A Critical Analysis and Review of Withdrawn Traces Part 4

The Second Leg Of The Holy Bible Tour

Now we move along to the second leg of the European tour, which started on 7 November 1994 in Frankfurt, Germany. This segment opens with anecdotes from the the Suede biography Love & Poison by David Barnett, in which members of the band remember Richey’s aloofness and the tension brought on by his health problems. Various selections of articles about that leg of the tour describe the band’s struggle to keep it together, with Richey “on the verge of madness”,¹ James going out drinking every night so as not to drink in front of Richey, and the general tension of the situation. The well-known story of Richey badly cutting his chest in Amsterdam is recounted, this time with the context that the “band and crew [were] maintaining their distance”,² so no one noticed the downward spiral until that breaking point. The episode which caused the cancellation of the tour, in which Nicky woke one morning in Hamburg to find Richey banging his head on the wall,³ repeating “I want to go home”,⁴ is afforded a single sentence. However the authors simply report that “Richey was found outside the band’s hotel in Hamburg, banging his head against a brick wall, his face drenched in blood”,⁵ neglecting to include the fact that Nicky found him or what it has been reported he was saying.

Another anonymous roadie (or perhaps the same one as in Chapter 9) is quoted recalling that there was a tense atmosphere when journalists weren’t present, remarking that “I even heard Richey lose his temper and raise his voice, something I’d never experienced before. He and Nicky were having a screaming match on the bus, and Richey was being threatened with being thrown out of the band. He was later given an ultimatum: if he cut again, he’d be out.”⁶ Again, we have no identifiable source for this quote. Most comments from anyone close to the band or associated with those types of ‘administrative’ issues seem to express the opposite, that they tried their best to support Richey and find compromises, rather than giving ultimatums despite the tension and the strain that the band was going through.

Rachel rather passive-aggressively implies that the rest of the band blamed Richey for the problems on tour and resented having to adjust to support him with his recovery: “[…] there are unspoken layers of tension there. What with Nick saying he wanted to quit the band, and James punching a wall and stating that he couldn’t drink because of Richard. […] It must have been frustrating for them to have to abandon some of their more familiar habits to accommodate somebody who was in recovery. It sounded like a hard time for everybody and I imagine Richard felt like a burden.”⁷ The authors then talk about various types of artistic tension in the band, such as the commercial failure of The Holy Bible, Nicky giving James lyrics he had written by himself, and the conflict about where to go musically with the next album. They wonder if it was “possible he felt demoted”⁸ because of this conflict of musical direction and perhaps felt that his opinion counted for less, and “to what effect did it determine the decision he would go on to make on 1 February 1995?”⁹

While it was clearly difficult for the band when it came to Richey’s illness, their explanations both during Richey’s time in hospital and during his recovery, as well as their quotes years later about the same time period, are tinged not with anger at the situation nor at Richey, but a more general sense of impotence and not quite knowing how to help. In No Manifesto, Sean remembers that “He seemed to be just drifting another way, down a darker path. And we all felt pretty helpless as well by it. We just couldn’t understand why he was heading that way. It was really sad that here was a person that was slowly falling apart, had the ability to do something about it, and the intelligence and everything else, but for some reason just couldn’t.”¹⁰ While Richey’s problems obviously increased the tension, it seems as though there were more factors at work than just that. The individual members were having their own issues and anxieties,^{11, 12} and in terms of audiences “no one cared,” and the record was “dead as a dodo” sales-wise and reception-wise.¹³ Nicky Wire was struggling with health issues and the hypochondria that they exacerbated, and was feeling homesick.¹⁴ James Dean Bradfield’s girlfriend broke up with him just before the recording of the album, Philip Hall had recently passed away from cancer, and Bradfield’s mother had recently been diagnosed with cancer as well, so he was having to deal with that stress whilst on tour.¹⁵ Nicky explained that “Richey had come out of rehab, and nothing added up. We were playing a record that no-one was buying, James was just pissed all the time, Richey was chain-smoking 40 fags a day on the bus. Everything was just an apex of shit. I’d been married and I wanted to be at home, I saw no purpose in doing what we were doing at all, and it was just horrible. I was not a good traveller, I didn’t eat anything, I didn’t do anything, I just moaned.”¹⁶ The Manic Street Preachers “were not a financially successful band at the time”,¹⁷ which likely added to the stress of the album’s lack of success in the charts or on tour. But it seems they were trying to help Richey in whatever way they could, despite the tension. James even responded to an inquiry by Q magazine about having to change their touring habits, saying that he and Richey used to “go out or stay up after the gigs. We can’t do that now. I wouldn’t want it for him. As far as his treatment is concerned, it’s just not on the agenda. We don’t want to be unfeeling dickheads.”¹⁸

I think it is also important to remember that Richey’s more intense downward spiral occurred over the course of about seven or eight months. That is simultaneously a very long and very short amount of time. It is a short time period when you step back and look at it after it has passed, and to realise that Richey seems to have slid so steeply downward so suddenly is shocking, but living through six months feels much longer. The major events of Richey’s worsening mental health were spread across those six months rather than in one shorter chunk of time and, it seems, he might have hidden some of his feelings and behaviours from those around him. In a 2019 interview, Sara Hawys Roberts acknowledged that “the band were young men themselves, and mental health was not as prevalent as it is now in terms of how to deal with it, how to cope with it, how to help the person.”¹⁹ Unfortunately that sentiment is not expressed in the text of the book, in which Roberts and Noakes repeatedly blame the band for not helping Richey or accuse them of not caring. The band were only in their mid-twenties, with no real experience as anything but musicians, so they didn’t have the tools to help Richey themselves. They were not trained in identifying or caring for someone struggling with severe depression and trying to recover from alcohol addiction. Even regarding the alleged fight between Nicky and Richey, attempting to help someone who needs a level of care you cannot give and who refuses to accept attempts at other kinds of help or compromise would likely be a frustrating and upsetting experience for all involved. Fighting when tensions are high and both parties feel helpless and frustrated is not a surprising reaction. Nicky admitted that “I didn’t feel I was in the greatest position to be the shoulder to cry on”²⁰ due to his own problems and general lack of knowledge as to how to help his friend.

Years later, the remaining Manics acknowledged that Richey “thought staying in the band was the best thing for him and it wasn’t.”²¹ Even the other members assumed at the time that it would be easier to keep tabs on his health if he stayed on;²² these decisions seem to have been made with good intentions and a desire to help, rather than any sort of exploitation in mind. It’s as though this situation was something of a ‘frog in a pot’ scenario, in which the problems rose in intensity slowly, so that it felt almost normal to those who were in the centre of it, despite those on the outside noticing that something was very wrong. In fact, Richey said as much to Simon Price in an interview from late 1994: “You don’t wake up one morning and say ‘Oh, bad day!’, and, like, here we go. It is something very gradual, and I don’t think you even realise what’s really happening.”²³ In the same interview, Richey also admitted to being reticent about admitting to his problems because “with most people, it’s not worth saying how you really think you feel. People say ‘How are you?’ and if you go ‘Actually, I’m f***ing feeling shit’, they don’t wanna know. So instead it’s ‘Feeling all right, feeling fine’. That’s just the way everyone does it, me included.”²⁴ The band recall the feeling that Richey was drifting away from them, and in the last few days of the tour, “Richey was not nice to be around” but they “don’t think he realised it” or “that he was being spiteful at all.”²⁵ Nicky has expressed that he was most upset that Richey had “stopped communicating” with his friends and was “more and more withdrawn,” and he felt that he “just couldn’t reach him any more.”²⁶

The chapter now moves on to an entirely new topic; Richey’s tattoos are explored as indications of his “dramatic symbolism”²⁷ that might “hold some significance”²⁸ regarding his disappearance. In autumn of 1994 Richey added three new tattoos to the ‘Useless Generation’ tattoo he’d had for years. The first addition was a quote from Apocalypse Now, the other two were tattoos based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. [image] Roberts and Noakes only focus on one of the Dante tattoos at this point, specifically the tattoo of the ninth circle of Hell. They explain that it “portrayed the deepest circle of hell, that reserved for the worst kind of sinner – the betrayers and the treacherous. Inscribed in the circle are the words ‘Traitors to their Lovers, Traitors to their Guests, Traitors to their Country, Traitors to their Kindred.’”²⁹

They ask, “Could such a bold statement possibly be read as a fore-warning that Richey was to betray his friends and family with his disappearance? Or was it implying that he, himself, was at the mercy of the betrayers? For someone who took the band as seriously as Richey, it’s no great leap to imagine him adorning his upper arm with such messages and communicating his sentiments in his usual cryptic manner.”³⁰ Again, I’m very uncertain as to where they’re getting “cryptic” when it came to Richey’s messages. Even the quote in which James talked about Richey being “adept at dramatic symbolism,”³¹ he implied that the symbolism Richey tended towards was more likely to be obvious rather than cryptic. I’m not terribly certain about tattoos as secret messages to others about secret plans, but I do not doubt that the tattoos Richey got had some sort of significance to him personally.

However, the authors go no further into their analysis of Richey’s tattoos aside from that simple hypothesis that it could have been a “forewarning” of betrayal and the single-sentence summary of Dante’s ninth circle of Hell. Richey’s first Divine Comedy tattoo is based on a drawing by C.W. Scott-Giles for Dorothy Sayer’s 1949 translation of Inferno.³² The image is a diagram of the ninth and final circle of Hell called Cocytus, which depicts the four inner circles and Satan in its centre. The divisions of the ninth circle are Caina: the traitors to kin, Antenora: the traitors to country, Ptolomea: traitors to guests and hosts, and Judecca: traitors to their masters.³³ All of the souls in this ninth circle are trapped in ice to varying degrees in accordance to their severity of their sin. The most egregious sin for Dante is treachery; those in the ninth circle are traitors guilty of “denials of love (which is God) and of all human warmth.”³⁴ These sinners denied God’s love by denying love of others, and therefore are furthest from God’s warmth and trapped in ice. Most of the traitors in this circle were those who murdered their kin for their own advancement. However, Dante also reveals that in this circle the sin of treachery against guests and hosts is so great that “the souls of the guilty fall to its torments even before they die, leaving their bodies still on earth, inhabited by Demons.”³⁵ At the centre of the ninth circle is Satan, trapped in the ice from the waist down, his three heads eternally gnashing Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. For Dante, this last circle of hell is the centre of the earth. In order to escape Hell and make their way towards purgatory, Dante and Virgil must climb down the hairy body of Satan and come out in sight of Mount Purgatory. This is important because passing through hell, especially the ninth circle, is symbolic of the most difficult path: recognising and renouncing all sin, and beginning the climb upward again towards salvation.³⁶ Richey’s second Dante tattoo featuring Purgatory isn’t mentioned here in any depth but will be very briefly examined later on in chapter 12.

Richey’s other new tattoo, on his right arm, is a quote from Apocalypse Now, “I’ll surf this beach,” surrounded by a rectangle of rose vines. The authors describe this tattoo, which he acquired before the two Dante pieces, but don’t explain its context. The tattoo is a variation on a quote from Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, a character meant as the foil to Colonel Kurtz. Kilgore is unbothered by morality, civilian casualties, or any need for order. He and his men only want victory – real or imagined – over their immediate surroundings so that they can relax, have fun, and try to ignore or block out the horrors of war by pretending to the best of their ability that they are at home in the American suburbs. This is the opposite to Kurtz, who has assimilated the horrors of war, whose philosophy has become dialectic: “you either love somebody or you hate them.”³⁷ In the scene the quote is taken from, Kilgore refuses to wait for a battle to be over in order to surf. He orders the treeline to be firebombed in order to stop the shelling despite any civilian deaths it may cause, just so that the fighting stops and he can have some R&R. In response to the main character suggesting it’s too risky to surf, he tears off his shirt and responds, “If I say it’s safe to surf this beach, Captain, it’s safe to surf this beach. I mean, I’m not afraid to surf this place. I’ll surf this fucking place.” He will do all he can to feel as though he is in control of the situation, and to create an artificial escape, and artificial feeling of normalcy, and convince his subordinates of that normalcy, rather than admit to the horrors he has done and seen.^{38, 39}

Something I was reminded of while reading through articles for this review, is how few people talked to Richey specifically about the meaning and intention of his lyrics. Many of the articles talking about the meaning and symbolism of The Holy Bible specifically come from Nicky or James, rather than Richey, who journalists often asked instead about his time in hospital, or about politics and philosophy in general, rather than lyrical intent. In only three print articles^40-42 that I could find did journalists encourage discussion about the meaning of the lyrics at any length. Roberts and Noakes also frequently fail to include in their analyses the few instances in which Richey did explain his lyrics in his own words, such as these interviews or the programme for The Holy Bible tour.

Roberts and Noakes then describe a bizarre story from Jo in which Richey showed her a tape of a “documentary featuring Joy Division [that] told the story of the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis, before going on to chart the band’s subsequent re-emergence as New Order.”⁴³ I’m uncertain why the authors don’t identify the documentary, which was released in October 1993 and is called New Order Story. In fact, Nicky Wire mentioned the same documentary in a 1996 interview,⁴⁴ in reference to New Order’s sarcastic way of dealing with the trauma of Ian Curtis’ death, and the Manics’ similar piss-taking way of coping with the pain of Richey’s disappearance when it’s just the three of them together.

According to this summarised anecdote, Jo “noticed Richey popping his head around the door. Was she taking it all in? Was the message getting through? […] Years later [such incidents] have left those close to Richey attempting to decipher what else he was trying to communicate.”⁴⁵ There is no indication as to the source of this story, whether it is summarised from a letter from Jo to Rachel or if it was supplied by Jo later on. The authors then theorise if perhaps this was Richey hinting at thoughts that the band wouldn’t miss him if he were to commit suicide and would “move on contentedly,”⁴⁶ or if he had instead “thought himself out of the cliched ending”⁴⁷ and decided he was “one step ahead of the game, opting instead for survival and for something better.”⁴⁸ To reiterate something I pointed out earlier, this belief that the band wouldn’t miss Richey if he died is not an accurate reflection of the feelings of Nicky, James, or Sean; rather it would have been a reflection of Richey’s own interpretations and depression-informed thoughts.

At this point we encounter another centre-formatted ‘pull quote’ used to emphasise the content of this segment. In this instance, the piece of writing is attributed to “Richey archive.”⁴⁹ Either Robert and Noakes did not look this fragment up, have forgotten to attribute a quote, or have deliberately left out proper attribution, as the passage quoted here and attributed to Richey is actually lines from Eugene Ionesco’s 1952 absurdist ‘tragic farce’ play The Chairs, from a translation by Donald Watson. I found the quote’s source very easily; there’s no way the authors of this book wouldn’t have found it if they searched for it. This selection Richey copied and which they have used in this pull quote is from a monologue by the Old Man, with a few lines omitted:

“I have always been hated for the right reasons and loved for the wrong ones. All my enemies have been rewarded and my true friends have betrayed me. They’ve wronged me and persecuted me and if I complained, it was always they were proven right. Sometimes I tried to revenge myself. I could never, never do it. I had too much pity to lay the enemy low. But they had no pity. I would prick them with a pin. They’d attack me with their bludgeons, their knives and their cannon and mangle my bones.”⁵⁰

In the one-act play, an elderly couple are preparing for an event in their home: the Old Man has a message that he believes to be of utmost, world-saving importance, and he has decided that it is time to present it. He explains that he has hired an orator to speak for him because “I find it so difficult to express myself,”⁵¹ despite being very articulate at the start about his ideas and his feelings of failure and victimisation. The couple then usher in an impossible number of guests, all of whom remain invisible to the audience as the actors pantomime their interactions. The above monologue is recited to an invisible Emperor as the elderly couple wait for the orator to appear. As more and more guests (who remain invisible to the audience) arrive, the couple become overwhelmed, flustered, trapped in a breakdown of language and communication. In the end, in front of a packed house and an orator standing at the ready, the couple commit suicide by leaping from their windows into the sea. The orator then reveals that he is both deaf and mute, and therefore cannot adequately articulate via speech. He writes nonsense words on a blackboard –“angelbread” and “adieu adieu” being the only two that are comprehensible– and then, garnering no response from the invisible audience, leaves.⁵² Written not long after World War II, and still in the midst of its aftershocks, the play at its core is about nothingness rather than failure, about loneliness and isolation and the absurdist notion that the search to find meaning in life is impossible because life is meaningless. This meaninglessness is suspended and displayed in the attempt to make sense of life and emphasised in the inability of anyone to communicate.

My frustration with the failure of the authors to properly examine or cite their sources when it comes to non-Manics works – aside from being poor journalistic research – is that Richey’s art, lyrics, and ideas are all so obviously informed by and tinged with his reading material and historical interests. Failing to properly read, summarise, or give context to a text that is lyrically referred to in order to analyse his art or illustrate a point, is also a failure to understand or properly examine Richey’s own art. So many of his lyrics are pulled from other pieces of literature or news, whether direct quotes or something closer to a summary or reference, that it’s not really possible to look at his work as though it sprang fully formed from his forehead. Much like the modernist poetry of TS Eliot and his contemporaries, Richey’s lyrics are extremely referential, requiring work on the part of the listener to pick out the denotative fragments that form the poetic impression and understand the meaning behind what’s being said or the social/political critique that’s being made. Failing to do that work is also failing to understand the context of intent. Not only that, but publishing a fragment of someone else’s writing but labelling it as Richey’s own original work is a disingenuous move, especially since later on in the book the authors criticise his tendency to use the words of others without their credit.

Returning to the chronological content of the chapter, the authors describe the final three London Astoria shows in December 1994. Richey invited family and friends to these gigs, which was unusual for him by this time. Rachel did not go to any of the shows, despite Richey’s repeated invitation, due to having to work.⁵³ Rosie Dunn, his fellow Priory patient, was also invited but could not attend. Richey invited some of his friends from university as well. The authors reiterate the generally agreed-upon and oft-repeated sentiment that it felt like the end of something to everyone in the band, due to the lack of sales and the general tension. Rachel thinks that “he knew it was going to be his last show”,⁵⁴ and the band also collectively thought that it was the end for them in general due to the failure of The Holy Bible album to be popular in sales or on tour.⁵⁵ When they smashed up all their equipment, they felt “like it was a full stop in our career, and maybe even a full stop in everything.”⁵⁶ The authors wonder if Richey used the destruction at the Astoria the day before his 27th birthday as a way to mark his end and the joining of the so-called ’27 Club.’ Rachel and some of Richey’s uni friends talk about seeing him over the Christmas holiday, describing his behaviour and what condition he seemed to be in. All mention that he had a wry sense of humour about his problems and was friendly and polite as usual, but note how “painfully thin”⁵⁷ he was and that he also seemed quite lonely and sad. A number of shorter anecdotes show that he seemed to have been looking for a certain kind of connection with other people, but failed to get whatever he was looking for.

The authors supply a number of late-December entries from Richey’s personal diary which, if the smaller single-sentence or single-paragraph quotes from his Priory journals or scans of letters to friends and notes from rehab aren’t invasive enough, seems like a pretty blatant breach of Richey’s privacy and quite disrespectful, especially as a number of the entries are a bit more obviously personal than the abstract or poetic rambling that has been previously quoted or supplied via scans, either for this book or for other content like the Journal For Plague Lovers deluxe edition. One of the diary entries included here contains lines in which Richey talks about his self-harm: “December 25th: See mam. So many kind people + kind presents. Very very kind. Day is so normal. Good cut tonight. Got a throbbing pulse underneath.”⁵⁸ While it’s not much more visceral than the things Richey published or talked about in interviews, it is certainly the most personal, private-seeming thing he has expressed on the subject of self-harm. It seems a bit hypocritical for Roberts and Noakes as well as Rachel to accuse the band of using the lyrics in the Journal For Plague Lovers binder when Richey allegedly might not have wanted them used, and then to turn round and publish things like this very personal diary. Artistic, worked on and edited lyrics are very different from an entry in one’s own private, personal diary. The Journal For Plague Lovers binder was obviously a curated creative endeavour. These diary entries are not.

Richey’s journal entries stop after 8 January.⁵⁹ His beloved dog Snoopy, whom he’d had since childhood, passed away on 14 January 1995. But three days after the death of Snoopy, on the 17th, under the calendar’s label for the full moon, he wrote the phrase “Killing Moon,” after the song by Echo & The Bunnymen.⁶⁰ The authors speculate whether he had written it on the 17th itself, or if he’d written it “days beforehand, with the vague notion that, at some point between Snoopy dying and the forthcoming trip to America, he would be forced to make up his mind about his future and take drastic action?”⁶¹ In a 2020 interview, Rachel elaborates on this, mentioning that in one of Richey’s last journal entries, two weeks before his disappearance, “he describes the experience of when we had to go and bury our pet.”⁶² The 17th of January was indeed just two weeks before his disappearance, so it seems likely that he wrote that phrase in the calendar marking the event of Snoopy’s burial. However, in 1995 January’s full moon fell on the 16th rather than the 17th and would have been marked as such on a commercial calendar.⁶³ This makes it unclear whether Richey wrote the lyric quote on the label for the full moon (the 16th) or on the 17th, when the moon would still have looked quite full, but the phase would not have been labelled on most calendars.

Snoopy’s passing and Richey’s reaction are then discussed, including a quote from Rachel about how badly it affected Richey, that “he was inconsolable, the most devastated I’d ever seen him.”⁶⁴ The authors also bring up Nicky’s comment about Richey’s sadness about and mourning of Snoopy being something positive that perhaps indicated a change from Richey’s apparent numbness because it “made him feel a real emotion” and “he cried naturally”⁶⁵ due to grief rather than it being over something caused by the stress of treatment or touring. They also quote another one of Richey’s uni friends who recalls that after Snoopy’s death, he seemed a little distant, but still familiar despite the change in his appearance with his shaved head and striped pyjamas.

Years before, Richey had explained in a letter to his then-girlfriend Claire Forward that he would cut off all his hair “after every emotional trauma.”⁶⁶ The authors propose that Richey’s shaved head was “an outward expression of emotional turbulence”⁶⁷ due to the myriad of stressors in his life at the time. However, the catalyst for the change in appearance wasn’t the death of his beloved pet, according to Roberts and Noakes.

Apparently, sometime in the days before Snoopy’s death, Richey visited Jo and asked her to marry him, to which she refused. They decided to break up, and he returned home, after which he cut out a chunk of his hair, and then was forced to shave it all off due to the large bald patch.⁶⁸ According to the authors, he told Nicky all this, who replied “Now I know why they say you’ve got a personality disorder!”⁶⁹ I’m uncertain how they found the story about Nicky’s comment since he has never mentioned it in any interview, and was not interviewed for this book. The authors frame this quote from Nicky as something mocking or nasty, but the band clearly had a history of using piss-taking and dark humour in a friendly way with each other.^70-73

The anecdote gets even more strange: Rachel recalls Nicky telling her that when Richey explained how Jo had turned down his proposal, he’d “had to tell Richard bluntly why Jo wouldn’t want to marry someone like him – because he’d spent the first two years of their relationship drinking and the rest cutting himself. Richard seemed oblivious as to how unwell he came across to other people.”⁷⁴ It’s odd, because only a few pages previous they had quoted Adrian Wyatt who observed that “he was bright enough to be aware of his problems”,⁷⁵ and because there’s always been the sense that the rest of the band are rather estranged from Rachel, and were never very close in the first place. Rachel’s general comments tend to carry the implication that she and the rest of the band rarely spoke to each other before or since Richey’s disappearance.

I’d also love to know how this anecdote about Richey shaving his head as an emotional reaction to the pain of rejection fits in with the authors’ earlier interpretation that the lyrics to ‘Revol’, written a full year earlier, contain clues about Richey planning on shaving his head in order to disguise himself and disappear.

Yet again, a pull quote used as a ‘break’ in the chapter is attributed simply to “Richey’s archive” rather than properly cited. It contains a quote from Frankfurt school psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm’s book Escape From Freedom, in which he discusses his concept of freedom from authority culminating in negative freedom (“freedom from”) and positive freedom (“freedom to”) and how the former is not enjoyable or desirable in itself, but combined with the latter can create a new order.⁷⁶ Richey quotes specifically from the fifth chapter, “Mechanisms of Escape,” in which Fromm discusses the ways in which people attempt to escape the discomfort, lack of order, and “unbearable aloneness” of solely negative freedom (‘freedom from’) through “the more or less complete surrender of individuality and the integrity of self”,⁷⁷ the larger mechanisms of which can be categorised by authoritarianism, destructiveness, and/or conformity. Richey quotes from the section on authoritarianism: “All masochistic strivings have an aim – to get rid of the individual self. To lose control and get rid of the burden of freedom.”⁷⁸ Fromm explains that masochism (and its contrasting partner sadism) is another way to deal with these feelings of helplessness and lack of control that result from a person being “’free’ in the negative sense, that is, alone with his self and confronting an alienated, hostile world.”⁷⁹ The masochist cannot deal with his independent self, and therefore strives to attach himself to someone else in order to be told what to do, because the independence of self is overwhelming, lonely and frightening. By reducing his self to nothing, he overcomes or can ignore the awareness of himself as an individual and avoid the conflict between the desire for independence and the terror of powerlessness. Fromm notes that masochism can present in a number of forms: “To feel utterly small and helpless is one way toward this aim; to be overwhelmed by pain and agony is another; to be overcome by the effects of intoxication still another. The phantasy of suicide is the last hope if all other means have not succeeded in bringing relief from the burden of aloneness.”⁸⁰ The problem, of course, with these masochistic tendencies, as with the other attempts at escape that Fromm outlines, is that it’s more like hanging a picture over a hole in the wall instead of fixing the stud and patching the hole: “the individual succeeds in eliminating the conspicuous suffering but not in removing the underlying conflict and the silent unhappiness.”⁸¹

A different manipulation of a source occurs only a page later. The authors quote an excerpt from an article in The Face from September 1998, entitled “Did Someone Order Gloom Service?”⁸² In the version supplied in Withdrawn Traces, the members of the band recall memories of Richey’s intellect and ability to remember things he’d read compared to his inability to retain knowledge of guitar chords or tabs. Withdrawn Traces quotes:

“’It’s strange how someone could remember all those quotes…’ Sean reflects.
‘… And the history of the fucking partition of Czechoslavakia…’ Nicky adds.
‘… And could quote In Pursuit of the Millennium back at you…’ says James.”
‘… And you show him just a little snippet of music that probably doesn’t last more than ten seconds,’ says Sean, ‘and within about two or three minutes he’d forget it…’⁸³

However, in the original article, that penultimate line does not exist. Nowhere in the article does anyone mention The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn (the title of which is also written incorrectly in the quote supplied by Roberts and Noakes).⁸⁴ The quote is mangled in other minor ways as well. In the original article, Sean’s comment refers to Richey as “he” rather than “someone,” and Nicky’s comment refers to the “Czech partition” rather than the “partition of Czechoslovakia.” It is unclear why the line about Cohn’s book was added or why other lines were reworded.

Roberts and Noakes now move on to a new topic, proceeding to dismiss Richey’s professional diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and instead proposing the theory that perhaps Richey was autistic and had Asperger Syndrome (a diagnosis that is being phased out in favour of ‘autism’ being the singular umbrella term for a number of characteristics, and as of 2018 no longer exists in the ICD-11⁸⁵ ). This theory is inspired by an article in MOJO magazine^{86, 87} from June 2016 (not April as this book says) about Syd Barrett, in which Barrett’s sister Rosemary discusses her brother’s neurological condition as a child and an adult, saying “Oh, [he] more than likely [had Asperger Syndrome]. We are all on the spectrum, but he was way over on the other side. Nowadays he would have undoubtedly been diagnosed. But we didn’t know what that was in the ’60s.”⁸⁸ Rachel connects the descriptions of young Barrett to Richey, and the authors go on to describe aspects of Richey’s behaviour that align with characteristics of autism.

(As a brief but important aside, saying that ‘everyone is on the spectrum’ is damaging to autistic people. First because it is untrue. Second because it minimises the autistic experience and suggests neurotypical and autistic people who share similar traits also share the same difficulties, when in fact neurotypical individuals may be able to compartmentalise as brief occasional struggles things that autistic people experience as continual difficulties that can define or affect their whole lives.)

Unfortunately, the authors mostly resort to descriptive stereotyping and generalisations about autistic people, presenting inaccurate and insulting stereotypes about neurodivergent individuals that also insult Richey’s (and other autistic people’s) intelligence and agency as a human being. Roberts explained that, “We read books about Aspergers and a lot of the traits clicked with Richey. It’s something that Rachel acknowledged that Richey might well have had – something that wouldn’t have been diagnosed back in the ‘90s.”⁸⁹ But it is clear that whatever literature they may have used for research was both inadequate and highly negatively biased. The authors strip autism down to one-dimensional, often infantilising, highly specific characteristics, such as “highly logical way[s] of thinking, entwined with a lack of understanding or inability to deal with emotions and protocols when it comes to interaction with others.”⁹⁰ Not all autistic people are ‘computers,’ ‘rigid’ or ‘mechanical,’ and while some struggle with interpersonal interaction or emotional regulation, it’s not necessarily due to an inability to deal with emotions, but with the unwillingness of neurotypical people or society in general to meet them in the middle or adapt to/accommodate for their needs. Using the terms ‘high-functioning’ or ‘low-functioning’ to describe autistic people and calling neurotypical people ‘normal’ compared to neurodivergent people are both massively problematic notions that I’m unsurprised the authors of this book engaged in.

They also claim that Richey’s relationship issues were caused by potential autism because “a great deal of emotional ideology for AS individuals is often learned or copied from television and films. They become obsessed by society’s version of ‘happily ever after’ and grow frustrated when life fails to follow the script. Some bail on relationships altogether because of the level of difficulty involved in processing their emotions, along with the grey area of second-guessing the complicated thoughts and feelings of others.”⁹¹ This assumption yet again insinuates an insulting puerility in the behaviour or experiences of autistic people. Autistic individuals learn about and form opinions on relationships and interactions by watching the people around them in real life, just like every other person. This idea that autistic people can only encounter and understand life if it’s filtered through fiction is denigrating and incorrect. Comparing one’s life to fiction is also a problem that is a common experience in the modern world. Many people, neurodivergent or not, compare their lives to the lives of fictional characters in stories and find themselves wanting when the two do not match their “wishful identification.”⁹² And many people, neurodivergent or not, find it challenging to understand the emotions of others, whether that’s caused by social anxiety, personality mismatch, or poor communication. To generalise this type of relationship-based problem in such a way is to narrow the vision of Richey himself and human nature in general into either-or categories.

The stereotypes continue, with the authors describing autistic people as “immersing themselves in books or computers to evade human interaction”⁹³ and having a “tendency to pursue incredibly idiosyncratic interests, becoming fascinated by narrow and marginal pursuits and obsessions.”⁹⁴ Some autistic people do avoid interaction, but often it is due to overstimulation, or failure by support services or their surroundings to accommodate them. Autistic people are not hermits or hobgoblins and have as varied a need and desire for social interaction as any person. The “obsessions” and “marginal pursuits” described here are what the autism community calls ‘special interests,’ which ultimately are very positive things. Special interests or hyperfixations are also a characteristic of ADHD and can be present in other conditions, too. They occur when a person finds a subject that not only fascinates them but provides them with a positive feeling or a rush of dopamine when they encounter and research it. A special interest can last for many years or can last a shorter amount of time, from a few months to a year or so. A person learns and consumes all they can about their special interest, and will find themselves associating outside things with that subject or talking about it more than other subjects. It is not usually a negative thing for the person and can be very joyful and positive. Similarly, Richey’s love for “routine and timetables” does not make him robotic. An aspect of autism, as well as ADHD, anxiety, severe depression, and other mental illnesses, is a difficulty in dealing with ‘cold starts,’ meaning a lack of transition from one task to another. Being asked to suddenly mentally switch from one task to a new one without warning can be overwhelming, confusing, or upsetting, especially if the person is engrossed in their current task. The aid of schedules and timetables allows for planning the beginning and end of tasks, allowing for time to be set up for transitioning from one to another rather than an abrupt change.⁹⁵

While I absolutely agree with and condone self-diagnosis (‘self’ perhaps being the operative word, though), it is likely not this book’s place to do this, especially considering the precedent it has set for poor understanding or research of mental health issues. Diagnosing a person with autism based on stereotypes when they are not present to elaborate on their experiences or behaviours isn’t a very good practice.

Furthermore, the only source in this section which Roberts and Noakes directly quote (though still without citing) is an article in the Daily Mail from 15 February 2014 titled “Is your man wired differently? Signs that he may have Aspergers Syndrome.”⁹⁶ The article’s unsurprisingly offensive lede reads, “If a lack of social skills, zero sensitivity and puzzling behaviour sums up your spouse, he could have Asperger’s syndrome, says Charlotte Pearson Methven. But if you focus on the positive aspects, it could make him the ideal husband.”⁹⁷ The article also describes Hans Asperger, the Nazi doctor and eugenicist whom the diagnosis was named after, simply as an “Austrian paediatrician.”⁹⁸ Roberts and Noakes wonder how much of Richey’s rock star posturing “was assumed naturally”⁹⁹ and how much was possibly constructed from the “studied technique of copy and imitation.”¹⁰⁰ They pull a quote from further down in the Daily Mail article which discusses the differences between boys and girls with autism: “Clinical psychologist and Asperger’s expert Tony Attwood insists that while a male with Asperger’s will present himself as ‘agitated, clumsy and immature’, a female will be far more convincing at covering her condition through imitation and far better at ‘pretending themselves to be normal as an avid observing of human behaviour. She will learn what to do or say, how to copy others and so go unnoticed, unlike the AS boy.’”¹⁰¹ The authors wonder if because Richey had a sister close to him in age, and a close connection with his grandmother, maybe he instead displayed “female” autistic behaviour rather than the apparently typical male behaviour, finding it “easier to mask his difficulties by mimicking, and copying more percipient female behaviour?”¹⁰²

Autistic men don’t “present” as clumsy or agitated. Generally if an autistic person is clumsy, agitated, upset, or seemingly “immature” it is not an act, it is likely because they are overwhelmed or something is upsetting. Clumsiness is a spatial awareness issue not confined by gender, which is again a characteristic of a number of neurological conditions including autism, ADHD, and anxiety, and is also not some sort of ‘act’. Apparent immaturity is often a consequence of the struggle to properly notice or understand nonverbal cues during socialising, which is something many autistic people can find difficult. Autistic women are often forced to “learn what to do or say”¹⁰³ (called ‘masking’ by the autism community) in order to protect themselves; their behaviours that don’t align with society’s expectations are judged more harshly than men’s. However, autistic men very often engage in masking behaviours as well. Attwood’s descriptions are stereotypical and insulting to the experiences of autistic people in a society that is unwilling to accommodate their perspectives and their needs, and he has a history of perpetuating these stereotypes.^104-106 Attwood also engages in person-first language (“male with Asperger’s”) which is generally rejected by the community in favour of identity-first language (‘autistic man’) because “many see their lived experience of impairment and disability as part of their identity and what makes them who they are as a person” and because the language “emphasises how people with impairments are disabled by barriers in society [and] places the responsibility on society to remove disabling barriers and be fully inclusive of people with impairments.”¹⁰⁷ The language Attwood uses to refer to autistic people is just one component of the way he dehumanises and delegitimises their experiences.

(As a semi-related aside, the Daily Mail is so unreliable that it has even been banned by Wikipedia as a source due to its poor fact checking, sensationalism, and tendency to use its own old articles as a source.¹⁰⁸)

Tony Attwood is problematic in a number of other ways in regards to the autistic community. He has expressed support for facilitated communication, a type of discredited pseudoscience technique that claims to assist nonverbal autistic people or people with other communication disabilities by means of guided use of a keyboard, which was disproved when it was revealed to be ineffective.¹⁰⁹ He has reportedly mocked, imitated, and made jokes about autistic people and their behaviour during his lectures at conferences and events,^110-112 claimed that autistic transgender individuals only want to transition in order to “fix” their autism,^{113, 114} and has been criticised by people in the autism community for his actions and statements infantalising and negatively stereotyping people with autism.^{115, 116}

He is also associated with and has promoted^{117, 118} counsellor Maxine Aston and been on the board of “support group” Families of Adults Affected by Asperger’s Syndrome (FAAAS),¹¹⁹ both of which have been labelled as hate groups by the Autism Self Advocacy Network, an American nonprofit organisation run by and for autistic people, focusing on disability rights, inclusive policies, and self-advocacy.¹²⁰ The organisation has labelled Maxine Aston and FAAAS as hate groups due to their “promoting the idea that prolonged family contact with Autistic adults in romantic or family relationships is harmful to ‘normal’ people”¹²¹ by endorsing ‘Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder.’ The term ‘Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder’ was invented by Aston and described as a “depressive disorder caused by romantic involvement with an Autistic person,” which she likens to ongoing trauma and abuse and whose symptoms she blatantly lifts from those of Seasonal Affective Disorder.¹²² The Autism Self Advocacy Network asserts that “CADD is based entirely upon pseudoscience, personal grudges, and stereotypes rather than any form of accurate research or evidence. CADD has never been recognised by any psychological association and is not supported by any peer-reviewed scientific research.”¹²³ In their article examining the rhetoric of CADD, Associate Professor M. Remi Yergeau notes that autistic people are spoken of as having a “less-than-human status”¹²⁴ by CADD advocates, and that CADD’s theories are extremely gender-biased, as they are based on Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory of ‘extreme male brain,’ which inaccurately “posits autism as a condition of hypermasculinity, one caused by excessive fetal testosterone.”¹²⁵ Attwood’s theories parallel those of FAAAS; he calls Asperger syndrome “infectious,” and implies that the autistic parents or partners of neurotypical individuals are inherently abusive in their behaviour when interacting with neurotypical family members.¹²⁶

Utilising Attwood’s stereotypical, infantalising, and condescending or negative portrayals of autistic people in order to examine Richey’s attempts to “be like everyone else”,¹²⁷ or to perform himself for the media is problematic due not only to Attwood’s depictions of autistic people, but because utilising these stereotypes that boil autistic people’s experiences down to gender-based characteristics and dehumanising portrayals of abusive behaviours or childlike ineptitude ignores the voices and personal accounts of actually autistic people. This bases Richey’s hypothetical diagnosis in absentia not on Richey’s relation to the world but on neurotypical individuals’ stereotyped interpretations of his behaviour.

The authors quote Richey’s final television interview with Dutch channel ZTV, in which he explains that “the reason I am doing this [touring] is for the two months we have off, where I can just be on my own in the flat and write. I do nine months of touring so I can get time to write words, that’s what I care about.”¹²⁸ In the interview, he goes on to explain that it is more satisfying to him to write lyrics that encapsulate his thoughts and feelings than it is to travel and tour. The authors speculate whether this was “possible evidence that Richey was re-aligning his priorities? Could he, just a short time later, have concluded that those several gruelling months of touring America were just not worth it after all?”¹²⁹ I agree that he could have just decided that it was too much, but since Richey had always expressed displeasure with touring,^130-134 it is more likely to have been a ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ situation, rather than a new reason for leaving. The authors say that “it is no surprise to learn that in later years, many with Asperger’s syndrome become overwhelmed by life’s situations and shut out the outside world as a means of coping.”¹³⁵ This is often true, however the association here doesn’t seem to take into account the number of fairly intense outside stressors in Richey’s life at the time, as well as his own inner struggles with depression and addiction and other aspects of his worsening mental health.

Rachel says “I don’t see something like Asperger’s as simplifying Richard at all; it just adds another layer of complexity to him altogether.”¹³⁶ To simplify him would be to infantalise him, so it is good to see this support from Rachel, but the descriptions and stereotypes expressed in this segment still seem like an insult to the agency, intelligence, and experiences of autistic people, whether or not Richey was autistic himself.

It was also brought to my attention that the portrayal of Richey in this section of Withdrawn Traces as stereotypically autistic: robotic, emotionless or emotionally tactless, uncaring, a loner, conflicts with their presentation of him as so emotional that a comment from a bandmate or the failure of a goal that changed two years prior could have caused his disappearance. Portraying him as having to learn emotion from television disregards entirely the ways he obviously felt very deeply and was quite empathetic. He may have loved schedules and routine, but he clearly had very strong, intense emotions, so the “robotic”¹³⁷ stuff doesn’t fit, at least not in the way this book stereotypically portrays the characteristics of autism.

Whatever the case was regarding Richey’s mental health and neurodivergent status, what I’m really getting from all this new information and these anecdotal descriptions of him, is that whatever else he was dealing with aside from the depression and alcoholism that he discussed in his own words, he did not receive adequate support. His needs were clearly not met in a way that helped him and he was not given proper support systems or care by the professionals that were supposed to facilitate his recovery. Alcoholics Anonymous has an extremely low success rate, especially for patients who stop attending meetings within 90 days,¹³⁸ and religious prayer-centred treatment is not effective for every patient. Richey criticised the failures of the mental healthcare system for others in his 1994 interview with Simon Price titled “Archives Of Pain,” in which he explained that “68,000 beds have been closed down in the last couple of years” and that in his experience “NHS hospitals are people banging off the walls in long corridors. Long, endless corridors. In communal wards, nobody sleeps. They can give you as many drugs as they want, but the noises in there are pretty horrendous. Then the next day, you wake up, have your drugs and sit in a big communal room, and you don’t hardly see any f***er.”¹³⁹ His criticism of hospital treatment only obliquely includes himself, but it seems he was also someone who was failed by the system.

While this book spends so much time blaming the band – young men without the knowledge or professional experience to help their friend – for Richey’s problems on tour, it is the mismanagement of his care by both NHS and private doctors that deserves the blame. It is frustrating that the authors describe all these instances where Richey was clearly struggling and had obviously not received adequate treatment and was suffering because of it (something such as taking away someone’s ‘unhealthy’ coping mechanisms and then not replacing them with healthy ones –sedation and AA Christianity don’t count– is really a one-way ticket to a downward spiral) but they don’t seem to actually think about or acknowledge how the system’s failure to help him obviously affected him greatly. Rachel “thinks the Priory made him feel special, which she hated – as if his depression was a gift”,¹⁴⁰ which is a gross failure of mental health professionals to help Richey reach stability and recovery. Nicky believes that during his treatment in the Priory, Richey “realised that the cure means having to destroy the entire entity that you are. And I don’t think he [was] prepared to do that for the sake of survival.”¹⁴¹ In his opinion, the Priory tried to change Richey’s personality, “filled him up with a lot of shit”¹⁴² in the form of pseudo-religion and standardised treatments, and “ripped out the man and left a shell”,¹⁴³ exacerbating Richey’s doubt, removing the things he enjoyed from his life and giving him nothing truly useful in return. Richey’s bandmates and management tried their best to help him despite their inexperience and helplessness; his downward spiral is the fault of the professionals that were meant to treat Richey and give him care that both fit his needs and adequately supported him where he was struggling, and who were not successful in doing so.

Returning to the subject of Richey’s emotional and mental state at the end of 1994/early 1995, the authors note that Richey was dealing with “crises in both his personal and professional relationships”¹⁴⁴ and speculate that Richey may have wanted to marry Jo because it would have given him an excuse to get out of the public eye or an option to attempt to build an existence separate from and unrelated to the band so that “the stigma of failure would not hang so heavily.”¹⁴⁵ Earlier that year, he had told Terri Hall that “he was going to be married by the end of the year”,¹⁴⁶ and she thought he might have seen marriage as an “abstract”¹⁴⁷ path to happiness, that he might have been thinking “’If I have that, then I’ll be okay’.”¹⁴⁸ Rachel also mentions his desire to make “something perfect,”¹⁴⁹ something that neither he nor anyone else could fault, whether it was “a band, a relationship, a work of art.”¹⁵⁰ It is unclear whether they are using this quote from Rachel to imply that Richey’s perception of failure in all three areas was a catalyst for a premeditated disappearance, or if they are simply implying that it may have exacerbated his already frail mental health.

In January, the band went in for rehearsal/demo sessions at the House in the Woods studio in Surrey, during which Richey handed over some lyrics to use. The authors state that Sean found the lyrics Richey offered up “pretty heavy going”;¹⁵¹ however, in the source article Sean is actually referring to the contents of the binder Richey presented at the end of the session that would become Journal For Plague Lovers, not the lyrics that were offered up to be worked on during the time in the studio.¹⁵² Two of the five lyrics Richey gave them, ‘Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier’ and ‘Kevin Carter’, were not completed during the session because they ran out of time, so James played them to Richey on his acoustic guitar. Richey wasn’t impressed by the musical direction James had taken the two songs in, and in 1998 the band speculated that they might have ended up in a “compromise situation” in which they might have written some songs in the style Richey desired and some in the more mellow style they were leaning toward, because if The Holy Bible was a commercial failure, doing a sequel in the same style would have been “a dead end ultimately.”¹⁵³

The anonymous roadie returns yet again and explains that once Nicky started offering up lyrics he had written solo, the rest of the band and their management “suddenly became very career-focused, very fast. After The Holy Bible flopped they seemed much more content to be guided by Sony if it meant guaranteeing them a long-term career in music.”¹⁵⁴ The roadie says that if he were in Richey’s position, he’d be “pretty pissed that my presence was going to be considered a compromise.”¹⁵⁵ It does seem a little bit odd that a roadie, who is probably used to seeing conflict in bands, would find disagreements about musical direction – a fairly common thing in any band or artistic endeavour with multiple contributing members – as something exceptional. It’s also an interesting move on the part of the authors to use this roadie’s opinion of how he might react as some sort of definitive proof that Richey thought similarly.

The authors have credited Richey with the band’s early success, with the majority of the political or otherwise impactful lyrics in Generation Terrorists as well as its album art, and with writing at least eighty-five percent of The Holy Bible lyrics. He also wrote the lyrics that were eventually used in Everything Must Go on his own (‘Kevin Carter’, ‘Removables’, ‘Small Black Flowers…’, ‘Elvis Impersonator, Blackpool Pier’, ‘The Girl Who Wanted To Be God’). The majority of The Holy Bible, they have claimed, was Richey’s effort, including lyrics, onstage aesthetic, and album design. And yet Nicky Wire writing lyrics on his own is seen as some sort of betrayal of Richey’s role in the band, a way of pushing Richey to the side and disallowing him a certain position as lyricist. Compromise is an inherent part of working in a group, and an inherent part of the way in which the Manics functioned through a “division of labour”¹⁵⁶ in which Richey and Nicky wrote lyrics, editing and adding to each other’s words, and Sean and James wrote the music. Nicky and Richey would often write apart and then come together and add to each other’s lyrics. If Richey was the only one contributing lyrics, as well as controlling the sound and visual aesthetic of the album, the band would no longer be a collective with a division of labour between them as they had been for so long; instead, it would be all about Richey with the others as a backing band.

While it could be taken as something of an un-punk move, the turn towards label guidance makes sense in terms of the Manics’ desire to continue as a band. The three albums they made were not as successful as they had expected, sales were low, audiences were unenthusiastic, and their contract was going to be up soon. There was discussion by the higher-ups at Sony about potentially dropping the band if their fourth album was not successful.¹⁵⁷ The smart thing to do would be to bow to the label’s ideas, however reluctantly, since experienced management might have a better idea of how to put together something that followed the zeitgeist and would be ultimately commercially viable.

Next, the authors supply a fragment of a letter from Jo to Rachel, in which she says, “I can’t help feeling that the band got what they wanted out of Rich when he was around. After the Holy Bible the only thing they could do was change, and it’s understandable sometimes in the world of music. I don’t hold that against them, but how could they not see how it affected him? To be so utterly demoted like that. They may have let him take control of the fourth album if The Holy Bible had sold, but when it didn’t… What happened to truth instead of platitudes? The message first and the music second?”¹⁵⁸

It is interesting to read the awareness that the band was required to change in order to be successful alongside this accusation that it was the fault of the band for Richey’s frustration with the change in artistic vision. They were in danger of being dropped by their label, and the message first, music second strategy wasn’t working. The stylistic direction they had been going in wasn’t working, and its intensity was difficult or even damaging to sustain.¹⁵⁹ Something had to change, and if it hadn’t, a fourth album failure and subsequent lack of support from the label as well as financial hardship might have been just as if not more emotionally devastating than being made to take a different artistic role in the band. But the failure of the album was an industry failure, a ‘right sound, wrong time’ failure, not a failure of Richey or the rest of the band on a personal level. There’s a reason The Holy Bible is considered the Manic Street Preachers’ masterpiece, beyond the sensationalism of Richey’s disappearance.

I’m shocked but not surprised at the amount of times the authors insinuate that the band were just using Richey, or that they didn’t care about him, or that they abandoned him. They were a band, but they were also close friends. To imply that they didn’t care about Richey when they tried to help him all they could, when they gave him every option they could think of to make his experience easier, to imply that they were just using him to get really famous (despite not finding that success until Richey’s departure and their stylistic change anyway) is insulting to them as people, to their friendship with Richey, and to Richey’s own relationship with them. They offered him options that prioritised his recovery and mental health, and he turned them down. The rest of the band were not mental health professionals or experienced caregivers, but they tried their best to care for their friend. Nicky Wire took on the responsibility of checking him for self-harm every night,^{160, 161} helping him maintain an eating schedule,¹⁶² and talking to him for long periods of time,^{163, 164} trying to reach out and help him despite feeling overwhelmed. But they were young and inexperienced, not trained to treat the degree of psychological problems Richey was going through. Putting the onus of Richey’s health entirely on his bandmates while criticising their complicated reactions to a difficult situation ignores the fact that even if a person is struggling mentally, they are still responsible for their own actions or decisions and they are still responsible for their choice to accept or reject offers of help.

There seems to be an incessant suggestion in Withdrawn Traces that the band saw Richey as an instrument to success rather than a friend, and that he became unwanted once true fame seemed out of reach via their original musical path. To see the authors dismiss or demonise the respect and support the rest of the band tried to give Richey when he was with them and have given his memory in the years since is frustrating, as it seems closer to personal attack than an examination of what went wrong. Richey’s problems were so obviously out of their depth as friends, they could not be expected to know how to help him. The efforts they made despite being young, inexperienced, and struggling themselves, show an attempt to respect Richey’s autonomy as well as support his health, and show a lot of love and dedication towards the health and comfort of their friend even in the face of tension and helplessness. Nicky Wire has always talked about how important his friendship and lyrical partnership was with Richey, because their styles meshed so well together and “it was always much more enjoyable having mixed the darkness and lightness of me and Richey. I can’t pretend to have that kind of depth of knowledge or intensity that he has.”¹⁶⁵ He also often spoke about how much they miss him specifically as a friend,^{166, 167} how awful it was to feel like he was “drifting away” after treatment¹⁶⁸ and how upsetting it was to lose him psychologically, to be with “someone you’ve done all those things with and you feel you can’t communicate.”¹⁶⁹ I also find it odd that the authors insinuate that James, Nicky and Sean were using Richey in order to become successful only to plan on dumping him afterward, because they never did become successful while he was still in the band, and obviously they could not have anticipated his disappearance.

The chapter continues describing the demo session, and Nicky remembers that Richey seemed on top form at the recording space in Surrey in January. Nicky has described over the years the ways in which Richey was like his old self during that time, “lovely and cuddly” and seemingly more tranquil.¹⁷⁰ “He was laughing more, the pathos and the irony were back,”¹⁷¹ and he seemed to have a more “serene calmness” than in the past few months. The authors quote a Louder article from 2006 in which Nicky mentions that he felt as if it was “Richey making some sort of peace with us,”¹⁷² and that for those two weeks it seemed as though something had suddenly changed for him.

A letter from Jo to Rachel in 1997 mentions how she thought it was odd that the band recalled Richey seeming in good form and stable during the demos. She says that he seemed “so much worse at the start of the year, even [than] before we broke up, but the band says he was in top form in the studio.”¹⁷³ She wonders if this means “he was trying to control and manipulate me and everyone else by claiming he was powerless? How much control did he have left at that point with the image he was putting out there? I wonder if sometimes he wanted different people to see different things.”¹⁷⁴

And yet, only two paragraphs previous, the authors quoted a 1996 NME article in which Nicky explained why that might have been. He recalled that that recording session was “the only time when I thought [Richey] was back to being Iggy/Keith Richards, as opposed to Ian Curtis. But that could have been because he was going.”¹⁷⁵ If he had been feeling and acting much worse, but had been trying to hide his worsening state from his friends, or even had come to a decision, some sort of future ultimatum, he might have acted different. Whether he was concealing his suffering in order not to worry his friends, or had felt better with an idea of the future sorted out, it may have affected his behaviour with them.

Another problem with this line of questioning is that no one has the same concept of anyone else, and each person’s vision of their friend or loved one will be coloured by their own experiences, feelings, contexts, and opinions regarding that person, and by how that person sees them and therefore acts around them. Nicky Wire was spending time with Richey on tour and in rehearsal or recording spaces, compared to Jo who was for the most part seeing Richey when he returned home to Cardiff to spend time with her, meaning they were definitely going to see different facets of Richey and perhaps would interpret his actions as normal or abnormal depending on their own experiences. The band was immersed in Richey’s mental illness, whereas Jo was seeing him less frequently and was less acclimatised to his behaviour.

Video producer Tony Van Den Ende describes an incident in which Richey showed up at the studio in London where he and Sony CEO Rob Stringer were editing clips for a ‘Faster’ promo video for the US tour. He was dressed in the striped pyjamas that had become his staple at the time, stayed for about about 45 minutes, and then Rob Stringer “asked him to step outside for a chat.”¹⁷⁶ Van Den Ende recalls some sort of argument occurred, and wonders if Richey’s concentration camp-like appearance with the shaved head and striped pyjamas was on purpose, that perhaps he was “doing it to wind people up”¹⁷⁷ and then questions if Stringer would have found that outfit offensive or confrontational “especially if Rob has Jewish family members himself?”¹⁷⁸ The assumption that Stringer is Jewish may come from the fact that in 2017 he was awarded Music Visionary Of The Year by UJA despite not being Jewish himself.^{179, 180} However, if Van den Ende was interviewed prior to 2017, it is unclear where this idea might have come from.

It is unclear if Richey’s outfit choices were meant to be purposefully confrontational. Wearing the same clothes for days on end can be a symptom of depression, often due to a lack of energy or struggle with decision-making.¹⁸¹ If Richey’s mental health was indeed worsening as the anecdotes in this chapter clearly suggest, this could have been the reason for his choice of comfortable, loose-fitting pyjamas and his sudden habit of wearing the same outfit all of the time, rather than a desire to “wind people up.” In 2013 Terri Hall recalled Richey similarly showing up at the Hall Or Nothing office in Shepherd’s Bush looking “pale and gaunt”¹⁸² and displaying comparably erratic behaviour, staring at them through the window, seemingly without any other interaction. It may have been this kind of worrying behaviour that prompted Stringer to speak to Richey, rather than his clothing choices.

On 23 January, Richey gave a final interview with Midori Tsukagoshi for Music Life magazine.¹⁸³ The authors briefly summarise only his disparaging comments on the music industry – “freely condemning professionals in the record industry and their treatment of artists”¹⁸⁴ – and relationships. I find it strange that they claim that “midway through the interview he took off on another familiar tangent, keen to discuss one of his favoured topics, love and relationships”,¹⁸⁵ as if he just out of the blue began speaking on the subject, rather than the reality which is that the journalist initiated the change in topic and then asked him a number of follow-up questions so he could elaborate on certain concepts.

They also note that he downplayed the length of his brief relationship with his girlfriend in uni, and glossed over his relationship with Jo, which has them contemplating if he “was shying away from reality – or trying to retain control of his narrative arc, right up until the end?”¹⁸⁶ However, this is not the first time he downplayed his alleged relationship with Jo. In an interview with The Zine in March 1994, he claimed that he had “never been involved in a relationship”¹⁸⁷ because he had observed that anyone in a long-term relationship was eventually unfaithful to their partner. He made similar comments in interviews with The Face in April¹⁸⁸ and with RAW magazine in early August, saying that “I’ve never been in love, I’ve never had a girlfriend,”¹⁸⁹ and in an interview with Dutch radio station Villa 65 in November 1994, he replied to a question about whether or not he’d ever been in love by stating “I’ve told myself I’ve been in love lots of times, but that’s kind of like forced. […] I would say I’ve been in lust, I’ve been physically attracted to people for lengthy periods of time and to the exclusion of everything else, but I wouldn’t necessarily call that love because if it was love it would last.”¹⁹⁰ In earlier chapters of this book, the authors pointed out Richey’s problems with sex, sexuality, and romantic relationships; I’m uncertain why these previous observations don’t seem to matter with regards to this Music Life interview the way they seemed to elsewhere. This interview also occurred on 23 January, after Richey and Jo broke up, which may have informed the way he chose to talk about the relationship.

Briefly, the authors recount Richey’s last documented week prior to his disappearance. They mention that he withdrew £200 from cashpoints on four different days in January, using some of the money to buy food, VHS’s, books and other items. In Simon Price’s 1998 biography of the band, Everything, Price mentions that Richey allegedly ordered a very large and expensive desk for his flat;¹⁹¹ I can find no direct source for that rumour, unless it was information he acquired directly from the band at the time of writing, and it’s not mentioned in this book. However, Price also mentioned that since Richey was about to be flying to America for a tour, keeping a good amount of money on hand seems fairly logical. More on this in the next chapter.

Rachel recalls that the last time she saw him, Richey seemed “flat” but “calm.”¹⁹² He took photos of his family and “made a point of looking [her] up and down,”¹⁹³ but dismissed her concern when she asked if anything was wrong. On 31 January, as they were leaving their recording space, Richey gave little gifts to his bandmates; Nicky thought at the time that it was Richey apologising for being “pretty difficult”¹⁹⁴ during the last year, that it meant that things were “going to be OK”,¹⁹⁵ a positive sign and indication of a desire to change for the better. Then Richey and James drove to the Embassy Hotel in London together.

Disappearance

Chapter 11 describes the events in the day leading up to 2 February 1995, most of which is fairly well known. Richey and James Dean Bradfield sat in the underground carpark of the Embassy Hotel in London and listened to the demos they had recorded in Surrey; Richey expressed a liking for ‘Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky’, but was ambivalent about the other two, ‘No Surface All Feeling’ and ‘Further Away’. They then checked into their separate rooms at the Embassy Hotel. Richey didn’t want to go to America and expressed that reluctance to his mother in a telephone conversation from the hotel at some point that evening. James knocked on Richey’s door and asked if he wanted to go out. Richey was in the middle of a bath, so they planned to meet up a little while later, and when James came by again Richey said that he’d decided he wanted to stay in and would see James in the morning. James left the hotel and met up with another friend for a little while, then went to bed.¹

We then march directly into ‘this can’t even be real, how can you expect anyone to believe you’ territory. Apparently, James was not, in fact, the last person to see Richey, because “between the time James went out and came back, Richey had received a guest at the hotel.”² The most confounding thing about the following anecdote is that this book claims that most of the information about this alleged guest came “from the band themselves.”³ This visitor has never been mentioned before, in any interviews with the band since 1995, has come up in no research by any other writers of books or articles about the band, and the first place we’re learning about it is in a book which Nicky, James, and Sean have not participated in, which consistently insults them and uses questionable or entirely fabricated sources.

Allegedly, “as confirmed to Rachel by the band, Richey was in his room with a female named Vivian”⁴ at some point that evening. This woman and her visit have never been mentioned before by anyone, nor is she in any other documents, because as the book reports, “she was not mentioned in any of the official police files Rachel accessed in the nineties”⁵ and “Rachel’s attempts to track her down have proved fruitless.”⁶ So if she wasn’t in the police reports, and the band did not participate in this book, and have never mentioned her, never even a slip-up in an interview or documentary, then where is this information coming from? And how did they know about her in the first place? The first time Vivian, or the presence of any other person in the hotel with Richey, has been made public is in this book.

According Roberts and Noakes, it “is not clear at what time, and for how long”⁷ Vivian was with Richey in his hotel room, or “whether or not he left the Embassy with her.”⁸ This claim is very perplexing. From an interview in NME in 1996, titled “Everything Must Go…On,”⁹ James knocked on Richey’s door around 8pm, when he was having a bath. He came back about half an hour later, and Richey decided he’d rather stay in. James went out by himself instead, came back at around 11:30pm and went to bed without speaking to Richey. So the only way he could have learned about the presence (or existence) of this Vivian is if she met with Richey in that half hour chunk of time, and then Richey told James about it. Otherwise, how would the band have known about her? Nicky and Sean were at their own homes, as were Martin Hall and Rob Stringer. Unless Richey rang any of them up to tell them about his encounter with Vivian for some reason, there’s no way they could have known. If there’s no clear information about “what time, and for how long” Vivian and Richey were together, and they have been unable to locate and question Vivian herself, how do they know that this interaction occurred at all? None of this is explained by the authors. The subject of Vivian is then dropped until Chapter 13.

The authors also ask “who from either the management or the record company”¹⁰ was also at the Embassy Hotel in preparation to travel the US. The interviews in Escape From History seem to imply that the answer is no one, since James had to call Martin Hall at home, who had to call Sony and the police once they realised that Richey was missing.¹¹ It seems as though they were to take a hired car to the airport, and management were to meet them there.

The facts about the morning of 2 February are laid out without much more new information. Richey did not appear in the hotel lobby when he and James had agreed to meet in the morning, so James had the porter open the door to Richey’s hotel room.¹² A collaged box was found on the bed in Richey’s hotel room as well as a bath full of water. Martin Hall waited in the hotel room to see if Richey would return; when he didn’t, Hall filed a missing persons report with the police in London.¹³ James flew to America to uphold the promotional obligations while Nicky made calls to various hotels to try and find out if Richey had checked in somewhere.

The authors report that “twenty-four hours later, band manager Martin Hall filed a missing person report at Harrow Road police station.”¹⁴ This is placed in the text after the description of the discovery of Richey’s empty hotel room, and gives the impression that Hall waited another full day before reporting Richey missing. In truth, he reported Richey missing on the same day, 2 February 1995, only a few hours after they realised he had gone.¹⁵ [image] This paragraph is another example of the authors manipulating how facts are displayed in order to promote a specifically negative opinion about the band or their management.

Once the missing persons report had been filed, the Manic Street Preachers’ management staff began phoning up people in Richey’s address book, hoping one of his personal contacts had seen him. Richey’s father was initially reluctant to ask questions or make a public appeal for information because he believed Richey was an adult who could make his own decisions, but eventually he did put an article in the Daily Mail and went on the radio to ask Richey to make contact. An appeal was made by the Cardiff police on 15 February for any information on Richey’s whereabouts. Richey’s car was found 17 February, two weeks after he first went missing, at the Aust Service station after getting a ticket on the 14th. It seems as though Richey had been staying in the vehicle for a time because “its battery was flat and inside was an empty wine bottle”,¹⁶ a hold-all bag, the developed photographs he’d taken of his family, “rubbish strewn everywhere and, in the cassette-deck, a Sex Pistols tape”,¹⁷ as well as Richey’s medication, the authors report. This differs slightly from other previous reports that Nirvana’s In Utero was in the tape deck and that he’d abandoned his medication at his flat.^18-22

Three separate police forces then became involved in Richey’s case: London Metropolitan Police, South Wales Police, and Avon & Somerset Police; however, all three forces apparently decided that “the vehicle was not […] crucial evidence.”²³ Rachel explained that “the Avon police said that they searched and photographed it and found nothing suspicious”²⁴ but they never investigated why the car might have had a flat battery, and never took anything out of the car for further examination. Richey’s father drove the car back to the Edwards family home, where it remained.²⁵ The authors move on to the examination of Richey’s flat, listing the items the police and Richey’s family found when they entered – his passport, the Severn Crossing toll receipt, and some spare change – and speculate that “Richey – or somebody else – must have visited and had placed the items in full view of anybody entering the flat.”²⁶

Apparently, Richey’s bank records show that he “withdrew £200 from cashpoints on 20, 21, 22, and 25 January”²⁷ and then later, he “visited an ATM in Cardiff, taking out £200”²⁸ (though they do not supply a date for this transaction) and “a day before his disappearance, he withdrew a further £200 from a cash machine in Surrey.”²⁹ They add the withdrawals that occurred before 25 January separately from those after; Richey bought food, films, and books with the money he withdrew before the 25th. They note that after the 25th he bought “new pyjamas and presents for the band”³⁰ for £44.40 and a visit to the printers which cost £9.60.

The authors give exact receipts for the money withdrawn and spent after 25 January, calculating that Richey would have been left with £346 from those two withdrawals, “a substantial amount of cash to be carrying around in 1995.”³¹ It is true that this is quite a lot of cash, but it seems like an appropriate amount for Richey to take with him in order to convert to American dollars if he was planning on mostly using cash overseas while there for a promo and full tour. Roberts and Noakes neglect to mention that the American tour was meant to have at least 26 dates between 8 March and 9 April,³² potentially extending the schedule closer to 35 or 40 dates according to James Dean Bradfield^{33, 34} – a number which is also reflected in a handwritten list of 35 American tour dates included in the booklet for The Holy Bible 20th Anniversary box set³⁵ and a Vox article from 1996³⁶ – plus the shorter initial week-long promo tour James and Richey were meant to be leaving for the morning he left the Embassy hotel, and at least two European dates in mid-February. This would have meant another month and a half at least of travelling and a grueling gig schedule. This is important both because that would be a fairly reasonable amount of money to bring for an overseas tour if the band’s per diem was fairly low, and because the number of dates meant Richey would be spending quite a long time in a place he had already established a pretty solid dislike for.^note

Rachel recounts the police showing up at her parents’ home at 3 in the morning about three weeks after Richey first disappeared; they “searched all through the property and out into the back garden” but weren’t specific about why they were searching aside from its “relation to Richard going missing.” In a 2020 interview, Rachel elaborated that the police implied that they assumed Richey’s disappearance was a PR stunt and were searching the Edwards’ home “because they thought that they had set it up and that he was hiding in there.”³⁷

The chapter moves on to the various reports of sightings of Richey. Two sightings occurred in Newport; both witnesses came forward in late February 1995, about a week after the appeal was publicised. In one sighting, David Cross, an acquaintance of Lori Fidler – an American fan and pen friend of Richey’s – spotted Richey outside a newsagents in Newport and briefly spoke to him about their mutual friend. Cross reported that after he and Richey parted ways, he saw Richey “get into the drivers seat of [his] car and drive away in the general direction of the bus station.”³⁸ In the second sighting, a taxi driver reported that on 7 February he was called to pick up a customer, who requested that they drive in a large circle through northern Newport, to Pontypool, and then to the Aust Service station on the English side of the Severn Bridge. This person had “dark brown collar-length hair”³⁹ and had a cockney accent that “sounded very much put on.”⁴⁰ The person didn’t know his exact destination and said that “he was looking for his boss who had driven a lorry to South Wales from London and had broken down somewhere in Gwent.”⁴¹ The driver took him to Blackwood bus station, then to Pontypool Railway station, and then to Aust Services, taking the “scenic route”⁴² at his request. The authors point out certain discrepancies that don’t fit Richey’s description, such as the individual’s hair length, accent, and height as reported by the taxi driver, but reason that Richey could have made an effort to disguise himself.

The authors speculate a connection between the two Newport sightings, hypothesising that the taxi sighting might not have been Richey in a wig with a false accent, but rather “someone in contact with Richey […] from within the music industry […] or even an old friend”⁴³ or that it might have indeed been Richey in disguise, looking for “a missing contact crucial to his plans”⁴⁴ who he had failed to meet up with in Newport.

Strangely, Roberts and Noakes don’t include or mention the claim that Richey had allegedly phoned Lori Fidler at some point on 2 February. An anonymous tip stated that an American girl had answered her phone and heard a “quiet, tired voice” on the other end. Lori Fidler said that her “girlfriend took the call on February 2, the day after he went missing. There was that beep-beep on the line showing it was from overseas. The man on the other end just said, ‘Hi Lori,’ and then hung up.”⁴⁵ She believed it was Richey who had called, although she later said she may have thought incorrectly, and that it might have been wishful thinking on her part.⁴⁶

A third sighting, over a year later in late 1996, was an apparent sighting of him in Goa, India, “very sunburned and [with] matted long hair”,⁴⁷ getting on a bus with members of a hippie commune. A fourth, in 1998, occurred in Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands; a barmaid witnessed someone verbally point a stranger out as “Richey from the Manic Street Preachers”,⁴⁸ after which the stranger fled. Allegedly, Rosie Dunn, journalist and friend of Richey’s from the Priory, flew out to Fuerteventura for the Sunday Mirror, attempting to track him down, to no avail. Another sighting from December 1998 occurred in Lanzarote, also part of the Canary Islands, when a woman saw “a young man playing guitar very quietly”⁴⁹ on the street outside a block of flats. The last occurred in October 2004 also in Lanzarote, when a vacationer allegedly spotted Richey and chatted briefly with him, and also noticed that his arms were wrapped in fashionable bracelets and rag-like fabric as if to hide scars or marks that might have been them.

Vyvian Morris, the vacationer who apparently spotted Richey in Goa in 1996, “later claimed to have regretted going public with the information, causing stress and palaver for Richey, who ‘had worked so hard to gain this anonymity.’”⁵⁰ The authors make it seem as though Morris only expressed remorse at his decision after a longer amount of time had passed, when in fact he expressed regret just days after the rumour broke.^{51, 52} I really respect his realisation that whatever it is Richey did, he did it for a reason and that should be honoured. Amusingly, in the very next paragraph the authors discuss tabloid journalists that flew to Goa to attempt to get a scoop, who simply encountered various foreign hippies residing in India. They speculate that the hippies “doubtless viewed the hacks as emblematic of the kind of tawdry life they were escaping.”⁵³ They’re certainly ones to talk. It’s ironically self-confident to call other people “hacks” in a book like this one.

Roberts and Noakes, oddly enough, don’t go into any other detail of these sightings, even the slightly more believable ones in Newport. They don’t appear to have attempted to contact these people who reported sightings to hear them retell or explain their versions of the story, even though they seem to want to investigate all the other details. Despite being so obsessed with Richey’s disappearance and the idea that he potentially had planned it for a long time, and despite attempting to wrench evidence of that theory from Richey’s oeuvre, they do acknowledge that there is scepticism about the sightings because they are “largely based on one person’s reportage,”⁵⁴ and the witnesses may not be credible due to potential wishful thinking, and that the sightings are simply a “testament to the continued general fascination with Richey Edwards.”⁵⁵ They then reiterate that this fascination “leads us to the central, over-arching question of this book: just what happened to him? And, specifically, and not over-fancifully, is it possible that the clues that he apparently scattered during his life could even help us to unravel the mystery of his vanishing?”⁵⁶

If they’ve already gone through so many supposed ‘clues’ and sightings and haven’t really gleaned anything that can be actually properly connected, I doubt it. However, in the next chapter, they try to spin as many speculative scenarios as they can think of, mainly with the help of various pieces of literature in Richey’s massive collection.

Citations

A Critical Analysis and Review of Withdrawn Traces Part 5  →

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