More Theories! More Literature! More Clues!
Chapter 12 begins with a quote from The Denial Of Death by cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, describing the human desire for immortality, to live on and “stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else”1 as the universal raison d’etre. Becker’s book reorients Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, placing death in the space where Freud found sexuality as psychology’s linchpin. Becker theorises that the ultimate human desire is to live on symbolically after death, and man attempts to leave something symbolic of himself behind after death because “his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own self-worth, an idea composed of sounds, words, and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper. And this means that man’s natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasures of incorporation and expansion, can be fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols and so unto immortality.”2 The authors use this quote to explain that “central to this book’s view of Richey has been precisely this aspect: namely, his blatant efforts to pursue his own transcendent symbolic meaningfulness, via the modern medium of rock music.”3
It’s perplexing to me that they can say this and mean Richey’s disappearance. Not only does interpreting Richey’s lyrics and other artistic efforts as an attempt at “transcendent symbolic meaningfulness”4 reduce him to a fictional mythical hero rather than a living person, it reduces his intellectual and artistic merit to an afterthought as well. Roberts and Noakes imply that Richey’s apparent desire to leave that “mark” on the world was not a desire to be remembered as someone with something to say about the world, not as someone with well-researched, solidly formed thoughts about history and current events and an artistic platform to express them, but as a sort of existential and symbolic question mark due to his disappearance. They don’t bother looking at what Richey was doing with his lyrics in terms of social and political critique, in terms of expressing his and others’ struggles with mental health, or expressing the anxiety of the increasing speed of the world via capitalism, media and mass culture.
By focusing on clues and symbols about his disappearance that were allegedly left in his work, the authors imply that the most important thing he left behind was the act of disappearing, rather than his thoughts and opinions about history, the world around him, and his own experiences. It implies that the most important thing Richey could think of to leave behind was the lack of himself and the mystery, rather than the outside-looking content of so many of his lyrics, which were meaningful because they included but also reached beyond personal emotions. They look out into the social and political world, and force listeners to become politically aware themselves if they want to understand the feelings they identify with in the songs. For the authors of Withdrawn Traces, the “immortality project” Richey was working on, the one he intended to leave behind as his magnum opus was not the body of work he had written with all its complex emotional, political, and artistic effort, but the enigma of leaving no trace, of nothingness.
This interpretation of Richey’s intentions is baffling and also a bit frustrating because there are multiple quotes from him in which he communicated an aspiration to express a certain “mood and a time”,5 and a desire to capture certain concepts or truths in lyrics,6 to inspire audiences to educate themselves,7 as well as stating that he had something to say and had a goal of saying it in a way that feels perfectly contained.8 The authors just seem to ignore these statements in favour of the view that Richey’s most important and impactful act was to vanish. So much for the attempt to “reclaim him from the rock mythology that surrounds him.”9
Ernest Becker’s theory, the authors explain, is that “mental illness is really a general theory of the failure of death-transcendence.”10 A person can embed a simultaneous avoidance of life and fear of death so deeply into their personality that they are “unable to exercise the ‘normal cultural heroism’ of other members of the society.”11 Continuing along this line of thought, Roberts and Noakes say that “Richey’s vision for what the Manic Street Preachers could signify was more deeply embedded in immortality-games and heroics than his three band members.”12 For some reason, they seem much more focused on proving that Richey was obsessed with the kind of success that centred around getting to number one in the charts and finding industry popularity, rather than the success of expressing himself and getting his ideas across. They posit that “disillusionment with the less precarious path the band were taking saw him plunge into deep depression,”13 because “he was faced with the prospect of keeping his head down in a mid-ranking careerist band in which he was not even the best guitar player”14 (a strange departure from their earlier theory that Richey’s hatred of his instrument was simply an act in order to ‘preserve his soul’). So, did Richey want to become highly successful and reach number one, or did he want to express himself in creative and lyrically unprecedented ways, which would inevitably be more difficult for the mainstream to swallow? The authors can’t seem to decide. They claim that Richey’s severe depression which led up to his suicide attempt was caused not by stress and grief of losing a friend on top of untreated mental illness and addiction, but by the failure of Generation Terrorists and Gold Against The Soul to be truly successful, and the “deepening dread sense [sic] that his strategy was coming apart.”15
It’s rather forced theory; the rhetoric about getting to number one and exploding into success dropped off sharply after the failure of Generation Terrorists. James Dean Bradfield acknowledged that it was part of the early myth-making to generate publicity,16 and Richey even dismissed their own naivete at believing they could have become so wildly successful so quickly only weeks after the release of Generation Terrorists,17 and reiterated the sentiment in 1993.18-20 In July 1994, Richey explained that the band had continued working after the failure of Generation Terrorists to explode into popularity because “We’re in it primarily for ourselves, and think that we’re doing something worthwhile.”21
Looking at both the lyrics of The Holy Bible and the unedited versions of the Journal For Plague Lovers lyrics, as well as the various stories about the conflict regarding the band’s musical and lyrical future after The Holy Bible, such as Richey’s desire for their fourth album to have a sound inspired by a combination of Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, Nine Inch Nails, and Pantera or Einsturzende Neubauten,22-24 it seems that by the end of the Gold Against The Soul tour, Richey turned to an attempt at creating intense, imagistic and complex pieces of lyrical expression rather than anything radio-friendly or potential insta-hit material. Even before they had begun recording, the band as a whole were planning to go somewhere even darker with The Holy Bible,25 and were aware that the album had “no commercial concessions on it whatsoever – from the artwork to the lyrics to the music,”26 especially compared to the musical zeitgeist of the mid-90’s and the steadily growing hype of Britpop.27 The band admitted to being uncertain about the album’s commercial viability, but said they were happy that its creation was “more natural”28 than that of Gold Against The Soul. Nicky Wire mentioned in The Holy Bible 10th Anniversary documentary that when “we went to the NME Awards, it was the height of Britpop. And we were just sat huddled in the corner dressed like these military outcasts, and we just felt brilliant. We felt like this is where we should be, just looking really odd in the corner but feeling utterly united,”29 so even at the time they were very aware of being aesthetic and sonic outsiders, rather than a band with a true chance at a big hit right out of the gate.
Roberts and Noakes seem to claim that the “excruciating compromise”30 of not exploding into success the way that the group had imagined at the start, and having to continue on as a member of an average rock band that didn’t quite fit in within the midst of Britpop hype was apparently the one major thing that pushed Richey over the edge. “We know that he had attempted suicide before, and so he may have done so again on 1 February 1995,”31 they write, and speculate if Richey then spent the rest of 1994 after his first suicide attempt deciding how to leave the band and also stay alive.
The possibilities of how he may have done this, they say, “boil down to three fundamental hypotheses.”32 The first one, which they call “the ‘common sense’ view”33 is that Richey committed suicide after parking his car at the Aust station. They do admit that “Richey’s condition in the months prior to February 1995 lends great weight to this suicide hypothesis.”34 That is all they have to say on the subject of the possibility that Richey may have died by suicide. They seem to place this course of action first on the list just to get it out of the way as quickly as possible, so that it’s not at the forefront of the reader’s mind while reading the rest of their theories. Immediately, the theory of probable suicide is appropriated for use as a bridge to the various disappearance theories, with the idea that the appearance of a suicide may have been used as a sort of red herring to “provide something of an alibi.”35
Roberts and Noakes pause in their theories for a moment and digress into targeting the band themselves, snarkily commenting that “the remaining Manic Street Preachers’ private opinions on Richey’s likely fate appear to be quixotic and somewhat self-contradictory. Strangely, they have managed to simultaneously hold to the firm conviction that he is likely still alive, while apparently not trying everything to trace their vulnerable friend and bandmate.”36 They band hired a private investigator37, 38 and did what they personally could in the weeks after he was first reported missing. In the present, there’s not much they could do that hasn’t already been done, especially after so many years. And throughout the years, the Manics have expressed an increasing acknowledgment of Richey’s choice, and seem to have eventually accepted that whatever it was he did, it was his decision and they respect that. Nicky has said that he finds comfort in “just the fact that he was in a Vauxhall Cavalier was much more Reginald Perrin than Lord Lucan. It’s real. He was genuinely doing what he had to do.”39, 40
The authors criticise the band’s comments about Richey’s disappearance, saying that they “seem to be relying on several hopeful thoughts: that, placed beyond public view, Richey’s health problems did not worsen; that some harm has not been done to him by others; and that their own vivid imaginings in rock mythology have, in this instance, become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Apparently, the band hope Richey has overcome all obstacles in his desire to become a mythical figure. Yet in the weeks before disappearing he was […] very visibly unwell. What evidence is there to support their belief?”41
This criticism is wildly hypocritical, coming from a book that has just spent a whole 230 pages talking about how Richey was aware of his rock mythology, claiming that he had been leaving behind clues this whole time and that he’d planned his disappearance and is likely still alive someplace. Roberts and Noakes have cobbled together ridiculous and reaching arguments for the various ‘secret messages’ in Richey’s lyrics and reading material, claiming that he had been thinking about staging a disappearance for years, and later in this current chapter they will present half a dozen ‘what if’ scenarios about his potential disappearance, but here they turn around and criticise Richey’s bandmates for hoping maybe he is alive but respecting his decisions and his anonymity. Roberts and Noakes have consistently referenced Richey’s detailed knowledge of and obsession with rock ‘n’ roll mythology and legend, with the implication that he wanted to join this cultural pantheon and would go to great lengths in order to do so. Hasn’t their whole ‘Richey was leaving secret messages in his lyrics’ theory also been assuming that his plan was formulated years in advance with that knowledge of the nature of rock mythology, rather than being a consequence of his health problems worsening, some harm coming to him, or simply being the result of a suicidal breakdown? In that case, the theory of Richey enacting long-term planning means that disappearance was a definite choice. Roberts and Noakes cannot dispute the same argument they have been making for the entirety of the book in order to paint the opinions, thoughts, or actions of the remaining members of the Manic Street Preachers in a negative light.
The authors advise the reader that the “alternative theory that Richey Edwards survived is, of course, far more attractive, tantalising, and yet still impossible to prove.”42 But there are another fifteen pages of bullshit trying to prove it, or at least theorising about it. That they criticise the remaining Manics for hoping Richey is still alive and then move on to this exercise in speculation in support of the same theory in an even more sensationalised and absurd manner is a blatant display of hypocrisy. How can Roberts and Noakes claim Richey was contemplating disappearance for years before 1995, then criticise the remaining band members for expressing some unspecified wish that he might be alive and happy? The remaining members of the Manic Street Preachers have expressed vague hopes that Richey might still be alive, and sometimes have allowed themselves to indulge in ‘I hope he’s out there doing [x]’ or ‘I imagine he would have ended up like this in the future’ scenarios. But they don’t theorise publicly about the details of his disappearance or go down ‘what if’ rabbit holes; their idealistic speculations hinge on Richey’s talents and interests, their knowledge of him as a person, and their affectionate desires for what they hoped he’d have become.43, 44 The theories presented in Withdrawn Traces are a series of conspiratorial, fantastical conjectures based more on rumours or interpretations of symbolism than on facts.
Roberts and Noakes start this series of speculative and interpretative activities by pointing out connections between Richey and a few literary references made by the band about authors who ‘disappeared.’ First are the number of references to J.D. Salinger made in the early days; the authors reference comments made by both Nicky and Richey in EP magazine45 and on Vivid TV46 about Salinger retreating to a bunker to remain reclusive and write. Both quotes are from 1991. Interestingly, on the forum of Manic Street Preachers’ fan site foreverdelayed.org, there is a post by Roberts under her handle “SHR”47 asking if the band has ever mentioned or quoted Catcher In The Rye or Holden Caulfield in their lyrics; there were no responses from any other users, and from my own research, the Manics have only ever mentioned Salinger and his works in interviews. I also tried to find any references Richey made to Salinger after 1992, but I could find none. This early reference is used by Roberts and Noakes to express a sort of amazement that a “rock band advertising the desire to suddenly vanish from view”48 at the beginning of their career “then went on to lose one of its members in circumstances of great mystery.”49
The authors also make a connection to “another of Richey’s favourite writers,”50 William S. Burroughs, as someone who engaged in “mythologising disappearance as a positive action”51 due to his many years in self-imposed exile in various countries. They also mention Burroughs making a “virtue of the act of ‘cutting’”52 – both his famous cut-up writing method and “severing ties with his immediate surroundings.”53 However, they neglect to mention that despite exiling himself to countries such as Morocco, Paris, or Mexico due to being on the run for numerous criminal offences, Burroughs generally stayed somewhat in contact with his friends and contemporaries, exchanging letters with and sometimes meeting up with fellow writers like Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Alex Trocchi, and Jack Kerouac, among others, as well as continuously publishing works from abroad.
As the last of this first set of literary associations, Roberts and Noakes connect Richey’s disappearance to French nineteenth century poet Arthur Rimbaud, who gave up writing poetry at age eighteen, retreated from public view, travelled around Europe, attempted to write some articles on his exploration of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) as its first European resident, and eventually resurfaced about 6 years later as a gun-runner in Africa.54 Quoting a 2013 article from WalesOnline in which James mentions that he was the one who introduced Richey to Rimbaud’s work, the authors highlight his comment that “there is a kind of terrible irony there, because I remember I bought into the whole enigma of Arthur Rimbaud, the poet, when I was young. One of the only books I’d given Richey that he hadn’t read was A Season In Hell by Rimbaud, the book that created this interesting myth around the poet.”55 In the same interview, Bradfield also mentions that the band were big fans of Joy Division, who have their own myths surrounding them as well.
But Roberts and Noakes take this quote fully to the brink of exaggeration, theorising that James’ “remark seems to suggest that, had Bradfield not introduced into Richey’s consciousness the mythology of the exiled poet, things might have turned out differently.”56 For some context, that specific section of the interview with James Dean Bradfield discusses the rock n’ roll myth of Richey’s disappearance. Bradfield mentions that when they were fans of Joy Division, they would “delve into what Ian Curtis stood for and what happened to him,”57 but that “to actually become part of some rock n’ roll myth is not a pleasant experience.”58 To somehow spend this whole book building up Richey’s repertoire of references of disappeared and exiled individuals from even before his university days, only to turn around and apparently blame James Dean Bradfield for introducing Richey to the concept of the “mythology of the exiled poet”59 is absolutely absurd. It is especially strange, because much earlier, in chapter 7, the authors claim that “throughout Richey’s teenage years and up until the end of his time with the band, he referenced Rimbaud continuously,”60 which would mean Bradfield’s statement conflicts with their claim that Richey was not friends with the rest of the band until the last year of his time at university.
Roberts and Noakes claim that “the exile of writers [like those mentioned] suggest a route by which a living writer may experience a flavour of immortality while still alive.”61 They then claim that “in those last months, Richey took definitive measures to link himself with Rimbaud,”62 citing the white boiler suit on which he had scrawled lines from A Season In Hell. They reference pictures of him wearing the boiler suit in Montparnasse cemetery and in the catacombs; these photos were from the same shoot on the same day, and both were published in an interview with Simon Price for the 3 December 1994 issue of Melody Maker.63
The selection written on the back of Richey’s outfit [image] reads “Once, I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed. Alas, the gospel has gone by. Suppose damnation were eternal! Then a man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?”64 Richey has in fact spliced the opening lines of the first, titular, section of the poem with three lines from the third section, titled “Night Of Hell.”65 In the first section of the poem, Rimbaud’s speaker describes the loss of youthful innocence and a willful entrance into abjection, revelling in being an outsider and in the grotesqueness of self-destruction.66 In the “Night Of Hell” section, he describes the experience of being confronted with the realisation that despite being baptised against original sin, he has still committed personal sins, and found strength in them through the othering they caused him. In this segment he continually expresses and then rescinds a desire for healing and change. Ultimately he ends the section with a desire for suffering because he does not yet have the strength for change and repentance.67
About Richey’s scrawled-on clothes, Roberts and Noakes ask “was this, in hindsight, a deliberately placed pointer, left for those seeking answers after his disappearance?”68 Considering that Richey omitted certain lines around and between the sections he had selected, and that those sections are not specifically about disappearance, but about self-destruction and personal sin, depression, and the self-perpetuating nature of misery, which culminate in the frustrated speaker remaining mired in abject otherness rather than being able to return to repentance and society, I’d imagine they’re more likely references to his mental illness and perhaps a desire for some sort of healing, and, if we want to reach a little but not too much, perhaps a reference to the media’s obsession with his self-harm. Since at least a third of the Manics’ lyrics at that point were references to literature and history, a literary reference written on Richey’s clothes is not at all unusual, and this is not the first or the last instance of quotes on Richey’s clothing.
Instead of focusing in on the selections Richey took from A Season In Hell and adorned his boilersuit with, the authors instead focus on the second section of the poem, titled “Bad Blood”.69 They explain that in this chapter “Rimbaud distances himself from bourgeois standards, likening himself to various exotic races”70 and point out that within this segment he “is compelled to overseas adventure.”71 The authors then state that “these references prove that Richey was at the very least cognisant of disappearance as a romantic trope.”72 I’m sure Richey was aware of this, but since he doesn’t actually reference that section of the poem, I’m not sure that this interpretation is very well supported in regards to the references to A Season In Hell. If they claimed their theory was based specifically on what Richey had omitted, it would make sense, but they’re talking about references he made directly. The sections that contain the lines Richey highlighted on his boilersuit do not mention disappearance or sailing; they are focussed on other, more internal subjects.
The next selection of literary interpretations are based on a list of what Jo remembers from contents of the box Richey left behind, as sourced from a letter to Rachel. Evidently Jo did not keep the box or didn’t remove it from storage for this correspondence. Roberts and Noakes claim that “the level of disappearance- and exile- oriented content in that box is extraordinary.”73 The contents as recalled by Jo include Camino Real by Tennessee Williams, “Nietzsche”74 (not specified here but later revealed to be The Anti-Christ), “a rubbish book by a young middle-class girl”,75 “some sort of [extract that was a] testament to socialism”,76 photos of W.B. Yeats’ London home, Equus by Peter Shaffer, and a note that referenced Novel With Cocaine by M. Ageyev.77 Oddly, Jo’s list implies that the Ageyev novel itself was not in the box. Also, the VHS tape of Equus directed by Sidney Lumet and the VHS of Mike Leigh’s Naked, which have been listed as part of the box’s contents in previous publications78-80 were not mentioned at all in this report. Nor is the note saying ‘I love you’, although the authors (or Jo) may have left that out because it would be difficult to analyse without actually seeing the item, or because they had nothing new to say about it.
Before they go on to discuss the various references to disappearance and other ‘clues’ in the contents of the box, the authors first focus on the unidentified “rubbish book by a young middle-class girl,”81 which included a note from Richey suggesting that Jo write a book herself. The authors presume that “he meant a memoir culminating in her time with him. This lends credence to her suspicion that Richey may have been ‘manipulating’ his experiences, even their moments together, to the point of ‘acting out’ for narrative effect.”82
This is such a strange interpretive leap. I’m not sure why Roberts and Noakes would assume Richey wanted Jo to write about him. They don’t give any more specific information about the contents of the note, and if Jo’s letter elaborated on it or on Richey’s stated intent, that’s not included. I don’t understand how they could make such an insensitive assumption about Richey’s behaviour. This idea that he was “’acting out’ for narrative effect”83 rather than as a genuine reflection of worsening mental health and/or a cry for help is perplexing and seems illogical given the extremes he went to, or the authors’ own claims that the band didn’t notice or care about Richey’s deteriorating state. Does that mean Richey’s prior suicide attempt, his alcoholism, his anorexia, his multiple instances of self-harm that required stitches, his depression, intrusive thoughts, and erratic behaviour were all just a performance so someone else might potentially write some good content about him? He was part of a middle-range rock band that was somewhat well known in the UK, not a world-famous one. Is that much hurt and trauma worth a little bit of hypothetical future publicity? A person does not go through the kind of suffering and pain, both mental and physical, that is expressed by cutting oneself so deeply, or refusing to eat for days on end and becoming so harshly underweight, or drinking oneself into a stupor, just for the purpose of someone else’s narrative benefit after the fact. And if someone really is ‘performing’ mental illness for attention or to manipulate their loved ones, they probably have some other mental health problem that no one is addressing. Perhaps the authors have never experienced mental illness or mental distress before, or did no research on maladaptive coping mechanisms as a symptom or characteristic of depression and other psychiatric issues. But to put this assumption into print as something to actually consider is such a heartless dismissal of Richey’s experiences and struggles, it almost makes the rest of their theories completely pointless, because they clearly don’t view his pain or his problems as real.
For the rest of Roberts and Noakes’ discussion and analyses of the contents of the box, I am going to try, as best I can, to provide a fuller summary of the texts than they do, either to support my critique of their interpretations or to provide context where the authors fail to do so.
Starting in on the contents of the box with identified sources, Roberts and Noakes begin with the play Camino Real by Tennessee Williams, whose major themes include freedom, anti-fascism and the “mutations” that “archetypes of certain basic attitudes and qualities” would go through “if they had continued along the road to this hypothetical terminal point.”84 That is, it is about the slow narrative decay that might occur to archetypal characters after the novel has ended, the loss of freedom – and the desire to reclaim it – when confronted with a dead end of life. Williams initially described it as “a plastic poem on the romantic attitude toward life”85 and the narrative explores these protagonists of popular romantic novels as they are confronted with the barrenness of the end of an idyllic life once their initial story has closed. It is also about the importance of community and mutual support to inspire hope for rebellion against and escape from the power of fascistic control as well as the fear of the unknown. But, as the introduction by John Whiting points out, the characters are also aware that “if the barrenness of the body and the land seem unbearable, well, there is always the gas oven. And the street cleaners.” The play’s subjects are always aware of the inevitability of death, as well as the power of choosing death over allowing a fascistic governing body to decide when you go. The question for every character who is desperate to escape is “How to get out of this place?”,86 and if they cannot escape, the question becomes “How to die with dignity and honor and gallantry?”87
To the authors of Withdrawn Traces, this play is important not because of its political message of anti-fascism or notable for Tennessee Williams’ perpetual themes expressing the despair of alienation or the positivity of finding connection between alienated individuals. Instead, it is important because the characters in the play include a number of literary “legends”88 including Lord Byron, Don Quixote, the titular Camille of the Dumas novel, and Casanova, and because the characters “retain some hope”89 for escape – fitting their theme of disappearance. Roberts and Noakes identify the main character Kilroy as an antihero, which is interesting as the other literature-based characters all also fall under the category of antihero in their own original literary pieces. But the authors pick him out because “Richey underscored lines spoken by one character, Kilroy.”90 In Jo’s list of the box’s contents, which were provided “from memory”,91 the list item regarding Tennessee William’s play simply reads “Camino Real with Kilroy underlined.”92 If Jo somehow remembered verbatim and clarified which lines by Kilroy were underlined, or how many within the text, the authors have failed to supply that information. They do not give an example of any of the marked lines. Instead, they explain that the character of Kilroy is significant because he “neither understands nor accepts the rules of the situation and rages against his confinement, embodying American optimism and boldness,”93 emphasising specifically his desire to escape the town as the important part of their interpretation.
In Camino Real, Kilroy functions to some extent as the narrative focal point. He is a former American boxer who finds himself in Camino Real, a Mexican town controlled by a fascistic hotel proprietor, beyond which is the “terra incognita,”94 a barren wasteland whose unknown qualities prevent the residents from leaving. Those who do want to leave are desperate, alienated, and mostly penniless. They ricochet between hope and lack of it, and are gripped more than anything by a desire for autonomy and to “do what I want to do,”95 though the control of the proprietor over the town prevents them from acting in the ways they want to. The only way in which the authors connect the play to their theory that all of Richey’s selections are about exile or escape is their claim that “Kilroy yearns to escape via the only possible way out – an aeroplane named Il Fugitivo.”96 This is nit-picking but again it is an example of the kind of strange fudging of summaries and interpretation that the authors go through in order to bend narratives to the interpretation they want to put forth: Kilroy does not attempt to escape in the scene where people are trying to board the plane. The primary direction in which he attempts escape is up the stairs toward the ‘terra incognita,’ where, until the final scene, he repeatedly finds himself frozen in fear of the unknown and unable to venture forward.
The general theme of Kilroy’s desire to escape is the extent of the analysis Roberts and Noakes put into this play. The escape itself is a rebellion against fascist control, and there is an important message of community and mutual support which is a key factor in both retaining hope and succeeding in escape from fascism or death as an irrelevant unknown. The rest of the characters attempting to escape the town fail to board the departing plane because they fight each other rather than working together. Kilroy does not escape Camino Real alone; it is Don Quixote who encourages him to leave and offers to help, and together they escape into the unknown ‘terra incognita.’ Similarly, the two characters whose chance of escape is implied at the end of the play, Casanova and Marguerite, are the only other two willing to work together to rebel against the proprietor’s fascistic control. While this play’s narrative does explore major themes of escape from death, control, or irrelevance, part of its moral is that those who are unable to cooperate and who are trapped by fear or extreme individualism will not be able to escape at all, and that connection and support between other people who are lost or alienated is an important part of finding freedom.97
The next piece of literature on the list is Equus by Peter Shaffer, which “evidently held great importance for Richey, having also […] been chosen as the vessel for his earlier suicide note the previous year.”98 Equus is a play in which child psychiatrist Dr. Dysart acquires a new patient, a teenage boy named Alan Strang, who has blinded six horses with a hoof pick. Dysart is in the middle of his own doubts about his profession and his ability to help the troubled children he treats, and his attempts to treat the young man amplify these insecurities. Roberts and Noakes do a good job describing this aspect of the play, and the way “the story revolves around [Alan’s] discussion with […] Dr Dysart, and his impact on the doctor, who comes to realise that his own life is safe, unimaginative, and lacking passion”99 and that the psychiatrist, whose job is to make his patients fit to function in society, “comes to realise that straightening Alan out in this way is ‘more likely to make a ghost!’”100
The authors connect Dysart’s revelation to Richey’s time in hospital after his breakdown. But instead of using the themes of Equus as a way to critique Richey’s lack of adequate treatment or the effects a ‘standardised’ type of mental healthcare might have on someone with more complex problems, they imply that Richey had perhaps made himself mentally unwell on purpose:
“Nicky Wire reckons Richey arrived well-prepared for his dealings with psychiatrists, and his use of Equus prior to entering the Priory suggests as much. It also adds to the list of texts Richey referenced dealing with mental hospitals, psychiatry and madness – leading even his sister to question whether he may have willed himself into certain institutions.”101
Once again we’re seeing a strange sort of blame placed on Richey for his problems. There’s also this assumption that Richey had a desire to ‘will himself’ into institutionalisation, an aspiration that seems antithetical to the themes within the texts he consumed prior to his hospitalisation – that mental institutions or hospitals in general are often upsetting, abusive, ruinous, or unhelpful. Why would Richey have “willed himself into certain institutions”102 if the books and other media he consumed about the subject mostly painted them in an extremely negative light? Why would he ‘will himself’ into hospital if he knew from his literary selections that he would end up feeling like he wasn’t being helped or understood or that “they would just believe that something was wrong with me if I went and sat in the bushes with a camouflage hat on and pretended I was in some kind of war.”103 The comment from Nicky that the authors reference above also implies that Richey was wary of institutional treatment, since Wire mentions that Richey’s reaction to the therapy portion of his treatment was something along the lines of “you can’t trick me!”104 But the authors certainly don’t seem to be implying that Richey felt he actually needed help and that in order for people to listen to him he felt that he needed to go to extremes. Yet again Roberts and Noakes seem to be implying that Richey deliberately did this to himself, that he wasn’t suffering from overwhelming mental health problems, but that for whatever reason he decided that he was going to behave in certain ways until he ended up institutionalised because….why? Rock ‘n’ roll mythology? I cannot for the life of me understand why someone would ‘will themselves’ into an institution or into such extreme behaviour if they weren’t anything but suffering and desperate for help.
The second major theme of Equus is not, as the authors suggest, simply “repressive Christianity”105 and the “repressive nature”106 of Alan Strang’s parents, but specifically the conflict between his atheist father who is so mid-century socialist as to be nearly conservative (disallowing television and holding intellectualism as far more important than blue-collar jobs), and his Christian mother who is concerned with her son’s happiness but also goes behind her husband’s back to teach him religion. Both parents are consumed with the conflict of their own opposing morals, and yet neither parents’ opinions overshadow the other, which means their son is trapped in a divided state, struggling to reconcile the two conflicting ideologies he has been raised with. The onset of puberty and sexual desires find him grappling with feelings of guilt and purity which he does not know how to confront in a way that peacefully combines both parents’ ideals. That Roberts and Noakes do not point this out is interesting, considering that in chapter 10 they discussed Richey’s own conflict between his need for meaning that religion might have provided and his scepticism of religion, even saying that he “must have felt like he was split in two.”107
Alan Strang’s attempt to reconcile the two opposing ideals of his parents materialises in the creation of an imaginary horse god-slave Equus, an expression of the passion and reverence and fear of a godhead as well as the desire for human control over this godlike entity. The Christian fear expressed in his mother’s remark of “God sees you. God’s got eyes everywhere”108 is tempered by the boy’s control over his horse-god when, in the dead of night, he secretly rides the real horse that stands in as its representation. In the end, with the effects of psychological treatment, Strang faces the potential loss of his worship and reverence and the passion the doctor is so envious of, the loss of connection to a spiritual entity, and therefore a loss of identity. But he is also confronted with the frightening prospect of freedom from being watched, a loss of guilt or fear of divine consequence. In the final moments of the play, Dr. Dysart admits in a monologue to the audience that whatever treatment he gives the boy will destroy a part of Alan’s self, will maybe one day leave him ‘normal’ in the eyes of society, but will also leave him with trauma and a feeling of grief or emptiness.109 The play asks its audience, What is suffering worth? What is sacrifice worth? Is taking away a person’s paganistic passion so that they can live a life that is ‘acceptable’ in the eyes of society worth the flatness of the life they will subsequently live? Is it right to try and change someone if that change will ultimately destroy a fundamental part of themselves?
If the message of this play is ultimately a condemnation of the ruinous nature of psychiatric treatment for people whose passions, habits, or behaviours are seen as incongruous, unacceptable, or uncomfortable in the eyes of society but may in fact be positive or neutral to the patients in question, why would this mean Richey had any sort of desire to will himself into an institution?
Roberts and Noakes flip-flop drastically between claiming Richey was extremely mentally unwell and obviously genuinely suffering, and claiming that he was faking it in order to become a rock ‘n roll legend. Richey was severely unwell if they are talking about his relationship with the rest of the band, but when they’re just talking about him, he was planning his own personal mythology and behaving accordingly.
Novel With Cocaine, a novel published pseudonymously in the Russian literary magazine Numbers in 1934, is the next item of focus, although the authors’ written description and the transcription of Jo’s list seem at odds here. Jo’s list includes “the Vadim Maslennikov note beside his bed,”110 seemingly implying that it was not the entire novel but a quote or passage from the text written down, as ‘Vadim Maslennikov’ is the name of the novel’s main character. She also “recalls handing the book over to Richey”111 in early 1994. The authors state, however, that “a copy of the Ageyev book was lying right there in the room.”112
They neglect to give context to the few pieces of information known about the actions of the author of Novel With Cocaine. The only English translation of the novel that would have been available to Richey in 1994 was the 1984 translation by Michael Henry Heim, who states in his translator’s introduction that “all that has come to light is this: ‘Ageyev,’ a Russian émigré living in Istanbul, wished to move to Paris and establish his reputation as a writer there. Encouraged by the reception of Novel With Cocaine, he sent first a short story, then his passport to a friend in Paris. The short story was published, the passport lost. […] The most probable of the speculations about his fate is that he returned to the Soviet Union, and any émigré returning at the time of Stalin’s purges faced almost certain arrest and deportation to the death camps.”113 In 1986, the English translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Enchanter included an essay written by Nabokov’s son and translator Dmitri Nabokov, in which he discusses the origin of the Ageyev manuscript, which in the late 80s was briefly rumoured to be a piece by Nabokov. Dmitri Nabokov elaborates on the author’s life, explaining that not long after Novel With Cocaine‘s first publication, “a Russian lady in Paris named Lydia Chervinskaya”114 was tasked with finding Ageyev. He was eventually discovered in Istanbul “confined to a mental institution because of tremors and convulsions.”115 Ageyev became friendly with Chervinskaya’s family after they rescued him from the institution, and confided to them his real name “Mark Levi – and his complex and motley history, which included the killing of a Russian officer, flight to Turkey, and obsession with drugs.”116 He travelled to Paris with Chervinskaya but eventually “returned to Istanbul, where he died, presumably from the consequences of cocaine abuse, in 1936.”117
Roberts and Noakes tell us that “Novel with Cocaine has fascinated Richey fans for the fact that its author handed over his manuscript for publication then fled without trace [sic], never to be heard from again. Was this a duplicate scenario – Richey leaving a blindingly obvious heavy hint of his survival?”118 Truly the most curious thing about this assumption is that the obvious interpretation is right in front of their faces – Richey handed over the binder of lyrics that would eventually become Journal For Plague Lovers to his bandmates in a notebook in the weeks before he left – but they ignore it completely in favour of looking at an even weirder and more unbelievable ‘clue’: Richey’s passport and the mysterious figure of Vivian.
Because acknowledgement of Journal For Plague Lovers generally goes against their theories, the authors seem to feel they need a stronger connection between Richey’s actions and those of the author of Novel With Cocaine. “If that notion seems tenuous,” they continue, “we can reveal an even more remarkable parallel. When Ageyev delivered his manuscript to a friend, he also gave them his passport. Similarly, on the evening before he disappeared, Richey was in his hotel room with a female friend, Vivian, and, according to reported remarks by Nicky Wire, made repeated offers for her to have his passport. Take it, he kept saying, he wasn’t going to need it.”119 Roberts and Noakes claim that it was “surely no coincidence” that Richey was attempting to give up his passport, since a copy of Novel With Cocaine was in the room with him at the same time.
This new anecdote about Vivian is different from the information stated in a 2017 article in which Rachel Edwards was interviewed, which claims that “the day before, he had left an instruction to a friend to read the introduction of a novel about a man who vanishes after spending time in an asylum.”120 Whether this claim in the Telegraph is based on an interpretation of previous secondhand rumours that Richey gave a friend a copy of the novel before he disappeared,121, 122 or if it was confirmed in the interview by a direct comment from Rachel is unclear.
There is, however, an origin for Roberts and Noakes’ theory, though it is only vaguely similar. In an article for The Independent in 1996, journalist and Manics fan Emma Forrest claimed that “the night before he disappeared, Richey gave a friend a book called Novel with Cocaine, and instructed her to read the introduction.”123 Forrest gives no other information about her source, or about the exact date or time of the encounter, whether she meant the night of 31 January or 30 January, nor does she mention Richey’s passport. Roberts and Noakes do not name her or mention her claim at all while discussing this theory about Vivian.
It bears reiterating some of the questions I asked when Vivian was mentioned earlier: How exactly did Nicky Wire get this information, if he was at home in Newport while this interaction occurred, and James Dean Bradfield was out with friends, and did not speak to Richey when he returned to the hotel? Who told Nicky this? Where are these “remarks,” plural, by Nicky, and who reported them to the authors? If they’re in an official statement, why not supply it? They’re certainly not in any interview I could find. Or, if they didn’t learn about the incident from Richey, how did Vivian contact the members of the band and tell them this information without it becoming important? The authors seem to be quoting Richey’s alleged conversation with Vivian verbatim, but how could they know what was said if the information was relayed to Rachel via Nicky, who was not present and would somehow have had to learn about the incident after the fact? How have we never heard about Vivian before? When did the band tell Rachel about this person, and why wasn’t it revealed in any earlier interviews with Rachel in which she asked for information about Richey’s disappearance? Rachel and the remaining band members were still in regular contact in 1997124 but Rachel has not spoken to them since 2012,125 and they did not participate in the making of this book, so there is no way they were the ones who provided Roberts and Noakes with this anecdote.
There is absolutely zero context or clarification about how anyone knows anything about this incident, and it makes it hard to believe. The way it is written also seems like an attempt to imply that that the band are keeping information from police or investigators, since nothing is quoted, and all references to Vivian are “reported remarks”126 or “as confirmed to Rachel by the band”,127 but no concrete information, no direct quotes from anyone who allegedly has information, and no commentary that doesn’t sound slightly libellous towards the remaining members of the Manic Street Preachers in the oblique implication that they have knowledge about Richey’s disappearance that they have not shared with investigators or police.
The subject of Vivian is dropped from here on out, for the most part. As with the anonymous roadie, anonymous nurse, summaries of Jo’s letters, and various uncited or potentially fabricated anecdotes and quotes, the information we are given here could almost sound credible – but not quite – and is just vague enough to be unable to verify in any way, with the sources lacking any specificity and the story lacking any truly identifying features. The problem with these uncited anecdotes is that a number of them hold just a little too much detail or specificity for someone remembering a moment or two spent with a brief acquaintance twenty-five years ago. And the anecdotes quoted or summarised from some older written sources are too vague to verify.
Returning to the examination and interpretation of the box’s contents, the authors move on to the text by Nietzsche. They assume first that whatever unidentified “ode to socialism”128 Richey included in the box was probably “a counterbalance to the kinds of politics usually associated with Friedrich Nietzsche.”129 Despite having no knowledge of what the unknown text might have been, or what its more specific content was, they immediately assume that Richey meant it to offset the Nietzsche. There is no explanation as to why they think Richey might have been deliberately looking to supply two texts to balance each other out. The other books on the list don’t seem to be intended to create balance or juxtaposition, so why apply that logic to these two texts?
Apparently, in her letter, Jo started to write the title of the book by Nietzsche, then crossed it out, but later confirmed that it was indeed The Anti-Christ that was included in the gift box. The amount of space Roberts and Noakes actually spend on the text of The Anti-Christ compared to the space spent interpreting Richey’s intent through Nietzsche’s other works is one paragraph out of the six about Nietzsche.
First, they note that Thus Spoke Zarathustra “fits perfectly with the running theme of exile,”130 because the titular character leaves home at thirty years old for a “new life in the wilderness”131 and an ascetic, solitary existence for ten years. He then returns to civilization, having been alone long enough that he now wants to find disciples with which to share his thoughts and intellectual revelations. Despite only discussing the opening pages of Zarathustra, the quote the authors subsequently supply is from about one-third of the way through the text, in the chapter titled “Of the Land of Culture”. The authors note that “Nicky Wire has openly pondered”132 whether Richey would have done something similar, if he might disappear only to reappear years later with a brilliant novel written or similar piece of incredible art created. They also briefly mention the lyrics to ‘Judge Yr’self’, the song that was supposed to be written for the soundtrack of the 1995 Judge Dredd film, pointing out a similarity to Nietzsche’s theories of the Apollonian and Dionysian in The Birth Of Tragedy, as well as the opposition to Christianity that appears in many of his works.
Next, they discuss The Anti-Christ and the excerpt they have chosen from it, which reads,
“The most spiritual human beings, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in severity towards themselves and others, in attempting; their joy lies in self-constraint: with them asceticism becomes nature, need, instinct.”133
The Anti-Christ is Nietzsche’s polemic against institutional Christianity, what it views to be ‘virtues,’ and its manipulation or misuse of the idea of virtue and sin in order to control the masses and oppose the creation of a higher man. It is also an outline of his own ideas of values for this higher man, and the aspects of behaviour and life that will help usher in the creation of the Ubermensch. Many of the criticisms laid out in The Anti-Christ were likely in conflict with the explicitly Christian values of the Alcoholics Anonymous-based therapy Richey had undergone during his time in treatment.
In the chapter of The Anti-Christ that contains the aforementioned quote, Nietzsche discusses the values laid out by Christianity compared to the values of the Manu Law-Book, or the Hindu Manusmriti. He points out that law books (like the Bible or Manusmriti) “summarise the experience, policy, and experimental morality of long centuries”134 of religious authorities seeing what does or doesn’t work, and codifying practices into law once they demonstrate their usefulness, rather than creating new values from scratch. He establishes that the laws in these books must “be made unconscious” by refusing to admit to that initial experimentation and insisting that “God gave it.”135 The law-books must follow a “natural order”136 with humanity that creates castes of people which forms the basis of society. Those castes consist of the “predominantly spiritual type, the predominantly muscular and temperamental type, and […] the mediocre type.”137 Each have their place in the hierarchy, with the mediocre type being the majority that forms the base and the spiritual type being the highest and “the very few.”138 These spiritual types are the most intellectual and therefore are also the only ones allowed to represent and express beauty, benevolence, and happiness; they are the caste that will usher in the creation of a higher man. The spiritual types are forbidden pessimism or a view that makes the world seem ugly, and subscribe to an ascetic ideal of philosopher-priests, in which they focus on themselves and their desire for knowledge, their intellectual instinct to “say yes to life.”139 This highest caste of the spiritual are the opposite of Christian priests, who are selfish tyrants who find intellectualism a threat: the knowledge-hungry spiritual types “rule not because they want to but because they are,”140 with the other levels of the castes forming the scaffolding that allows them to work towards the creation of the Ubermensch.
From the selected quote, the authors pose that “supposing Richey pursued such a life of asceticism as a positive option in 1995 – would that not require his becoming a completely transformed person?”141 My most pressing thought upon reading this theory is – how would this work? Clearly most of 1994 was a fairly good example of how much asceticism wasn’t working for him. He was already dealing with anorexia, with self-harm, and his original breakdown was, it seems, at least partly a result of both literal isolation in his flat and feelings of psychological or emotional isolation. Obviously we have seen how those forms of physical asceticism turned out for him. It is very, very difficult for someone who associates with those types of behaviours in a negative or unhealthy way to completely flip them around into something actually, properly positive – at least in the way that the authors are proposing. Things like ascetic spiritual practices can be extremely triggering for people who are working toward recovery from eating disorders – even those who have had proper treatment, which Richey never seemed to get for that specific problem. Severe self-isolation like that implied in Nietzsche’s ascetic character of Thus Spoke Zarathustra can also be a pitfall for attempting to recover from or stabilise long-term depression.
If Richey was struggling mentally, if he had potentially relapsed and begun drinking again as the contents of his abandoned car suggest, do the authors really think he would have been able to treat asceticism as a positive force? Especially after the kind of conflict with religion and increased focus on Christianity he was expressing in late 1994, it would more than likely have fallen under the type of Christian asceticism that Nietzsche criticised in his 1887 book On The Genealogy of Morality. He criticised the kind of Christian asceticism that “makes the ill more ill”142 by convincing the sufferer that their personal character and their guilt, inadequacy, or sin is the cause of their own suffering, rather than the outside world, and that their suffering through asceticism is a punishment for such things. Because Christian asceticism uses negation of life to turn ressentiment into guilt and sin, rather than turning to true spirituality, it only exacerbates neuroses or ailments, and “those who are sick, out of sorts, depressed, then such a system makes the sick, even supposing that it makes them ‘better,’ at all events, sicker.”143 Asceticism used in this way means the individual is “from now on […] a hen imprisoned by a chalk line. He can no longer get out of this chalk circle: the invalid has been transformed into ‘the sinner’”,144 and the ultimate result is “a shattered nervous system, added to any existing illness”145
(This tyrannical Christian asceticism is similar to the way the Alcoholics Anonymous treatment system functions: you only succeed in the programme if you are 100% abstinent. If you relapse it’s not the treatment that’s failing, it’s you. If you relapse or slip just one time, your ‘days sober’ resets to one. Through this system, you are made to feel like one mistake has undone all of your progress, and “you can’t avoid feeling like a failure, because that’s exactly what the system is designed to tell you.”146 It’s all-or-nothing, which exacerbates any feelings of shame upon relapse because of the inevitable guilt at not being able to complete the programme, which can lead to people falling into the guilt-ridden, self-blaming mindset of ‘Well, I’ve already failed, so I may as well just keep drinking.’)147
Roberts and Noakes expand their Nietzschean train of thought by theorising that Richey’s potential conquering of his demons and transformation into another person may be explained by Nietzsche’s theory of the Dionysian, which was mentioned in the chorus to ‘Judge Yr’self’. The authors postulate that Richey embodied Nietzsche’s Dionysian state, as explained within a fragment in The Will To Power, whose aspects consist of “an urge to unity, a reaching-out beyond personality, the everyday, society, reality, across the abyss of transitoriness: a passionate-painful overflowing into darker, fuller, more flowing [sic] states.”148, 149 [Note: The translation they seem to have used, that of Walter Kaufmann, originally contains the word “floating” rather than “flowing”.150] Roberts and Noakes claim that “automatically, we think of the various reported sightings of Richey internationally”151 because he had survived but his appearance had changed so drastically, supported by “his new passion, Friedrich Nietzsche”.152
Directly quoting without citing Otto Bohlmann’s book Yeats and Nietzsche: An exploration of major Nietzschean echoes in the writings of William Butler Yeats,153 the authors explain that Nietzsche’s Dionysian hero “yearns to become his opposite, his anti-self”.154 This text is not cited in the body of Withdrawn Traces nor in the bibliography, but they allow the context to imply that it is a direct quote from Nietzsche’s texts rather than Bohlmann’s discussion specifically of Yeats’ book A Vision. Roberts and Noakes again quote without citing, “He gains from this creative conflict with the opposite of his true being. The intellectual thus becomes the anti-intellectual man, of ‘perfect bodily sanity.’”155 Here, the authors have slightly re-worded passages from a few pages of Bohlmann’s text as well as using some direct quotes without clear citation. They also fail to include the final passage from the section on self and anti-self: “What we are lies neither in the self nor the anti-self alone. We are the product wrought from the struggle to obtain their union.”156 They then propose that Richey used Nietzsche’s idea of “self-overcoming”157 to overcome his “strong pangs of guilt”158 and “become his opposite”,159 which would explain how he “may have become such a barely recognisable person, post-disappearance.”160 However, they do not make it very clear why they assume that Richey’s adherence to Nietzsche’s philosophy might have transformed his appearance into something unrecognisable.
As he describes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the concept of self-overcoming would not require Richey to become an entirely new person, or to become his opposite. Rather, Nietzsche proposes that when one commands oneself, one most follow one’s own rules and claim responsibility for one’s own actions: “Yes, even when he commands himself: then also must he make amends for his commanding. He must become judge and avenger and victim of his own law.”161 With a will to power, a man alone creates his world, gives things meaning. Life, and the great man, are “that which must overcome itself again and again”162 because constant conflict means constant change, and for Nietzsche, the man who can withstand suffering and see it as creation and progress is the stronger man. Typewritten above the lyrics to ‘Judge Yr’self’ is a quote from the chapter on self-overcoming: “The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger and play dice for death.”163, 164 In the same description of the Dionysian from The Will To Power quoted above, Nietzsche continues, describing the Dionysian state as “the feeling of the necessary unity of creation and destruction.”165 It is unclear why this unity between creation and destruction, individual as judge and victim, self and anti-self, that Yeats and Nietzsche both explored equates to a complete change in appearance for Roberts and Noakes.
My concern with the authors’ focus entirely on a Nietzschean interpretation of Richey’s lyrics and actions is the conflict obvious within both from mid-1994 onward. It is clear from interviews, lyrics, and anecdotes that Richey was grappling with two very different and opposing concepts: Nietzsche’s ideas of will to power, self-overcoming, the significance of knowledge, and nonconformity, and the Christian concepts of guilt, purity, sin, and asceticism. This straightforward interpretation advanced by Roberts and Noakes greatly simplifies something that was obviously a much more complex and convoluted issue in Richey’s life.
Robert and Noakes wonder if Richey was conscious of the idea of the Ubermensch or Nietzschean Superman “as he counted down to retirement.”166 (A bizarre phrase; perhaps they were attempting to reference ‘Methadone Pretty’? If so, they did it badly.) He clearly was well aware, considering how often the themes of Nietzsche’s theories also crop up in other songs like ‘Faster’ and ‘Removables’, as well as the rest of the band’s references to Richey’s use of Nietzschean ideas both in lyrics and elsewhere.167, 168 The authors also mention that Nietzsche’s Ubermensch theory was a major inspiration and influence on comic book characters and themes, and they wonder if Richey was aware of that as well. Most likely, as he was an extremely avid comic book fan and probably knew the smallest references, such as the main character in the politically and philosophically contemplative story “America,” featured in the first seven issues of 1990’s Judge Dredd Megazine, growing up in ‘Fred Nietzsche block’,169, 170 as well as references and inspirations in other comics series.
The subject turns to comic books and Richey’s date planner, which displays a “picture of Spiderman in action”171 on the front. In the whites of the eyes, Richey wrote “I love you”172 (stylised as ‘I ♥ u’) [image] and the inside cover features a “monochrome picture of Spiderman, and Richey has written a speech bubble for him, saying: ‘Spidey say, Call myself Lyla-May.”173 The authors wonder if this was just “idle doodling”174 or some sort of secret, humourous message that he was “about to launch himself into a probably self-defeating transfiguration,”175 implying that he associated his planned disappearance and change in persona with becoming a comic book character. They wonder if he was moving toward a less public existence, “to explore what he needed to become”176 and ponder whether he “would become…what? A superhero? Even if only to those willing to receive the signs, and the wherewithal to interpret them.”177
It could have had some special significance to Richey, or it may be “idle doodling.” Often a doodle truly is just a doodle; not everything writers put down onto paper is significant. Sometimes it’s something they think sounds good or has a nice visual, or sometimes it’s just a silly sentence that’s in their head. I imagine Richey was not exempt from this habit of writing down random, contextless phrases.
The authors also fail to explain what this exact reference is from. Maybe it was cut for space, or maybe they just neglected to supply the information or didn’t even know it was a reference. “Lyla-May” is likely a reference to Spider-Man 2099, a series begun in 1992 which shows a future version of Spider-Man living in the year 2099. ‘Lyla’ is the holographic AI assistant to this future Spider-Man, a man called Miguel O’Hara. She has a number of forms, usually appearing as a Marilyn Monroe-esque movie starlet, but at one point in issue #2 she briefly appears in the form of original Spider-Man Peter Parker’s beloved Aunt May, a digital ‘skin’ which O’Hara commands her to delete.178-181 It is unclear if this Spider-Man datebook was included in the box Richey left at the Embassy Hotel and was the alleged note he left saying “I love you”, or if this was just a kind of focal interlude, as it was not included in the list supplied by Jo.
Now Roberts and Noakes turn back to the listed contents of the box, focusing on the photograph of W.B. Yeats’ house at 23 Fitzroy Road in Primrose Hill. They explain that this house was “formerly the residence of Sylvia Plath, and earlier still of Irish poet W.B. Yeats.”182 However, rather than looking at Sylvia Plath, of whom Richey was a known fan, they state that “Jo sees Yeats as the likely inhabitant of interest. There is an obvious overlap between the works of Nietzsche and Yeats; the German philosopher profoundly informed the Irish poet.”183 If they’re going to be making all these connections to Richey’s works, I’m rather surprised that they leaned into Yeats and not Plath, considering one of Richey’s last completed works was ‘The Girl Who Wanted To Be God’, whose title references an entry in Sylvia Plath’s published diaries and correspondences, written when she was just seventeen about her anxieties regarding her future and her self, writing,
“I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day – spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free… I want, I think, to be omniscient. I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.’ Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be – perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I – I am powerful – but to what extent? I am I.”184, 185
However, Roberts seems to have deemed this path irrelevant, at least partly because it seems as though despite the lyric itself being completed before the session, Richey did not hear any demoed versions of this song. In a ForeverDelayed.org forum entry186 under her handle “SHR,” she asks if The Girl Who Wanted To Be God was one of the songs demoed in Surrey before Richey’s departure. Various answers from other users confirm that Richey did not hear the song, as it was produced in late 1995 or early 1996 by Mike Hedges rather than during the demo session at the House In The Woods studio.
Instead of taking the route of Plath – who would also move thematically away from their theories of disappearance, since she struggled with lifelong depression and committed suicide at the age of 30 in the house at Fitzroy Road which is the subject of Richey’s photograph – they decide to look at Yeats. This is an unusual decision, if their intention is to assume that Richey’s choice of the photograph was deliberately symbolic, as Yeats only lived at that location as a young boy, from the ages of about two to nine, before his family moved elsewhere.187 If Richey was meant to have chosen a location that was symbolic or meaningful to Yeats’ poetic or dramatic works as a clue, then he might have chosen a photograph of 5 Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury, where Yeats lived and wrote for nearly 25 years.188, 189
If Jo really saw Yeats as the “likely inhabitant of interest,” I would be curious to know what, aside from Yeats’ connection to Nietzsche, prompted this. Richey was fairly vocal in interviews about his literary interests, and his lyrics are full of references or even lines taken directly from other sources, some vaguely reworded, some used verbatim. There is no indication in any of Richey’s interviews, lyrics or other published written works that he had an interest in Yeats, or a depth of knowledge of the writer that would indicate an awareness beyond Yeats’ poetry.
Yet again, Roberts and Noakes directly quote Otto Bohlmann’s book Yeats and Nietzsche without citation, claiming that “following Nietzsche, the heroes of Yeats’s plays embody the Dionysian ‘insistence on strength and will, passion, self-sufficiency, solitude and boundless self-overflowing.”190 They do not give any specific examples of which characters from which plays, or why those characters embody Nietzsche’s theories, or even whether Richey had read any of Yeats’ works outside of his most well known pieces of poetry. It is unclear why they think that Yeats’ plays support their theory that Richey planned to disappear, or why Nietzsche’s Dionysian traits automatically imply disappearance. There are connections between Nietzsche and Yeats, and between Nietzsche and Richey, but no connections between Richey and Yeats. Still, Roberts and Noakes claim that “Nietzsche and Yeats, considered together, add fuel to the theory of pre-meditated disappearance”191 and decide to look into the connection between Yeats and Nietzsche, searching for “which elements common to the both might be relevant.”192
Their research for this section seems to be almost random, as they list off five of the various books found in the Cardiff University Library on the subject of William Butler Yeats, and claim they are searching for “something relating Nietzsche with Yeats with millenarianism? Or possible content linking heroic exile, mythology, modern history and the occult?”193 Their final selection which they do actually cite in the body of the text (though not in the bibliography), a book called Yeats and the Poetry of Death – Elegy, Self-elegy, and the Sublime is chosen at least partially because “The Poetry of Death was Richey’s first suggested title for what became The Holy Bible.”194 However, this is incorrect. In the 2014 BBC Radio 4 Mastertapes programme presented by John Wilson, Nicky Wire mentions, in response to a question about division of labour on the album, that “my original title for the album was ‘The Poetry Of Death’.”195 He also mentioned it was his title in an NME article from August of the same year196 and in the track by track commentary included in The Holy Bible 20th Anniversary booklet.197 Was this an intentional omission of information, or did Roberts and Noakes simply not see these interviews and misunderstand the few smaller articles that mention said title suggestion without attributing the origin? It is unclear, but the assumption that the ‘Poetry of Death’ title was Richey’s idea colours where they go next, which is the final line of Yeats’ famous 1920 poem “The Second Coming” which references Bethlehem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”198 They claim that “Yeats’ famous poem ‘The Second Coming’ also feels like it has much in common with where Richey’s mind was travelling through that final year.”199 A majority of the interpretations in this section seem to be directed by that phrase ‘feels like’, assumptions based on how the authors feel rather than on any concrete connections or evidence.
At this point I can’t help but imagine a chaotic collection photos and documents tacked to the wall with red string connecting them, because Roberts and Noakes make the most ridiculous theoretical leap here. They write, “Bethlehem. In his last weeks, Richey spoke repeatedly of wanting to go to Israel.”200 They then posit that because Richey titled his last album The Holy Bible, read many religious texts, and apparently mentioned a desire to go to “the Holy Land,”201 perhaps he was potentially assembling a “personal mythology for himself”202 and planning to go to Israel. I assume the alleged mentions of wanting to go to Israel were in passing conversation with family, because they don’t exist in any interviews and the remaining members of the band have never mentioned or referenced this desire, and it is well-known that Richey disliked travel.203, 204 And although this whole book is hinged on mostly ignoring the Journal For Plague Lovers lyrics, looking at the unedited lyrics on the deluxe album, as well as a number of quotes from Richey about the Christian nature of the Alcoholics Anonymous programme he was in during his time at the Priory and his own fluctuating thoughts on religion,205-209 there’s a lot of religious conflict apparent in the texts, so it would not be a surprise if said “poring over countless religious texts”210 was less about a desire to run away to Israel and more about an attempt to straighten out a complicated and confused belief system that had only become more so after treatment, as the authors and Rachel have both already pointed out earlier in this text.
“The Second Coming” is arguably one of the most famous poems in the English language; that the authors claim they had to do massive amounts of research about Yeats and Nietzsche in order to make a shallow interpretation based on the poem’s final lines is absurd. These interpretations don’t seem to have any basis in any of Richey’s written material or anything expressed by him. The authors claim that “sitting surrounded by decades of research on Yeats, the relevance becomes obvious to us, and it feels certain that Richey took a photograph of the Yeats commemorative plaque […] with some definite sense of purpose.”211 (Now they are claiming he took a photo of the plaque, when previously they claim the whole house was pictured.) This laser-focus they have on a single word in Yeats’ most famous poem, without taking into account the context of the poem as a whole or its place in history, is the same kind tunnel-visioned analysis they enacted on The Holy Bible lyrics. It is insulting to Richey’s intellect to assume that he made a similar kind of shallow interpretation of a poem with such overtly political themes.
The authors then reveal an aspect of Richey’s mental state that perhaps would have been very important to consider in the days and weeks after his departure, but seemingly was not taken into account then. The authors hypothesise that the desire to travel to Israel could be because Richey may have been “acquiring a ‘Messiah complex’, and losing his sense of reality completely.”212 According to Jo, Richey feared losing his sanity or felt his sense of reality slipping, and experienced severe anxiety about being left alone in his home, thinking that “something bad is going to happen if I stay in this flat.”213 In a letter to Rachel from 1995, Jo says “I know I should have asked him about the voices. […] It was as though he felt he had no control over his own thoughts.”214 Maybe this did come up in later official police documents somewhere, but that seems like a fairly important detail to me. It certainly might have affected whether or not the case was treated as though Richey was a danger to himself. Due to this information, the authors wonder if Richey had experienced a psychotic or schizophrenic break, or was headed in that direction towards the end.
Once again, they mention Sylvia Plath in connection to the photograph of W.B. Yeats’ house, acknowledging that Richey would have known about both previous inhabitants of the building. But they very quickly redirect the focus from Plath’s suicide in the house in Primrose Hill to the idea of Richey perhaps instead choosing to vanish for some reason, proposing that the “picture may be read in favour of both hypotheses – suicide and survival.”215 If Richey was aware of both inhabitants, yet he was trying to send a specific message or leave a specific clue with the inclusion of the photograph, why would he invite misinterpretation of his intentions by choosing a location with multiple famous inhabitants? I’m not sure why this paragraph and the earlier information about Sylvia Plath were not supplied in the same place, and instead are separated by a good two pages of information about other things. Throughout the interpretation of The Holy Bible, the authors claim that the clues Richey allegedly left in the lyrics were proof of a deliberately planned disappearance; now they are claiming that either interpretation is applicable. Strange that they have suddenly changed their tune.
A similar organisational oddity occurs in the next paragraph: we return to the subject of Israel and Richey seeking spiritual interests elsewhere in the world, which was discussed a mere three paragraphs ago, for some reason separated from this paragraph by unrelated information. The authors write,
“Researching this book, we happened across someone who had heard this theory many times. […] We approached her not to enquire after disappearance theories but to find out about an aborted tattooing session that Richey had booked in January 1995.
As we talked, the woman said: ‘Most people think he went to Israel, don’t they?’
‘Do they?’ we asked.
‘Yes, living on a kibbutz.’”216
A 2019 interview with Sara Hawys Roberts about the book’s release gives a little more context to this encounter. She explained that “co-author Leon went for a haircut in Cardiff and started talking about Richey. The lady cutting his hair said ‘he’s actually living in a kibbutz in Israel, everybody knows.’”217 The authors claim to have dismissed this theory until Rachel also mentioned that Richey had been talking about going to Israel. And apparently, because Richey was “acutely aware of the counting down to the end of the millennium,”218 this somehow conjures up the idea that maybe he was planning to vanish into the Middle East until the turn of the millennium, only to make a dramatic return with a new masterpiece. Which he quite obviously did not do.
“Is this too fantastical?”219 the authors ask. The obvious answer: yes. Generally, if most people are going to answer ‘Yes that is completely ridiculous’ to your question, maybe you should stop theorising and, I don’t know, go outside.
But instead, Roberts and Noakes return once again to Dante as yet another clue that maybe Richey went to Israel. Returning to a subject discussed two chapters earlier, they point to one of Richey’s Dante tattoos as “supporting evidence”220 of this theory. The design on Richey’s right arm depicts “a diagram of the entry to hell, below Jerusalem, based on an illustration from a 1949 pressing of Dante’s the Divine Comedy.”221 It is the first drawing in Dorothy L Sayers’ translation of Inferno, printed on the page facing the start of the first Canto.222 Jerusalem, in Dante’s work, is at the centre of the known inhabited world (the northern hemisphere), and is directly opposite Mount Purgatory on the longitudinal line. So, in Dante’s construction of the afterlife, the final circle of Hell is at the centre of the earth, with Jerusalem and Mount Purgatory standing as exact opposites on either hemisphere.223, 224 The drawing by CW Scott Giles depicts Jerusalem with Hell beneath, the path Dante and Virgil walk to reach the base of Mount Purgatory, and the mountain itself.
The authors describe a number of photos of Richey displaying his new Dante-themed tattoos to professional photographers and fans with cameras. They specifically describe one which was “evidently taken by a fan gazing up from street level,” which depicts “Richey on the Manics tour bus. Through the misty window, he is captured pushing aside his sleeve to show the Jerusalem shoulder.”225 [image] Looking at these photos, the authors wonder, “Was he perhaps anticipating that people would later scrutinise and interpret just these kinds of clues?”226
What clues? That he was showing off his new tattoos? Many of the photos of the band from the early days also featured Richey showing off his ‘Useless Generation’ tattoo. It is not at all unusual for someone who has just acquired new tattoos to show them off in photos; they are personal decorations and usually people are proud of them. I’m also uncertain how this could be such concrete evidence that Richey might be going to Jerusalem, especially as the city features only briefly at the very beginning of Inferno. It is interesting that this is the angle the authors take in examining Richey’s tattoos, as it requires of them very little examination of the actual texts of Dante’s Divine Comedy with all its political and religious themes that were radical for its time.
Dante himself is also added to the list of people who “have lived or written about a life of exile”227 that the authors have been using to prove that Richey apparently exiled himself. Dante Alighieri wrote his Comedy “following his enforced exile from Florence in 1302, the result of political rivalries.”228 The political rivalry referenced by Roberts and Noakes was essentially a tug-of-war between two factions of the Guelf political party in Florence; Dante was a magistrate in Florentine court, but a moderate, and he subsequently banished two of his close friends who were on opposite sides of the conflict. Eventually, one faction overpowered the other with the help of a corrupt pope, and Dante was tried and convicted of “graft and corruption in office.”229 He would have been burned at the stake but was absent from the city and therefore became an exile under threat of death if he did return to Florence.230
The authors then move away from the items found in the box that Richey left behind at the Embassy Hotel, and instead focus on his personal bookshelf in general. They seem to cherry-pick various books from his shelves at random, just choosing the ones that have references they could potentially use to corroborate their ‘planned disappearance with intentional clues’ theory. Only a few of these texts or authors have been mentioned by Richey in the media, though that doesn’t necessarily mean they weren’t of importance to him. But I do wonder how exactly they are choosing which books they should look at and which ones they don’t need to analyse. It’s not as though they were able to go into his abandoned flat and see which books were stacked by his bed or something like that, and it’s obvious from the few photos we have of him in his flat just how many books he owned.
In an interview with 3AM Magazine, Sara Hawys Roberts mentioned this section of the book and the examination of literary references as secret clues, saying “What he was capable of I’m not sure. What band before has ever talked about the perfect disappearance? As far back as 1992, they were referencing JD Salinger.” The interviewer, Guy Mankowski, replies “Yeah, but they were referencing a lot of authors.”231 And this is the issue: Richey – and the band as a whole – was constantly referencing authors, novels, historical events, politicians, other bands, current affairs and thinkers in everything they did. Picking and choosing just a few as secret messages seems like an absurd endeavour in the face of this mass of references that the Manics found and displayed like intellectual magpies.
But, as stated at the beginning of this review, the early framing of Richey’s life as fitting easily into Joseph Campbell’s mythic structure as well as the continual referencing of Richey’s alleged desire to turn himself into a rock ‘n’ roll myth has set the reader up to easily accept these literary interpretations, because at this point Richey’s life story is being framed as similarly fictional, similarly literary. From here on, Richey becomes a figure like a paper doll or a choose-your-own-adventure protagonist, a character and a story ripe for speculation and able to be manipulated at will. He is no longer a person but a concept in which to plug theories or characteristics based on the fictional characters in books he read or on various hypothetical scenarios later crafted by Roberts and Noakes. Richey’s humanity, the image of him as a real person, which flickered in and out of view for most of this book, vanishes almost entirely behind literary analyses and later exercises in narrative conjecture.
The first ‘clue’ Roberts and Noakes find by picking a book off of Richey’s shelves is in Hart Crane’s works. Crane was a Modernist poet whose major work The Bridge, much like the works of many of his contemporaries, contends with the struggle to express new experiences like industrialization and world war without the help of the inadequate forms and ideas of old. The Bridge symbolically crosses all of America’s territory and history by way of a subway journey in New York City, trying to reconcile the modern need for constant forward progress with the suffering of entropy and potential failure. Crane “saw the poet as reflecting the central problem of the society in which he lived, and the poet’s solution to the problem – if he could achieve one – as having consequences far beyond the poet’s private life.”232 To do this, he rejected “the great mythologies of the past”233 and tried to find new symbolism in modern imagery, in order to somehow find hope in the hardships and uncertainty that comes with progress. Crane, as the authors note in Withdrawn Traces, committed suicide in 1932 at the age of 32 by jumping from the stern of a boat into the Atlantic ocean; his body was never found.
The poem the authors reference as a “clue”234 is not The Bridge, but a poem written by Crane circa 1918 called Exile [link], which had the “corner folded over”235 in the book from Richey’s collection which the authors examined. Roberts and Noakes do not describe the content of the poem, analyse it, or discuss it any further except to note that Richey marked the piece with the folded-down corner and that it happened to be titled “Exile.” The poem’s epigraph, “(after the Chinese)”236 reflects the American Modernist interest in Asian art, writing and culture.237 The short poem, which is two stanzas of four lines each, depicts a speaker missing their lover, feeling the way the “distance again expands / Voiceless between us” and yet experiencing that feeling of distance making the heart grow fonder, as “love endures” and they think more fondly of their lover each night.238
The next paragraph contains a reference point that doesn’t seem to indicate or yield any ‘clues’, and Roberts and Noakes don’t extrapolate any or expand on how it supports their theory. It is therefore unclear why they included this text in their list of apparent literary evidence towards Richey’s orchestrated disappearance. The authors simply note that James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner was on Richey’s shelves. They point out that the narrative questions whether the main character “is tempted by the Devil”239 or has gone insane, and that the writing, which has “an element of meta-fiction”240 that gives it “self awareness as a constructive narrative”,241 makes the text “very Richey.”242 That’s the extent of their discussion of Hogg’s novel. No clues, no analysis; it’s as if they just wanted to say ‘Look, we know what Richey was reading!’ But so does everyone; he referenced books in most interviews that he gave. It almost seems as though they were running out of books they could bend to their desired narrative, so they just stuck this reference in here without doing anything with it. It’s a very odd, nearly empty addition to the list. They give a poor summary of the novel and fail to mention that it was a satirical critique of Calvinist religious fanaticism and related totalitarian thought, or that the main character commits suicide at the end, driven to it by the torment of the devil that has possessed him and by the crimes he committed in a state of possession.243
Briefly, Roberts and Noakes also mention Richard Bach’s short story Jonathan Livingston Seagull as a text on Richey’s shelves, but do not analyse it other than supplying the quote, “I don’t mind being bone and feathers, I just want to know what I can do in the air and what I can’t, that’s all.”244 However, they do fail to mention that the book is a religious allegory for the story of Jesus Christ. The titular seagull feels different from the other gulls in his flock, more interested in learning new ways to fly than in getting food. He teaches himself flying tricks and is banished from the flock for his nonconformity, and forced to wander without a community. Instead, he goes to a different dimension for gulls that are similarly inclined; when he has learned enough, he returns to his flock to spread the teachings he has learned. Bach’s sequel, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah,245 is simply name-dropped as something that “perhaps Richey also read.”246 Illusions is about a pilot’s encounter with a modern reincarnation of Jesus Christ who teaches him how to become messiah-like, which anyone can do because miracles are just “illusions” created by accepting that one’s life and the world around him is infinitely malleable once he stops enforcing limitations on it and himself. The final message of the book is the importance of the recognition of free will, one’s own power, and that people should do what they want and what makes them happy, so long as it hurts no one else.
Another novel retrieved from Richey’s shelves is Six Miles To Roadside Business by Michael Doane, published in 1990. The summary by Roberts and Noakes describes a main character who “goes off into the desert wilderness […] to discover his true self and becomes the reluctant leader of a small hippyish cult.”247 The authors connect this novel to Richey’s apparent “known interest in the Reverend Jim Jones and the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana”248 as well as the “cult components in Apocalypse Now.”249 They also connect this novel to the “images [that] come to mind of that dreadlocked Richey spotted in Goa or the Canaries.”250 I cannot find any references made by Richey to Jonestown or Jim Jones, so this implication of a widely “known interest” that Richey had seems to perhaps be in fact confined to his family or close friends. The cult components of Jonestown and Apocalypse Now also don’t quite fit with the theme of the novel, since both Jones and Kurtz created the ‘cults’ surrounding them, built them up, led them, and ultimately were the cause of their own undoing as well. This is not so with the main character of Doane’s novel, which is in fact a main component of the novel.
In Six Miles To Roadside Business, the main character, Vance Ravel, is not a “reluctant leader” of a cult as Roberts and Noakes describe; he is a reluctant and unwitting prophet. Another man named Gazer is the leader of the cult, and builds it up around this idea of Ravel as a prophet. The plot of the novel explores Ravel’s search for spiritual truth and peace in the face of the unknown, and his eventual acceptance that the reality of the truth, while more difficult to accept, will bring more peace than a search for some metaphysical answer.
As this book seems to be relatively unknown, I’m going to give a better and more complete summary of its storyline and themes. The novel’s conflict begins in 1957. When main character Vance Ravel was six years old, his father, a military officer involved in nuclear warhead testing at the Nevada Test Site, was dying of cancer due to radiation exposure, and “walked into the light”251 – committed suicide by walking directly into ground zero of a nuclear warhead test shot – and no body was ever found. The father’s experiences and his decision to commit suicide in order to allow his family to get insurance benefits are explained through flashback chapters from the father’s perspective. When Ravel is an adolescent and old enough to understand the unknowns regarding the loss of his father, he becomes obsessed with the idea that if there was “no body, no gravesite”,252 it means there was no death. It consumes him until it morphs into general rebellion, drugs, antagonising his neighbours, and experimenting with every religion and spirituality he can find in order to find some sort of ultimate peace or truth that might explain his father’s actions and settle his own inner turmoil. As an adult, he eventually tires of this erratic life and moves to a canyon 40 miles away from his hometown with his wife and child to find temporary solitude and “a vacation from the planet.”253 But a strange man named Gazer comes upon them while he is travelling across the desert, and when Vance tells him the story of his father “walking into the light” and explains his theory that his father may still be out there because there was no body, Gazer decides that this is the man with the spiritual knowledge and destiny he has “been looking for in every corner of the earth”,254 and sends letters to his friends and disciples, encouraging them to come to the canyon.
Gazer turns Vance Ravel into a reluctant and unwilling prophet, starting a cult and painting Ravel as “something more than just one of their number”255 in the eyes of the other members, creating a “theocracy”256 in which Ravel is the idol and Gazer is the ruling priest. Ravel at first refuses to fully participate until Gazer threatens to kill or otherwise dispose of him if he doesn’t, even going as far as murdering a woman who tries to leave the cult in order to send Ravel a message. Ravel’s wife leaves him due to his participation in the cult, taking their son with her. Eventually Ravel is forced to burn down the entire community so that he can leave without being killed. He wanders for three years, picking up odd jobs and travelling the U.S. Then he finally returns home, and must work to regain the trust of his wife, child, and his former neighbours, who are wary of him due to his previous association with the now-dispersed cult members. He must reconcile with the single remaining youngest cult member who resents him for leaving and is in a similar place of inner turmoil as Ravel was when he was young.
There is no twist in this novel; the reader knows the truth of what happened to Ravel’s father the entire time, and the point is watching Ravel wrestle with that reality. Eventually, he realises that the cult was the consequence of his rejection of the truth that his father deliberately died in a nuclear test explosion so that his family would receive insurance benefits from his death in the line of duty. He learns that he must accept the fact of his father’s death, because he recognises that the search for some ultimate metaphysical answer has been more damaging to his own life and the lives of others around him than the basic reality of the truth.257
Next, a fairly good summary of A Happy Death by Albert Camus – yet another book on Richey’s shelves – is supplied by the authors: “Patrice Mersault goes on the run from Algiers, seeking happiness and a meaningful life. He discovers that these are found not in relationships, nor in money alone, but happiness is possible, given two criteria – sufficient solitude and sufficient time. […] [He] gives up on hedonism and nihilism, and arrives at an answer betraying Camus’s obvious debt to Nietzsche […] ‘the will to happiness, a kind of enormous ever-present consciousness.’”258 However, the authors neglect to mention in their summary that a major theme of the novel is that in order to acquire the sufficient solitude and time it takes to gain happiness, one must have a large amount of money so that one does not have to work.
Labour without end or meaning, for Camus, is a false mode of life because it kills the authenticity of self, and forces one into monotony without peace and without time for contemplation. Mersault is “on the run from Algiers”259 because he kills a rich but disabled acquaintance called Zagreus, and takes his money to use to gain his own happiness. Zagreus himself is somewhat complicit in his own death: he explains to Mersault that he learned that in order to work towards a will to happiness, one must be patient and have time, and in order to have time, one must have money. But just as he gained his wealth, Zagreus was injured in an accident and had both legs amputated. He feels he is living a “diminished life”260 because he must have assistance for nearly everything and cannot have the solitude or independence that would allow him happiness. He shows Mersault a safe that contains a gun and an undated suicide note. He explains that he often has suicidal urges, and that he when he does, he takes out the gun and puts it to his head, but his desire to live is stronger despite its incompleteness, and he cannot bring himself to do the duty, because death would solidify the truth that he lived a marginal life. He also tells Mersault that “for a certain class of beings happiness is possible, provided they have time, and that having money is a way of being free of money.”261 He explains that despite his desires he cannot kill himself because he still has an impossible hope of gaining this ideal happiness, and implores Mersault to “think about it” because he “still has two legs.”262
Some time later, Mersault murders Zagreus and takes his money, and through some trial and error, finds that a connection with nature and a moderate but pleasant connection to community allows him a solitude that is not overwhelming and a happiness that comes from the “struggle with its opposite,”263 where he can face the duality of positive and negative within himself and allow them both a kind of peace. There is, to put it rather crassly, a ‘shit or get off the pot’ aspect to Zagreus in that he refuses to kill himself but also refuses to consider that there might be some other way to use his time and money to find happiness, if he looked at it from a different angle than the one he has been tunnel-visioned on but which is no longer accessible to him. Instead, he languishes in a limbo-like state, rather than acting in either direction. His money and the potential happiness it could bring languish with him. By showing Mersault the undated suicide note and gun, Zagreus places the agency of the suicide he cannot bring himself to commit and the proof that he cannot find his ultimate happiness in someone else’s hands, passively making the decision to die but not taking responsibility to complete the act. Mersault is able to find the happiness Zagreus so desired because he is able to find solitude and time, and because he has the will and ability to act rather than languish.
Roberts and Noakes continue their seemingly random exploration of Richey’s bookshelves, reporting that “as we progress through Richey’s book collection, it becomes clear we could locate messages in nearly all of them, and many of them would be highly fanciful.”264 So, then why bother with all this? Why encourage these conspiracies in the first place? Why search through these books and pose these questions and theories if only to dismiss them as “highly fanciful,” despite never using that important qualifier before or during their presentation of the theories? To only qualify the multiple interpretations as “fanciful” after they have all been laid out is a way for Roberts and Noakes to present each argument as though they fully believe it, and then right at the end slightly walk all of their analyses back just a bit in case a reader questions them.
But it is completely absurd to assume Richey’s intentions by cherry-picking from his bookshelf. The books people read may give clues as to some of their interests or stylistic tastes, but to attempt to construct someone’s intentions or mental state through a fraction of the literature on his shelves seems like an insufficient endeavour. I’m certain I could easily pick an equal number of books about suicide from his shelves (No Longer Human, Kokoro, The Bell Jar, The Setting Sun), or books about war (Black Rain, The Drowned And The Saved, Man’s Search For Meaning, Homage To Catalonia), or books condemning capitalism (American Psycho, High Rise, Society Of The Spectacle, The Torture Garden), or books about anti-social behaviour (Last Exit To Brooklyn, Less Than Zero, The Divided Self, The Atrocity Exhibition) or sexual perversion (Crash, The Story Of O, 120 Days Of Sodom, Frisk). I personally find it interesting that a number of books that the authors examine have major themes of conflict with religion within their pages. It’s not hard, with a band that was so steeped in literature, to find recurring themes of most kinds. Since literature works by expressing multiple ideas and themes within one piece of text, and dozens upon dozens of them make up a rounded whole, removing select pieces to highlight isn’t going to reveal anything except a now-fragmented, less stable or rounded whole. Both with Nietzsche and Rimbaud, and in some sense Sylvia Plath, Roberts and Noakes focus less on the specific text referenced by Richey himself and more on other texts by the authors, or ignore Richey’s references completely in favour of other ideas. This certainly doesn’t seem to help in refraining from cherry-picking themes.
But Rachel apparently “sees the point of this line of enquiry”265 because Richey’s act of taking the box of items which “he thought symbolised him”266 with him to the hotel seems “a bit pre-planned with whatever he was going to do.”267 While I agree with the impression of premeditation of some sort, whether suicidal, a post-departure message, or something else, I don’t see what going through Richey’s bookshelves and examining those that were not in the box has to do with that premeditation. By the end, Richey was apparently reading something like five or six books a week;268 to get an understanding of him through literature, you’d probably have to read everything on his shelves.
Journal For Plague Lovers suddenly becomes relevant after being ignored for almost the entire book, but only so that the authors can shoehorn in a bizarre theory. James Dean Bradfield was “often left perplexed by Richey’s lyrics,” they say, but mentioned that a lyric in ‘Peeled Apples’ made him “laugh out loud.”269 That lyric was “A dwarf takes his cockerel / Out of the cock fight.” The authors wonder if that image could have “perhaps been lifted from another source? A dwarf, cockfighting; instantly, scenes come to mind from one specific novel, noted as one of Richey’s favourites, Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano.”270 The problem with this claim is that in the novel itself there is no dwarf. The character in question that is portrayed as a dwarf in the film is not a dwarf in the novel. He is also not the owner of the fighting cock in the book nor the film, and there is no actual cockfight in either the book or its film adaptation. On the other hand, another famous novel (and film adaptation) with similar themes of disillusionment, the nausea of humanity and obstinacy against positive change, Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, has all three: a dwarf who enters a rooster in a cockfight, and refuses to take it out of the fight even when it is obviously doomed to a violent death.271
Roberts and Noakes mention that Malcolm Lowry referenced other authors and written works in his own work, “the same way Richey did,”272 and that Lowry’s writing was shaped by authors that came before him, an element also to be found in the works by the Manics, “especially those of Richey prior to his disappearance.”273 I’m not sure how the authors are getting away with placing credit entirely on Richey for the various literary references in the band’s works. Unless they are talking about the Journal For Plague Lovers pieces, every album, including The Holy Bible, was a collaborative effort between himself and Nicky Wire. While Richey wrote 70-75% of The Holy Bible, Wire’s contribution is important to remember. It reminds me of some comments about ‘Roses In The Hospital’ and its similarity to Richey’s mental health trajectory after Gold Against The Soul was released; however, all but a few lines of that song are in fact Nicky Wire’s.274
The authors do have an obvious agenda with this reach regarding alleged references to Under The Volcano. They go on to compare Richey to Lowry specifically because they both made liberal use of references to literature, film, and politics in their works. Lowry originally planned to write an alcoholism-based trilogy inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, with Under The Volcano as the “Inferno” segment of the series. Under The Volcano, the only book he completed of the three planned, is about the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, British consul in Quanahuac, Mexico. Firmin is experiencing a slow death and emotional/mental downfall through severe alcoholism, and quite literally announces that chooses the “hell” of his addiction over the “paradise” of recovery and sobriety.275 Roberts and Noakes claim that because “Under The Volcano references other written works in the same way Richey did, in fact, precisely the same authors”,276 that perhaps Richey was “quietly using Lowry’s incomplete trilogy as a model for his work, much as Lowry himself had used Dante? Was The Holy Bible album his ‘Inferno’? Were the writings left over to the band in early 1995 intended to become his ‘Purgatorio’? And was there maybe then a third installation, an album corresponding to Dante’s ‘Paradiso’, to be delivered when Richey returned home, possibly at the start of the millennium?”277
This assumption is baffling on many levels. Lowry was not the only author Richey read who made references to other sources in his works, nor is doing so an unusual literary device for authors and lyricists alike. It simplifies both Richey and Lowry to assume that by referencing politics, literature, and the world around him, Richey was specifically copying just this one author rather than independently making his own interpretations. Most absurd is the idea that Richey planned to return at the turn of the millennium, in a dramatic and rather uncharacteristically crass fashion. A move like that would be more tabloid sensation than Ballard social critique.
The comparison to Lowry is also a bit odd, as Lowry never completed his other two novels, partly because he actually wrote the ‘Purgatorio’ novel Lunar Caustic first, which turned out instead to be more of a warm-up for Volcano.278 But he left the work unfinished mainly because the use of the Dante symbolism and outline “was too simple a strategy and did not accord with Lowry’s sense of the difficulty and complexity of becoming and staying sane and saved,” and because he “[found] it inappropriate to the dynamics of the experience he had to set down.”279
There almost seems to be an implication on the part of Roberts and Noakes that Richey left his trilogy incomplete in order to reflect and then eventually overtake Lowry’s failure to complete his own triad of novels. This proposition that Richey was planning on a Divine Comedy-esque album trilogy with The Holy Bible as the ‘Inferno’ segment and Journal For Plague Lovers as ‘Purgatorio’ also directly contradicts the claim made later in the book that Richey might not have wanted the band to use the lyrics that eventually became Journal For Plague Lovers.
Roberts and Noakes wonder if “all of this evidence”280 means that Richey was not, in fact, in the middle of a mental health crisis at the time of his disappearance and that his disappearance itself was not the “predictable falling apart of his time in the music industry, but the apex of his entire approach from the very beginning: his semi-detached knowingness and theoretical alertness?”281 (I love a good word salad.) There are two reasons that this bewilders me, and both have to do with the unpredictability of life. First of all, the music industry is massively unpredictable. How could Richey have planned this disappearance from the early days of the band, not knowing where the band’s trajectory would have lead? Secondly, for many people who live with mental health issues, future-planning is extremely difficult due to executive dysfunction, which affects “planning, decision making, set shifting, and inhibitory control”282 and can cause poor time perspective, an increased impulsivity and a tendency to find it hard to see value in delayed, far-off outcomes.283 When one is depressed, anxious, or otherwise unwell and struggling to get out of bed or to complete tasks without feeling overwhelmed like Richey expressed in late 1994,284, 285 it is extremely difficult to rationally or properly plan something as complex as a disappearance far in advance. The more details or choices attached to certain tasks, and the more long-term they are, the more overwhelming and insurmountable they can feel. Most of one’s energy is focused on the effort to function in the immediate present.286
“The issue,” Roberts and Noakes claim, “essentially revolves around the extent to which we feel Richey retained a masterful authorship throughout”287 his disappearance and over his actions or mental state just previous. But they are running with the theory of a planned disappearance, claiming that because a full-scale search for Richey never properly occurred, “what we are left is this, the narrative verdict – the narrative that emanates from Richey’s words and actions and seems to imply a planned disappearance and exile.”288 According to the authors, it’s possible that Richey could easily have stayed alive after vanishing, because he “had been repeatedly expressing the desire to minimise his life”28 and “had also publicly craved a life of reclusion and exile.”290
They do anticipate the question I’m going to ask, which is, what about his untreated mental health problems, which they have anecdotally implied were even worse than previously stated? They’ve already used his deteriorating mental health to suggest he wasn’t well enough to survive on his own and to accuse the remaining members of the band of not doing enough to search for him. Why is his mental health suddenly stable enough to succeed in orchestrating a disappearance? What about the fact that he allegedly didn’t even know how to do basic things like his own laundry?291 What about the fact that he quite likely didn’t weigh much more than 100 pounds at the time of his disappearance? What about his history of severe self harm? His potential relapse after leaving the Embassy Hotel? The erratic behaviour that this book has reported and that the rest of the band have since talked about?292-294 His comments about jumping off of bridges?295
Their answer is based yet again on the ideas of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, which is that a “key concept”296 to understand “man’s urge to heroism”297 and therefore his life-drive is narcissism, which creates the belief that “everyone is expendable except ourselves. We should feel prepared… to recreate the whole world out of ourselves even if no one else existed” and “we could suffice alone if need be, if we could trust ourselves.”298 They reconcile this idea of narcissistic survival with their theory of depressive isolation as a form of self-sufficient survival that had to be done. They claim that “social withdrawal is often a basic fact of depression […] The depressive retreats into a kind of living death – clearly, Richey’s degrading relations with his life in music demanded such a departure.”299
Has any research into mental health been done for this book that isn’t based on philosophically-inclined and psychologically-reductive anthropology books rather than medical texts? While the ‘withdrawal’ part of depression is a common symptom, it is a type of maladaptive behaviour; if it reaches unhealthy extremes it may cause or indicate suicidal ideation and should be treated as such,300 especially when accompanied with other indications of suicidal intent,301 like the anecdotes about Richey provided in Jo’s letters. Apparently the authors aren’t considering comorbid factors, because to them Richey’s “vanishing permitted him the otherwise impossible: an immortality upgrade”,302 and instead of being seen as a failed musician, he would be able to live on in complete solitude and be remembered for his disappearance. They do not seem to consider that such an extreme form of self-isolation could indicate or cause another severe psychological crisis, or that socially isolated individuals have a higher mortality. Richey had previous psychiatric history, and “social withdrawal in neuropsychiatric disorders is an important symptom that may cause deleterious effects on disease development, progress and outcome.”303
Richey was taking Prozac after leaving the Priory, but psychiatric medication is not an exact science, and the first medication doesn’t always work for everyone. Prozac also takes about a month to have noticeable effects,304 which means people can become frustrated and stop taking it or skip doses, negating its effectiveness. In his last interview with Music Life, Richey said about his treatment, “I don’t feel much different. I just realise I’ve got more time”,305 and in an interview in 1996, Nicky Wire answered a question about noticing any sort of change in Richey after he was prescribed medication with, “To be honest, I don’t think it did [bring about any change].”306 If he was taking them irregularly, it would have affected the medication’s efficacy and may have also caused more negative side effects, because taking the medication inconsistently can “lead to the amount of the drug in [the] body fluctuating and make withdrawal symptoms more likely.”307 In addition, it was reported that Richey had left his medication behind in his flat after he left the Embassy hotel; withdrawal symptoms for Prozac/Fluoxetine can start for some people within a few hours of their first missed dose, especially if they have not been taking the medication regularly or for very long, and further withdrawal symptoms can include increased depression and anxiety, agitation, suicidal ideation, and physical symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, or sensitivity to sound.308 Some of Richey’s anxiety and agitation that the authors describe seem to potentially fit these side effects.
Also, what about the one-two punch he’d recently received of his girlfriend refusing his marriage proposal and the death of his childhood pet? In the next chapter, Rachel reveals that a month before his disappearance, Richey allegedly went to a tattoo parlour to try and get Jo’s name tattooed on his arm.309 Why is the failure to reach musical stardom more emphasised than the emotional impact of both the rejection from the girl he said he loved and the death of a childhood pet that had been a dear companion occurring in rapid succession? Richey’s potential feelings of grief and abandonment or hurt in addition to the ongoing deterioration of his mental health and the stress of imminent touring don’t seem to be taken into consideration here.
The new information provided by this book regarding Richey’s psychological state throws up so many red flags warning of mental crisis and possible suicidal intent, and yet they seem to dismiss most of them unless they’re discussing Richey’s relationship with the remaining members of the band. The new documentation about his severe depression, his intrusive thoughts and severe anxiety, his continued self-harm and verbal suicidal ideation as recalled by Jo, his erratic behaviour and alleged auditory hallucinations, are alarming when put in context with the stressors that affected him in the final six months before his disappearance: the failure of the healthcare system to adequately care for him, his struggle to remain sober and the resulting severe insomnia, the stress of the autumn tour that culminated in him repeatedly bashing his head against a wall, the uncertainty regarding the band’s future, his inability to communicate his needs to his friends, his twenty-seventh birthday, the looming month-long tour in America – a country he’d already professed hatred for, the rejection of his girlfriend, and the death of his childhood pet barely a week later.
A 2011 data study by Tom Foster found that “nearly all adult suicides have experienced at least one (usually more) adverse life event within 1 year of death,” with the majority of the events concentrated in the last few months before death,310 and those events coupled with mental disorder are cited as the cause for the person’s life becoming “too much to bear.”311 The study also found that adverse events “are particularly common prior to young, male, impulsive, personality-disordered, and substance (notably alcohol) misusing suicides.”312 Richey, unfortunately, fits the majority of these categories. Even without the information supplied by this study, it is difficult to look at these two lists of Richey’s psychological symptoms and the stressors he was faced with and assume he was anything other than unwell and struggling by the end of 1994.
The various new illustrations of Richey’s crumbling mental health, combined with the well-known anecdotes provide a strange sort of angle to the authors’ theories about Richey’s plans. In an interview with Guy Mankowski, Sara Hawys Roberts stated that “When people say he made a choice: was he too ill to make a choice? That’s something Rachel says and sticks by.”313 How is his agency or ability to choose different when it may be suicide than when it may be total abandonment of his current life and recklessly starting another somewhere else without money or any other kind of stability? It is unclear whether they think he was so unwell that he needed help to function and his friends failed him, or if they think he was well enough to plan and execute a disappearance. If a person can barely get out of bed and is terrified of leaving the house, how are they going to be able to make concrete plans to leave the country and set up a life somewhere new? If he had suicidal ideation over some length of time and eventually acted upon those thoughts, how would he have been too ill to make a choice about it, compared to planning a disappearance over some length of time? Why does the act of leaving everything behind to an uncertain future imply personal agency while the act of taking one’s own life does not?
Lastly, the authors wonder if perhaps some kind of foul play might have happened to Richey, specifically from someone in the “business end of the music industry.”314 Their source, somehow, is Nicky, who apparently “shared his personal fears that something bad might have happened to Richey at the hands of someone else.”315 When? Where? I know of no sources in which Nicky speculated something like this. There are no interviews in print, radio, or video from 1995 that quote Nicky on Richey’s disappearance other than the standard variation upon ‘if Richey doesn’t want to come back, then that’s fine. But we just want him to give us a call or send a postcard’ that was printed in most articles. (More on this claim in the next chapter.)
Another theory that Sara Hawys Roberts proposed in an interview with The Independent but did not include in the text of Withdrawn Traces is that the sighting in Goa was real, and that Richey “intended to return after 10 years, but who knows what could have happened in the first 10 years of Richey being a missing person. He was spotted in Goa and on the hippy trail, there’s every chance he could have been in Thailand in 2004 and sadly perished in the Boxing Day tsunami.”316 In an interview with Wales Online she also mentioned that she was willing to follow up on a theory received by email which “claimed Richey paid somebody to kill him. This man said he had information to say that Richey hired a hitman to kill him and to dispose of his body. It’s quite far out, but then you think the story itself is quite far out.”317 This theory sounds a lot like the Robert Bresson film Le Diable probablement, although I’m uncertain if the authors made that connection. In any case, it was not looked into because “Rachel thought it was too far-fetched.”318
The final two paragraphs of this chapter seem quite telling as to the research methods of the authors and validity of their theories. Foreshadowing the content of the upcoming chapter, they claim that “any future investigations into the Richey case ought to strive to thoroughly probe a range of possibilities; something we have tried to kick start with this book.”319 They explain that most of the research they attempted to do through official channels and “persons of interest inevitably went through Rachel Edwards,”320 but that there were constant delays due to uncommunicative police. “Even more disrupting,” they note, “were the many Manics-related people who were initially very happy to talk to us, only to then withdraw co-operation.”321 Considering the number of false anecdotes, words placed into the mouths of those who did agree to be interviewed, unsourced, modified, or nonexistent quotes, anonymous sources with dubious anecdotes, questionable political interpretations, and absurd conspiracy theory claims, I’m not surprised that people who initially might have thought this was going to be a book about their appreciation for and memories of Richey eventually changed their minds about participating.
A quote from Nicky Wire can, I think, sum up this and the next segment of Withdrawn Traces fairly well. In an NME article from 1996 titled “Everything Must Go…On”322 he spoke about the notebook full of lyrics that Richey gave to the band during their rehearsals in Surrey, and the desire to look through the pages of the binder and the things he left behind for significance: “You can go in his flat and you can look at every book, everything. At the end of the day, you haven’t got a clue.”
A Brief Interlude On Conspiracy Theories
According to political scientist Joseph E. Uscinski, some people believe in conspiracy theories due to “a pervasive sense of powerlessness,”1 and so they use the scenarios mapped out by conspiracies to explain unknowns and regain a sense of control or understanding of their surroundings or circumstances. Uscinski’s book Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, published in 2019, contains thirty essays by forty different researchers examining conspiracy theory beliefs and their impacts from many different angles and viewpoints. In the essay “Conspiracy Theory Psychology: Individual Differences, Worldviews, and States of Mind”,2 Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas explain that conspiracy theories are “better understood as disbeliefs. […] People advocating conspiracy theories more often argued against the mainstream explanation than for their own,”3 claiming the mainstream to be impossible rather than giving detailed or concrete evidence for their own theories. Conspiracy theorists will often claim the subject of their theory ‘looks like’ or ‘seems like’ to explain their reasoning, but will not look into concrete details or facts about the subject when they discuss their claim. Wood and Douglas explain that,
“A good deal of research points to a connection between beliefs in conspiracy theories and perceived ‘outsiderdom’ or separation from mainstream society. This is especially evident when looking at work on the psychological concept of anomie. Anomie is a sense of social alienation or disconnection, a feeling that one’s own values and beliefs are not represented in broader society. Feelings of anomie have been shown to correlate significantly with beliefs in conspiracy theories in diverse samples.”4
In the case of theories about Richey’s disappearance and some sort of long-term planning on his part, this seems to be a fairly good explanation. Without a body, and without a note or any other kind of concrete personal explanation for his actions from Richey himself, there is a desire to understand and fill the blank spaces of unknowns in order to make sense of the situation which renders those left behind powerless. Francisco Garcia, whose father went missing in 2000, and who is associated with the Missing People charity, notes in the end of his book If You Were There: Missing People and the Marks They Leave Behind that “Life is not a set of plot points, drawn up and mapped out with perfect logic or precision, however much we sometimes wish it might be, if only to breathe some sense into the messiness of the choices we make and all the other things we never had a chance to control.”5 Those who care about Richey, including family, friends, and fans, are left without closure to his story and therefore without a feeling of control over the messiness or uncertainty of that part of their lives. Richey’s end is “a gigantic question mark”6 that leaves those searching for answers feeling alone, especially after so many years of no new evidence or clues, and the frustration that comes from difficult interactions with bureaucracy such as police or legal administrative staff can leave those seeking answers feeling out of the loop or alienated. This feeling of ‘outsiderdom’ and helplessness can motivate a turn to conspiracies and more fantastical ideas to try and make sense of the unexplained and unknown.
It is discomforting and unpleasant for people to experience events without explanation or with an unclear or confusing meaning. This is part of why conspiracy theories form: they “arise in situations that groups have trouble interpreting,” due to gaps in important contextual information. “We interact to fill the gaps with rumors”,7 explains Nicholas Difonzo, who uses the words ‘rumor’ and ‘conspiracy theory’ interchangeably in his essay “Conspiracy Rumor Psychology.” Events that lack explanation or meaning leave people scrambling to understand, and “when reliable news is in short supply, groups ‘improvise’ by crafting their own explanations, which are rumors.”8 When people find themselves “in circumstances that are unclear and threatening [to our values, community, ideology, or anything else we happen to cherish], conspiracy rumors explain matters and help groups defend themselves psychologically.”9 Because “drawing connections and recognizing patterns […] can help restore a sense of control and certainty – to make sense of a world that, in [the] moment, seems difficult to predict or understand”,10 trying to connect the dots of some details while ignoring others becomes a way to control the narrative and turn it into something comprehensible and perhaps even satisfying. People end up digging for scraps of clues that might have been left behind to explain Richey’s behaviour, which results in things like this book’s many hypotheticals and theories, rather than doing something similar to what the band seems to have done, which is accept that whatever it is Richey did, it was what he wanted to do and the subsequent unknowns of his actions should be accepted and respected, especially after so many years of nothing new surfacing.
In an attempt to uncover or generate new answers, clues, or meanings, Roberts and Noakes engage in conspiracy thinking and theorising, including dipping a toe into the waters of antisemitism. While some amount of guesswork or hypothesising seems inherent when discussing the Manic Street Preachers and Richey’s disappearance, Roberts and Noakes tend to overstate the probability of secret messages or secret knowledge of deep-state activity in Richey’s works and secret plots or foul play in the actual event of his disappearance without supplying concrete evidence. Difonzo calls the act of spreading or inciting conspiracy theories ‘rumour transmission.’ He states that “researchers have found that anxiety, believing the rumor to be true, and having a sense of uncertainty, which is a lack of sureness about current or future events, all predict rumor transmission.”11 While some theories might be more benign, such as Richey’s references to Che Guevara in the lyrics of Revol allegedly pointing towards his own planned disappearance or the idea that he might have hired a hitman to kill himself, others, such as the theory about Richey targeting a ‘New World Order’ (an antisemitic dog-whistle term) or implying that the remaining members of the Manic Street Preachers are keeping information from the police, are more dangerous.
A Critical Analysis and Review of Withdrawn Traces Part 6 →
Supplement: Scans of the photo inserts in Withdrawn Traces + other images for context
Squash Writes 