A prologue to history

?r?-1967

Blackwood? Where the fuck is Blackwood? Sounds too like 'back woods' for comfort. Blackwood. Coed Duon. Blackwood. Backwoods. These names spin through my head while I wait for Google Earth? to load. I want a bird's eye view of where I'll be going. The town has almost as many bastardised names as the reason for my crusade. Richard James Edwards. Richie. Richey. Ritchie Vee. Richey James. Richey Manic. Richard. Titch. Android. The last Generation Terrorist.

I used to be a scientist, maybe I still am and always will be, so I know a little about space and time even if I used to hate physics. I know that a scene in a book is dependent on the writer giving the space and time to the reader; in non-fiction it's best for the writer to be able to inhabit one or both to be successful. One should also know their history. It affects the people you write about in ways that you might not otherwise understand. Time is sometimes hard to handle. The zenith of this book involves man walking out through a door. The man and door are in the past. While I think about the man and the door I see the man?s life pass before me, approaching like the proverbial express train. Me standing on the platform as it hurtles ever closer. Then in a blink it has passed and is miles away in seconds. I'm left standing with clothes flapping in the slipstream. Now I have to recreate the journey, walking back along the tracks, noting that some small elements of the journey expand to fill a whole chapter. Other chapters cover many years in just a few pages. The whole effect is a concertina of time: contracting and expanding as moments accelerate away out of reach. The day of Richey's disappearance glows brightly in people's memories because of the intense emotion attached to the events, while the months afterwards blur into forgetfulness. And so I start back to history.

***

Despite his high intellect, Richard James Edwards of Blackwood never did study at Oxford, but Geoffrey did. Like Richard, or Richey as we shall call him throughout this volume, Geoffrey was from South Wales; in fact he was said to have been born in (Sweat Geoffrey wrote several famous texts, in a language that many would struggle to understand, and in later life he inhabited a priory. Although Richey knew of Geoffrey, the two never met, mainly because Geoffrey died i n 1151 after writing one of the earliest known histories of Wales in his Historia Regum Britanniae. If Richey ? who had a keen interest in history ? had been born eight hundred years earlier, he could have been Geoffrey. Geoffrey wrote that Wales was first inhabited in 1170 BC when Brutus, a descendent of the Trojans, arrived by boat. Geoffrey decided that apart from the few giants that already made Britain their home, Brutus was the first human to live there. Of course Geoffrey was using a large portion of his own imagination to stir this truth, but it was his own truth, his own version of Wales and how it had all began.

This book is my version, but like any non-fiction it becomes a kind of fiction as soon as I begin deciding what to include and what to leave out, what should be highlighted and what should be downplayed. As soon as I start making those choices it becomes mine alone. Someone else would make different choices. That fact can't be escaped. Time is a large factor in this. I know exactly what happened to Richey Edwards on certain days and during certain weeks, but there are months and, in his early life, even years where virtually nothing is known. Inevitably the dreadful parts are swollen by import as they slow right down under my magnifying glass, hour by hour, and then the story flies off at an ever faster pace. We know that the first real recorded version of Wales comes from an account of a Roman battle with local tribes in AD 48. As far as I can tell, there weren't any giants involved. Wales, with about 70 per cent of its border being coastline, has changed considerably over the years because the sea level around its shores has varied up and down by over 150 metres across the millennia. The area we now know as Wales came into existence with the building of Offa's Dyke around ad 790, the name 'Cymru' had been in use for around two hundred years by then. Richey knew history. He knew what it meant and how to use it. He knew that you had to understand the past in order to decipher the present.

***

The world of rock music has its own private universe of myth and legend. The stories of the deaths of Jimi, Janis, Jim, Ian, Kurt and the rest are well told. The fact that a guitar player can become an icon for a generation - a soothsayer for the masses ? when he dies, but not before, is quite confusing to those with no interest in the genre. Wales, with its Celtic heritage, is also a land of myth and legend. King Arthur and Owain Glyndwr will rise again to save the country in its darkest hour. Another of these ancient stories involves the Welsh prince Madog, who disappeared from Wales and supposedly turned up in America several hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Though there is no hard evidence that this actually happened, there were later reports of Native Americans being able to speak Welsh. In 1669 a Revd. Morgan Jones was captured by a tribe, which was going to kill him, until the chief heard him speaking Welsh and understood what he was saying. This saved his life. Another story had an explorer finding a tribe that owned a copy of the Bible written in Welsh. This last point might not be quite as astounding as it seems. After rejecting the church of Rome in the sixteenth century, Wales, on the whole, turned to Episcopalian values for the next 250 years. John Wesley first spoke in Wales in 1739. Methodism then spread in part due to the large numbers attending its Sunday schools, which were an integral part of religious teaching. Both adults and children would attend to read the Bible, and this was the major function of the schools. Because so many attended, by the late 1700s Wales was one of the few countries that had more people who could read than couldn't. Early in the nineteenth century, twenty thousand Bibles were printed in Welsh - a massive print run for the time - and these slowly disseminated around the world. These chapels and meeting rooms gave people a sense of community and the preachers provided leadership - things that had been missing since the English lost interest. In an entry in his journal dated 27 August 1763, Wesley wrote a description of a sermon given by fellow preacher William Williams: 'It is common...After the preaching is over, for anyone that has a mind to give out a verse of a hymn. This they sing over and over with all their might, perhaps above thirty, yea, forty times. Meanwhile the bodies of two or three, sometimes ten or twelve, are violently agitated and they leap up and down. In all manner of postures, frequently for hours together.?

Religion wasn't the only thing to transform Wales. Soon, industry was growing at a pace never before seen anywhere in the world. Coal mines were dug into the ground, copper and tin plate industries expanded, and ironworks grew to meet the demand for tram and rail lines. The tramways spread across South Wales to move the people into work and the goods that they were producing to market. By 1840, South Wales was mining 4.5 million tonnes of coal a year. About three million tonnes were used locally: the majority of this went into the local iron works, while the rest was exported - leading to the building of a massive dock in Cardiff.[3] Between 1850 and the start of World War I, the population of Wales more than doubled from approximately 1.1 million to approximately 2.5 million, with workers flocking in from other parts of Wales and all over the British Isles. Wales' agricultural workers shrank to number as heavy industry called. By the start of the war, Wales was exporting thirty-six million tonnes of coal annually. During this period, Wales was turned from an almost forgotten backwater on the world stage to an important financial power. This new wealth helped to fund museums, a national university and a string of new libraries.

'Libraries gave us power.' Nicky Wire wrote the words. James Dean Bradfield sang the words. I sat in Blackwood library thinking about the words. On a Tuesday afternoon the library was pretty quiet. A couple of pensioners browsed the new novels, and another was slumped asleep on one of the chairs. I looked for some in-depth local history but could find little. To make matters worse, the photocopier was out of toner and I had to write out everything by hand. The ordering of new supplies seemed to be the highlight of the afternoon for the staff. The building was smaller than I'd imagined, nestled at the end of the shops on the High Street. I thought about all the trips Richey Edwards made here while he was growing up and I realised that I was still closer to the beginning than the end. Prior to the building of the Sirhowy Tramroad, which opened in 1805, there was not a single building in what is now known as Blackwood. A chap called John Moggridge from Wiltshire settled in the area and eventually owned 450 acres of land, on which he built cottages with one eighth of an acre each of land and rented them out at the equivalent of eight pence a year. This social experiment gave local people some advantages but also made a bundle of cash for Moggridge.

The Beer Act of 1830 saw a massive increase in the number of places that were allowed to sell beer and by 1842 there was one tavern for every five inhabitants of Blackwood. In response, Temperance societies sprung up to cater for those disgusted by the excessive drunkenness, the beaten housewives, the employers with missing workers. One such society allowed members to drink two pints a day, but manual workers would save up during the week and then neck fourteen pints on a Saturday night. At the same time, there were thirty collieries within two and a half miles of Blackwood, and the biggest local deep pits ? Oakdale, Wyllie and Markham - were still to come. At its peak in 1908, Oakdale was supplying a milium tonnes of coal every year and employing two thousand men. When it closed in 1990, it signalled the end of two hundred years of mining in Gwent.

The Blackwood Miners' Institute was built in 1925, and still stands at the opposite end of the High Street to the library ? these two buildings providing the only cultural refuges to the townsfolk and book-ending the strip of shops. The impressive multi-storey Institute included a stage and dance hall, library, music rooms and areas for the use of local clubs and societies. Its completion coincided

with the onset of a crushing depression: by 1932 unemployment was running at 43 per cent and continued to cripple South Wales until World War II, when most other countries had been over the worst, five years earlier. The transfer to oil from coal caused many of the Welsh problems. This was an area, and a town, that had endured its fair share of hardships before the Marries were born.

***

In 2007, the Independent printed a picture of the Blackwood Miners' Institute. It was an article about yet another TV Top Ten list. VH1 had listed Blackwood, which has produced one nationally known act, as number eight in its Top Ten of influential music towns in the UK. Someone must have been having a laugh. Somehow the town got listed ahead of, for example, Sheffield, home to acts as diverse and influential as Arctic Monkeys, ABC, Pulp, Richard Hawley, The Human League, Def Leppard, Joe Cocker, The Long Blondes, The Comsat Angels and Heaven 17. Despite all that the Manics have achieved, there are suprisingly few bands that are overtly influenced by them.

Until the 1990s, the rock and pop music of Wales was decidedly ?oldschool'.Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Bonnie Tyler, Shakin' Stevens, Badfinger, The Alarm. As Britpop took over the mainstream in 1995, a sub-cult of Welshpop gained a wider following too. Catatonia, 6oft Dolls, Stereophonics, Super Furry Animals and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci led the way. When Melody Maker changed to a shiny magazine format to try and stave off its demise in 1999, it pulled off a publicity stunt of projecting huge images of Catatonia's Cerys Matthews and the Stereophonies' Kelly Jones onto the facade of Buckingham Palace with the headline 'The New Prince and Princess of Wales'. But the real 'Cool Cmyru' only emerged in 2008. The broadsheets were all over themselves proclaiming 'Wales Swings'. 'Dragon Force' and ?A Good Time To Be Welsh', with celebrities draping themselves in the Welsh flag at every opportunity. Why? Because the rugby team won the Five Nations, Cardiff City got to the FA Cup semi-finals and Duffy was at number one. Add in Gavin and Stacey, Joe Calzaghe, Catherine Zeta Jones and Rhys Ifans, and you had a veritable cultural phenomenon on your hands. 'In Wales at present,? claimed the Independent, 'no matter what your line, you're feeling pretty confiden.?

This was all very different to the Wales that Richey Edwards knew and grew up in. 'Where we come from there is a natural melancholy in the air,? he said. 'Everybody, ever since you could comprehend it, felt pretty much defeated.? In the early 1990s, it was reported that Gwent had the highest rate of alcohol poisoning in the UK. When the mines closed and the jobs vanished, there was little else to do. 'It's a museum, everything is closed, it's like a long walk down a graveyard,? said Edwards. '[Wales is] a soul destroying place; we'd rather say we were from Europe.' He had nothing positive to say about his hometown at all: 'If you built a museum to represent Blackwood, all you could put in it would be shit. Rubble and shit.? From these initial interviews, Edwards' world-view became clear: rather than look for a sliver of positivity, he chose to accentuate the negative. It might have been bad, but it wasn't Somalia.

Today, Blackwood is a shopping centre and a site for light industry. Sony, Toshiba and Unilever all have factories in the area. With a population of over twenty thousand (and growing), Blackwood is now merging into surrounding villages. It even has a cinema again after the previous one closed down in the 1980s. Even the Miners' Institute has undergone a rebirth. After being left to rot in the 1980s, it was bought by the local council, and reopened in 1992. Jasper Carrott and the Welsh National Opera have since performed there (not together). It is presently under the umbrella of the Arts Council of Wales and thriving once again. But the damp stigma of melancholy remains. Wales seems to have a high rate of suicide, whether it's backed up by statistics or not. Going way back in time, Milly 'Peg' Entwhistle left Wales to act on Broadway and then moved to Hollywood in the 1930s hoping to get work in the movies. She famously committed suicide by jumping from the top of the letter 'H' in the giant Hollywoodland sign up in the hills. Alun Lewis, the poet whose works included 'The Suicide', shot himself while serving in Burma during World War II. Some speculation argues that it might have been accidental. These are just the many Welsh suicides from the arts world. While this book was being written, more than twenty young people killed themselves in nearby Bridgend. Why was the South Wales suicide rate so high? Many other areas of the UK have been through depressions when the primary industries died out, but few seemed to take it so badly.

Despite there being no proof, the story of Richey Edwards is often reported as a suicide. Should that be expected? You would be forgiven for thinking that the Richey Edwards book had already been written, the mystery explained and it all nicely wrapped up. Surely this was such a story that it had already been told, and would not be sitting around waiting for its author? But it hadn't. So why not? It hasn't been an easy project to research, as I noted to myself at one point, 'When one door closes, another one is slammed shut.' Some Manics fans have been helpful, others haven't. There is certainly a cult surrounding the memory of Richey Edwards and some take it as their duty to 'protect' his name. They, thankfully, are in the minority. Many Richey fans are too young to have experienced his place in the world of pop first-hand. Maybe it's the generation gap of fourteen years and counting between Edwards' disappearance and now. Looking at the age of people posting on various internet forums tells its own story. Looking down a random page I noted that the comments were being written by people who were three, two, nine, three and two respectively when Richey was last seen alive. Like Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison, there are conspiracy theories revolving around this story and I had to try and work through them. It was highly unlikely that I would literally find the man himself, but I hoped to find his version of reason.

I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a jar,

and when the boys said to her, Sibyl, what do you want?

she replied I want to die.

? Petronius, The Satyricon

Writers often compose their best work when they are suffering times of personal upheaval or difficulty. Or maybe it isn't their best work but it is the work of these times that the critics and public at large are drawn to in hindsight when they discover what the writer was going through. It makes them seem more human to know that the text has been felt by the writer first-hand.

'The Waste Land' was one of Richey Edwards' favourite texts. When Thomas Stearns Eliot was writing it after the end of World War I he was experiencing difficult times. His first marriage was felling apart and he was struggling. During the many years that he worked on 'The Waste Land', these things contributed to the despair of the poem and the perceived disillusionment of his generation. His life was grim, his writing was grimmer. He wasn't just writing of personal hopelessness but also of the wretchedness of modern society and the loss of order and faith. Chaos was king, death was everywhere. Flowing water replaced by hard rock. A 31-year-old woman with no teeth. A dead tree. Bad sex and gladness when it's over.

Edwards was drawn to Eliot's obscure, sometimes pedantic, Grail mythologies that reached into the core of human despair; he could relate to Eliot's almost prudish outer being, which was at odds with his writing. Edwards found that someone so calm on the outside could spew out writing of such horror from within. When Edwards later studied the abominations of the concentration camps he lost faith in humankind; to him the whole world had become a waste land, where the fortunate lived blinkered lives and pretended that the horror didn't exist while he grappled with a conscience that couldn't bear to live such a life.

Similarities between Eliot and Edwards are many. Eliot was able to use a wide range of different literatures and religions in his writing; Edwards also drew on various religious texts and holy books for his lyrics. Eliot was not averse to pursuing populist culture, just as Edwards did. Eliot was given three months' leave from his job to recover from a 'nervous breakdown'; Edwards was given similar leave in the summer of 1994. Eliot abandoned his childhood religion and turned to the Anglican church when he settled in England; Edwards rejected his Methodist upbringing. Both remained virgins until relatively late (Eliot was 26; Edwards 21), both smoked heavily (Eliot died of emphysema, which was at least exacerbated by his heavy smoking; Edwards was smoking upwards of sixty a day before he vanished), and both were fixated on producing the perfect work.

There were parts in 'The Waste Land' that Richey Edwards could relate to, even reaching back to his teenage years when he first read it. The general mood of decay was around him in everyday life as the industry of Blackwood collapsed in on itself in the wake of the miners' strike; the text hinted at night terrors and problems with sleep and of thinking too hard about things, and these were problems that Edwards would wrestle with his whole adult life.

Many pieces of literature held important places in Richey Edwards' psyche. In later life he became so engrossed in Dante's 'Inferno' that he had his arm tattooed with connected imagery, as his own self-worth dipped and his thoughts turned to an eternity of damnation while musing over the loss of youthful innocence. Edwards' later interest in religion would have a real Old Testament ring to it; he discovered that 'The Waste Land' alluded to Dante in the section starting 'Unreal City'. In the Bible verses referenced by God warning the people that they must remember the days of their youth (for, in their old age, 'fears shall be in the way'), it became almost a self-fulfilling prophecy as Edwards - from his late teens onwards ? carried a possibly unhealthy view of his childhood being the best, and only good, part of his life.

II

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 180