. The sudden allusion to British culture is a “summation of the century-long war in which the class from which the Manics arose found themselves unwilling conscripts”,¹⁷² a perspective of working-class oppression and economic strife through which the Manics framed their earliest songs. Rather than another reference to foreign relations, these last two lines turn the song back on the so-called ‘heroes’ of the second world war, scorning the “myth of Churchill”,¹⁷³ reminding the listener of Churchill’s own values of upper-class white supremacy¹⁷⁴ and discarding “Britain’s ‘victory’ and Churchill’s heroism as so much soiled bunting.”¹⁷⁵

Richey did elaborate on the context of ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ in a number of interviews, explaining that it expressed how “frightening” it was that “in such a short space of time that the Holocaust is rendered almost obsolete” because it gives space for people to question the truth of the atrocities that occurred.¹⁷⁶ He also referenced a few books that had recently been published which claimed the Holocaust was a hoax, expressing concern at the encouragement of debates about the Holocaust in universities because “within a few decades, you’ve got books being written, saying the Holocaust was a lie, which are getting some kind of academic credence now. And that is really, really offensive. And dangerous.”¹⁷⁷ In the album’s tour programme liner notes he stressed the importance of a realistic, reflective education in history that is not sugar-coated or revisionist, stating that the songs are “What reflections should be for everyone. Otherwise we’re all Edward Scissorhands Avon Lady. Winners dictate history. Holocaust one of the few examples where even truth is being questioned. Revisionist histories. Danger of Schindler’s List – portrayal of merely flawed men. Never question our own past – myth of Churchill. An individual death means little – millions must mean something?”¹⁷⁸ James Dean Bradfield noted that “the lyric was a massive part of Richey’s history degree. He hadn’t just watched one episode of the World At War – he’d gone deeply into it, very obscure writing. I remember him talking about Holocaust deniers – of the battle between the reality versus the myth of history and how important it was to read as much about it as possible.”¹⁷⁹

That Roberts and Noakes only closely examine Richey’s alleged – and unused – lyrical references that might have been deemed controversial, without producing concrete evidence and without ever pointing out his public statements against antisemitism and Holocaust revisionism, is hugely problematic. Their unfounded insinuation that he believed in the antisemitic conspiracy theory that “many rich Jewish factions profited from the war by funding both sides”¹⁸⁰ is another huge red flag, waving high over any of their legitimate interpretations of his work. So far in Withdrawn Traces, Roberts and Noakes have engaged in antisemitic dog-whistle behaviour multiple times, walking back or contradicting their own statements just before their implications become overt. At no point do they outright accuse Richey or the Manic Street Preachers of antisemitism, but the text of their book is peppered with antisemitic references and hints of conspiracy theories with antisemitic origins or connotations, to a degree that it seems primed to catch the attention of those who take stock in those prejudiced theories.

Stating that audiences may view Richey’s lyrics as “confusing or just plain confused; their supposedly random mix of references and moral indignations can be seen as hinting that he may not have been fully compos mentis during the writing”,¹⁸¹ the authors dispute this idea that Richey’s writing is random or chaotic and instead posit that Richey knew what he was doing when writing the album, and “armed with knowledge of the boundaries of liberalism,”¹⁸² he was deliberately looking to push buttons and boundaries, “daring reviewers to accuse him of being something he was not.”¹⁸³

One such provocation was his placement of Dr. Hassan El Turabi, a right-wing Sudanese politician, on his “Top Ten Men of the Year” list for Melody Maker. His explanation for the selection was one of deliberate provocation: “Islamic fundamentalism scares the West, and makes us examine our own moral ambiguity.”¹⁸⁴ Richey also mentioned wanting to meet Dr. Turabi in a hand-written answer to a fanzine questionnaire from December 1993. The authors search for an “explanation for this bizarre devotion”,¹⁸⁵ deciding that it is Richey’s statement in early 1994 that he had a “childlike rage”¹⁸⁶ that best supports these opinions, because Richey’s self-contradiction in his lyrics or interview statements are better interpreted as “a form of protest or personal lashing out, rather than as a philosophical agenda”,¹⁸⁷ and because, according to a university friend, Richey loved to play devil’s advocate in conversation. Nicky Wire has mentioned that Richey would plan and ‘revise’ for interviews; he came up with the infamous “We hate Slowdive more than Hitler” the night before the he spoke to the journalist.¹⁸⁸ The issue, of course, with crafting intentionally transgressive or aggravating statements is the potential to go too far or to fail (whether deliberately or accidentally) to make clear the difference between a premeditated deliberately antagonistic remark and one’s own true beliefs. Unsurprisingly, it seems Richey was not spared from this trap. However, the authors don’t acknowledge that Richey’s songs were quite a bit more nuanced than his provocative statements to the press. His lyrics contained references, opinions, and just enough context to encourage listeners to do the work to understand all the historical and political allusions; his statements to the press tended to be more exaggerated, more dramatic, seemingly going for shock value and trying to goad a reaction in the same way the band’s early onstage performances deliberately antagonised the audience.

“The genius of The Holy Bible,” state Roberts and Noakes, is not simply due to its wide range of references and broad political subject matter, but also “its sprawling disjunctions, scattershot outrages and sheer cryptic messiness.”¹⁸⁹ Despite the difficulty that comes with deciphering each lyric, the authors say, audiences knew “these words were authentic, a genuine snapshot of Richey’s mind.”¹⁹⁰

But Richey was worried his words would be misunderstood, and compared his own lyrics to the ways in which the Brett Easton Ellis novel American Psycho was misunderstood by the wider public as being cheap or shallow, when he found the novel to be “frightening, and very moralistic”,¹⁹¹ and viewed his lyrics similarly. It is this view of morality and condemnation that found Richey “adroitly positioning his lyrics directly in the firing line of mainstream reaction,”¹⁹² with the expectation that “some of The Holy Bible‘s subject matter would challenge dogmatic thinking”¹⁹³ and force audiences to question the status quo.

It is the opinion of Roberts and Noakes that the lyrics to ‘Yes’ are a judgement “not just in relation to political correctness”¹⁹⁴ or social issues in general, but that they are a “devastating critique of something closer to home – the music business in London.”¹⁹⁵ However, according to their interpretation, the focus of this song is not the band’s music industry experiences of dealing with the media and major labels, nor is it about their discovery of the rigours of touring or their disillusionment at the glamour of being in a rock band. Roberts’ and Noakes’ analysis concludes that the subject and target of this song are – yet again – the administrative bigwigs of the music industry, label CEOs, famous entertainers, or others with metaphorical weight to throw around within the music business.

Despite the lyrics being entirely Richey’s,¹⁹⁶ the authors only quote his own explanation of the song once, printing his tour programme notes, which read “Prostitution of The Self. The majority of your time is spent doing something you don’t need. Everyone has a price to buy themselves out of freedom. Say yes to everything.”¹⁹⁷ The plan for the design of the single was a play on the popular TV ad for TSB – ‘MSP – the band that likes to say yes.’ Roberts and Noakes point out that the single’s cover and Richey’s programme notes reflect a criticism of the “obvious hypocrisy in adopting a radical leftist surface layer while having willingly signed one’s life over to its opposite.”¹⁹⁸ Nicky’s own explanation of the lyrics to ‘Yes’ from the August 1994 Melody Maker article “Manics New Testament” follow the same line of thinking, in which he explains that Yes is about prostitution, both others and their own:

“It looks at the way that society views prostitutes as probably the lowest form of life. But we feel that we’ve prostituted ourselves over the last three or four years, and we think it’s the same in every walk of life. Marlene Dietrich said that she’d been photographed to death. Red Indians believe that every time they’re photographed a little piece of their soul goes. We came to a point where we felt a bit like that. I don’t want to come across like Eddie Vedder or something, because we’ve always made an effort to make our pictures fairly aesthetic. But you come to a point where you think, ‘Why are we doing this?’ It must come with maturity.
There’s a line in there, ‘Tie his hair in bunches, f*** him, call him Rita if you want.’ You can get to a position when you’re in a band where you can virtually do anything you want, in any kind of sick, low form. It’s not something we’ve particularly indulged in, but it is a nasty by-product of being in a group.”¹⁹⁹

With this statement from Nicky, the authors support the claim that Richey was sick of prostituting himself to the media “for mainstream success.”²⁰⁰ They also point out that certain “indulgences”²⁰¹ were available to bands that were harder for individuals outside of the music industry to obtain, but that “the band made clear their revulsion at the depraved entertainments sometimes dangled before them.”²⁰² The Manic Street Preachers were always vocally judgemental of the drug use, physical violence, and willful destruction of property perpetuated by other bands without consequences, but Richey’s earlier experience in Bangkok and the many stories, rumours, and quotes about Richey and Nicky’s relations with groupies at the band’s start seem to tarnish this second claim to some extent, as does the authors’ earlier attempts to insinuate that Richey’s discussions of his experiences in Thailand were in fact an attempt to implicate his bandmates or others in the touring party.

In a Japanese interview in September 1994, Richey explained that the lyrics of ‘Yes’ explore endless consumerism and its hypocritical morality, emphasising that “misfortunes can happen to anyone. The theme of this song is that people aren’t always weak, but they become liars”,²⁰³ and that everyone is in some way a victim of consumer society. In 2014, Nicky Wire offered up his own interpretation, stating that “I think ‘Yes’ was very much applicable to being about how he felt, as being in the band and about the band kind of prostituting itself. [He was looking at it as a metaphor] because he used to do this thing where he would rip off the TSB bank and say ‘MSP: the band that likes to say ‘yes.’ There was an element of, not pathos, but self-realisation in it.”²⁰⁴

Instead of digging into Richey’s own explanations of the song, examining instances in which the band or Richey might have felt prostituted or used by the media, and expanding on the interpretations they have just laid out, Roberts and Noakes expound their own theory: that rather than being at least partly inspired by the experience of the band as a spectacle, or perhaps being Richey’s attempt at walking a mile in the shoes of a sex worker, the lyrics are intended to “draw public attention to the levels of corruption and hypocrisy […] particularly the entertainment industry’s abuse of vulnerable children.”²⁰⁵

There is a partial reason for this assumption, although they do not quote or state the source: an article in The Mail on Sunday from 1993, entitled “Children For Sale On The Streets Of UK Cities”²⁰⁶ which discusses the sudden increase of adolescent sex workers on the streets of the UK and the poverty that was its source. Richey lifted two quotes almost verbatim from the article to use in the lyrics of ‘Yes’. The first is a quote from a young sex worker talking about his first time on the street: “So Michael said ‘Tell him you’ll ‘T’ him’. That means toss. ‘T’ for toss. Only I didn’t know that then”; and the second is a quote from a social worker: “Our community homes now contain a combination of the most damaged, deprived, depraved and delinquent children, and they are incredibly difficult to work with. And our problem is that we are the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. We pick up the pieces when they have been damaged.”²⁰⁷ Nicky Wire mentioned writing the song around the quote pulled from the article in a September 1994 interview with Metal Hammer.²⁰⁸

Richey lifted information from news sources for lyrics quite often; many of the unedited versions of the Journal For Plague Lovers lyrics (available in the deluxe booklet) feature subjects and references lifted from articles in The Independent from the summer of 1994, as well as content lifted directly from William Blake and The Sunday Times.²⁰⁹ Richey has clearly done this here, lifting information about the subject of prostitution that he found pertinent in order to set it into his lyric that embodies both a fictional character and perhaps, as Nicky has suggested, his own experience. The current events that he read about in the news were synthesised into a longer lyric which was originally multiple pages long and closer to a short story or a piece of journalistic writing.^{210, 211}

While Richey did say that he was writing about the “moral” problems of “hard-core pornography or snuff movies – which is an important thing to write about”,²¹² he likened his writing to that of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho, which was a condemnation of a consumerist lifestyle, a criticism of life so entrenched in capitalism that even human life becomes a commodified object that is easily and unthinkingly destroyed for pleasure or for no real reason at all. The subject of prostitution in ‘Yes’ turns the subject of consumption of sex into a metaphor for a culture of consumption in general because, Richey explains, “regardless of liking or hating it, people have to work, and continuously buy things, consume, in the endless pursuit of the ultimate ‘thing’. But they probably never find it. That’s the rule of consumer society.”²¹³ The need to consume objects inevitably also turns human beings into commodities, whether sex workers, entertainers, or labourers.

However, Roberts and Noakes take their interpretation in a different, more extreme direction. It is their opinion that Richey’s target is a very specific one. They claim that details from a specific paedophilic snuff film called ‘The London Tape’ “appear to have an astounding parallel with the lyrics on The Holy Bible.”²¹⁴ Though they never actually specify which lines have a parallel in with the material on this alleged tape, they are specifically referring to the lines of the chorus: ‘He’s a boy, you want a girl so tear off his cock / Tie his hair in bunches, fuck him, call him Rita if you want’. At no point do they analyse any other parts of the song; even this line which they regard as a “parallel” is simply inferred rather than actually provided as a direct example.

Roberts and Noakes theorise that perhaps Richey was somehow privy to knowledge about this mysterious tape. They support their theory by mentioning that Richey spoke about “pervy judges”²¹⁵ in a 1992 Smash Hits article. However, the reference comes from the very end of the article in question, in which the journalist lists off a few of the things Richey talked about in the multiple-hour interview, and that after talking about the loneliness of being in a band and the collapse of the environment, “then he starts going on about dolphins and pervy judges and Dundee and Mike Tyson and how, at the end of the day, the Manics will probably end up with gigantic drugs problems living in a squat in South London.”²¹⁶ Certainly Richey was aware of the tendency towards 70’s and 80’s rock stars manipulating underage groupies, as evidenced by his remark in a fan mail-out from 1993 that the musicians who participated in Live Aid and other charity events do so as publicity stunts and then “piss off to Brown’s Nightclub and sniff cocaine off the bodies of twelve year old girls.”²¹⁷ There is no indication, however, that Richey was referencing any specific person. The culture of groupies was well known by this time; Pamela Des Barres published her memoir I’m With The Band in 1987, and the names of other famous young groupies like Sable Starr and Lori Mattix were common knowledge.

The authors also mention Operation Yewtree, which was ongoing while Withdrawn Traces was being researched, and describe a segment of interview footage that was packaged with the 2013 reissue of PiL’s first album, Public Image: First Issue, which included an unaired segment of a 1978 BBC interview in which John Lydon stated “I’d like to kill Jimmy Savile”, and mentioned that he had heard many rumours about Savile and thought he was a hypocrite. The authors wonder if Richey was in a similar situation, asking “could it be that the song dared to share shocking information that Richey had actually been privy to, and with which he could taunt or scare whoever had shared such details with him?”²¹⁸ They theorise that he knew something a powerful person didn’t want him to talk about, and there was “someone in the wings, terrified that he could relay their words verbatim, and now wondering what he might say next.”²¹⁹

Information about the mysterious tape mentioned in this segment was very hard to find, and the authors don’t cite any of their sources for this segment in the bibliography at the back of the book or within the chapter itself. I did find a few conspiracy theory forums^{220, 221} and website or blog post entries^{222, 223} all from 2014 or later that mention the London Tape in conjunction with discussing Operation Yewtree and the Elm Guest House, but none of the entries do anything more than debate whether or not the tape exists. I could find nothing referencing the tape by name that was dated before 2014. I also found four news articles, from The Guardian, Daily Mail, and The People (now called The Sunday People) respectively, which mention paedophilic snuff films passing between the UK and Amsterdam sometime during the late 80’s or early 90’s. All but one article were written well after 1994. However, only one of the Guardian articles reports anything even remotely similar to the London Tape description – but not the same – and does not name the tape at all. The Google Books entry of Withdrawn Traces itself is the sixth result on a basic Google search of the key words ‘london tape snuff film.’

Why, with the recent explosion of true crime media of every imaginable kind, couldn’t I find any information on this alleged tape? The authors give specific details about the content and production value of the video and write as though this snuff film were common knowledge (and cite their sources that way too, that is to say, they don’t), but reliable information about it does not appear on popular sites or search results with news searches, Google Books searches, or keyword searches. The articles I did find about 80s/90s snuff film rumours in the UK and Europe in general were hunted down through ProQuest database, and those were essentially dead ends as well. The difficulty in finding any information about this in the age of the internet, digitising, and true crime interest certainly says something about how difficult it would have been able to find in the 90s, and Richey certainly didn’t seem to be one to schmooze with the big boys of the recording industry for long enough to learn their dirty secrets. Despite the increase in investigations and release of information following the Savile scandal, there doesn’t seem to be anything concrete out there about this alleged tape; at least, nothing as thorough as described in the book.

However, after finding no credible sources that name the London Tape specifically, out of curiosity I clicked on a Youtube link that comes up as the third result of the same ‘London Tape snuff film’ keyword search, which I initially disregarded due to its obviously antisemitic title: “Jewish MP Leon Brittan – Child Porn tape, the London Tape & Child Snuff Movies.”²²⁴ The video was posted 3 November 2015 on a channel called ‘vEnUsLuCiFeR,’ which is made up entirely of conspiracy videos about the occult, Satanism, aliens, Freemasons, and hours upon hours of videos of antisemitic conspiracy theories. In its ‘About’ section, the channel mentions that it has been blocked by Youtube from uploading videos; its last upload is from 2018.

[Trigger Warning: The following paragraph contains graphic descriptions of torture and sexual abuse.]

This video about the London Tape is of average quality, and features two unknown, unnamed middle-aged English men sitting on a sofa in a nondescript home, talking to each other about child pornography, paedophilia, Leon Brittan, and Warwick Spinks. At about four minutes in, one of the men begins to explain the history of the London Tape. What he says is written almost word for word in Withdrawn Traces. The man in the video explains that, “in February 1991, five people were arrested by French police in Paris, and they were charged with possession of some extremely nasty child pornography, including a snuff movie of an eight year old boy. It’s called ‘The London Tape’ because the boy featured in it is an eight-year-old boy from London.”²²⁵ The text in Withdrawn Traces reads, “In 1991, French police charged five people in Paris with possession of extreme child pornography, including a ‘snuff’ video of an eight-year-old British boy being murdered.”²²⁶ At about nine minutes in, the man mentions that it was a “professionally set film,” then explains what happened to the child in the tape, something that is also similarly summarised in the book. He says the alleged content contained “various things, including rape, he was cut up with a knife, he had his testicles removed, […] they horrifically mutilated him.”²²⁷ Withdrawn Traces contains a similar summary, however theirs is in fact a bit more more detailed, despite the Youtube video being the only source I could find that spoke about the film in any amount of detail. Roberts and Noakes describe the snuff film as “clearly having been assembled using a significant budget and professional filming equipment,”²²⁸ and summarise the contents of the film which “contained footage of a British child having his penis removed with a scalpel, his killer then raping the remaining cavity.”²²⁹ I feel it is important to point out the specificity of the descriptions given by Roberts and Noakes in comparison to the descriptions in the Youtube video, as it is unclear whether they have embellished their descriptions for dramatic effect, or if they have somehow found another source. In the case of Withdrawn Traces, no source is cited; the video’s claims are also sourceless, with no indication from either of the two men as to where they learned these details.

This Youtube video, filmed by two seemingly unidentified men and posted on a racist, conspiracy-mongering Youtube channel, is the most comprehensive amount of information I could find about this alleged London Tape. The specifics given in the video that are also supplied in the text of Withdrawn Traces, such as the arrests in Paris, the details of the violence, or the age of the victim, were not supplied in any other legitimate source I found.

Frustrated at the total lack of information about this video and the two men speaking in it, I skimmed one of the conspiracy forums³⁰ cited above once more and looked up a name mentioned in a post that also referenced the London Tapes. I found that the two men in the video are documentary filmmaker Bill Maloney,²³¹ and Chris Fay, a former employee of the National Association of Young People in Care (NAYPIC), who was convicted of fraud in 2011.²³² The video was originally posted on Maloney’s personal Youtube channel in July 2014²³³ and seems to have been ripped and reposted to the other channel.

Chris Fay has a history of claiming to have knowledge of child sex rings run by powerful people but has never been able to supply evidence when requested,^{234, 235} and his story changes drastically when questioned more than once.^{236, 237} He and a colleague, Mary Moss, admitted to fabricating and publishing the list^{238, 239} that kicked off the Elm Guest House hoax, which was later disproved. Almost all sites that mention Fay and Maloney in a positive light are full of conspiracy theory content similar to the above Youtube channel on which I first found the video of the two men, and all official investigations into Fay’s allegations have been dismissed for lack of evidence or lack of credibility on the part of Fay, including his pressuring or leading on witnesses during investigations.²⁴⁰

The fact that these details about the alleged London Tape only seem to come from this more recent video by Chris Fay, who was deemed “not credible”²⁴¹ a number of times during various police investigations, makes me seriously doubt that Richey was referring to this specific snuff film. I also doubt that he was writing in a way meant to “taunt or scare whoever had shared such details with him”²⁴² as Roberts and Noakes claim, or that there was “someone in the wings, terrified that he could relay their words verbatim”²⁴³ and potentially threatening him. I especially doubt this since the Manic Street Preachers had been referring to themselves as “prostitutes” and comparing their relationship with labels and journalists to sex work and spectacle from the beginning of their career, meaning metaphorical references to prostitution in the band’s repertoire were already well-established.

Using the ‘pull quote’ format described earlier as a scene-setting device, the authors present a quote from an interview with Richey on Dutch radio station Villa 65 in November 1994. They show only the question posed by the interviewer. Deliberately omitting Richey’s answer from any place in the text, the authors highlight a feeling of uncertainty about the song’s subject and meaning by providing only this quote: “Interviewer: ‘I find that, again, extraordinary – the chorus [of ‘Yes’]. …Where’s it coming from?!”²⁴⁴ The authors do not include the interviewer’s clarifying comment that he thinks the song seems “intensely personal,” or Richey’s response, in which he explains that,

“I think it is quite personal. A song like ‘Yes’, it’s about self-image and it’s about feeling used. Like, when I lost my virginity it was a definite act, that I was 21, everybody for years and years had been fucking around me, saying how brilliant it was, and I felt like ‘I’m not happy, maybe it is this glorious event that’s gonna change your life’. And so I just deliberately went out and sat in a pub, drank until somebody came up and said ‘Do you want to come back to my house’, and we went back and we fucked – it was very clinical and the next day I felt really bad. I didn’t like it, and that kind of shaped my perspective on things.”²⁴⁵

If Richey was in fact writing about this alleged film, referencing specific details despite knowing that his targets were powerful people, what was his goal? What outcome did he want to see from writing these accusations into music? What did he think might happen if someone were to figure it out? And why is it that, despite the numerous books and articles analysing this album, no one else has uncovered this secret reference, despite it apparently being well known enough that Roberts and Noakes have chosen not to cite any of their sources?

As I touched on before, this analysis in particular does not take into account any of Richey’s explanations of the lyric which was his alone, nor does it acknowledge the song as a whole. The two lines in the chorus of the song are the only ones that this theory is based on, entirely disregarding any other lines or references in the lyrics. Out of the five songs covered in this segment, only ‘Faster’ has more than 5 lines analysed. The lyrics of ‘Yes’, ‘P.C.P.’, and ‘The Intense Humming Of Evil’ are not even presented in the text, much less properly dissected or close-read.

Frequently, “conspiracy theories have a common storyline: a powerful and secret group is engaging in covert, malevolent, and organized activity against vulnerable groups”²⁴⁶ or attempting to surreptiously control a person or group in an influential role. Roberts and Noakes have so far referenced a number of classic conspiracy theory themes: blood sacrifice and Faustian deals, Rosicrucians, the antisemitic dog-whistle phrase ‘New World Order’, the conspiracy theories that “Jewish factions”²⁴⁷ funded and profited from the Holocaust and that Jews run the media, and paedophilic sex cabals. They have openly encouraged conspiracy-type thought, stating that “a new generation, raised on internet conspiracy theories, is now able to read more into”²⁴⁸ the meaning of the albums than older fans and that there are “certainly clues in The Holy Bible‘s lyrics hinting that [Richey’s] later disappearance may have been pre-meditated.”²⁴⁹ The varying degrees of conspiracy-mongering that they have engaged in and will continue to engage in throughout this text is concerning, especially as it is embedded in what is claimed to be a legitimate biography of Richey Edwards and an attempt to reclaim him from a negative image or stereotype.

Notably, Richey’s more emotional- or personal-sounding songs – ‘4st 7lb’, ‘Die In The Summertime’, ‘She Is Suffering’, – and the political songs that are more straightforward with their intent but with far more references and therefore harder to reinterpret – ‘ifwhiteamerica…’, ‘Mausoleum’, ‘Of Walking Abortion’, ‘Archives Of Pain’ – are ignored almost entirely, as is, of course, ‘This Is Yesterday’, to which Richey contributed only a very small number of lines. It is puzzling that the analysis of Richey’s political and historical lyrics interpret those songs as “personal” while there’s seemingly an almost deliberate evasion of the songs that appear to be about more sensitive personal or emotional subjects.

In early 1994, just before going into the studio, Richey discussed the band’s ideas for the newest album to the press, lamenting that “when we write lyrics, sometimes we’ll come up with something that we think is really good, and works really well with James’ melody. And I hate having the thought in the back of my head, that we can’t possibly print this in a lyric sheet, because people will misunderstand it.”²⁵⁰ In 2001, while discussing the 1998 Close Up documentary about the band, the remaining Manic Street Preachers expressed frustration with how Richey and his writing on The Holy Bible were framed because “he was almost being given a Jim Morrison makeover. Nobody really saw there was a political agenda in that album.”²⁵¹ The criticism could equally be levelled at Withdrawn Traces and its fixation on finding a secret ‘true’ personal meaning even in Richey’s most political lyrics. While I don’t believe that all of Richey’s more personal-sounding lyrics were in fact completely inward looking, I’m almost surprised that the authors didn’t pick this low-hanging fruit. There is no in-depth analysis of those lyrics because, as far as I can tell, they wouldn’t fit this narrative that Richey’s songs were either criticisms of the music industry or expressions of a plan to vanish due to conflict with his bandmates, rather than an outward look at society as a whole or an inward look at one’s own reaction to living in an increasingly overwhelming 20th century world. Even though Richey’s questionable attempts at being deliberately provocative are criticised, those critiques are buried under all these bizarre theories about conspiracies and personal metaphors built from political allusions.

It is strange how frequently this book seems to attempt to prove that Richey wasn’t friends with the rest of the band, that he wanted to leave the band not because he was clearly struggling with his mental health – despite all this new information about his psychological state – but because his bandmates and label were somehow exploiting him or forcing him to refrain from writing about certain subjects. It’s an extreme agenda to try and push, especially when nearly every piece of historical or political context in the album’s songs is ignored or deliberately misinterpreted in order to support this strange theory that Richey’s lyrics could only be socially outward-looking if they were in reference to some secret knowledge about the recording industry, rather than critique of the issues that were current in the news cycle or relevant to his historical or intellectual interests.

The chapter moves on from the absurdity of the ‘what if he had secret knowledge of a paedophilia snuff film ring and someone was out to get him’ conspiracy theory with nonchalance, simply proceeding to talk about the album as a whole. Comparing Richey to Michel Foucault for their similar tactics of social critique that refuses to look away from or romanticise the discomforting aspects of human experience, the authors emphasise The Holy Bible‘s darkness and violence and the way the lyrics “hold up a mirror to society”²⁵² and target the “moral consciousness in listeners”²⁵³ by forcing them to confront the “most uncomfortable truths”²⁵⁴ about humanity. This is an interesting contradiction to their earlier analyses that the lyrics were primarily ‘personal’ rather than ‘political’. Describing how they used to write back and forth to each other, Richey’s journalist friend Alistair Fitchett discusses the ways in which they would examine the meaning and ideas behind the lyrics and poetry of different artists, and how Richey “would have been aware of the image he’d have after The Holy Bible was released.”²⁵⁵ Richey did acknowledge this potential image and how others would view him in a late 1994 article titled “Archives Of Pain,” responding to Simon Price’s observations that to an audience “your breakdown has put ‘The Holy Bible,’ indeed everything you do, into a different, revisionist perspective” and “even your apparently objective, second/third person lyrics seem to refract back onto yourself.” Richey acknowledged that “you get judged by what you write” but clarified that “if I use ‘we’ or ‘you’ or ‘they’, it doesn’t necessarily mean what it says.”²⁵⁶

Roberts and Noakes also say that “While writing The Holy Bible, in 1993, Richey told the music press that ‘If you have a record which encapsulates the mood of a generation you should split up.’”²⁵⁷ The quote is accurate but the context isn’t. The quote comes from an article in Smash Hits from 9 June 1993 titled “The 5th Manic”;²⁵⁸ Gold Against The Soul was released two weeks later on 21June 1993. At that point most of The Holy Bible pieces probably hadn’t been written yet or were only in their inchoate state; the band had not yet visited Dachau, Belsen, or Hiroshima, and a number of current events mentioned in The Holy Bible lyrics had not yet occurred. Rachel says here that she believes Richey was “laying out a ground work for something when writing the album,” that he “saw it as his final testament on record.”²⁵⁹ The authors put forward the idea that perhaps the thought of leaving it all behind in order to add another layer of symbolism after successfully capturing the mood of a generation became “the excuse he needed to make that break”.²⁶⁰

The problem is, how do you then explain the lyrics that became Journal For Plague Lovers, most of which were worked on in mid-to-late 1994, even into 1995? And if Richey had been planning this disappearing act since the failure of Generation Terrorists – or even earlier – why didn’t he leave any clues in the previous two albums? Acknowledging Richey’s works on either side of The Holy Bible generates questions that complicate this theory of long-term planning.

Richey After The Priory

Chapter 10 begins by describing Richey’s release from rehab and immediate immersion back into publicity and touring. Rachel says she thinks Richey didn’t give himself enough time to get better. Various anecdotes reflect Richey’s increasing unwellness on tour, including Nicky remembering that Richey often “burst out crying in the car”,¹ Rosie Dunn commenting on Richey’s terrible insomnia, and a letter from Richey to Jo in which he expressed his frustration with “other people’s judgements”.² The first European leg of the tour was difficult, with unresponsive audiences that frustrated the band and the ‘She Is Suffering’ single failing to get higher than 25 on the charts. Comments from both Nicky and Rachel support the theory that Richey was trying to contend with the effects of his treatment in the Priory, the “emptiness”³ he was left with after the Priory “ripped out the man and left a shell”,⁴ and Rachel believes he was trying to figure out how to change his frame of mind and fill that emptiness with something new, like religion or some similar stable belief system.⁵

Something that Richey never seemed to get from his time in rehab or either hospital setting were healthy or positive coping mechanisms or any other sort of ‘crutches’ to replace the unhealthy ones that were taken from him. He was told to stop drinking, self-harming, and restricting his food intake, but it seems as though he was never given the proper tools for using something else in order to cope. He indicated more than once that the Alcoholics Anonymous method of ‘turn our will and lives over to God’ didn’t exactly work for him, seemingly for a number of reasons. The medication he was prescribed possibly helped somewhat, but it’s extremely hard to break habits and not return to old ways of coping if there’s not something else put in their place. The rest of the band tried their best to help him by not drinking around him and by helping him stick to the schedule planned for him by his doctors, but he didn’t seem to have anything else to use as a support when things got hard except those old habits, which was likely a problem in terms of recovery. Going almost immediately from a hospital setting back to the grueling but monotonous schedule of touring (“wake up, travel, sound check, gig, wake up, travel, sound check, gig”⁶) was probably hugely detrimental to any of Richey’s progress, but the general sentiment from the band, management, and even Richey himself, was that he wouldn’t consider any other option.

In The Holy Bible tour programme, Richey clarified the lyrics of ‘She Is Suffering,’ explaining that “’She’ is desire. In other Bibles and Holy Books no truth is possible until you empty yourself of desire. All commitment otherwise is fake/lies/economic convenience. Salvation is purity.”⁷ Despite ‘She Is Suffering’ being written before Richey’s hospitalisation, the authors point out that Buddhist literature was among the reading material Richey had with him at the Priory, and that he had “an increasing interest in the religious and the spiritual.” However, Rachel believes he was still struggling with the cynicism he’d always had, and that this conflict between a desire for religious meaning and scepticism towards religion meant “his belief system was still very fragmented”⁸ and “it must have felt like he was split in two.”⁹

While on tour in late 1994, Richey read an article about support band Dub War, in which a technician associated with the band claimed that Richey didn’t drink as much as he said he did and was not an alcoholic. Roberts and Noakes claim that this review came in the middle of the three week long October tour of the UK, and Dub War were told that they “were no longer required for the latter half of the tour.”¹⁰ They were subsequently kicked off the lineup after the show at Manchester Academy on 13 October 1994 and did not continue to play. However, an article in Time Out in December 1994¹¹ and another by Stuart Bailie from the NME in 1996¹² seem to indicate that Richey did not read the review until November, after Dub War’s supporting slot with Manic Street Preachers had ended and the Manics were supporting Suede in mainland Europe. The information on Setlist.FM,¹³ reviews of the band’s 15 and 16 October shows in the fanzines Molotov Cocktails¹⁴ and Everlasting Nothingness,¹⁵ and a number of fan recollections¹⁶ collated by Yusef Sayed of 227Lears also seem to indicate that Dub War played until the scheduled end of their support tour with the Manics on 20 October 1994.

The authors allegedly spoke to Dub War’s vocalist Benji Webbe, who remembers that “He used to come to our gigs in Newport in 1993. But the Richey I saw in the past and the Richey we toured with were two totally different people. From the first day of the tour, he was sketchy as fuck.”¹⁷ He describes Richey barely speaking and remaining alone most of the time, recalling that “I barely saw him with anyone, not even James, Nick or Sean.”¹⁸ According to Webbe, the last time he saw Richey was in the hallway of the Manchester venue on 13 October, standing in front of a door with a key code, where

“He kept trying and trying different combinations but he just couldn’t get it. He was on his own, and he was just fucking well freaked out. Like a puppet with the key taken out of his back. There was no need for him to be freaked out, because he’s got ten thousand fans all screaming his name every night, but he was just so shaky and scared. I remember looking at him and thinking he wasn’t well at all. He just seemed like he didn’t want to be there, didn’t wanna play, didn’t wanna be on tour.”¹⁹

Webbe has mentioned in other interviews that he noticed while on tour that Richey “was clearly in pain, and he was very ill.”²⁰ However, if the band continued to support the Manics for another week, this story, or at least its date, seems dubious.

Because this quote seemed fairly odd to me considering the surrounding date inconsistencies, I reached out to Benji Webbe online. When I initially told him that he was quoted in Withdrawn Traces, he told me “this is the first time I’ve heard I was in there.” He at first assumed that the quote I was asking him about was the rumour started by their roadie, but when I clarified that it was something different, summarised this new quote about the last time he saw Richey and asked him where they might have gotten the quote, he said “I haven’t a clue,” and confirmed that “I was never interviewed and I wouldn’t have wanted to be.” In her retrospective in 2023, Roberts claims that they have “a taped interview that took place […] on the 24th of January 2015”²¹ and requests “further clarity”²² from Webbe regarding the claim that he was not interviewed.

While attempting to find a source for this quote from Webbe, I instead found a similar quote on a now-dead website dedicated to Richey’s disappearance, richeyedwards.net, whose domain name expired in 2022. The site contains a segment called “Anna’s View”, a written anecdote in which a fan of the Manic Street Preachers describes her views and opinions on Richey as she saw him while following the band, compared to the way he was portrayed in the media. This segment contains a phrase that is oddly similar to the one Webbe is allegedly quoted as using: “It’s early 1994. You see Richey blundering about the hotel bar like somebody’s taken the key out of his back. You do not think ‘oh my suffering hero’. You think ‘Christ, come over here and talk to us. Normal human interaction might do you some good.’”²³ [image] The website was up and functional during the time that Withdrawn Traces was being written. It is unclear if this is simply a coincidence, but the two phrases about Richey looking like a puppet with the “key taken out of his back” are surprisingly similar, despite the specific phrase and image being an unusual one.

NME journalist Alan G. Parker, who was apparently falsely quoted earlier in the book giving an account of an encounter with journalist James Brown, appears again, this time discussing the severity of Richey’s mental state during the gig at Manchester Academy on 13 October 1994:

“There were a lot of gawpers because Rich had just come out of hospital, and all eyes were on him. […] After the show I spoke to Therapy?’s Andy Cairns and asked him, ‘How’s everything going with the Manics?’ and he just gave me a look that said, ‘Don’t go there.’ When I got to the dressing room to see the band, they didn’t seem as tight as they’d been in the past.”²⁴

The Manics did not support Therapy? during that gig at Manchester Academy; they were supported at that show by Sleeper and Dub War.²⁵ Their supporting slot with Therapy? ended in Bordeaux, France on 1 October, after which they played a number of UK dates [image] and then went on to support Suede in Europe from 7 November. Therapy? continued with their European tour and had played a show in Tilberg, Netherlands on 12 October. In an interview for Classic Rock Magazine, titled “Richey Edwards: 20 Years On,” Andy Cairns reminisced about the tour of France which the Manics supported. When asked about what he recalled regarding Richey’s condition at the time of the tour, he said “[Richey] and Nick never went out with us after the shows, though. They always seemed to have early nights. We did have a table football tournament which he took part in. That was quite good fun. There was nothing untoward went on and there was no inkling, certainly among us, that Richey wasn’t in a good place. […] I never saw any side of him which suggested to me the rock ’n’ roll myth that surrounded him.”²⁶

This doesn’t mean that Richey wasn’t struggling, but it may indicate that he was trying to conceal the severity of his problems from those around him. Most anecdotes from bandmates, friends, journalists, and management all imply that Richey’s downward spiral in late 1994 was much more subtle and more complex than what the authors of this book want the reader to believe. In an interview with Simon Price, Richey himself acknowledged his tendency to hide behind a smile and answer questions with “Feeling all right, feeling fine”,²⁷ and in a letter to Jo in September 1994 supplied in this book, he pointed out his frustration that no one realised how he was feeling because “a smile and an OK is all it takes to convince the world that everything’s hunky dory.”²⁸ The anecdotes in this book as well as those from previous documentaries and interviews seem to indicate that Richey was very ill, but was trying to hide his unwellness from his bandmates in order to carry on the way that he wanted to. In the 2018 documentary Escape From History, journalist Stuart Maconie, manager Martin Hall, and Sony label exec Rob Stringer all mention that they knew about Richey’s issues, but that their severity was not as obvious as this book leads one to assume. Stuart Maconie explains how the band informed him that Richey was “a bit wobbly, [and] he’s been in a bad place” and that it was shocking to see him so thin, but that “I don’t think we knew how bad things were, really. I don’t think anyone knew.”²⁹ It is only mentioned once in this book in the context of Philip Hall’s death, but the band had already sent Richey to health farms at least twice before, in summer and winter of 1993,^{30, 31} and Martin Hall commented that “during the record[ing], I don’t remember him being particularly unwell. Any more unwell than he’d been the last few years.”³² Richey had previously used drinking at night to combat his inability to fall asleep, but with sobriety the struggle returned, and he “couldn’t sleep, he had bad, really terrible insomnia.”³³ James explained that one of the reasons Richey’s mental health seemed to have gone downhill so suddenly is because “any kind of signs are very hard to read when it’s been an ongoing situation for, y’know, four years.”³⁴ So they certainly were aware of his problems, but their long term tolerance of and desensitisation to certain behaviours may have also affected their perception of the severity of Richey’s struggles in late 1994.

Rob Stringer explained that “we were expecting that it was going to be difficult. The boys had tried a lot of things to make it easier for him, and that wasn’t working.”³⁵ It seems too as though the band were worried that Richey might see an attempt to force him to stay home or continue treatment as a betrayal of their friendship.³⁶ Richey was determined to continue on, even after the band offered to let him take a less taxing role, away from touring, or offered to stop touring altogether: “We also said, We can just finish – we can stop this,” James described when recounting the conversation between the members of the band about Richey’s mental health, “And after thinking about it for two days he said, ‘No, we’ve got to carry on’.”³⁷ Richey was resolved to participate fully in the obligations of the band, even if it might have been detrimental to his health. “Every single option was put on the table and just batted back remorselessly,” James recalled, because “he just so wanted to be in the band and he wanted to go on tour.”³⁸

In Escape From History, Martin Hall explains quite well that they saw that Richey was struggling and tried their best to support and help him in whatever way they could, but that Richey was an adult who could make his own decisions, and they couldn’t force him one way or another: “We’d given them options not to go on the road. Whatever worked for him, whatever help he needed, we would try and give it to him. But you can’t make people change – if they’re on a path – it’s hard to stop people once they’re on a path, […] it’s hard to move them off that.”³⁹ In an article in Sky magazine from October 1994, titled “Rapid Mood Swings,” James says something to a similar effect when asked about the band’s connection with and support for Richey, “The other day this person said to me ‘Did you do all you can for him?’ I said ‘Of course!’ and they said ‘Are you sure?’ I thought: ‘I’m gonna punch your face right across the other side of the room in a minute.’ You do all you can do but you can’t put someone in a straitjacket. It’s a cliché, but you can only be there for the fall.”⁴⁰ According to the band, Richey was having trouble communicating with his friends, and they in turn struggled to figure out how best to help him. James explained that “everyone tried: his family, his friends. I really do not know how to reach someone who is so far away. It’s a shame. But there is probably no magic formula.”⁴¹ The band and all the people close to them knew something was wrong, and did what they could, but there’s only so much outsiders can do to help someone struggling with mental illness, and no one can read minds or place themselves so perfectly into the experience of someone else as to know exactly what to do or how to help. Most importantly, it is up to the person who is in distress to be willing to accept help if any change is going to be effected.

A frustrating aspect in terms of this implication that the rest of the band were not invested in helping Richey is that they truly could not force him to do or not do certain things. Even Richey made similar remarks about mental health treatment in his “Archives Of Pain” interview with Simon Price during the tour in France, commenting that “the best thing is knowing that no one can do f***ing anything about it. People can’t actually hold you down and force food into your mouth. They just can’t do it. And someone can’t be near you 24 hours a day to stop you doing something to your body. And ultimately they’ve got no right to anyway, because it is your body.”⁴² And in his final interview with Music Life in 1994, he expressed the idea that trying to change the mind of a mentally ill person can be a study in futility because “you can’t force somebody to do something they don’t want to. You can beg them to do this or do that, but you can’t make them do something they really don’t want to.”⁴³ No one can force another person to work at getting better, to comply with treatment, to want to make the effort at recovery; they have to want that for themselves, and forcing someone to do something can often backfire. Even a person’s closest friends or family cannot make them think or act in ways that they don’t want to do, or accept help they’re not ready or willing to accept. In a 2006 interview, James Dean Bradfield spoke about the band’s struggle to help their friend: “We’ve re-traced our steps in terms of what happened to Richey so many times and at the end of the day Richey was surrounded by people who cared about him and who were quite sensible and still we couldn’t help.”⁴⁴ And while they had close relationships, they were not Richey’s biological family, and Richey was an adult; the best they could have done was offer support, which they did, and help with treatment in whatever way they could, which they did in the form of paying for his time in the Priory as well as working to remove triggers and temptations after he left hospital. They described the tension and worry that his illness caused them, since they didn’t know how to help him or get him to accept the help they could give.⁴⁵ In No Manifesto, Sean says “He seemed to be drifting down a darker path. We all felt pretty helpless as well.”⁴⁶ It’s a uniquely frustrating experience to watch someone on a downward spiral, knowing there’s not much you can do because they are their own person and they can make their own decisions, no matter how terrible they are, and unless a drastic action occurs that truly endangers them, there’s not a lot you can do to make them act in a way they don’t want to. This is the position the rest of the band were likely in, wanting to help but not knowing how.

In this chapter, the authors level a criticism at the press for “turning [Richey] into some sort of caricature”⁴⁷ via the rumours of a growing Cult of Richey and the media focus on his problems making a spectacle of his mental health. Rachel says that “it was only the very basic elements of his character being amplified – as if his cutting and diagnosis of depression were all there was to him. He was so much more than that, and I know he wanted to be appreciated for his poetry and sensitivity.”⁴⁸ She criticises the music media for “lapp[ing] up all his behaviour,”⁴⁹ and potentially goading him into “playing up to the rockstar myth at times.”⁵⁰

Withdrawn Traces appears to somehow fall into its own criticism trap here. It seems odd and exceptionally lacking in self-awareness to me that Roberts and Noakes criticise the way the press turned Richey into a caricature of mental illness and exaggerated elements, only to turn round and do exactly the same thing. Rachel also says in the same quote that “it’s a shame that people can’t show their appreciation of him without others making such assumptions [about fans being depressives or self-harmers].”⁵¹ I’m not certain this book isn’t also doing that. So far, the focus of this book has almost entirely been on Richey’s mental illness, his frustration with the music industry, or his position in the band and his subsequent long-term plans to orchestrate a vanishing act, complete with hidden messages. ‘Tragically depressed rock star’ and ‘sad genius who planned his disappearance for years’ aren’t much different from each other in terms of rock n’ roll mythology. If they have a problem with literature that turns Richey into a caricature, then why isn’t this book focusing on Richey’s artistry and poetry and humanity and sensitivity? Why is it that these two authors who profess to show Richey as a person, as “an artist and scholar”⁵² spend the majority of their text almost entirely focused on conspiracy theories about his disappearance? That’s not all he is either. He was also an artist who had a lot of pertinent and well-written opinions about politics and history and justice and humanity. He was a fantastically journalistic poet. He was incredibly well-read, very smart, articulate, and obviously a very empathetic person. The remaining band members, journalists, and other musicians have remembered him as a “sweet and gentle soul”⁵³ with a mischievous sense of humour who could be “a hilarious character”.⁵⁴ He wasn’t an intellectual prodigy or a brilliant mastermind; he was a young man who had a talent for expressing both his inner experiences and his criticisms of society and history. And yet this book only wants to focus on his disappearance and the rock myth of his self-destructive actions, rather than portraying him as the fully rounded person that he was.

The Manics had a brief two-week break between the UK leg of the tour and the second continental leg. Richey visited an old acquaintance who remembers that he “seemed his old self”⁵⁵ and “hadn’t changed much.”⁵⁶ During the short break, Richey and Jo spent time together as well. The authors describe –but do not supply– photos of Jo in Richey’s apartment and around Cardiff with him.⁵⁷ They also quote a letter from Jo to Rachel which was sent sometime after Richey disappeared, in which she describes his increased agitation and erratic, manic behaviour at that time. She recounts the change from his previous tearful and gloomy yet calm demeanour, to now being “unable to relax. The TV, the stereo, had to be on. He’d be chain smoking, drinking one coffee after another, writing, eating; he had to be doing something. He had to be occupied. It was as if he let himself stop, he let himself think, something awful might happen.”⁵⁸ In the letter, she recalls that “One night, I knew he was hiding something from me, he wanted to tell me. It took until dawn for him to say that he wanted to chop off his fingers. […] He felt he had no control over his thoughts.”⁵⁹

Intrusive thoughts, including negatively obsessing over certain subjects, doubts over relationships or religious faith, urges to do irrational things to oneself or others, or having thoughts that you know your true morals disagree with are common characteristics of a number of mental illnesses, including OCD, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorder, or severe depression, or they can be brought on by stress and anxiety.⁶⁰ They are “involuntary, and have no bearing on reality or a person’s desires”⁶¹ or beliefs. It can be terrifying to feel a lack of control in one’s own thoughts or actions, especially if the intrusive thought is uncomfortable, violent or extremely persistent.

The authors simply present this anecdote from Jo’s letter and then move on without at all explaining or researching intrusive thoughts or their effects on an individual. While depression is often characterized by automatic negative thinking, in which the person follows a negative chain of thoughts that although not necessarily controllable, are predictable, intrusive thoughts are specifically ones that are jarring or unexpected. This unexpected nature of intrusive thoughts may be due to their subject or severity, or to the fact that they are irrelevant to the person’s present thoughts. Depressed individuals’ attempts to suppress intrusive thoughts can be counter-productive: finding no adequate distraction, the mental concentration needed to suppress negative ideation can instead increase the awareness of negative or upsetting thoughts.⁶² For example, if Richey was attempting to suppress the desire to return to old coping mechanisms such as drinking or self-harm, the lack of adequate distraction could instead result in intrusive thoughts of more extreme violence towards himself, like a sudden urge to chop off his fingers. Intrusive thoughts are fairly common in individuals struggling with depression, anxiety, or OCD, but it can take a fair amount of time and mental training to learn how to ignore, shut out, or redirect the thoughts in a way that is effective and less upsetting, and Richey clearly did not get those resources from AA or any other counselling he might have received in treatment.

Roberts and Noakes’ intentions are perplexing at this point in the text. Despite numerous quotes from Rachel about how Richey’s struggle with his mental health was latched onto and exaggerated by the media, despite the authors’ claim that they have tried to write this book book as a “tribute to the life of Richard Edwards, to celebrate him as a unique artist, visionary, friend, son, brother, and profound human being,”⁶³ what they continually seem to do is present readers with anecdotes that portray him as being really crazy, blame the band for not noticing,and then they simply move on to more ‘proof’ of his plans to vanish, rather than giving Richey’s behaviour or mental health experiences some sympathetic context or examination.

Nowhere in the text do the authors attempt to explain what Richey may have been going through emotionally or psychologically. They move on after this anecdote from Jo without reflection and redirect their attention to some six degrees of separation type of connection that they seem to have discovered: in late autumn 1994, Richey became fascinated by Dennis Hopper’s character from Apocalypse Now, who was allegedly based at least partially on photojournalist Sean Flynn, son of actor Errol Flynn. The authors explain that Flynn “vanish[ed] while on a photo assignment for Time magazine in Cambodia.”⁶⁴ In April 1970, he and another journalist, Dana Stone, were likely captured by the Khmer Rouge while travelling by motorbike on the road to Saigon; it is believed they were killed, but their bodies were never found.^{65, 66} The authors imply that Richey would have been highly aware and interested in this association because Sean Flynn’s mother Lili Damita died in March 1994, so Flynn’s “disappearance would have been all over the news again.”⁶⁷

They also correlate Richey’s interest in Apocalypse Now with Marlon Brando’s reclusive tendencies and the fact that “after filming [Apocalypse Now], Marlon Brando left Hollywood and virtually disappeared.”⁶⁸ While this is true, Brando had already been somewhat reclusive by the early 70s, when he purchased an island atoll that he’d fallen in love with and built a home there. By the time he was set to film Apocalypse Now in 1976, he was already fairly isolated, only taking on occasional jobs but mostly remaining at his residence in Tahiti. He had also become increasingly overweight since filming The Godfather in 1971. Rachel believes that “Richard wished he too could go past that point of caring about his own body and appearance, and live a life free from the judgement and scrutiny of others,”⁶⁹ which seems like a valid assumption considering the media’s eye on Richey and his obvious body image issues. The authors say that Richey recommended Heart Of Darkness when Melody Maker asked for Christmas reading suggestions in December 1994, however I cannot find that article. They wonder if, after admiring Brando’s decision to distance himself from Hollywood society, “might Richey have also made the decision to similarly remove himself? Could his methodical and compulsive nature have conspired against his innate sensitivity to facilitate a calculating retreat into his own heart of darkness?”⁷⁰ Richey did indeed have an obsession with Apocalypse Now; however, I fail to see the connection between photojournalist Sean Flynn’s capture and presumed murder in the midst of a war and actor Marlon Brando’s conscious decision to recede from public life, except that they have the link of both being somehow associated with the Coppola film.

The authors describe “one of the last photocopies that Richey printed”⁷¹ of a promotional photo of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, beneath which he has written an excerpt from Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness. They describe the film as being about “sisters, former well-known actresses, now hiding in obscurity and living as recluses.”⁷² This simplified summary of the film’s plot casts the sisters’ reclusive lives as a deliberate decision. In actuality, both sisters were actresses but the younger, Jane, was a child star whose vaudeville style became unpopular while her elder sister, Blanche, became an acclaimed film actress as an adult. Blanche is paralyzed in an automobile accident that is blamed on the alcoholic Jane, and Jane becomes Blanche’s reluctant caregiver. In the present-day of the film, it is thirty years after the accident, and Jane is confined to the mansion not due to deliberate reclusiveness, but in order to reluctantly care for her wheelchair-bound sister. In the ensuing years, Jane has become psychotic, jealous of Blanche’s success in pictures and resentful of the blame for the accident and her guilt-fueled obligation to assume the role of caretaker. Due to Jane’s growing mental instability and her discovery of Blanche’s plans to sell the mansion and commit her to a mental institution, Jane traps Blanche in the house, torments and then attempts to kill her. In the end, Blanche confesses that the accident was her own fault, Jane loses her mind entirely, and Blanche is found by police at the edge of death.⁷³ Yet again, while the details of the film are not necessarily important to Withdrawn Traces itself, it is important to show the way the authors either did not do their research thoroughly, or deliberately worded descriptions or left out context in ways that supported their theories and implied that a character or real person’s disappearance was a deliberate decision rather than a result of outside forces.

The scan of the …Baby Jane clipping and Richey’s handwritten Heart Of Darkness segment is reproduced in one of the sections of glossy photos and scans. [image] Richey has selected a number of scattered lines from the last pages of the novel, in which the narrator Marlow describes his respect for Kurtz, explaining that despite his corruption and madness Kurtz still had an intense faith in his own goals and ideas, and still had something to say. Marlow admires Kurtz because he saw and experienced the horrors of humanity and the horrors of the soul due to his beliefs and desires; he perhaps glimpsed a terrible truth that Marlow himself has not, and yet he is able to express those horrors despite mental and moral corruption. Even once Marlow returns to England after Kurtz’s death, he feels he knows some secret or has seen things that those around him have not, and he cannot forget his admiration for the triumph of Kurtz’s eloquence and the voracious unshakeableness of his beliefs despite madness, illness and terror.⁷⁴ Context is not given for Richey’s selections by the authors of this book. They simply supply the scan and look into it no more. The selections Richey has written out seem less like any sort of secret code or meaning than it does a sort of manifesto expressing an identification with what Richey wanted to do thematically and stylistically with his lyrics, or how he wanted to be viewed artistically. Richey made multiple copies of this collage and “kept them in his last known folders of writing.”⁷⁵

Citations

A Critical Analysis and Review of Withdrawn Traces Part 4  →

Supplement: Scans of the photo inserts in Withdrawn Traces + other images for context