Withdrawn Traces Read online

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1 I Accuse History

  2 A Fixed Ideal

  3 Crosskeys

  4 Student Body

  5 Drop Your Life and Pick up Your Soul

  6 Imitation Demigod

  7 New Improved Formula

  8 Negative Capability

  9 The Holy Bible – the Powers of Horror

  10 Doors Closing Slowly

  11 The Vanishing

  12 The Narrative Verdict

  13 Rachel’s Search

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix

  References

  Index

  About the Authors

  LEON NOAKES and SARA HAWYS ROBERTS have been working closely with Richey’s sister, Rachel Edwards, examining Richey’s archive and investigating his disappearance. Their new discoveries and fresh perspective, together with a range of previously unseen sources, illuminates and brings a deeper understanding of the Richey Edwards story.

  Foreword

  I was 24 years old when I last saw my brother. Twenty-four years have passed since the day that he went missing. I have been without him for half of my life. I am almost the same age that my mother was when her son disappeared.

  There are a great many things I do not understand in life. I do not understand why my brother Richard went missing. I do not understand how, in an area with some of the highest levels of CCTV coverage, he could apparently just vanish from the face of the earth. I do not understand how after so much searching, so many appeals, that not one shred of information about him has ever come to light. Surely someone, somewhere, knows what happened to him. I do not understand how I can grieve for him when there is always hope just around the corner that we will find an answer.

  But there are some things I do understand. I do understand the impact of having a loved one go missing. I do understand that every moment is affected by the absence of those you hold dear. How every phone call fills you with anxiety. How potentially every e-mail and letter could provide you with the answer. How every walk through the crowded streets leaves you searching. Having a missing loved one is like having a candle that is never lit. There is a diminishing of light and of joy. And although I live daily with this loss, I find through sharing memories and prayer, I can rekindle the light through uncertainty, and find hope.

  I want my brother to be remembered as more than just a member of a band. I want him to be remembered as an artist and as a person and as a dearly loved and missed family member. Although there has not been a shortage of writers keen to work on Richard’s biography, it was not until my meeting with Sara, some ten years ago, that I felt able to entrust anyone with my brother’s story and extensive archive. Sara ‘got it’ from the outset, seeing Richard as an artist standing in, yet outside, his creation – and not just a member of a four-piece band. That he should be remembered as someone who stands outside of this framework. This is the first attempt in any book to explore Richard in this way, in a sympathetic light. The authors reveal my brother as I knew him.

  Sharing my recollections, many aspects of the private life of my family, and the contributions from people who both knew and cared for Richard has not been an easy undertaking for me. My parents, when alive, were quiet, dignified and the least likely couple to wish to have attention drawn to themselves. As the remaining living member of our small family, I feel that if I can reach out one more time to as wide an audience as possible, not only will Richard be remembered but the light from that candle may illuminate what became of him.

  As for my thoughts about what became of Richard, I honestly don’t know. People will ask me if I think he’s alive or dead, and I have no answers. Without a body there is no certainty, and the only certainty I have is uncertainty. Richard was a highly intelligent, enigmatic and most of all complicated character. His very complexity sometimes makes it seem appropriate that his fate is shrouded in such mystery.

  The book concludes with more questions than had previously been raised during the investigations into Richard’s disappearance. Part of its legacy is to discover the story behind all of those other stories – not the soundbites, not the headlines – but the actual reality. Everything has to now be re-explored. I have felt a sense of burning injustice in the way the case has been handled by the authorities and various agencies, therefore being involved with this book has proved to be a cathartic experience.

  We now know that the timeline of events has been wrong from the moment Richard went missing. Even though the police are aware of this, it is enormously frustrating that they have closed the case and will not reopen it.

  Only new information can now change the situation. There have been Missing Persons cases which the public have solved before. Perhaps someone knows something but had their reasons to conceal it at the time? Or maybe they have some evidence but do not believe that it is important? From my perspective, any new information is valuable.

  If the mystery of Richard’s disappearance can be explained, then it is only you, the public that can help me. Please come forward with any information if you have it. Both my parents died without knowing what happened to their son; I don’t want to die without knowing what happened to my brother.

  Rachel Edwards, 2019.

  Introduction

  ‘You’ve got to reach out on a massive level. Once we’ve done that we’ll fade away. You’ll never hear from us again.’

  Richey Edwards, 1991

  Over two decades have passed since the disappearance of Manic Street Preachers’ lyricist and guitarist, Richey Edwards. A missing person since 1 February 1995, his car was found at the Aust service station overlooking the old Severn crossing. He has not been seen or heard from since.

  This mysterious case is lodged in the popular consciousness. Even those unfamiliar with the Manic Street Preachers, or unable to match a face to Richey’s name, have heard of the legendary missing rock star and his dramatic story.

  As the years go by with no apparent progress, will we ever find out what happened to Richey Edwards? This book is an invitation to consider the issue anew, in the hope that something of the obscured truth of what happened to him may come to light.

  In a 1992 interview, Richey stated, ‘Whatever anyone thinks of me, whatever happens to me, at least I know that I tried to be a person. I set out to be something worthwhile that meant something real and valuable; to talk about ideas and attitudes that are important and real, and that no one is saying or is too scared to speak of; to be the influence to people I never had when growing up.’

  Since his adolescence, Richey dreamed feverishly of entering the pantheon of rock’s greatest figureheads, aiming to contribute to that lineage. His devout mission was to become a pop-culture icon, and one that meant something.

  Richard James Edwards grew up in the working-class town of Blackwood in the Welsh Valleys, a once thriving and close-knit community, now devastated by industrial decline. A teenager of the eighties, he spent much of his youth in his bedroom, listening to The Smiths and The Clash, reading the Beat poets and dreaming of escape.

  With his fierce intellect, he initially believed academia would be his ticket away from a home town he later described as ‘being a museum, full of rubble and shit’. Born to a generation mired in defeatism and hopelessness, he saw this new barrenness as a great opportunity, a blank canvas upon which to daub. He would join forces with three local friends and become ‘Richey Manic’ – a spokesman for a generation revered for his highly charged, polemic and politicised lyrics.

  When the Manic Street Preachers broke into the musical mainstream in the early 1990s, their name became synonymous with a certain literacy and barbed rhetoric. Richey’
s acute intelligence and desire to deliver complex and uncomfortable truths, lyrically and in interviews, hit home hard.

  His attempts to tackle head-on the existential questions of a post-Cold War world, and his strong knowledge of political history, offered music fans a whole new perspective. His mission was to follow the goal of all great art – to take us out of our commonplace reality and reveal alternative ways of seeing. Richey became the central focus for the band’s core message – that magic could be found even in a disenchanting world.

  Despite the band’s pursuit of their own romantic escape from mundanity, they remained committed to understanding how modern society is constructed: politically, culturally, and economically. Their concerns and obsessions reached far beyond the set agenda of most rock bands. ‘We’ll never write a love song,’ said Richey in 1991. ‘If you wanna end up with gold discs on your wall, it’s pretty easy to go that way. We don’t care about that; it doesn’t matter to us. You can maybe ignore our songs, but when we walk down the street and you see our song titles on our chests, you’ve got to think something.’

  Masters in the art of narrative, the Manic Street Preachers brilliantly defined their own identity using the building bricks of rock mythology. They referenced, drew from, and alluded to a vast range of cultural texts to magically weave an involving narrative that was very much their own. This was rock music steeped in self-awareness.

  Richey’s perspective set him apart from his contemporaries on the music scene. Of a deeply idealistic and sensitive disposition, it was evident that the world he wrote about troubled him greatly, and as his time with the band progressed, his own troubles played out for the world to see.

  More than twenty years later, he has become uniquely mythic among the tragic young rock heroes whose stars burned out rather than faded away. But it was a painfully premature departure for a man with potentially so much more to give.

  We’ll never know the true impact Richey Edwards could have had on the world, had he stayed around. In the annals of rock he stands alongside such beloved cult figures as Ian Curtis, Syd Barrett and Stuart Sutcliffe – rising stars whose creative genius was precipitately cut short, their legends transforming into something more alluring, and mysterious.

  Richey’s disappearance captures the imagination with its appalling ambiguity; for having no resolution. There are those who will believe that he took his own life, while others simply refuse to completely give up the hope that his vanishing was planned.

  As far back as 1992, Richey publicly referenced The Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger, famed for his life of isolation in self-imposed exile. In the last known year of Richey’s life, this fascination with writers and characters in exile grew. His parting words to the British music press came in late 1994, when he told readers of Q magazine that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness would be his Christmas reading material. One of the central characters, Kurtz, is a renegade ivory trader and charismatic cult leader, hunted down while living off-grid in the heart of Africa.

  Reading through Richey’s personal archive and talking to those close to him a pattern emerges that suggests a possible life in exile. Scrutinised in detail, what appears to be an uncanny trail of puzzle pieces is surely enough to convince even the most hardened sceptic that Richey may have planned his disappearance.

  For those who believe he took his own life, Richey’s vanishing signalled his release from an extended period of suffering. A history of self-harm, anorexia and alcoholism, together with his own self-confessed inability to love, lead many to think Richey Edwards was a casualty of problems beyond his own control. Throughout his time with the Manic Street Preachers, his bloody-minded desire to confront life’s harsh realities seemed to corrode him physically and his quest for truth appeared to weigh down on him heavily.

  We wrote this book at the request, and with the help, of Rachel Edwards, who for years has been frustrated at unchallenged notions about her brother’s life and disappearance. ‘People seem to think there are only two outcomes when it comes to discussing what happened to my brother,’ she says. ‘One is that that he walked off into the sunset to go somewhere exotic and the other is that he jumped off the bridge. There are a million different scenarios between those two things.’

  Only a partial version of Richey Edwards’s story has ever been told. The many writings about Richey invariably approach him from the perspective of his position in the band and the music industry. There is more left to be uncovered, and a lot until now left unsaid.

  We have interviewed many crucial people who knew Richey during different stages of his life. Most are speaking publicly for the first time – childhood friends; university housemates; former girlfriends; colleagues from the music industry and fellow patients from his time in rehab. It all helps to bring us closer to understanding the life and mysterious vanishing of Richey Edwards.

  In our research, Rachel Edwards has kindly granted us unprecedented access to an archive of Richey’s possessions: letters, essays, artwork, unused lyrics, photographs and other intimate belongings.

  We have followed every new source available to attain the truth – but we found that Richey’s story is more complicated than we had imagined, and the narrative neither simple nor linear.

  The disappearance had an enormous impact on Richey’s remaining bandmates. The perspective of James, Nicky and Sean has fluctuated throughout the years when they have spoken about their old friend and colleague. In this book, Richey’s private archive, and the recollections of new voices, offers fresh perspectives on his life and story.

  Had Richey planned to disappear, and should he have survived, it would have meant an almost superhuman exertion of willpower, and the emergence of a very different kind of music icon.

  Speaking to the press in 1991, he made abundantly clear the band’s initial manifesto: ‘We want a real classic purity, because we’ve never heard of a band that were perfect, that we could feel were the real deal. Because they’ve all carried on too long, and become so banal and uninspiring, you lost all faith in them. It’s what we take from every generation of rock ’n’ roll to become the perfect band which I don’t think there ever has been.’

  The appeal of the early Manic Street Preachers was their self-awareness, their willingness to submit to the world of rock cliché when the occasion demanded; from the very beginning they promised tragedy, suicide and disaster. Might Richey Edwards have become so immersed in the theatricality and the myth-making of rock super stardom that he felt compelled to adhere to the band’s early manifesto, or was he so overtly aware of the clockwork machinations of shallow fame, that he consciously shunned what might have seemed the obvious outcome?

  How far was Richey Edwards prepared to go to achieve his ambition of creating the perfect band, and to what lengths would he go on a personal level?

  Richey radiated a rare and undeniable personal charisma, so captivating the hearts of his adoring fans that some music writers labelled him a ‘cult leader’. His fans have suffered the accusation of being slavish disciples, and part of the ‘Cult of Richey’. Writing this book, we met people who felt ashamed of expressing their admiration for him. As passionate admirers of a gifted lyricist and sensitive artist, they were fearful of association with only the more tragic aspects surrounding Richey’s life.

  Since 1995, Richey has not received the recognition he very likely would have following a confirmed suicide. This is possibly explained by people’s unwillingness to contribute a critical opinion while his tragic story remains unresolved. There is reluctance to give a definitive verdict when there is still the possibility that Richey retains full authorship of his fate, and may yet walk back into our lives at any point.

  In the two decades since Richey’s disappearance, by far the most energy into the search for him has been expended by Rachel Edwards. Rachel has expressed profound frustration at her dealings with the police and the catalogue of errors that she believed followed the events of 1 February 1995.

  Rock bi
ographies do not usually aspire to affect matters in the real, wider world, but Withdrawn Traces may just be an exception. We hope that this book might stimulate renewed interest and perhaps even a fresh commitment by the authorities to treat this case with all due seriousness.

  We are grateful for the generosity of Rachel and those who knew Richey for sharing their precious memories. Without their contributions, and without Rachel giving us access to his personal archive, this book would not exist.

  Ultimately, Withdrawn Traces is a tribute to the life of Richard Edwards, to celebrate him as a unique artist, visionary, friend, son, brother and profound human being. It is also, of course, for the fans who have never stopped worrying for his safety, hoping for a revelation as Richey continues to occupy their minds. This book is for those who miss him.

  Chapter 1

  I Accuse History

  ‘The Welsh are the most melancholic people in the world. Where we come from, there’s a natural melancholy in the air. You’ve got the ruins of heavy industry all around you, you see your parents’ generation all out of work, nothing to do, being forced into the indignity of going on courses of relevance. Everybody, ever since you could comprehend it, felt pretty much defeated.’

  Richey Edwards, 1991

  Dusk is falling when we pull up outside 2 Penmaen Villas in Oakdale, Blackwood. The lights are on, and there are new occupants in the modest, terraced home that directly faces the local comprehensive school. The two-storey property is not dissimilar to any other Valleys house in any other Valleys town in South Wales. Serried rows of dwellings are interspersed with the ubiquitous local pubs, post offices and boarded-up chapels. But the colliers and their families who once resided in them, and the mines where they toiled, are now but a distant memory.