Rachel’s Search Efforts
The final chapter details the efforts of the police and Rachel Edwards’ own efforts to locate Richey. Rachel has always been determined to keep the search for Richey ongoing, even if “the passage of time has cast its mist over certain events and decisions taken in the immediate aftermath of his vanishing.”1 She does not want him to become just another statistic or to be consigned to a file that will be looked at less and less as the years go by. The chapter first introduces the various failures and inadequacies surrounding the search. As time went on and the search for Richey continued, Rachel “became aware of a lack of cohesion and attention to detail, and formed the impression that her brother’s disappearance was being viewed as little more than a stunt from a publicity-hungry rock star.”2 While it is true that at least one investigative team assumed it was a stunt, we also have to remember that three different police forces were involved in this investigation, which means that there was an increased number of chances for miscommunication, misunderstanding, and poor delegation between the departments. Later in the chapter it does mention that “Rachel soon discovered that the greater number of police forces involved, the more complicated the process became.”3 A singular police department is inadequate at the best of times; three attempting to work together with such minimal information and poor communication is not likely to get very coherent results.
Rachel questions how the police dealt with Richey’s case and treated the search for him, and feels that there are “concerns about how the police generally instigate and carry out searches.”4 The authors present an unrelated case in which a former Wiltshire Detective Superintendent, Stephen Fulcher, ignored police protocol while searching for a missing woman who was a victim of a serial killer. The officer’s disregard for protocol revealed the body of the missing woman and another victim, but he ultimately left the force. The authors discuss Fulcher’s opinion that “obsession with police procedure diminishes the bigger picture. ‘The public needs to know what the police won’t do if their daughter went missing.’”5 According to this officer, “investigations into Richey’s disappearance fell short of even the most basic police procedure” because it is vital to “account for an individual’s last known 24 hours as soon as possible.”6
It certainly seems that the police didn’t do much, but circumstances and time were not on their side, either. As the book points out, Richey wasn’t reported missing until over 12 hours after he left the Embassy hotel, which means everyone was that far behind. His parents were at first reluctant to put out a public call for information; an official statement calling for any details about Richey’s whereabouts wasn’t released until 15 February. After the initial discoveries at the hotel and his flat, there were no clues and no information for nearly two weeks, and for once I don’t think it was fully due to the cops. A search for a person who is driving in a car is going to be more difficult than searching for someone who is on foot, and in the 90s there wasn’t CCTV everywhere yet. A hotel clerk isn’t going to notice or recognise every person coming or going, and similarly neither will employees in places like a service station.
Rachel is “unaware of any interviews conducted with James or Vivian, the last two people to see her brother alive. Nor has the person who apparently checked Richey out of his hotel at 7am been formerly [sic] identified or interviewed.”7 James was in the U.S. at the time, and Vivian’s existence is questionable considering the dubious timing of her visit to Richey as well as the unclear source of the information about her. There is no indication of exactly when anyone learned of Vivian’s existence or interaction with Richey, whether it came to light in the days or months after he was reported missing, or if they only learned about it years later. Apparently, none of Richey’s family spoke to Vivian or knew her last name, were never put in touch with her, and very few people knew who she was. According to Rachel, “Nick told my parents [Richey] was trying to give her his passport, and that could carry some weight somewhere in the investigation.”8 I know I’m repeating myself here, but how? Why would Nicky, who was at home in Newport, know that some mystery woman was in the hotel in London with Richey in the middle of the night and that he was trying to give her his passport, while James Dean Bradfield was either out with friends or in his own hotel room? By quoting a verbatim conversation without any identified source but “reported remarks by Nicky Wire,” there’s an insinuation here that the band are withholding information from Richey’s family or the police, which seems like an attempt at an underhanded defamatory implication.
The chapter goes over all the various miscommunications and lack of accountability that inevitably comes from three separate police forces being assigned to work on a singular case, including the police failing to look into incoming or outgoing calls in Richey’s hotel room, the accidental destruction of evidence photos of the car years later, lack of proper investigation of the car at the time of Richey’s disappearance, not dredging the river or searching the water through Severn Area Rescue Association as was usually standard, and conflicting answers from various marine agencies in regards to Rachel’s questions about the river’s tides and strength of current at the time of Richey’s disappearance. Rachel inquired to various monasteries about newcomers and coroner’s offices throughout the UK about unidentified bodies, both of which came up with nothing. She recalls following up on various receipts she found in Richey’s belongings and learning from staff at a hotel massage parlour Richey frequented that his “legs and back were scarred from self-harming”,9 and describes feeling like she was “constantly flipping back and forth, between hope and hopelessness”10 regarding the lack of any new information.
“A short while after Richey disappeared, the officer in charge of the case, Detective Sergeant Stephen Morey, set the tone for the investigation”11 by stating that Richey was a fairly well-known person in the UK and there are many people on the street who would recognise him, and that in all likelihood he was “no longer with us”12 and that he would “move towards [that] theory.”13 The authors say that “such discouraging comments seemed inappropriate for an ongoing, active search for a vulnerable adult”14 and note that Richey’s missing persons report said that he had had a history of psychiatric problems. However, the statement was made by the detective in August 1995,15 six months after Richey’s disappearance, which seems like a fairly reasonable amount of time after a case has essentially run cold to make that assumption, especially if that person had a history of suicide attempts and most evidence pointed in that direction. The statement itself isn’t closing the case, or even officially claiming it cold, only making it clear that the evidence available at the time meant it was more than likely that Richey was no longer alive.
The authors note that at the time, the UK lacked a nation-wide police database of missing persons, making the search that much more difficult. It meant a police force in one city might not know about a person missing from a neighbouring city. Police forces work on many cases at once, and “searching is expensive and time-consuming; just one of hundreds of daily responsibilities to be shared around and gnawing at the sides of every working day”,16 especially without the use of a wider database. Due to limited resources and staff, “they need to be concentrated on the cases that the police can solve, and the ones they should solve. Of course, these are two very different things.”17 Cases are considered “long-term” after they have been open for twenty-eight days, and after those twenty-eight days, the cases are reviewed “every three months, six months, and twelve months, then annually thereafter.”18 If the search for Richey was yielding no new clues after six months, cases that could be solved in order to lighten the load unfortunately likely took precedence.
The chapter then runs through several different missing persons cases that were closed without a body found, for which the bodies were found and identified months to years later, mostly due to their deaths being in different areas from where they disappeared, and police forces where they died being unaware that they were missing persons. Roberts and Noakes note that “appropriate inter-force communication, or contact with the National Missing Persons Helpline”19 would have helped to find these people.
It is obvious that the establishment of the National Missing Persons Helpline – which was renamed Missing People in 2007 – has created an important middleman in terms of helping police find missing persons. However, Roberts and Noakes neglect to include an important piece of information about the work that Missing People does, which is the fact that when “someone is reported missing and they’re then found as an adult, the first thing [police will] ask is ‘What do you want us to tell your family?’”20 Both Missing People and the UK Missing Persons Unit state that “when an adult missing person is located, their whereabouts must not be disclosed to others if this is against their wishes”21 and both institutions “will only put people in contact if the person that is being looked for wants it.”22 Meaning that if a missing person is found alive, it is their decision whether they want to be reunited or want their families informed at all about their wellbeing. According to Joe Apps, head of the UK Missing Persons Unit, “Sometimes it’s ‘Tell them I’m safe and well’, sometimes they don’t want anything said at all.”23 This can be difficult for the families and loved ones of those reported missing, because “they just want to know if they’re ok and it can be hard for them to accept that there might be no answer at all.”24 This means that if the police found Richey alive at some point in the years since his disappearance, he may not have wanted his family informed and they would be obligated to respect his wishes.
Roberts and Noakes then turn to a different missing person case, explaining that the disappearance of Anthony Calveley may be “of possible significance when considering the fate that may have befallen Richey”25 because Calveley’s body was discovered in London after he passed away while sleeping rough, but his body was not identified despite his birth certificate being on his person and his fingerprints in a police database. His body was eventually cremated and his mother not notified of his death until two years later. I’m not entirely certain how this incident has more significance in terms of Richey’s disappearance compared to the other anecdotes, considering that Richey left his identifying documents in his flat, unless his fingerprints or some other type of physical identification record were somehow on file from his hospitalisation.26
Similar to the creation of a missing persons helpline, the subject of DNA matching is another new, important factor in finding missing people. The authors note that the detective in charge of the Fred and Rose West cases has suggested that unidentified bodies should be interred separately so that DNA can be extracted. Rachel expresses rightful concern that Richey’s body may have ended up in an anonymous grave somewhere due to being unidentified, as well as frustration that she had to be the one to take initiative to provide a sample of Richey’s DNA to the police in 2005, because they did not ask for it. The National DNA Database didn’t exist in the UK until April 1995,27 and was initially limited by funding for use only in cases of violent or sexual offences and burglary,28 so that is likely a primary reason for the suggestion to not have occurred when Richey first disappeared. If, by the time it became more commonly used, Richey’s case was already being treated as long-term or cold due to no new evidence or legitimate sightings, that’s perhaps the reason for the suggestion not coming up. However, Rachel is right that since the case wasn’t officially closed, the police should have been the ones to prompt the acquisition of DNA, and it was indeed careless of them not to do so in the first place.
Now we transition from science and general frustration with poorly conducted police procedures back to the territory of the absurd. Yet again, the reduction of Richey’s life to that of Campbell’s hero’s journey and the previous chapter’s analysis of various pieces of fiction as applicable parallels to his life has prepared the reader to accept the ludicrous theories that follow.
Anna Bowles, an undergrad student at Oxford, wrote to the NME and the Metropolitan Police in late 1995, proposing in a three page-long letter the theory that Richey had gone to Germany on a visitor’s passport to mark the 50th anniversary of the Holocaust. However, the Vox article that the book cites also supplies a small selection of the letter, in which Bowles explains that she is proposing the theory because she is “interested in protecting those among my friends who are vulnerable and hope that this theory would help to do so, for, providing nobody is found, it permits the extension of rational hope until mid-May,”29 since she feared that there was a risk for copycat suicides among fans similar to those that occurred after Kurt Cobain’s death. Her theory doesn’t seem to be supported by anything but the The Holy Bible lyrics, a few interviews that mention the Holocaust, and the visits the band made to Dachau and Belsen in 1993, but it seems as though her motive was more about making sure other people believed he was alive and well in order to keep them safe from self-harm rather than any legitimate knowledge about Richey’s whereabouts.
Instead of leaving that theory to lie, and letting it exist simply as one woman’s concern for her friends’ mental health in reaction to the potential death of someone they admired, the authors have decided yet again to make wild assumptions based on essentially nothing. They propose, “could someone have found his body and decided that for the greater good he should remain unidentified?”30
Sorry, what? This theory makes no sense. Even Rachel stated in an interview that most people on the street “wouldn’t recognise him”31 because he no longer looked the way most people expected, with no makeup and close-cropped hair. Imagine a random person finding a body washed up on a shore somewhere, a body with a shaved head and very likely a week or so’s worth of beard growth, and the typical bloating and discolouration from being submerged in the water for a few days (or, if longer, the more extreme decomposition), and somehow being able to recognise this unidentified body as the missing musician from a minor rock band who in all but the most recent missing persons photos looked drastically different. And somehow this mysterious discoverer decides that maybe they shouldn’t alert the family or the police, or shouldn’t just walk away and leave someone else to find the body and alert authorities, but instead that they should hide the body somehow, because no one should know that he died “for the greater good”32 of preventing upset and copycat suicides. What kind of absurd, implausible idea is that? How is this idea any more believable than the theory they heard from someone but dismissed because “Rachel thought it was too far-fetched”,33 – despite Roberts’ apparent willingness to follow it up34 – which claimed that Richey had hired a hitman to kill him?
This bizarre theory is followed up by a brief quote from Rachel about how emotionally difficult the uncertainty is, how “on the dark days” it’s easier to consider conspiracy theories because “someone, somewhere must know something.”35 It is strange to see this self-awareness combined with denial. Perhaps Rachel’s opinions and thoughts are less dramatic than this book makes them out to be, and the authors’ choice of placement and context affects how she sounds. Rachel seems to be aware of the absurdity and the desperation of most of these theories, and seems on the verge of saying they are best used as a crutch for hope, but she often makes a swerve back into making other similar assumptions. Perhaps she believes in these theories, perhaps it’s about keeping up hope for others, perhaps it’s the authors cherry-picking quotes, I’m really not sure.
The subject moves to CCTV and its role (or lack thereof) in the search for Richey. A segment on the BBC Radio Wales programme Eye On Wales explored CCTV cameras and their use in finding missing persons. Presenter Tim Rogers spoke to a police detective who explained that there was no CCTV footage of the bridge and that “if it did exist, it would have been destroyed by 1997.”36 However, the authors explain that despite this, “Tim Rogers easily obtained the recordings from the operators of the bridge. It appears to be something else the police overlooked.”37 The authors do not cite their source and do not supply a proper title or full date of the programme; instead, I found the information in Everything by Simon Price.38 I have tried to find this BBC Radio Wales segment, which was broadcast 17 March 1997, but unfortunately it seems as though it either was never archived or simply is old enough that it has not yet been digitised for BBC online archives. Either the authors have accessed a hard copy of the programme or they’re summarising from Rachel’s recollections. In any case, I can’t find a recording of the programme and therefore can’t look into its context or details.
Rachel and her family viewed the tape that Rogers acquired alongside police, and there does appear to be a person on the footpath, but because it was raining on 1 February 1995, the camera lens was covered with rain and deciphering any details in the footage was impossible. However, Price supplies more information, quoting the officer on the programme who explained that “the footage came from a camera that is 150 feet in the air. It is designed for traffic flow, nothing else. You would be hard-pushed, even with video enhancement, to tell if you are looking at a lorry, a bus or a car. […] If there were any figures on the bridge, they would be so far away as to be unidentifiable. I doubt if we would be able to tell if the figure were a man or a woman.”39 Rachel wonders if “another opportunity was lost by not viewing footage taken either side of 1 February to elicit how often the footpath was used by pedestrians”40 because frequency of the footpath’s usage could indicate the probability that the figure in the footage was Richey.
The authors argue that police should have taken into account the two apparent sightings of Richey in Newport, “just around the corner from Wales’ main Passport Office.”41 They suggest that the “mystery surrounding his passport”42 should have been cause for the surveillance cameras near the passport office to be reviewed. However, they previously indicated that the police did not know about Richey allegedly trying to give away his passport. If the police were unaware of Richey attempting relinquish his passport to another person, only that he left it at his flat, they likely did not make the connection regarding the office’s proximity to the two sightings. Even so, CCTV cameras might have been present despite not being nearly as ubiquitous as they are now, and Rachel is frustrated and confused that the police didn’t consider checking for cameras and footage near the potential sighting areas. She also wonders if the Aust service station had cameras as well that might have remained unchecked. Perhaps, the authors theorise, Richey might have been aware of the cameras en route and avoided them. Since that would mean researching and knowing camera locations in both London and Cardiff and any potential stops or areas in between, that seems doubtful to me; the authors seem to agree with this, as they do concede that the toll ticket left in his flat suggests that he was not avoiding being recorded.
The subject moves from CCTV to the toll receipt for the Severn River Crossing and the time on said ticket, which is one of the items of new evidence referenced in all the publicity at the book’s release and on the cover. The time on the receipt says 2:55; [image] it was always assumed and reported that Richey left the Embassy Hotel in London at around 7:00 A.M and therefore crossed the bridge at 2:55 in the afternoon. However, the owner of the company that installed the ticketing systems reports that the tickets used a 24-hour clock system, which means that the 2:55 on the ticket was 2:55 A.M. rather than the P.M. that everyone, including police, assumed. This means that about twelve hours are unaccounted for, rather than the originally assumed seven hours. Rachel is rightfully frustrated by this, and says “The first thing I want to know now is: who on earth said they checked him out of the hotel at 7am? Or, who drove his car over the bridge earlier at 2:55 in the morning? He can’t have done both.”43
Regarding the “who checked him out at 7am?” question, I wonder if it’s far less complicated than any sort of nefarious plot or accomplices or intricate planning. A number of articles and books relaying information about Richey’s disappearance report that Richey left the hotel at 7am “watched by a receptionist”44-46 or “seen by hotel staff,”47-49 implying that he did not stop at the registration desk at 7 in the morning. Earlier in the book, Rachel questioned whether there was a guestbook logging people coming and going from the hotel. On a Facebook page dedicated to Richey Edwards50 that is apparently run by Rachel or someone close to her, a post was made on 2 March 2019 that featured a scan of Richey’s guest registration card for the Embassy Hotel. This picture is not included in the images printed in Withdrawn Traces nor is the card mentioned anywhere in the text. [image] The registration has the Embassy Hotel letterhead in one corner and bears Richey’s signature “R Edwards” and two faint electronic typewritten check-in and check-out dates of 31/01 and 01/02. As noted in the Facebook post, “there is only a ‘date’ and no ‘time’ indicated on the ticket to confirm his departure from the hotel.”51
Perhaps Richey checked out much earlier in the morning, around midnight or 1 A.M., and simply left the hotel then, and the rest is a result of human error, such as a different receptionist than the one who checked him out assuming someone else with a shaved head leaving the hotel at 7am was Richey. I assume due to the car being in the underground carpark and not on the street, a receptionist would not have literally watched Richey get in his car and drive away. That also would answer the second question; he likely drove his own car over the bridge in the small hours of the morning, dropped his things at his flat, and left. Perhaps he drove around for a long while; his car was not reported at the service station for nearly two weeks, it’s possible that he didn’t park there on 2 February or even 3 February. Maybe the Newport sightings that reportedly occurred on 5 February and 7 February (which, as they say in this book, seem more believable and possible than the others) were true, due to a breakdown or psychotic break or perhaps just a depression-based listlessness rather than any planning or plotting, which eventually led him back across the bridge to the Aust service station. Of course, this is just as speculative as any of the other theories in this book, but it does attempt to take into account Richey’s mental state and the effort it would take to plan something for years between touring and execute it without a hitch in the midst of distress. My thoughts about what might have happened are equally as unproven as the theories presented by this book, but it’s just evidence that no one knows what happened and no amount of theorising or reaching is going to conjure up the answer from thin air.
Due to the apparent misinterpretation of the tollbooth timestamp not being discovered for twenty years, the authors ask “can any more information be salvaged when it comes to investigating Richey’s disappearance?”52 The answer, unsurprisingly, seems to be ‘not really,’ but they’re going to go ahead and present some inconclusive and mostly baseless theories anyway.
This exercise begins with the 2004 book Love & Death: The Murder Of Kurt Cobain, the premise of which they describe as theorising that “[Kurt] Cobain did not in fact kill himself, but that his death was a staged suicide, and should therefore have been treated as a murder enquiry by the authorities.”53 New York homicide detective Vernon Geberth is quoted claiming to have a list of murders that were staged to look like suicides, and so every suspected suicide should be handled as murder first. However, Geberth was not actually interviewed for the book on Cobain; instead, the authors of Love & Death quote extensively from Geberth’s criminology textbook on homicide investigation.54 In 2016 after the release of the documentary Soaked In Bleach, which proposed that Cobain’s death was a homicide, Geberth stated on his business Facebook page and his website that, “I was not happy that the producers made it appear that I agreed with their ‘homicide’ theory. I had made it quite clear that I believed that Kurt Cobain took his own life and backed up my opinion with the facts that I had obtained from the Seattle Police Department’s Homicide Division coupled with my own experience with suicide cases.”55, 56 There are a number of issues with using the Cobain suicide as an example of alleged murder made to look like suicide, not least that many of the murder accusations stem from misogyny directed towards Courtney Love.
This is not the only time the suicide of a musician has resulted in murder accusations: the suicides of Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, Michael Hutchence of INXS, and Chester Bennington of Linkin Park all were followed by murder accusations.57-61 It can be difficult for people to admit that an artist or musician they admired, who they perhaps thought ‘had it all,’ might have been struggling mentally, that they might have felt so bad that they didn’t want to live anymore. It may also be difficult for people who have never experienced suicidal thoughts to comprehend or even imagine wanting to die. This means that people grope for a conclusion that they can wrap their heads around, or that satisfies their denial of the fact that someone they looked up to was somehow suffering so much. Unfortunately, that leads to pointing fingers at other people, since the idea that someone’s internal hurt was enough to die just isn’t compatible with some people’s worldviews.
Continuing with the theory of foul play rather than suicide, Roberts and Noakes claim that “in an interview following Richey’s disappearance, Nicky Wire expressed the deepest fears over the fate of his missing bandmate. ‘I just hope nobody has harmed him,’ he told the music press. Usually too hard-headed to air such ideas publically, Nicky was nonetheless making it clear that even he hadn’t ruled out the possibility that Richey might have been involved in some sort of foul play.”62 I haven’t been able to find any evidence of or sources for this quote, or even this type of sentiment from Nicky or the band from any interviews in the three years after Richey’s disappearance. Not only that, but in 2017 while Withdrawn Traces was being written, Sara Hawys Roberts posted a thread on ForeverDelayed forum, asking if anyone knew of the quote. She writes, “I was just wondering if anybody recalls the interview where Nicky Wire said something along the lines of ‘I hope nobody’s hurt him’ shortly after Richey vanished?”63 The post has no responses. In my search, I also did not find this quote anywhere or any similar phrase, and due to the fact that the authors only cited a fraction of their text-based sources in the body or back of the book, and none of their audio or video sources, they don’t seem to have supplied the original source either, if it does exist.
Next, the authors present us with an anecdote about a woman who disappeared from Gloucester in January 1995, whose case was reopened 21 years later as a murder investigation. However, nothing seems to have come from reopening the case. The inspector on the case comments that “there’s no evidence to say either way” whether it was suicide or foul play, but that “she seems to have vanished so completely.”64 The officer also explains that most police officers and departments do not have time or resources to “explore the full spectrum of possibilities when someone vanishes”65 which is why they are often put aside after a few months of no new evidence arising.
Rachel expresses concern about the state of Richey’s car when it was discovered at the Aust Services station,
“People have commented in the past how staged the discovery of Richard’s abandoned car appeared. He hadn’t had a drink since he left the Priory the previous year and yet there was an empty wine bottle in the car – no receipt for it although there was lots of other rubbish. The steering lock was left on the vehicle, but if someone is in a chaotic state of mind and intending to kill themselves, it seems unlikely they would care to do such a thing. Maybe he or perhaps someone else put the lock on to ensure the vehicle was discovered. In hindsight, the steering lock should have been fingerprinted to eliminate this possibility.”66
This is a strange assumption that seems to lack insight into mental illness. Richey may not have had a drink since rehab, but relapses are absolutely possible, especially in a person under extreme stress who is alone and doesn’t have friends, family, and colleagues monitoring him anymore to make sure he doesn’t drink. Cessation of SSRIs can increase the probability of relapse as well.67 It seems odd not to take relapse into consideration, as Richey had only been in recovery for six months, and because he had clearly been using other, non-substance related but still unhealthy coping mechanisms instead of drinking, such as self-harm and anorexic behaviour. Stressful or upsetting life events or mental states can easily trigger a relapse.68
The engaged steering lock doesn’t seem unusual if he was using his car for shelter while parked at the service station as the debris inside seems to indicate. Whether he took his own life or not, if he was sleeping in his car for a few days before acting upon his decision, it wouldn’t be odd behaviour to put the steering lock on to avoid a stolen vehicle if he walked away from it for some reason, such as using the service station facilities. It may have also been out of automatic habit; if it was something he always did, he may have acted unconsciously, simply following muscle memory. And, if his actions were premeditated as Roberts and Noakes have theorised throughout this book – whether disappearance or suicide – he may have thought that putting the steering lock on would have prevented a stolen vehicle from being just another thing for those left behind to have to deal with.
In 2011, Rachel was contacted by a postman who claimed to have spotted Richey on 1 February 1995 on the Severn Bridge footpath. He claimed that as he had no transport, the only way he could access the bridge was via the footpath. He reported that he saw Richey on the Aust Tower side and became concerned enough to make a detour to the bridge office and report it, but he doubted it was logged because the night security did not ask for his name.
Evidently the authors don’t have anything more to say about this claim, because they instead return to the idea of foul play, wondering if “with his slight and vulnerable appearance, Richey might well have fallen into the wrong hands”69 and someone might have taken advantage of him. They point out that the deaths of Jim Morrison, John Lennon, and Michael Hutchence are all ripe for conspiracy theorists (the musicians died of overdose, murder, and suicide by hanging, respectively). Somehow, these musicians’ deaths are supposed to connect to their next theory: “Rather than it being a case of Richey being in the wrong place at the wrong time, might someone closer to home have been plotting Richey’s removal for their own gains?”70
Instead of discussing any of the aforementioned musicians whose deaths are “ripe for conspiracy theorists”, Roberts and Noakes move on to the subject of the death of Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, because one of Richey’s folders from university has “POOR BRIAN JONES” scrawled inside it, and Jones’ image apparently “crops up repeatedly in his private files.”71 Jones drowned in the swimming pool on his property, but a number of books published in 1993 claimed that he had been murdered. The case was reviewed twice after 1969, in 1984 and 1994, but after a third review in 2009, no new evidence had emerged and it was not reopened.72 The authors note that there are still theories about “whoever was responsible for Jones’ death. Many could be said to have motives – financial or otherwise – for his removal. He had many enemies in the business. Had Richey, too, made enemies that were closer to home?”73
The authors wonder if Richey had somehow sought out confrontation with powerful people or “even just the wrong kind of people” due to his “provocative nature.”74 It’s an odd claim to make, since the Manics were not a massively popular band in 1994. They weren’t a proper Britpop band and certainly weren’t as big as Blur, Suede, or Oasis at the time. Most of the bands they slagged off in the press didn’t seem to take their comments seriously. Not to mention Richey’s most provocative lyrics in The Holy Bible mostly referenced historical figures who were already dead or past their prime, or they were simply pulled from already-existing news articles about current events (such as the lines in ‘Yes’ or the ‘Archives Of Pain’ reference to Yoshinori Ueda), and his comments in interviews tended to be more generalised rather than pointed attacks at specific individuals.
Instead of being ‘disappeared’ by an enemy, Roberts and Noakes then ask, what if Richey had an accomplice? They propose that he might have had one or more accomplices helping with his planned disappearance. If he did, they assume, “surely there would have been a meticulously thought-through plan.”75 Alternatively, they theorise that his accomplices might have taken advantage of his questionable mental state to perhaps manipulate or murder him rather than go through with whatever the original plan was. They also speculate that instead of being suicidal at the time of his actual disappearance, he “might have been suicidal in the days, months, or even years to come, driven to the brink by his use of substances, his mental illnesses or even the frailty of his body. The implications for his fellow conspirators would have been immense had he subsequently passed away in their care – by whatever means – and it would be unlikely that anybody who had assisted him would step up and speak of such events in the fear of being incriminated themselves.”76
I really don’t have much to say about this bizarre theory that some unknown individuals might have somehow agreed to help him disappear and instead held him captive without any indication of motive or reason. In their essay “Conspiracy Theory Psychology” Michael J Wood and Karen M Douglas state that “on a very basic level, a plausible conspiracy theory must have a good reason for the conspirators to risk being caught committing some terrible crime or another.”77 How would Richey convince someone to help him? It’s not as though he had loads of money to offer – all three albums had only been middling in terms of sales – or another kind of incentive. It’s also strange to conjecture that he wasn’t suicidal then due to mental illness, substance abuse, stress, and other issues, but could have become later, while his hypothetical accomplices stuck around after helping him, for some reason.
“I know people could see it as clutching at straws,”78 says Rachel, hitting the nail on the head. But she continues on. She explains that she saw a 2014 Netflix documentary called Who Took Johnny,79 about a twelve year old Iowa paperboy, Johnny Gosch, who was abducted in 1982 during his paper route. The film chronicles Doreen Gosch, Johnny’s mother, in her search for her son, the various pieces of evidence or witness reports that eventually dead-ended, and the lack of cooperation from the FBI. It specifically discusses rumors of child sex trafficking, as well as Doreen Gosch’s work to help form a law that requires police to begin a search immediately if a minor is reported missing. However, Gosch’s final statement of the film is actually in opposition of her earlier search efforts: she believes that if her son is still alive thirty years later in 2014, staying away is “working for him,”80 and that it is better for him not to come forward, because he would be subjecting himself to a media circus that would be extremely stressful and traumatising.
It’s also important to note that Johnny was a young child when he disappeared, while Richey was a fully grown adult. This film and its own recorded investigation prompts Rachel to wonder, “Did Richard have enemies? Could he have been forced to disappear? Is he maybe with somebody who’s supporting him right now?”81 There are, of course, no answers.
I find it strange and hypocritical that in the publicity interviews for this book, Roberts touted it as an attempt to celebrate Richey and reclaim him from the mythology that surrounds him,82, 83 when all it actually seems to do is add to the mythologising with the claims that Richey had planned everything and his “disappearance was not just 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”84 or seriously puts forth the question whether “he may have purposefully made an exit before he became a victim of the industry, leaving those who adored him pondering: murder, suicide, or escape? Was this a part of his own, self-creating, over-arching narrative?”85
It is interesting that the authors never seem to consider a more mundane theory, and only look toward the more fanciful or complex. Not included in any of the theories they presented is the idea that perhaps he is still somewhere in the UK, that maybe from the area near the Severn Bridge he hitch-hiked someplace rural and has managed to remain undisturbed. Of course, there arises the question of ‘But then why haven’t there been any sightings of him in the UK since those two in Newport?’ I think that’s just as fair a question as ‘Why would Richey be playing guitar somewhere in India?’ The theories presented in this book seem only to consider the nefarious or the elaborate without much consideration for more simple, prosaic hypotheses. In “Withdrawn Traces: a Retrospective”, Roberts claims that “as authors, we did not give a concrete, definitive answer of what become [sic] of Edwards, nor of his fate.”86 It is true that they never make any definitive, full-stop statements regarding Richey’s fate. However, they consistently and strongly insinuate that Richey’s disappearance was elaborately premeditated, presenting many of their ‘discoveries’ and ‘clues’ as more than mere hypotheticals, and with a frequency that suggests it is their genuine belief.
Another aspect the authors neglect to mention when they theorise that Richey might have planned his disappearance in advance is the idea of the “right to be forgotten.”87 According to Alan Rhees-Cooper, Staff Officer to the NPCC’s Lead for Missing People, an issue with the search for individuals who deliberately go missing is that “’if the police are constantly looking for me when I’ve done nothing wrong, then why?’ There’s that other tension with long-term missing adults.”88 Those who choose to go missing have a right not to be found if they don’t want to be. As stated before, if a missing person is found but does not want their loved ones informed, that is their right and the Missing People charity as well as the police will respect that desire. Roberts and Noakes have spent so many pages describing their theories about Richey’s long-term contemplation and eventual plan to go missing, clues and signs he left behind, and yet they do not acknowledge that if Richey’s disappearance was a planned one, that means it was “a question of individual choice. Complicated, often fractured in reasoning, but still a choice, however painful”89 for him or for his loved ones. Much of this book has been interpreting Richey’s lyrics and literary tastes as clues to his premeditated actions, without seeming to consider that premeditation might also indicate that he didn’t want to be found. If he chose to walk away from his life and his loved ones and start a new life elsewhere, it probably means he wanted to be left alone, and he should be allowed the right to be forgotten. The authors have spent so long attempting to prove that it was indeed a deliberate, coherent, long-term decision on Richey’s part, but don’t seem to consider that if so, it was for a reason, and his choice to absent himself should therefore be respected.
The next few pages are taken up by a summary of the history of the Missing People charity organisation and Rachel Edwards’ involvement with it, as well as the Edwards family’s experience declaring Richey legally deceased in 2008. The organisation was founded in 1986 and aims to help families of missing people gain access to information about the search for their loved one, emotional and legal support, as well financial assistance regarding their loved one’s affairs. Rachel has been a representative for the organisation since 2010. She describes how difficult the process of declaring Richey legally deceased was due to the “logistics of handling the missing person’s everyday affairs […] like sorting through their finances […] and, when it came to Richard and his line of work, his publishing rights.”90 There was no legal framework in place for declaring a missing person legally dead, so it took them three years to do so. In 2011, Rachel gave evidence in order to help with the passing of the Presumption of Death Act, which allows families to “approach the courts for the right to declare their missing loved ones deceased”91 and resolve their affairs more easily. In 2019, not long after Withdrawn Traces was published, the Guardianship (Missing Persons) Act 2017,92 which Rachel had campaigned for, was also enacted. This legislation means that a missing person does not necessarily have to be declared deceased in order for their relatives to be responsible for their personal and financial matters, so “families that do not want to wish that finality on themselves, […] can now opt for guardianship, which allows the families to oversee their affairs in the hope that they may return or their body be recovered.”93
Richey and Rachel’s father Graham passed away in 2012, before the Presumption of Death Act was passed; Rachel describes the “prolonged bereavement”94 that her father went through, and laments that “there was never any closure for him.”95 In a 2020 interview, she mentioned that her father “didn’t like talking about it,” and that despite her family members each dealing with their loss in different ways, “as the years went by and the trail kind of ran cold, you’re left looking at each other and thinking, is there anything left to say?”96
A pull quote from Moliere signals a transition in the chapter to a new subject. The line is from an 1894 translation by Katherine Prescott Wormeley of The Misanthrope, which appeared in an eight-volume set of her translations of Moliere’s works.97 The quote, which reads “Doubts are crueller than the worst of truths”98 is also featured on the homepage of the richeyedwards.net website, though it is attributed to an anonymous source on the site.99 [image] Whether the authors were inspired by the website or not is unclear. However, this version of the line which appears both in Withdrawn Traces and on the website is in fact a mistype of the Wormeley translation, which reads “Doubts are more cruel than the worst of truths.”100 This wording and translation is unique as Wormeley’s translation of this line includes the word “truths,” and also does not preserve the rhyme scheme that exists in the original French, which most other translators attempt to maintain in some way.
Roberts and Noakes then go on to point fingers at the band, framing them as uncaring or uninterested in finding Richey and saying that “while Rachel desperately sought to discover what had become of her brother, the band would re-invent themselves and find fame and fortune following the loss of their chief lyricist.”101 In a pull quote, they give an excerpt from a letter written by Jo in 1997, who says she believes that “the band have never given [Rachel] or me the opportunity to hear what they had to say off camera to people that mattered to him. Only to those who contributed to his unhappiness.”102 It is unclear what this is supposed to mean. The band have rarely mentioned Jo in their interviews, likely because Richey never talked to them about her and they consider the subject private to him,103 but when the subject of his family comes up, they seem quick to praise Rachel’s work104 and to emphasise that Richey wasn’t just their bandmate but also “someone’s son, Graham and Sherry’s son, and he was Rachel’s brother. He was a member of a family.”105-108 Perhaps Jo wanted something more from the band, but her letter doesn’t explain what that might be. She never spoke to the media herself and refused to be interviewed for this book,109 and these correspondences and quotes attributed to her are over two decades old, so she doesn’t seem to want that spotlight and there’s no clarification regarding her comments in this letter from 1997.
Next, the authors summarise the band’s success after Richey’s departure. They mention that Nicky would talk frequently about Richey, praising him as a rock star and missing him as a co-writer, and say that “the band’s own narrative seems paramount”110 when mentioning Richey. Of course Nicky is going to compliment Richey’s talent. It’s something he was publicly known for and it’s something Nicky can mention and praise Richey for easily and sincerely. It’s not as though he’s going to be going into deep, heartfelt, personal stories of their time together during every interview. He has done a few times, but the members of Manic Street Preachers are fairly private people whose feelings about Richey are likely quite personal. The public knows Richey as a writer and a rock star, and Richey’s writing was clearly something he felt was very important, so Nicky is going to compliment that. But he has also mentioned his love for Richey and often called him a “best friend”111, 112 and a soul mate,113 and brought up how much he missed their friendship and not the “professional stuff” of being in the band.114 He also noted that he felt his own grief was different from that of fans, who were only missing Richey as “an icon” and “a picture on the wall” as opposed to his own memories of Richey as a close friend who he’d spent time with “for hours on end,”115 and explained that he wants to keep his memories of Richey “unadulterated”116 and uninfluenced by the media.
According to Roberts and Noakes, the band have “policed the boundaries of received wisdom on the topic of their former bandmate”,117 remaining private in order to keep from hurting the feelings of Richey’s family. They have “drawn a boundary around the matter in the name of good taste”118 instead of inviting fans to speculate and come up with theories or “encouraging their hundreds of thousands of fans around the world to look for Richey.”119 Rachel mentions that journalists are shocked whenever she tells them the band have done nothing for the Missing Persons charity. This segment is rife with mixed messages and feels back-handed. It’s bad that the remaining Manics are only mentioning Richey when complimenting his contribution to the band and his artistic talents, but it’s good they aren’t speculating about Richey in order to keep from hurting the family’s feelings, but it’s bad they’re not talking about him because they could encourage their fans to look for him, but it’s good they’re not encouraging more wild theories, but it’s bad that they want to remain tactful about the situation in terms of publicity? I don’t know what Roberts and Noakes want from the band, if anything, or if their motive is just a more official publication of the insults towards the remaining members that Sara Hawys Roberts has posted on the Forever Delayed forum site over the years.
Rachel thinks that the majority of the task of finding Richey has been placed on her, and that “as [she] sees it, the band and those surrounding them could have helped her more with her search.”120 In all honesty, I’m not sure what they could have done. Since they are not family, they have no legal ability to do much, and if Richey’s immediate family struggled with legal processes and bureaucracy, then Richey’s business partners – which is essentially what the band were in an administrative sense – probably would have had an even more difficult time. While the band and their management had legal control over things like labels, paycheques, and PR, they probably would not have had much power over anything that might have been a substantial help regarding Richey’s personal affairs.
Roberts and Noakes quote a friend of Richey’s from university, Adrian Wyatt, using his statement about “what happened after his disappearance”121 to express the opinion that “more could have been done to help find Richey”,122 and to say that “there were interviews where James was saying he wouldn’t talk to Richard if he came back and hinting it was best that he stay away as it was ‘obviously working for him.’”123 The interview being referred to was an NME article from May 1996 titled “Everything Must Go…On”124 in which James expressed how strange and potentially traumatizing it would be if Richey showed up again, wanting to know them, and returned to the same routine and the same problems that had existed before he left. The content of the article also sounds very much like the band at that point were still trying to deal with their emotions and grief, and were expressing the confusion and frustration that inevitably comes with that. There is a lot of honesty in their answers; they could have simply said they were very sad, but they chose to be honest about their conflicted emotions. Later, James said that “it’s taken a while to accept Richey’s disappearance but there’s no anger, no resentment, no bitterness there. I know what I feel about Richey and they’re all good feelings. I’ve no complex in me about him,”125 and that “my first reaction [to his disappearance] was: ‘How could he do this to us?’ That was wrong – you have to respect people’s actions – and the anger changed into sorrow.”126
According to Richey’s university friend, “it seems as if they did and said as little as possible. They ticked certain boxes, but I feel like they showed little emotion or passion.”127 Are we reading the same interviews? The interviews and articles from 1995 are understandably sparse, since no one really knew what was going on or what to say in statements or how to treat the circumstances of Richey’s disappearance when it came to the music press. The interviews from 1996 onward certainly do ring with quite a lot of emotion, especially emotion that is tinged with confusion and frustration, uncertainty and grief, all the same things that Rachel and her family were clearly going through as evidenced in their own comments at the time. But the band were public figures and couldn’t exactly go breaking down crying or even making in-depth emotional declarations in every interview, nor are they necessarily the types to do so.
There are also some conflicting statements between Adrian Wyatt’s thoughts on the band’s actions and what the band actually did. For example, the interview mentioned in the previous paragraph is quite emotional. While the emotions might be somewhat negative, they’re certainly not impersonal. In 2018, Nicky Wire remembered that in the time after Richey disappeared “there was no music, there was no words, there was just anxiety, stress and waiting.”128 In 1999 he was also more honest about the tension and discomfort of Richey insisting on touring with them and being unable to accept help, explaining that it was the stress of Richey’s illness while touring, rather than the band’s friendship, that was causing problems, and his feelings about it were complicated because “it’s nothing to do with the friendship side. […] I know that fans and reporters see these big tragic messes as the best people on earth. But to be around them 24 hours a day is a gigantic pain in the arse. It’s disturbing as well. There is only so much of it I think you can take.”129
The band’s feelings about their bandmate were unsurprisingly mercurial in the first five or six years after Richey’s disappearance. Being emotionally open or vulnerable in the public eye is difficult, especially if one is frequently under media scrutiny, knowing you will be asked sometimes less than nuanced questions about a sensitive topic, and it’s hard to want to give honest answers knowing journalists and editors have the power to cut out context or select quotes rather than placing an entire unedited comment into an article. In 1998, in an interview with Esquire, Nicky seems to have allowed both kinds of feelings to show through, and the article retains that balance. When asked if he felt angry with Richey for leaving them, he answered “I don’t know. I think he’s the coolest person who ever lived. Anger mixed with respect. If he turned up at my house tomorrow… the thought of writing a lyric with him again would just be the most joyous thing. People can’t understand. Sitting in a room writing lyrics together. It was an unbelievable sensation.”130 In 2003, Nicky mentioned that the effect Richey’s disappearance had on him made him decide that “I don’t want to have any more friends. After losing your soul mate, like losing Richey, I can’t be bothered. If you’re going to spend that much time with someone, reading, writing, educating yourself, then you think, I’m not gonna go through that again, it’s too much.”131 The majority of the time the band mentions Richey in interviews it is with fondness and admiration, and even when they do mention the tension or problems that they grappled with in 1994, their comments are usually tempered with appreciation for him as a friend and an artist. They often mention how upsetting it was to feel as though he was slipping away and how difficult it was when he disappeared, but they also consistently emphasise that the pain is worse for Richey’s family.132
It seems as though there is some expectation from the authors or from Rachel that the band must feel and express the same level and type of grief as Richey’s family, or perhaps a resentment that they have found a way to continue on without Richey. But James Dean Bradfield has explained that they were able to continue because their relationship with Richey was one of friendship, not family, and “what we went through is miniscule compared to his parents and his sister. Once you realise all those things, you don’t have to carry that around and say, ‘When am I gonna get closure? When will the search be over? When will I get answers?’ You just don’t.”133
Roberts and Noakes can’t seem to decide whether they want Richey to be seen as a person rather than a rock myth, or if they’re more preoccupied with wanting the remaining members of the band to appreciate his value specifically as their bandmate rather than a friend. There are a number of video interviews across the years in which James or Nicky become obviously emotional when discussing the subject of Richey, and the subject inevitably comes up in most interviews. Nicky, Sean, and James often mention that they mourned Richey more as a friend than as a member of a band. In 1996, Nicky Wire mentioned that they were grappling more with personal rather than professional emotions: “At the end of the day you can’t feel grief because you don’t know if he‘s dead. You feel anger, sympathy and sadness. The tragedy lies on a personal level. On a professional level, as a professional band, it doesn’t really come into it. You don’t think, ‘Oh the band’s f—ed’. We’ve known each other too long for that. It’s the personal element that’s the hardest to take.”134
Over the years, however, the band have differed from Richey’s family in terms of their long term reaction to his disappearance and their way of coping with the loss of their friend. Their focus has often been on accepting the uncertainty, and on Richey’s autonomy and its importance.135, 136 “Philip’s death was so arbitrary,” Nicky expressed in a 1996 interview, “At least Richey exercised some kind of control.”137 The remaining band members acknowledge that Richey’s family has dealt with the pain of Richey’s disappearance differently from the way they have: “From his family’s point of view, I understand them feeling utter abandonment. Now I just see it as he had to do what he had to do. He made the ultimate choice. Whether it’s disappearing or suicide, I take some solace in that he knew exactly what he was doing, although obviously that meant leaving people with a lot of debris and unhappiness. I’ve learned that you can’t judge people when they’re in that state.”138 In 2009, James Dean Bradfield observed that “If somebody leaves a car by the Severn bridge they’re either saying, ‘I’m gone’ or ‘I want you to think I’m gone and I want to be left alone, forever’”139 and Nicky similarly said that “there’s very little comfort to be had from someone disappearing, but if you do feel that they’ve done it from their own accord with some sense of clarity that there is no other way for them, I think that as a friend and a bandmate you just have to somehow accept that.”140 The thought that whatever it was that Richey did, whether suicide or an orchestrated disappearance, he did what he wanted to do seems to have been important in the band’s ability to grieve their friend and cope with the aftermath of the blank space of the unknown. But they have also tended to emphasise that whatever his choice, they wish he’d contact his family; in 1996 Nicky said “I’d just like it if he phoned his mum and dad, basically, and said ‘I’m all right.’ Wherever he is and whatever he’s doing, I just hope he’s happy doing it.”141 They continued to express a similar sentiment for quite a while afterward.
In the years since, the topic of Richey’s disappearance has come up in most interviews, and the band often indicate that the idea that Richey had some level of control over his actions gives them comfort.142 It may be one of the reasons why they have not participated in the search for Richey to the degree that Rachel seems to have wanted them to. If they believe that Richey made an active choice and was doing what he wanted to do, then by not seeking him out they are acknowledging his agency, and respecting his boundaries if he is still living or his decision if he is dead. In 1996 they were very aware of being in the public eye due to Richey’s disappearance, as well as having a personal tendency towards privacy in their lives, and their statements in the press seem to attempt to navigate that dichotomy of public and private. Nicky explained that “We can‘t pretend that it hasn’t caused a lot of pain, but we can’t spend the rest of our lives acting out,”143 and that while they don’t feel closure, “we’ve come to accept the situation for what it is.”144
The authors also use the previous comments from Richey’s uni friend, Adrian Wyatt, to state that “what propelled [the band] into the spotlight was Richard going missing”,145 and to claim that they wouldn’t have ever gotten the attention of a big label without him being in the band in the first place. I certainly agree that their unique energy as a four-piece and the way they worked together was compelling and eye-catching. It was the chemistry of the four of them (plus Richey and Nicky’s letter-writing scheme) and their collage-like artistic expression that made them so interesting in the early days. The collaboration between Richey and Nicky was certainly responsible for their aesthetic presentation then, as well as their entertaining, dynamic and quotable interviews.
But Richey’s lyrics were complex, stuffed with references; he had a tendency to force listeners to do work in order to understand what he was talking about, to require listeners to read books and newspapers and do research for the lyrics to truly resonate. Within the musical zeitgeist of Britpop, this meant he was an outsider. Writing solo, Nicky Wire is not quite as intense; he makes his lyrics much more accessible and less packed with references and words. Listeners can research the references he makes if they want to, but there’s fewer of them and they’re less integral to the message. Casual radio listeners could hear a song and understand its full message from the get-go. Musically, too, Everything Must Go fit better into the popular style of the decade than the band’s previous albums. This is more likely why they were propelled into the spotlight after Richey’s departure and not before.
Upon resuming recording in 1996, Nicky Wire mentioned that the band had discussed their intent to return to making music with Richey’s family,146 and that Richey’s father thought the news about the Manics recording and touring again “might flush his son out”147-149 if he was still alive, and encouraged them to return to the creation of a new record.
The subject of the binder that eventually became the material for Journal For Plague Lovers is now addressed, despite its content being ignored for most of this book. Roberts and Noakes explain that “in the weeks following Richard’s disappearance, the band got in touch with Rachel and asked her to go down to his flat to retrieve a folder with a Bugs Bunny cover from his shelves for them. She asked why and was told it was because they wanted to look for clues, and that it was the property of Sony Records, and they had to have it back.”150 However, the band have always said that Richey gave them the folder towards the end of their time at the House In The Woods studio in Surrey, explaining that he “made the original copy of the lyrics, and Nick got the original copy. And then Richey made two other successive versions that were a bit more photocopied from the original, and they have different covers.”151-153 This is potentially supported by that £9.60 Richey spent at the printer’s in the days after 25 January. Richey giving the binder to his bandmates was already public information by 25 February 1995.154 If all three of them received their facsimile of the binder’s contents (minus the original cover on Nicky’s version), then they wouldn’t have needed anything to be retrieved. But Rachel claims that the band requested her help and that she “wasn’t able to think straight at the time and just handed it over”155 when they asked her to get the binder from Richey’s flat.
Richey’s father, Graham Edwards, gave the band permission to use the lyrics in the folder that Richey had given them when they asked for approval fourteen years later. Rachel says that she thinks Richey “never left the Bugs Bunny file for them as they claimed. I think it was about how they could market it as Richard’s lyrics.”156 So why didn’t she speak up about this when the band decided to use Richey’s lyrics, and went to his family for permission in 2008?157 Why didn’t she take these concerns up with her parents, when they could have refused or retracted their permission? Why didn’t she go to the press about it in 2008 when the band were mentioning their plans to make a new album with the lyrics, or even in 2009 when they were releasing the new album and doing publicity for it? There don’t seem to be any pieces of press before 2015 in which Rachel expressed doubt about the use of the journal. Why wait until now, when the album has been out for ten years, neither of her parents are still living to discuss the matter, and the band have not used lyrics by Richey since? In fact, Nicky Wire even answered a question about whether or not they felt they needed permission to use Richey’s lyrics. Though the band did ask the family for permission, he explained that “We always assumed we had Richey’s tacit permission, because he gave the lyrics to us just before he disappeared, but we wanted the family’s blessing. If his mum, dad and sister had ever said to us, ‘We’re not sure about this,’ then that would have been a bar to it.”158 But no one spoke up at the time, it seems.
The content in the binders Richey gave to his bandmates are “not actually notebooks or scraps, these are all fully formed pieces,”159 clearly collated together alongside drawings, clippings and collages. In the deluxe edition of the album, the second page of the booklet is a scan of the first page in the binder itself, on which Richey has written “these songs are in no particular order of preference although some lyrics are obviously better than others – infancy speech, all is vanity, etc.”160 [image] On most of the subsequent pieces of writing he has identified “chorus,” “bridge,” or “outro.”161 Richey referring to the content in the binder as “songs” and “lyrics” of which some are better than others, as well as labeling their sections, implies at least an assumption on his part that they would be used. The band worked on demos for two of the songs that were included in the binder – ‘Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky’ and ‘Elvis Impersonator, Blackpool Pier’ – with Richey while at the studio in Surrey, which also sets a precedent for their use of the pieces in the binder. This theory that Richey didn’t want his work used also directly contradicts the authors’ previous proposal that Richey was planning a trilogy of Divine Comedy-like albums, with The Holy Bible as the “Inferno” piece and another two planned; if the lyrics collected in the binder weren’t a continuation of that planned trilogy, then what were they? Was Richey planning to write a trio of albums or was he keeping the collated lyrics all to himself?
Rachel also points out “how different what Nicky sings on ‘William’s Last Words’ is to the actual words Richard wrote on the accompanying paper. Again, it’s the band’s structured narrative of four best friends until the end.”162 It seems like she’s trying to imply that it’s somehow offensive that they cut down the massive page-and-a-half monologue of ‘William’s Last Words’ into something that sounded like Richey speaking to them about their friendship. I agree that that is what the album lyrics sound like, and Nicky also acknowledged that he wasn’t sure if the original prose was autobiographical or based on a character in a film Richey liked, but that “the editing process then does turn it into something so loaded with meaning.”163 But does Rachel expect them to turn the entire page and a half of prose into a song? In a 2009 interview, James and Nicky mentioned that the original lyrics to Yes were similarly prose-like, but that “just because [Richey] would hand you some lyrics that it actually seemed it might be impossible to put music to them, didn’t mean that they weren’t written as lyrics.”164 The editing process for the band was always collaborative; Nicky explained that “Whenever we wrote, we always edited each other – I’d edit [Richey’s]; he edited mine. James would edit both of ours.”165 Almost all of the songs on Journal For Plague Lovers were similarly edited, and James Dean Bradfield wanted to try his best to use lines that he felt were decipherable in terms of meaning or intent, so some lines or songs remained unused if it “seemed like the key had just been chucked away to the meaning of them.”166 His bandmates were well aware that Richey had been consuming far more media than them, and that even in the final versions of the songs, “you’d need to do quite a lot of research just to spot the references.”167 The parts that were cut from the original lyrics of Me & Stephen Hawking, for example, show its focus on non-political current events and concerns about environmentalism, the limits of human scientific experimentation, and the increasing speed of mass culture, punctuated with a self-deprecating joke on the same subjects. The final, cut-down album version is more surrealist, a series of seemingly unconnected abstract images presented in the same space. However, that is the nature of editing things down, and has been the nature of the band’s process since they began, a process they used while Richey was still in the band as well as when Nicky began writing solo. ‘A Design For Life’ started out as two separate sets of lyrics across twenty pages that James then combined and whittled down.168 Their treatment of Richey’s lyrics is no different.
The authors claim that Richey has been relegated to a “footnote or an afterthought in any post-1996 documentaries or interviews.”169 But what else are the remaining members of the band meant to say, since they’ve been over all the information about Richey’s disappearance many times and there’s really nothing new to mention? In 2001, Sean Moore expressed frustration with the more crassly voyeuristic tendency of the press to ask about Richey, explaining that the band tended not to open up as much about Richey’s disappearance because “I think if people were sympathetic, perhaps we’d be a little more accommodating but people just want the gruesome and the grotesque. I don’t know whether it’s to make themselves feel better about their own lives but all they are after is the macabre side rather than the sensitive, torn soul side. It’s complete torture for his family and friends, reviving it all the time.”170 The band do mention Richey, whenever he is relevant, and praise him or remember him when they can, but he’s not always relevant to everything they’ve done since 1996. They have talked at length about their relationship with Richey and Richey’s disappearance in several long-form film documentaries, making-of videos, and countless radio, film, and text interviews since 1996. There have been four separate film documentaries post-1996 about the band that focus heavily on Richey’s disappearance171-174 (though one was exceedingly tasteless), and a number of books have been written that are mainly about the band during Richey’s involvement. But it has been 25 years, and by now the band have mostly repeated the same answers to the same questions, because there’s no new information and therefore no change.
In 2020, James Dean Bradfield explained they have mentioned Richey less frequently because “with each anniversary that passes, people become more interested in the subject and more questions arise, but we no longer have any more questions, we cannot give more answers. There is a gap between personal experience and rock mythology, and we understand that he has become part of the latter. There are no conspiracies, no secret truths, no hidden agendas, and no untold stories.”175 In 1996, Nicky Wire expressed frustration with fans who claimed the band were committing some sort of ultimate betrayal by continuing on, saying that “They don’t see us as artists, they just see us as Richey’s backing band.”176 Withdrawn Traces suffers from the same problem; the authors are unable to acknowledge the remaining members of the band as artists in their own right, who “didn’t really have anything else in [their] lives and couldn’t imagine [them]selves doing anything but being in a band and music.”177 They specifically changed their musical and aesthetic style when they continued on so as not to pretend they were still the same band as they had been when Richey was with them.178 Roberts and Noakes can only see the remaining band members through the lens of being either tools toward or obstructions of Richey’s attempt to become rock myth, rather than three people who lost a close friend but have carried on despite ‘fan’ censure and media scrutiny in the face of their grief.
Allegedly, Jo wrote a letter to the band about having written a poem called “Edit The Sky” which “formed part of the song ‘The Girl Who Wanted To Be God’”179 and the band never wrote back. The line that contains the specific phrase “edit the sky” did not appear in the original album track, but was included in a track on the bonus disc of the 10th Anniversary version of the album, in the Stephen Hague production of the song.180 There’s no context given regarding when Jo wrote this letter – whether she wrote it before or after the album’s release – or anything she said to the band, if she requested a change or credit or something similar. I don’t know what to do with this information except that they can’t really be blamed for the apparent line-stealing since they did not write the song; if she did not write to them until after the album was released, they may not have even known about the appropriated lyrics while they were recording the song. Besides, so many of Richey’s lines were nicked from other sources. “The girl who wanted to be god” itself is a line from Sylvia Plath; 4st 7lb allegedly contains lines from a poem written by a fan; some lines from Yes are, as previously mentioned, directly lifted from an article in the The Mail on Sunday; much of ‘Marlon JD is from a monologue by Marlon Brando in the 1967 film Reflections In A Golden Eye;181 lines from ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ were lifted from a poem by Nicky’s brother Patrick Jones;182 the “Today it’s a cow, tomorrow it’s you” line from ‘Me And Stephen Hawking’ is part of a Dutch anti-GMO poster;183 a number of lines from ‘Bag Lady’ appear in a collection of William Blake’s works,184 and so on. Richey had a history of pulling lines and phrases from other, uncredited sources, and in this case I don’t think it is the fault of the rest of the band for not knowing that he’d done so.
Roberts and Noakes claim that the Edwards family have not been in contact with the band’s record company or management since Richey’s disappearance and “were sad not to have been able to speak to anyone personally.”185 I’m not entirely certain how this is possible, since the label would likely have to contact the family in some regards for basic legal and monetary affairs. The band has continued to place a quarter of their royalties in an account under Richey’s name.186
The authors mention that Rob Stringer was quoted in an article for the NME on 25 February 1995 saying, “Richey is a very ritualistic person. He doesn’t act arbitrarily. And the scary thing is, he’s the most well-read person I’ve ever known – he would be able to tell you the last words of all the world’s famous suicides, he would know the content of Kurt Cobain’s suicide note off by heart and he would know 20 different ways to disappear completely. He will have planned it. He may be in Tibet for all I know.”187 Rachel says she “recently” wrote to Stringer, Sony’s CEO, “asking for more information about him saying that Richey was obsessed with the perfect disappearance”188 and got no reply. There is no quote from Stringer claiming Richey had an “obsession with the perfect disappearance,” only the above quote in which ways to disappear were listed as something Stringer saw as being in Richey’s circle of interests. However, in 1999, in an interview with The Sun, Rachel was quoted saying that “Before he disappeared, Richey had become obsessed with the perfect disappearance.”189 It remains unclear whether that is based on her personal knowledge or a misunderstanding of Stringer’s statement.
The authors state that “both Rachel and Jo have over the years felt excluded from the Manics’ inner circle,” and that “nobody ever said a word to [them].”190 Apparently only in 2018 or thereabouts (the book says “last year”191) did Rachel try to contact the band’s management to view the findings of the private investigator that the band themselves hired. Strange that she didn’t do that sooner, since the band spoke about hiring a private investigator when they were doing press in the months after Richey’s disappearance, which means she likely knew about it then. In the interviews in which the band discussed the private investigation, it was revealed that no leads had been obtained from those efforts.192-195
Yet again Roberts and Noakes return to the Journal For Plague Lovers binder of lyrics, this time in order to support the idea that “how Richey felt about the band towards the end is, in truth, open to interpretation.”196 Richey gave the lyrics of ‘Elvis Impersonator Blackpool Pier’ (which was included in the collection of lyrics in the binder) to his bandmates to include in their next album; the song was completed after his disappearance and included on Everything Must Go. The authors propose that the song could “be considered a pre-emptive strike on any future incarnation of the Manic Street Preachers [who were] hell-bent on pursuing a decade-long career without him.”197 The song seems to be about the “Americanisation of the entertainment industry”,198 but Roberts and Noakes question who the ‘so fucking funny’ chorus might be targeting, implying that the “pointed refrain”199 might actually be a dig at his former bandmates rather than at the saturation of American pop culture as illustrated by the tackiness of American-style ceramic souvenirs being available at seaside shops in Blackpool. [image]
As I read these few segments about Journal For Plague Lovers, I do wonder why they chose to ignore it almost entirely while writing this book. The lyrics to Journal contain as many, if not more, references to political, social, and literary artifacts as are contained in The Holy Bible. Why isn’t Journal – an album which is potentially, if the authors’ other theory about the Dante-esque trilogy of albums is to be believed, Richey’s second part of the trifecta, his Purgatorio – something to inspect for clues the way The Holy Bible is? What makes Journal, the majority of which was written nearer in time to Richey’s disappearance, less important to examine than The Holy Bible? Of course, including Journal For Plague Lovers would make Withdrawn Traces and its research more complex, and perhaps would require even more dramatic reaching on the part of the authors in order to support certain interpretive theories established in this book. It would also require acknowledging that Richey really did intend for it to become an album and for his bandmates to use it thus.
The authors compare Richey to Michel Foucault, citing the “sardonic nature”200 of both individuals, and the habit of both to write in such a way as to make their audience uncertain whether they are being serious or ironic. Off the back of this comparison, Rachel notes that her brother had “many multi-faceted, sometimes indecipherable layers”201 that made it difficult to understand or predict him. Sometimes she thinks it was his intention all along to not be found, she says, since it “cheats people of an opinion of him”,202 as it means that there is no definite ending to his story; he’s not an ex-member of a band or dead, but something undefined. She says that the family and those who cared about Richey don’t even have the certainty of his death and are also left with this undefined unknown. In her opinion, he was a very complex person and she says “it seems obvious that nobody ever really knew him as well as they thought they did.”203 It seems odd to place this quote about no one knowing him as well as they thought here after spending so much time interpreting his lyrics and his bookshelves without his own input. Richey had different relationships with different people and changed quite a bit over the years, so it’s not surprising that others would have complex and wide-ranging memories of him.
This sentence from the last two pages of Withdrawn Traces seems to sum up in the length of a tweet what they have absurdly stretched to the length of a book: “Whether he opted for suicide or survival, the likelihood is that the mystery of the disappearance of Richey Edwards will only ever be definitively solved in the event of his sudden reappearance, or in the discovery of a body.”204 Did the last 25 years not teach them that? Those really are the only two options at this point. They didn’t need to write this entire book full of conspiracy theories and fantastical hypothetical scenarios, since they just answered their own questions and theories in a single sentence. This isn’t a concluding summary of something that needed the time and research dedicated to write a book on the subject; it probably could have been gleaned by anyone after reading a music magazine article summing up the history of Richey and the Manic Street Preachers.
Withdrawn Traces closes with a quote from Rachel and an excerpt of a letter from Jo to Rachel. Rachel simply remembers Richey as someone who “gave so much as artist, a poet and most of all as a person”205 and says that she will never give up looking for her brother until she finds out what became of him. The final word is given to Jo, in the form of an excerpt of a letter from 1998 in which she talks about how often she thinks of and remembers Richey, and how “you just don’t meet people like him.”206 The last lines of her letter describe her memory of him as sensitive, quiet, warm, a good listener, “gentle and loving and incredible,”207 and she laments how those positive attributes of his “never seem to come across.”208
On The Retrospective
In September 2023, Sara Hawys Roberts posted “Withdrawn Traces: a Retrospective”,1 a statement giving explanations for or responses to certain criticisms of the book. A few of Roberts’ comments in “Withdrawn Traces: a Retrospective” have been addressed in the main body of this piece, and more will be addressed in the proceeding section which summarises my final thoughts about the book. However, there are some statements made in the retrospective which did not easily fit into the already-written parts of my project, so I would like to discuss them here.
As mentioned at the start of this review piece, the publication of Withdrawn Traces was delayed several years. Most people speculated that it was due to legal issues pertaining to the content of the book, but Roberts clarifies that “there were no legal ramifications whatsoever with anybody involved in the writing process.”2 Instead, she lists off several reasons for the delays, as well as for issues within the content of the book. First, she explains that she was ill, and wrote at least part of the chapter analysing The Holy Bible album while in hospital. It is due to writing while unwell, she says, that explains the “amateurish style”3 within some of the lyric analysis chapter. It seems that neither Roberts nor her co-author reviewed the content of the analyses, and failed to catch the issues within a chapter that constitutes twenty-five pages, and which is both literally and figuratively a central part of the book. Roberts also mentions that she “personally tried to leave the publication on numerous occasions”4 but implies that she was persuaded by her editors to stay on.
She also blames a communication breakdown with her co-author, Leon Noakes. Noakes has been a shadowy figure throughout this entire production; he has not appeared in any interviews or articles about the book nor has his role in the book’s creation been elaborated on. The relationship between the two authors apparently worsened until they had “barely any contact between them, and an abundance of bad feeling.”5 Why not put the project on hold? There are no instances of Noakes publicly discussing or acknowledging his participation in the book; it is frustrating that Roberts seems to place the blame on him despite being the voice of the project. She then admits that in the chaos of these communication issues, pieces of Richey’s archive “were mixed up with what I presume were both authors [sic] personal writings (in two cases)”.6 This is an egregious error to commit even once when writing a nonfiction piece, especially a biography that requires examination of the subject’s personal written works. That it occurred at least twice is appalling.
The other two reasons for delays in the publication of the book was the fact that “Penguin accidentally left the Edwards family address on an item of the archive”7 which had to be redacted, and word count limits, which meant many things had to be cut and information edited down or consolidated – which Roberts also says accounts for the “somewhat disjointed”8 nature of the book. She mentions that “some whole chapters were pulled”9 and therefore new passages had to be written to bridge those gaps. There was, she says, a “strict word count”10 of 90k “based on the standardised number of pages available”,11 and this meant large portions of writing were left behind.
Like the pull quotes in the body of Withdrawn Traces, Roberts uses Amazon reviews of the book in order to support her claims in the retrospective piece. The first review is by someone called K D Skirid. The review was published 4 April 2023 and is titled “I learnt new things about Richey”.12 The review quote supports the theory that the band and the music industry are purposefully selling a specific image of Richey and preventing the “real” story from getting out. However, Roberts cuts out a segment of the review in which the reviewer acknowledges the poor interpretations of The Holy Bible album and also mentions that they “have seen the authors say it’s bad and if given a second chance they would cut it completely.”13 This review was posted in April 2023, but until this retrospective was published in September, I have seen no statements reflecting this sentiment from either author. Roberts’ Twitter and Instagram are both private, so perhaps she made comments on those social media sites about her feelings towards that segment of the book, but I have not seen anything in media available to the public.
Roberts gives some context regarding her participation in the Manic Street Preachers fan community, and her history as a fan starting when she was a teenager. She explains that she “began using the many different Manic Street Preacher forums available at the time, mimicking some of their more outlandish comments and creating somewhat of an obnoxious persona that those with a sharper eye saw as a pathetic attempt of parody/comedy.”14 To invoke the internet axiom of ‘Poe’s law’, “without a clear indication of the author’s intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism.”15 Perhaps the satire was more obvious when she was younger and using other forums, but Roberts’ more recent comments and behaviour on the Forever Delayed forum from 2010 onward look and sound sincere in their seemingly unfounded hostility towards the remaining band members and antagonism of both other forum users and the band themselves, without any apparent indication towards parody or comedic intent. Her attempts to explain her antagonism by comparing her own actions to “the contentious, incendiary sentiments”16 that have come from the band over the years, and the ways in which the Manics “have long taken pride in their hypocrisy”17 are more like diversion tactics, as she then moves away from her own behaviour to double down on the insinuations that the Manics are not what they seem.
Here, Roberts returns to the unfounded accusations that the remaining band members have done something bad. What this is, she will not say. She remains vague, only implying that “there is no smoke without fire regarding how the band were portrayed in the publication”18 and even claiming that they attempted to tone down the “sensationalist aspect” of the book by omitting “the most cruel, offensive and inflammatory actions and words”19 so as not to “appear as a smear campaign against the band and management”.20 Unfortunately, many parts of the book still read as a smear campaign, so whatever they omitted must have been quite bad. However, even the accusations and insinuations that were included in the book for the most part lack concrete evidence or even cited sources. The apparent “actions and words” of the remaining band members hinted at here that have apparently “gone beyond questionable and into the deliberately offensive”21 are no exception, as Roberts fails to supply any example or explanation of what those actions and words might be.
Roberts claims that “this isn’t my story to tell”22 regarding the remaining members’ alleged actions. Whose story is it, then? It doesn’t seem to be Rachel’s, otherwise her words and thoughts regarding the band and their actions would have featured more prominently in Withdrawn Traces. Jo did not seem interested in participating in this book; she refused to be interviewed for the book and it seems she did not remove the box she received from storage when asked about its contents. If it is not Roberts’ story, and she cannot or will not give any details, then why mention it? Why sow seeds of doubt about the character of the remaining band members without proof, without witnesses, without any piece of evidence or even a detail or hint of whatever “deliberately offensive” thing they might have done? She claims that “there is so much evidence outside of the book about this time in their career”23 regarding their “distance from Richey.”24 Whatever the band might have done behind the scenes or in private, some sort of proof needs to be produced. Insinuation does not cut it when much of the content of Withdrawn Traces and its claims are held up by conspiracy theories, vague antisemitism, and manipulated or fabricated quotes.
This was already mentioned in the main body of my review, but I will reiterate that these were four young men who were all unhappy, all struggling with personal and professional issues at the time, and none of whom had the knowledge or skills to be attempting to care for Richey as he struggled with addiction and mental illness. It is not a secret that all four of them were drifting apart at the time, despite the desire and effort to help Richey with his problems. It is no secret that there was tension between them despite the fact they still did clearly care for each other. That does not mean that the remaining members of the Manic Street Preachers had some sort of malicious intent against Richey. Roberts claims to have left some information out in order to avoid sensationalising, but unfounded insinuations bordering on libel certainly work to do the same thing. If she is going to accuse the band of something, it is important that she back up her claims rather than making vague hints against them and allowing imaginations to run wild.
Roberts notes that “many fans have expressed their desire for a non-biased author”25 and mentions that there was negativity levelled at Rob Jovanovic’s book A Version Of Reason, which she says attempted to be unbiased. The criticisms from users on the Forever Delayed forum on average seem to mostly be that the book didn’t put forward anything new in terms of research and summarised a lot of interviews and articles most fans had already read. Other reviews from non-fan websites like Amazon and Goodreads have similar criticisms, but a few reviews also point out that a lot of the book was simply the author talking about himself and his agent walking around various locations of England and Wales without gleaning any new insights, an aspect of the book which bored a fair amount of readers, it seems. Some other reviews specifically criticise that Jovanovic was not a fan, and therefore was unaware what information was already well known and what fans would have wanted him to delve into more deeply.
Despite conceding that “it was hard as an author not to be heartfelt and have the utmost sympathy”26 for the Edwards family after hearing their story, Roberts maintains that the only biased content was material that did not make it into the final publication. She argues that “I would not say I was biased, as more in possession of the facts, as highfalutin as that may sound.”27 I do not think it is possible to write an unbiased book about Richey that includes interpretations of his lyrics or any speculations about his fate. To write an entirely unbiased book, all possible angles would have to be looked at equally, and objectively, which in this case they clearly were not. An unbiased book would more than likely be almost entirely regurgitation of already-recorded facts, something which has already been published in the form of other books about the band like Nailed To History by Martin Power, which for the most part simply summarised the band’s trajectory up to 2009. Roberts obviously considers Rachel Edwards to be a friend, and her treatment of both the Edwards family and the remaining members of the band within the content of the book reflects that.
Next, Roberts notes that Withdrawn Traces has been compared to Everything: a book about Manic Street Preachers, Simon Price’s 1998 biography of the band. She says that “Price’s book […] is that of speculation and mostly newspaper/magazine copy and interviews.”28 She points out that Nicky “drew back after agreeing to write the Everything‘s [sic] foreword due to Price’s take being so subjective.”29 In this way, she claims that there is a difference between the two books and that they are “unfairly compared in tandem”.30 The two books are certainly different; Simon Price mentioned up front that his work was exaggerated and subjective, he did not attempt to present his book as 100% truthful biography. In his introduction, he writes, “This is not, however, a work of uncritical hagiography, nor is it the Official version. […] This is my truth.”31 He also includes a footnote here explaining that Nicky “had to bow out”32 of writing the foreword. Price mentions in the footnote that Nicky told him that “although he respected my subjectivity (he signed off with ‘It is YOUR truth – and that’s cool’) there were also ‘a lot of mistakes, some minor, some major’.”33 At no point does Price attempt to pass his book off as an authorised biography, or even as something completely truthful and not sensationalised or meant for entertainment. He admits from the start that he is a fan and a friend of the band with his own thoughts and opinions, and that his text will reflect that. Withdrawn Traces does not do the same. In attempting to pass itself off as unbiased and completely truthful, it puts forth inaccuracies and biased information as objective truths.
The end result that went to print was not what was intended, Roberts says, and “neither author was overly happy with the final version”34 because the “search” section did not have a satisfactory end result and the book “deviated from the premise of a search that would access every conceivable angle promised to us.”35 She claims that the editors wanted them to build tension in the text, and therefore “requested an episodic investigation type approach”,36 but many of the people contacted to be interviewed retracted their offers, and they struggled with communication with the police. This is a complaint the authors included in the text of Withdrawn Traces itself as well.
Roberts points out that some fans complained that the book “delved too far into […] various texts name-dropped by Richard.”37 For the most part I have addressed this issue in the body of my review, but I want to reiterate that part of the problem is not simply that they spent too much time on these texts that Richey name-dropped or that they claim were on his bookshelves, but that they researched them inaccurately or insufficiently, clearly omitting certain parts of some texts that didn’t fit their interpretations or desired outcome. She does acknowledge that many of the literary and cultural references “had the dual aspect of suicide-vs-exile”38 but that they decided “not to ignore the disappearance aspect”39 because it had not yet been explored.
Roberts says that “the worst accusations”40 have been levelled at her, that people on forums have reacted with “cruel words”,41 and even claims that she had “threats of violence”42 sent to her via social media. She refutes the rumour that “Rachel Edwards was somehow ‘manipulated’ into this project”,43 explaining that she and Rachel Edwards met when Roberts wrote an article debunking a psychic (an article which I mentioned at the beginning of my own piece). Roberts says that she “never wrote this book for fame, vainglory or money”44 and turned down a number of interview, documentary, and film opportunities because, she says, “this is not my story to tell.”45 She says that she has “no regret when it comes to my intentions, which were always pure and done with affection”46 and that the book was “a labour of love above all else.”47 I’d be interested to know in what direction that affection lies; it certainly isn’t towards the remaining members of the band, but even the portrayal of Richey falls short of respect or humanism in the end.
She concludes the piece saying “I hope that this retrospective clears up some of the misconceptions around Withdrawn Traces, and the need for any further defamation when it comes to the aforementioned points above.”48 Most problems I found within the text of Withdrawn Traces and many of the questions I asked in my piece have gone unanswered by this retrospective. Nowhere does Roberts address the manipulated and fabricated quotes, or the lack of sources cited for a number of claims. Her excuse for the poor interpretations and analyses of The Holy Bible lyrics do not explain the equally poor and sometimes questionable analyses of the lyrics from Generation Terrorists or Gold Against The Soul. That she writes this retrospective as though she is the voice of the project yet refuses to accept any blame on her own part for the disappointment of fans is also a problem. The accusations against the remaining members of the Manics also continue to be unsupported, even as she doubles down on them.
Now that I have addressed “Withdrawn Traces: a Retrospective”, I will move on to my final thoughts regarding the content of Withdrawn Traces itself.
Final Thoughts
I was disappointed with and frustrated by so many aspects of Withdrawn Traces. I felt it had little interest in Richey as a person and presented him more as a legendary, mythological figure than as an intellectual young man with artistic talent, and that it spent more time waffling about his mental health and sensationalising his disappearance than looking at either subject with a realistic or empathetic eye.
Rachel’s quotes in the foreword, and now at the end of the final chapter, seem to have a different view of what Withdrawn Traces is about than how it presents itself as a whole. The original proposal was a desire to present him “as an artist and as a person.”1 Odd, then, that this book seems to allow the mythology surrounding Richey’s disappearance to entirely obscure his talent as an artist and the qualities of his person. Richey’s positive and warm attributes also don’t “seem to come across”2 in this book, because this text doesn’t even seem interested in focusing on them in the first place. In an interview with Guy Mankowski at the release of the book, Sara Hawys Roberts explained that “Rachel [Edwards] wasn’t happy by the way Richey has been portrayed. She is sick of him being defined by his illness and as a tortured genius. She wanted to reclaim him as a brother, a friend, a son. So she and I decided to write this book. We wanted to see him as a poet, a thinker, a gentle person (which he was) so that’s how it came about.”3
Withdrawn Traces does the opposite of Roberts’ stated intent. The aspects of Richey as an artist and a poet have been pushed aside in favour of interpreting his creative and intellectual endeavours not as artistic expression or analytical, poetic critique of history and the world around him, but of overly complex long-game clues and an almost narcissistic focus on the self. His personality, positive and lovable characteristics, gentleness and politeness, and endearing quirks or qualities that others have mentioned all remain unexplored and glossed over in favour of the apparently more interesting angle of his (already oft-discussed) psychological problems and disappearance. Roberts stated that she thinks “that from a biographical angle, the book offered more insight into Richey’s life.”4 Readers now have more details about Richey’s adolescence and early days before the genesis of Generation Terrorists, but not much more than that, at least in terms of his life and personality as an adult. Certainly more information and details about his problems have been revealed in this book than in any other content about the band. His illness is pored over yet again while simultaneously being dismissed as attention-seeking, or viewed as an intentionally prophetic act, deliberate steps on the way to leaving some sort of dark and mysterious legacy. Instead of new, positive stories about his life and reflections on his personality, we get baseless reinterpretations of his lyrics as secret messages, or anecdotes about his early years that are depicted as ‘signs’ predicting his future actions. His personhood and autonomy are all but ignored and replaced with an array of ‘what-ifs’ that not only go nowhere but remove agency from his final actions in favour of implausible solutions that satisfy the inevitable lack of closure in absurd ways.
If I were someone reading this book who was new to the Manics, who had not watched any film or interview and read every article or book concerning the band that I could get my hands on, I would have no sense of Richey’s work as an artist and an intellectual from this text, only an idea of ‘Richey Manic’ as a tragic, mysterious figure of rock mythology, as though that is the be-all and end-all of his life and creative efforts. But to quote Taylor Parkes, journalist for The Quietus, “Richey was young and beautiful, his words were tantalisingly oblique, his style unique; the Richey Myth is easily understandable, as well as immovable. And obviously, it’s absurd and insulting. What the Richey Edwards story ‘tells us’ is that sometimes human beings end up in places where rock and roll means nothing, or very much less than nothing, and to lose sight of that for a second is shameful.”5 In all the years since Richey’s disappearance, Nicky Wire has done a far better job of consistently and earnestly promoting the view of Richey as a person, an artist and a poet rather than a tragic myth during interviews where the subject comes up and in many concerts while introducing songs from their first three albums. Withdrawn Traces uses its access to new information to only enhance that myth and Richey’s image as a tragically brilliant figure of rock stardom, rather than bringing some humanity to his memory.
In her foreword, Rachel asks for any new information about Richey’s disappearance, saying that “it is only you, the public that can help me.”6 In her retrospective in 2023, Sara Hawys Roberts also emphasised this desire to use the book in order to “effect real life change pertaining to the ongoing search for Edwards”7 and potentially reignite interest in his case or uncover fresh clues. But if Rachel Edwards, or Roberts and Noakes, want to request more legitimate information on Richey’s whereabouts or fate, running through about a dozen conspiracy theories or hypothetical scenarios, and about as many bizarre interpretations of songs as secret messages for 250 pages first is perhaps not the best way to go. Roberts claims in her retrospective that she thinks the “the definitive word is that of ‘Searching‘. The book proposes hypotheses, theories and possibilities when it comes to Richard’s disappearance. Some of these I still stand by, some of them I don’t, some of them I never did – it was about exploring as many conceivable angles as possible from all the new information we had gleaned.”8 Focusing on implausible and fanciful hypotheticals perpetuates absurd theories rather than rational thought and racks up more outlandish and probably increasingly complicated hypotheses or stories about what might have happened. Roberts and Noakes’ use of potentially dangerous conspiracy theories, such as the antisemitic ‘New World Order’, the insinuation of Richey’s knowledge of a secret sex cabal, and the implication that the remaining members of the band are hiding vital information from the police, are hugely problematic. That they establish early on that they are genuinely willing to consider “internet conspiracy theories”9 while analysing Richey’s lyrics is concerning, as it allows them the freedom to make claims without properly backing them up. Generally, most conspiracy theorising is framed as “connecting the dots, seeing the bigger picture based on the limited information that has slipped through the conspirators’ fingers – they have covered their tracks well, so there is no single definitive piece of proof”,10 meaning that Roberts and Noakes can simply say that a lyric ‘seems like’ it is talking about something, but because the limited information has been hidden – whether by Richey or by others – they don’t need to prove it. Conspiracy-mongering like this also removes Richey’s genuine analytical skills and intellectual enthusiasm from his lyrics; rather than well-researched historical and social critiques they become shot-in-the-dark jabs at shadowy figures.
More people know about Richey as ‘the musician who mysteriously vanished’ due to his disappearance ending up on various true crime lists, podcasts and Youtube videos (if you search his name on Youtube, five of the first ten results are true crime videos about his disappearance; on Spotify all ten of the first ten podcast results are true crime pieces about his disappearance), but those people don’t know anything about Richey as a person with a life. In 2015, Rachel said “I suppose his legacy lives on in a way through the songs he wrote for the band – but his work is often set against the backdrop of his disappearance and his problems.”11 Unfortunately, this book is doing just that. The authors claim to want to portray Richey as an artist and a person, but it seems they have decided that focusing on his disappearance and his problems and sowing the seeds of various theories in order to potentially drum up new information or hypotheses is the most important task, even if the theories they’ve presented continue to further turn Richey into a myth rather than emphasising that he was a human being.
I was surprised to learn that Rachel did read Withdrawn Traces after it was completed and thinks it is a “really good book.”12 The body of the text seems to go so against the intentions stated in Rachel’s own introduction that I initially assumed she hadn’t read the book and had only supplied the foreword off the outline of the authors’ intended manuscript.
I am also surprised that this book isn’t a self-published work, that it made it through a pitch to a large publishing house, to an agent, editor and copy editor, etc, and still came out like this. Throughout my time writing this piece I have found within Withdrawn Traces incorrectly cited or entirely uncited quotes, quotes that had been augmented with lines that were not in the original articles or audio, and citations whose articles were incorrectly dated. Individuals who were not interviewed are quoted as if they had been, and those who were interviewed have come forward to say they were misquoted. There are a few ethically questionable sources, such as the anonymous nurse who talked about patients other than Richey in somewhat sexual tones, the doctor cited in the discussion of autism who has reportedly insulted and undermined autistic individuals and supported pseudoscience, and the use of the Daily Mail as a credible source. The lack of cited sources, the inadequate literary interpretations, the absolutely baffling lyrical interpretations, the misattributions and fabricated quotes and anecdotes, the poor research and poor explanation of information, all of which somehow passed through the hands and gaze of an editor, were still able to be published by a branch of Penguin Random House. If this is what Withdrawn Traces looks like after an editor went over it, what did it look like originally? Considering the disparaging tone of Sara Hawys Roberts’ forum posts on ForeverDelayed, I can only guess.
There is also a lack of input or perspective from Richey’s parents. The lack of input even through summary from Rachel is interesting because I’m sure it’s something the family discussed to some extent; if the authors were comfortable paraphrasing and summarising Rachel’s recollections of conversations with Jo, Nicky, and other individuals, I wish they had also included the thoughts or opinions of Richey’s parents. Graham Edwards passed away in 2012, but in the mid-90’s both of Richey’s parents did supply a few interviews in which they seemed not to take stock in conspiracy theories13 and seemed fairly supportive of the rest of the members of the band,14 at least in that they didn’t seem to think badly of them for being successful the way this book tends to do. They even attended the Manic Street Preachers’ 1999 New Years Eve concert at Millennium Stadium.15 In an interview in 2019, Rachel mentioned that, “my dad felt Richard was an adult and had made his own decision,”16 when he disappeared, a point of view that was not included in Withdrawn Traces. Richey’s family was of course affected differently by all of this than the band were, especially with the legal stress of handling Richey’s affairs and grieving the loss of a family member. But I would have liked to know the thoughts of Richey’s parents, their opinions of Richey’s words, his struggles, the media, and the theories surrounding his disappearance, as they appear to have had somewhat differing opinions from those of Rachel Edwards or the authors of Withdrawn Traces.
People deal with emotionally challenging unknowns in different ways, and this is true for those left behind after Richey’s disappearance. The band have accepted that whatever Richey did, it was his decision, and they respect his agency and his choice. This doesn’t mean they don’t care for him or have not grieved the loss of him; it means they have chosen to deal with his departure in a way that accepts Richey’s actions and allows them to move on. Rachel and her family’s own ways of coping with their loss are also not ‘wrong’ or bad; they are simply different from the reaction of Nicky, James, and Sean. The assumption by Roberts and Noakes that the band’s reaction means that their feelings for Richey were not genuine is terribly insensitive.
Rachel’s comments in interviews and Roberts and Noakes’ interpretations of Richey’s mental health issues make me wonder if they have taken into consideration how damaging it would probably be for Richey’s mental health if hereally were to suddenly return after more than 25 years. Official support in the UK for adults returning from missing ‘episodes’ is “meagre to the point of non-existence”17 and things would likely be made more difficult with Richey as a high-profile missing person case. Nicky expressed a similar worry in 1997 that if Richey were to return, the media attention would have a detrimental effect on him: “I have no problems with him coming back, coming round and drinking tea like he always did. But with the press, I’d be very nervous for the boy.”18 It is likely, if he is somehow still alive, if he planned his disappearance, that he has not reached out because he does not want to be found for whatever reasons, and that ought to be respected. However, Rachel’s grief and her struggle with the lack of closure is understandable. It is an extremely difficult thing to come to terms with unknowns about a loved one, and it is terrible that she has lived with it for so long.
I wish that Rachel had perhaps written a shorter book on her own about Richey specifically “as an artist, a poet and most of all as a person”,19 rather than allowing two people to run amok with poor writing, inaccurate sourcing and wild theories. Maybe Rachel feels as though she hasn’t had a chance to portray Richey the way she remembers him, while the band, having such a public platform and such a constant one as well, have been able to express their memories of him more often and process their grief in multiple ways. If that’s the case, it would have been much better if she’d written her own account of her brother’s life in her own words. In an interview from 1998, she describes Richey as “the sweetest, kindest and most sensitive man. He was someone who laughed a lot despite the image of this massively depressive person.”20 In 2020 she also recalled that as a child “he had just an amazing imagination. […] He would be able to construct these amazing imaginative stories in his mind, that I can recollect now even 40 years later.”21 It would have been lovely to hear these stories from Rachel, or a collection from his friends and family about this side of him. In 2023, Sara Hawys Roberts said that the goal of the book had been “to shed light on his life outside of the music press, as an individual, as a friend and predominantly as a brother.”22 Sadly, this intent does not come across in the final version of the book. Positive stories of Richey are lacking in Withdrawn Traces, and focus on his life outside the music press is minimal aside from brief recollections from university friends, which are for the most part treated as clues to Richey’s future problems or observations about how unwell he was. I think that stories and memories like the ones that Rachel talked about in 2020 would have been a far better way to remember him and commemorate him as loved person instead of a myth, as well as a better appeal to the pathos of the average Manics fan rather than true crime or conspiracy enthusiasts who focus less on Richey as a person and more on the wild theories. Perhaps Rachel is more interested in the possibility that Withdrawn Traces may somehow drum up new information than any concern with Roberts and Noakes’ exploration of Richey as a rock n’ roll myth. Perhaps she thinks his being framed as a rock myth is better than being framed as a tortured artist. But a shorter piece that humanised him rather than sensationalised him would have been better than either portrayal.
It is strange that this book seems to defend a position that doesn’t need defending. Fans of the band – and the band themselves – are not attempting to diminish Richey’s role in the Manic Street Preachers. Despite Everything Must Go being the catalyst to their commercial success, The Holy Bible is consistently referred to as their masterpiece. Nicky, James, and Sean talk about him as a beloved friend and a talented artist and express their appreciation for him in the majority of publicity they’ve done over the years. Those with more than a passing interest in the Manics aren’t focused on Richey as a ‘tortured artist’ but as a talented writer. Fans of the band still talk about Richey, specifically pointing out and appreciating his intelligence and the power of his words. The ‘Cult Of Richey’ may have been bigger in the late 90s, but there’s far less of it now, and at this point it’s closer to a meme about the worst kind of fans than a real part of the main Manics fan community. There are not articles out there saying that Richey was less important than the remaining members of the band. When larger music magazines like the NME and Melody Maker have done retrospectives on the albums Richey wrote, they have included appreciative and positive memories of him from friends and acquaintances in the music industry or from the band themselves.
At its release, Withdrawn Traces was touted as having “unprecedented and exclusive access to Richey’s personal archive.”23 In an interview with Guy Mankowski, Sara Hawys Roberts stated that “he left this marvellous body of work, and he was always going on about how he wanted to write, how he wanted to leave something perfect behind. I think it would be a great disservice to him not to look at these lyrics, not to look at this body of work.”24 When I read this selling point I assumed it meant maybe some of Richey’s unpublished poetry, manifestos, short stories, unused lyrics, or other pieces of creative writing might be included in the book, or even some high-quality images of his collages like those that can be seen in a few photos of him from 1993 and 1994. Instead of publishing more of Richey’s art or never-before-seen written works, and therefore rekindling the flame of appreciation for him as a talented and opinionated writer and artist, his private and personal treatment notes and letters to old girlfriends were published, his private diary quoted, and some school pieces that show Richey’s written wit as a young teenager scanned in – but no content from Richey as a more honed artist in his twenties. The first two albums are just barely glossed over, none of the specific lyrical content deeply analysed or considered, and The Holy Bible content is examined with far less depth or academic integrity than other books on the subject like Triptych or David Evans’ 33 1/3 book on the album. The theories in this book are mainly supported through analysis of what Richey read rather than what he wrote.
“Lyrics are an art form,” Nicky Wire said of Richey’s writing in an interview during their American tour in 2009, “and I’d like to see him recognised for that. To make lyrics like that you have to have that state of mind, and that can’t come from my lyrics. My lyrics don’t paint questions into musical corners.”25 Sadly, Roberts and Noakes neglect to recognise Richey’s artistic talent as a writer or explore his lyrical prowess with any depth of analysis or appreciation. His “body of work”26 is reduced to a fragmentary analysis of five songs from The Holy Bible, a summary of two songs from Generation Terrorists, one line from Journal For Plague Lovers, and a handful of scans from schoolwork and rehab, some of which feel like an invasion of his privacy. Any new artistic content that would be of interest to a fan of Richey as a creator was left out in favour of very private and personal writings.
When claiming that Richey may not have intended the pieces in the Journal For Plague Lovers binder to be published, Rachel commented that “the stuff in there could have had his private musings on them: stuff he wouldn’t have wanted published.”27 It seems strangely hypocritical to assume that this curated folder of works that Richey refers to as “songs”28 might have been private and should not have been published, only to publish both transcribed and scanned versions of Richey’s actual private diary writings, personal letters to loved ones, and hospital notes. Why do these personal pieces of writing get a pass while the curated binder which contains collages and fully finished and typewritten lyrics is deemed something that should not have been published?
In its review, The Times pointed out Withdrawn Traces‘ negative treatment and portrayal of the remaining members of the band, saying that “Rachel’s anger at [the police] feels warranted; less so her sudden criticism of the remaining band for somehow failing her brother’s memory — not looking hard enough, using his lyrics even with his father’s permission — when they have always seemed to behave with dignity and honour.”29 Whether this accusation towards the band is entirely Rachel’s or if some of the more aggressive sentiment comes from Sara Hawys Roberts and Leon Noakes’ own opinions, I’m not certain, but that it is significant enough for a journalist to point out in a review seems important.
In 2023, Sara Hawys Roberts mentions in “Withdrawn Traces: a Retrospective” that “before the authors of Withdrawn Traces were announced, the Manic Street Preachers and their management sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to the publishers”.30 She does not elaborate on the details of the letter, but mentions that the authors’ “overall stance was that it was cruelly unfair to try and silence Rachel Edwards’ voice after two decades of not being able to authorise her full, complete story.”31 What Roberts does not mention is that the band were filming their documentary Escape From History at the time, and likely felt that the authors were stepping on toes. They’ve had a number of poorly researched books written about them in the past, and probably are now wary of that possibility as well. However, this cease and desist letter informed how Roberts and Noakes proceeded with their project, and the band “were never asked”32 to participate in the book. Instead, Roberts explains that she and Noakes decided to imitate other music biographies that “aimed to look beyond and individualise”33 musicians outside of their bandmates. The only book she cites directly is the Jim Morrison biography Feast of Friends by Frank Lisciandro, though she mentions “plenty of biographies in the same vein”.34 “These books,” she says, “stand on their own merit, as I believe ours does.”35 The issue here is not that the Manic Street Preachers did not participate in this book or that their comments and memories were not included. The issue is that the authors actively target and insult the remaining members of the band without concrete reason.
Much of the portrayal of the other members of Manic Street Preachers leans in a distinctly negative direction. According to Roberts and Noakes, James, Nicky and Sean were just using Richey to get famous, didn’t care about him, didn’t try to help him, and used his lyrics and then decided they didn’t want him around when they to wanted make a concerted effort to be successful. Their relationship with Richey is consistently framed as a negative one, and Richey is generally portrayed as being more important than any of the other band members. The remaining members are accused of not doing enough to remember Richey, but the authors simultaneously assert that the Manic Street Preachers should not use any of Richey’s lyrics or mention their appreciation for him as a lyricist and friend in interviews. The band is frequently portrayed as having not been invested in Richey’s health and wellbeing. The authors just barely refrain from accusing them of hiding information from the police, and repeatedly insinuate that Richey’s lyrics were deliberately targeting his bandmates, insulting them, calling them manipulative and expressing a desire to leave. I’m interested in the reasoning Roberts and Noakes have for targeting the rest of the band so vehemently. Rather than simply portraying James, Nicky and Sean as Richey’s friends who wanted and tried to help him but were unable to, they persitently try to imply that they didn’t care about Richey, were using him, or even disliked him. While Rachel has spoken somewhat negatively about the band before, it has never been with such intensity. It makes me wonder what Roberts and Noakes’ motives are for framing them this way.
A fairly large problem Withdrawn Traces has when it comes to analysis and searching for clues to prove its theories is that it assumes that The Holy Bible was entirely autobiographical, and allegorical in the places where direct autobiography isn’t easily assumed. To support this interpretation the authors stretch and reach and twist the words, references, and facts in order to make it all fit into an autobiographical shape. Roberts and Noakes insist that everything must be self-referential, rather than acknowledging that much of the album is outward-looking – either at politics and society in general or at more specific people or groups – and that the ‘autobiographical’ parts are opinion or analysis, and Richey is not always relating back to himself or his direct personal experience. In an interview at the book’s release, Sara Hawys Roberts said she thought that “maybe Richey wanted to get away so his work could be judged on its merit.”36 But Roberts and Noakes’ examination of his work doesn’t judge its merit as poetry, art or social commentary; it is entirely obsessed with examining only the personal clues allegedly secreted away inside. Despite Roberts’ comment in 2023 that they wanted to “illuminate the life of Richard Edwards as an artist and a scholar,”37 the authors seem to completely dismiss Richey’s literary skills and his interest in political and historical matters, which is ironic considering how much he emphasised that his academic intelligence and his knowledge of history were extremely important to him, and that it was important to him that others acknowledged his skills.
A similar issue is the authors’ claim that Richey had some bigger, long-term plan to vanish or some sort of secret knowledge of evil goings-on in the music industry, in politics or other, similar esoteric knowledge. Yes, Richey’s intellectual abilities and artistry were unique, but why does that mean he had to have some sort of obscure or genius knowledge, some greater plan or hidden agenda? Why imbue him with powers instead of focusing on him as a person? Why couldn’t he just be a regular person from a working class family who had strong opinions and a unique writing style? Why couldn’t he just be a smart, creative, very talented but hurting young man? The authors criticise fans for romanticising Richey’s problems, but throughout this book they’re just romanticising him and his struggles from a different angle, giving him superpowers instead of acknowledging the obviously hard work required to read and learn so much and to synthesise all his historical knowledge into poetic or lyrical critique. But “he wasn’t a saint; he was a person”,38 and framing him as some sort of inherently gifted genius mastermind just fuels the myth and also ignores his humanity and the effort he put into his education and his intellect.
In the past, Rachel Edwards has discussed people making assumptions, saying “what annoys me more is that it must be even more difficult for him, because if he was out there, there are people who are talking about his work and his albums and theorising over them, and he was the writer and he’s not even here to give his view.”39 She has stated that people proverbially putting words in Richey’s mouth “makes me feel angry because he’s not here and doesn’t have a voice. They think it’s just an easy way to cash in with someone not being here.”40 I don’t see how this book’s agenda is much different, considering the sheer variety of unfounded theories they’ve inserted into Richey’s written words and the way they seem to be mythologising him instead of humanising and memorialising him. There is also a noticeably small amount of direct quotes from Richey himself in this book, aside from the scanned items and the few printed letters from his university days. Rarely in this book are Richey’s own words offered up in order to explain, illustrate or explore some aspect of his life or his work. James Dean Bradfield expressed frustration with journalists who did similar things when referencing Richey, reminding them that even on The Holy Bible, “not all songs are about Richey,”41 and wishing that media would “represent him as a real person rather than a myth.”42 In this book, Richey is not defined by who he was as a person or by the art and words he left behind and their scope of perspective, but by his final act.
I do think what Richey wrote was so important because it did have a voice, and it expressed feelings and experiences I don’t think anything other artist was expressing at the time, at least in such a unique way. Nicky Wire pointed out that he felt Richey was better than him at writing lyrics that intellectual and introspective fans could truly connect with.43 Richey’s lyrics forced listeners to do research in order to fully understand what he was saying, which made them feel smarter as well as making them a participant in the band’s art. His intellectual “ability and all his thirst for knowledge was captured in his lyrics, and that’s the real thing about him”44 which attracted so many listeners with similar desires for knowledge and artistic expression. Another part of why many fans found his writing so compelling and important is because he was the first (famous) person they heard talk openly and honestly about mental illness and express it in a way they could identify with, and the first person who also recognised, respected and encouraged his listeners’ intelligence.45 That’s not a bad thing, for Richey’s image or the fans, because it means he was talented and empathetic and able to express himself in a way others connected with. But misunderstanding or seeming disappointed in Richey for his mental health struggles as well as the work he put into expressing those feelings with intelligence and skill is an insult to his own unique abilities to express himself, and an insult to those who connected with his words as well.
One of the aspects of Withdrawn Traces that concerns me most is the way it waffles about and then minimises Richey’s problems and mental health struggles in 1994. The authors could have made a point to primarily emphasise Richey’s warmth, his humanity, his sensitivity, and his talent, and supplied more heartfelt and positive stories about him as a person rather than a myth. They could have focused on positive aspects of his life, presented stories about him from the people who loved him, examined some of his unpublished art and writing, and only looked at his mental illness insofar as the general knowledge already circulated. Instead, they make his mental struggles a major focus, but only as a vehicle to accuse his bandmates of failing to care for him. Roberts and Noakes’ bizarre dismissal and somewhat manipulative narrative use of the toll Richey’s mental health problems obviously took on him is extremely insensitive and frustrating. Richey’s mental illness has been talked about and analysed over and over for so long and romanticised so much, and even this book continues to romanticise it, though from a different angle. But Richey also never sugar-coated the subject when he spoke or wrote about mental illness, which was unusual for the time. And it resonated with listeners on a specific level in that he spoke and wrote about mental health with a visceral sort of honesty beyond the usual metaphors and cliches, as well as from a more political perspective.
With the decision to focus on Richey’s disappearance and the inclusion of all the new information about his mental health struggles and psychological state in 1994 and ’95, the authors could have done proper research on the challenges of living with mental illness, and could have researched subjects like depression, alcoholism, self-harm, and eating disorders, and how those things interact with each other in different ways as (unhealthy) coping mechanisms or comorbidities. They could have taken the time to research how all of these factors can affect someone living with mental illness or addiction when it comes to getting help and working towards recovery and stability. They also could have explored the inadequacies of mental health or addiction treatment, the ways in which the system failed Richey and, to continue with his own sentiments in interviews from 1994, how it fails others. They could have explored the ways in which the political and social climate of the late 80’s and early 90’s may have had a detrimental effect on the mental health of Richey and others. They could have looked at why his lyrics in particular resonated with fans, how his writing about mental illness differed from other bands or musicians at the time, as well as how and why fans connected with it as a special, smart, empathetic form of expression. Having access to his files of unpublished works, they were in a unique position to discuss his place as an artist and a writer and to explore the obvious connections between capitalism/mass culture/modernity and mental illness that crop up in his works, as well as a unique position to talk about his art and intellect as observed and loved by those close to him.
Roberts acknowledges this failed potential in her retrospective, saying “We wanted to add statistics, information about mental health conditions like Edward’s [sic] borderline diagnosis – but this came at the cost of the search angle.”46 Unfortunately, for the most part the ‘search angle’ is unsupported speculation, accusations and insinuations against the remaining band members without proof or evidence, and reiterating information that is already well known about the days and weeks following Richey’s departure from the hotel. The more general factual information about the types of conditions Richey was diagnosed with by various doctors is almost entirely overlooked, overshadowed by inappropriate literary and media interpretations of the same.
Instead of taking a “humanist slant”,47 Roberts and Noakes infantalise Richey while simultaneously imbuing him with an almost impossible solo power of mastermindery regarding the long-term planning of his disappearance. They highlight certain moments which frame Richey as really, really crazy and unstable and in need of support, and then turn round and deny that his mental health could have been so bad, even while discussing anecdotes of concerning behaviour. They do not acknowledge the failure of the healthcare system – both NHS and private – to support Richey and give him the help he needed. Instead, they blame his inexperienced bandmates for his failing mental health on tour, or claim Richey’s actions were manipulative, meticulously planned, or acted out just for attention. Was he unstable and severely unwell to the point of having no agency, or did he know exactly what he was doing and have everything planned out, with total agency and uncanny intelligence? They can’t seem to decide how they want to frame it; he becomes Schrodinger’s Richey. They seem to portray Richey as mentally unstable when they are criticising the other members of the band or claiming they were using him to get famous, but when they want to prove their point that Richey planned his disappearance, they claim that he knew exactly what he was doing, that he was manipulating people’s views of him and faking certain behaviours or feelings. There is a constant flip-flopping regarding his mental health, playing it up when it’s convenient and waving it away when it’s not or when it’s shameful to Richey’s image or family.
This aspect of the book is incredibly frustrating because the only agenda seems to be to insult the remaining members of the band and drum up conspiracy theory after absurd, implausible conspiracy theory. A large part of Withdrawn Traces seems to be an oblique attempt to figure out who to blame for Richey’s disappearance, a needless exercise that ends in ultimately attempting to fault the remaining members of the band. The majority of the examination of his disappearance is overshadowed by speculations and thought experiments, conspiracy theories and hypothetical scenarios not backed up by anything, rather than a straightforward account of the exact known details of the events from 31 January onward.
In her retrospective, Roberts acknowledges that within Withdrawn Traces, “Edward’s [sic] mental health was dealt with insufficiently seriously, and that the book dwelt too long in the mythical and speculative.”48 However, she then doubles down on the rock myth angle, claiming they were “obligated to look more into other possible outcomes”49 and that Richey shared “various cultural tropes on exile, vanishing, and starting a new life”.50 She claims that the remaining Manic Street Preachers have made comments that support this idea that Richey was deliberately trying to become a part of rock mythology, and that she and Noakes were simply trying to “look into what mythological material was already there, to support such a notion”51 because “Edwards was apparently inviting such thinking right until the very end.”52
Comparing Richey’s life to Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey and claiming that Richey deliberately constructed his life and his disappearance to become a rock n’ roll myth removes the humanity from the description of both Richey’s works and his life in general. Extrapolating conclusions about Richey’s actions not from what he said or wrote but from works by other authors that he read not only separates Richey from his own agency but allows him to be thought of as similarly fictional, so that inserting him into various dramatic hypothetical scenarios later on in the book is something that needs no pause for consideration as to whether it is respectful or not. Claiming that he wanted to become a rock myth, that his disappearance was a deliberate spectacle, also implies that the instances in which his humanity is ignored in favour of his being framed as a mythical figure, or in which his disappearance is sensationalised by media like true crime podcasts, are publicity treatments that he might have wanted as well.
What are the motives of Sarah Hawys Roberts and Leon Noakes for writing Withdrawn Traces in the manner they did? Who was their intended audience? A number of books about the Manic Street Preachers and about Richey have been published over the years, but this is the first that portrays both Richey and the rest of the band with such a negative sheen, and so heavily endorses conspiracy theories. Neither author seems old enough to have known Richey himself or for the band to have slighted them personally, and yet they consistently malign the intentions and character of the remaining Manic Street Preachers. Richey’s intelligence and creativity are framed not as talent or hard work, but as superhuman skills magically surpassing others’, and his mental health issues as self-induced or even as an act. No other book on the band is so heavily immersed in conspiracy-mongering, running the gamut from the absurd (what if a stranger found his body and disposed of it to prevent copycat suicides) to the sinister (insinuations of antisemitism and of the remaining members withholding information from police). As with any band, the line between fact and fiction regarding the Manics’ history is often blurred for the sake of entertainment. However, this book in particular contains a remarkably high number of falsified or manipulated quotes and anecdotes, the majority of which have been contrived by Roberts and Noakes rather than by the source material. What is the intention behind deliberately changing quotes, and doing so drastically enough that it cannot be considered simply an edit for readability’s sake? What are their motives for attempting to paint a more mysterious and sinister picture of Richey’s disappearance through these manipulations, conspiracy-mongering, and the presentation of unsubstantiated ‘new evidence’? These are questions that arose while working on this project which unfortunately have no answers, despite Roberts’ attempts to explain herself in 2023.
The Occam’s razor wielded by Roberts and Noakes has hacked Richey’s story and the few definite facts about his disappearance into a slew of increasingly absurd speculations and fantastical stories. Instead of focusing on Richey the man, they focus on the act that he is now defined by in popular culture. They want him to be everything, all at once. In their view, he is both a mastermind who planned his own disappearance to solidify his place in rock legend, and someone who should not be defined by it; he is too unwell to function, yet he is capable of orchestrating the complex details of his own vanishing; he wants to be a chart-topping success in the music industry, but he wants to write lyrics that express “unpalatable truth[s]”53 which would not be widely marketable. The authors complain about people reducing Richey to his mental illness, but throughout this text they reduce him to his disappearance instead. Rather than finding his body of work to be the important, influential thing Richey left behind, they claim that it is his disappearance that he wanted the world to focus on as the ultimate act distilling him as a rock myth. His life and his actions are repeatedly compared to fictional scenarios or characters. Rarely do Roberts and Noakes supply anecdotes from others that are simply memories of Richey; each anecdote must be interpreted through the lens of his long-term planning or his mental health. This book isn’t catering to fans of the Manics or Richey, or to people who want to learn about Richey’s life and artistry, or people who care about finding him. It is catering to fans of true crime and conspiracy theories, to those who want to read a sensational story rather than the biography of an artist. Within these pages, Richey has become a character or a doll which Roberts and Noakes can manipulate into the hypothetical scenarios and shapes that fit the mysteries or fantasies they want to present. There is no sensitivity, towards Richey or others. There is no nuance. There is no respect.
In a book that initially claimed to be about celebrating Richey, I find it both disappointing and rather insulting to Richey as a person that there are so few pleasant stories about him in Withdrawn Traces and that the memories recorded and preserved within, like so many other articles about him, look only at the the painful moments, or look back on memories in order to search for signs that he was or wasn’t destined to tragedy. It’s stuff that’s been talked about in every book and article about Richey or the Manic Street Preachers since 1995. What’s been lingered on less – and what this book had the chance to focus on but failed to do – is Richey’s talent as a writer and an artist, and a subject that has rarely been highlighted: simple, positive memories of Richey as a man who did have a sense of humour and could have fun and who had friends and family and had a life. In 2020, James Dean Bradfield fondly recalled his happy memories of him:
“Richey’s much more interesting in real life than the version people hold of him. […] He had much more of a sense of humour than his lyrics ever give off, was much more self-deprecating, and also much more into his sport than you’d realise. Fucking loved rugby, fucking loved boxing, and the dichotomy in a fight like Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler, the artist and the butcher. And I think he wanted the butcher to win. So much more interesting, and more soppy. So, when he stepped into wanting to write songs, and you look at his bookshelves, you’d touch on something like A Season In Hell by Rimbaud, Dostoevsky and Bulgakov, and you both got it. Then he’d go off-piste with Torture Garden, and stuff I couldn’t get into. But sometimes he’d just put on Taillights Fade by Buffalo Tom, an amazingly soppy, yearning indie song. And other times he’d listen to stuff which was unlistenable. But, you know, a lot of the time, you’d go out and talk about why Dai Bishop from Cardiff was a great fucking scrum-half in the pub with him. That’s an image of him that people just won’t understand. So much more flawed, much more perfect in real life.” 54
In her retrospective, Roberts said that Withdrawn Traces was different from other books about Edwards or the Manic Street Preachers because “the people who were close to Richard and who knew him in the past spoke in depth and at length for the first time about his life from their own unique perspective.”55 She claims that “we wanted the book to have some balance between memories of Edwards as a close-up person, and his constructed persona in the culture.”56 However, the majority of direct quotes are very short, anonymous, or apparently fabricated. Very few comments from those interviewed shed light on Richey himself or on his personality; for the most part they were used to describe the zeitgeist surrounding the band, not Richey himself. This is disappointing, as it would have been a new and interesting journalistic angle to hear the good things about him, the pleasant memories like the one above, the image of him as real, as human. Richey’s university and childhood friends, his bandmates, journalists and other music industry people who knew him, members of other bands, and even fans could have shared their positive stories and memories of him. I would much rather read those stories as a celebration of Richey than another piece of writing in a long line of 27 years’ worth of pieces about the tragedy of his downward spiral and disappearance. Underneath the persona portrayed by the media through selective quotes and photos there was a person, and that’s the thing that should be highlighted in something that wants to celebrate Richey Edwards.
Withdrawn Traces is more about Richey’s absence than his presence, more about the lack of him than his life. It doesn’t dispel myths as it claims, it simply creates more. The anecdotes, stories and descriptions of him that the authors chose to include don’t necessarily portray him as a person or an artist, a friend or a son, but instead endow him with superior mental powers in order to explore potential reasons for and connections to his eventual disappearance, often spiralling into the territory of the ridiculous. Richey is not in reality present to tell his story, but he’s not really metaphorically present in this book either. An impression of him as a person rather than a myth does remain, but it is light, and it is just an outline, an echo, despite it being obvious that there was such richness to his thoughts and ideas and artistry, as well as to his relationships with his friends and family. What is more defined is the empty space left, and instead of filling it with positive memories, examples of his art and his obvious talent, creativity and intelligence, or the small mischievous smile the band often describe, it is filled with those rock n’ roll myths, motives placed in his mouth, and other people’s narratives for his end. This book purports to portray him as something other than a tragic figure, but there’s so little in it that frames him in any way differently from every other piece of media that covers his end. It is extremely sad to read this book and see only an undefined, shadowy figure with a strange tunnel-vision on leaving a specific kind of media mark – and then to look at photos of Richey with the band and with his friends or family, or to watch videos of him in interviews online, and suddenly remember that, Oh, yes, this was a man with thoughts and feelings and experiences of his own, likes and dislikes, a sense of humour and a life with dimension, not some sort of vague, mythical writer who sounds like a piece of fiction. We’ve already heard so much about his disappearance and his struggles, he’s been mythologised enough. Why not focus on his life, his artistry, his intelligence, his personality, the things people – family, friends, fans – loved and miss about him?
Supplement: Scans of the photo inserts in Withdrawn Traces + other images for context
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Liz for sending me her copy of the book. Thank you to Soll Ballard for being a fantastic conversationalist, helping me to expand ideas and find so many sources, and being so wonderfully encouraging. Thank you to Soll, Danni, Elliott, and Michelle for editing and all your input. Thank you Soll and Lauren for helping me find so many specific and obscure sources. Thanks to Kim, Beata, Emilee, Ava, R, bitpunk, Danni, Kristofer, and Wil for helping me with context/research, pointing out important topics that needed to be included, and being soundboards at various points in this project. Thank you James Brown, Benji Webbe, John G. and Bob Stanley for your willingness to speak with me. Thanks to Yusef Sayed of 227lears for pointing me in the direction of the Mail on Sunday article for the context of Yes as well as helping me find a number of other sources, and for compiling the article on The Holy Bible UK tour memories. Thanks to Yusef and Helen for explaining some comic book references that I was unfamiliar with so I knew how to research them. Thank you to Emily and Kevin for input on the ASD section and to Emily for the FDForum access. Thanks to Rob and Michelle for input on the Nietzsche/Yeats sections. Thank you to Marta for giving advice so readily. Thank you to Jenny and Emilee for the extra research site access. Thank you to J for her wonderful and complete translations of a number of Japanese language articles on the Manics, available at Solitude Grey. Thank you to everyone on Twitter who collectively helped me identify sources or track down quotes. Lastly, a massive thank you to admin James Florey and any other contributors of MSPpedia and Forever Delayed Forum; the Manics fan community’s encyclopaedic knowledge and penchant for archiving everything was extremely helpful and the existence of the archive of articles on MSPpedia was indispensable.
Squash Writes 