THE GREEN, GREEN GRASS OF HOME 2 page

I was in the region for a few days and later drove into town. True to form, it started to drizzle. I wondered if it ever stopped. When I thought about this place in my mind's eye, it was always 1992. Shell-suits and semi-mullets walked the streets, with the occasional lumberjack shirt open to reveal a Mudhoney T-shirt beneath. Blackwood today is not quite the one-street town as reported of old, but almost. Now, it has the obligatory provincial 24-hour Asda. A small retail park has been added at the end of the winding High Street, which includes ail tihe usual retail suspects. It took me three minutes to drive, slowly, from one end of the High Street to the other, and that included stopping at every pedestrian crossing. The town was very busy for a Tuesday morning. I noticed that all the signs, no matter how trivial, were bilingual. But I wondered who might read only the bottom halves, especially for something like the parking costs behind the supermarket. At the 'Top End' of the street sits the Red Lion pub, scene of early Manics nights out. Every window is now bricked up: not the most appealing of drinking venues. Next door is the much-vaunted Miners' Institute.

Where once the Edwards had the only hairdressing salon, there are now no fewer than six hairdressers nestled together at one end of the street. Perhaps people have more haircuts in Wales now than they did fifteen years ago? As I wandered past the most established one, I saw it was empty of customers but had two bored-looking teenage girls with streaky hair waiting around. Nicky Wire once recalled that the Edwards' shop had been burgled eight times, even though the only thing to steal was shampoo. The local kids only did it because they had little else to do. Across the road is the Blackwood library, once the employer of Nicky's brother Patrick and often the haunt of all four band members. I popped in to look up some local history, but apart from a couple of picture books and some fading postcards there was little to go on and they had nothing on Neil Kinnock.

Despite my seeing Blackwood in the summer time, I just couldn't think back to Richey walking these streets without anything but rain in my mind. As he ascends the hill back to his parents, the rain is swirling down gutters and overfilling the storm drains at the base of the hill. Why does a place I've hardly touched in reality give me these feelings? ?That's been the truth since we were fifteen years old,? said Nicky Wire 'All I can remember is being melancholy. I?ve never said I was desperately unhappy. The truly unhappy people of this world are usually the ones who end up suicidal or living on the streets.'Richey Edwards certainly felt that way. 'It's just our natural mood,' he said. 'We've always been like that, 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 indlgnity ot going on courses of relevance. Like a fifty-year-old miner, worked in a pit all his life, there's not much joy for him to go and learn how to type. It's just pointless. And that is all around us, ever since we were born.'

Once the house move had been completed, the closest Methodist church was the Central Methodist Church. This imposing building had been erected in 1890 to a gothic design that was seen as extremely modern at the time. Its massive wooden organ with metal pipes rising behind the tiered choir stalls, with balconies along either side, three columns of pews and purple glazed brick would have been intimidating to a young child. But now he was old enough to speak up, Edwards refused to attend any more. 'He's always had this thing about it,? said Nicky Wire. 'I've never really talked to him about It, but he's always made out that it really pissed him off and fucked him up.?

'I went to church three times every Sunday until I was thirteen, when I was big enough to refuse,? Edwards explained in 1992. 'Then it was football. But when you've got an eighty-year-old preacher screaming at you by name if you're late, you fucking sit there and obey, like blind sheep. Next to him, liberal teachers just didn't compare. At school, you walk around like, "Who gives a fuck?" By thirteen, most of us could recite, parrot-fashion, huge chunks of the Bible. I still like a lot of Isaiah, I've got some of it in my notebook. In [the Manics' song] ''Crucifix Kiss", we quote Luke, Sermon 6: "And if one of the occupation troops forces you to carry his pack one kilometre then carry it two." I've always found that attitude moronic. What?s the fucking point? Religion's the reason why areas like this or Liverpool continue to be oppressed, because of a false sense of community stops them rising up.?

Edwards? reaction to traditional schooling and being forced into religion struck a chord when he started reading the works of French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud's father had also served in the army, and he had a strong religious upbringing; he also rebelled against classical schooling. Edwards said that qualifications were not a true measure of intelligence and that the most important lessons were not on an? syllabus. He would grow fascinated with Rimbaud as his teens progressed.

***

Maybe it was because younger children need less complicated things to stimulate them and keep them happy. An empty field or a group of trees could provide endless possibilities for play. AsI teenage years progressed, however, it was suddenly very easy to be bored with nowhere to go. Blackwood, like many small towns throughout the UK, suffered from drink-related violence ? especially at weekends. It seemed that more teenagers were turning to drink and letting out heir frustrations on the Blackwood High Street on a Saturday night. In the 1980s, the town inhabitants were increasingly struggling with the loss of industry and the hard economic environment. Things were certainly becoming grim.

Richey Edwards could understand why the violence was happening around him and where the boiling frustrations came from, but he himself pulled away from it. Never a violent person, he was much more likely to retreat into his own thoughts, which caused problems of their own.

In 1982 James Dean Bradfield was singing in his local church choir, but at school he was known to be tough and the other kids didn?t mess with him. When the news was saturated with the Falklands War, he began to have thoughts of a military career ? even when the war had cost the lives of thirty-nine Welsh Guards. It was, in part at least, because of the Falklands War that the Tory government was re-elected for a second term in 1983. In July 1981, headline riots in Toxteth and Brixton ? but also in Hull, Preston and Birmingham ? showed the growing ripples of discontent running through the country. In January 1982, unemployment reached three million for the first time since the depression of the 1930s. Despite this, Labour still managed to lose the June 1983 General Election, signalling the end of Michael Foot's reign as party leader. Foot was replaced by Blackwood MP Neil Kinnock the following October. ?Everything Neil Kinnock stands for is everything that my grandfather would have spat at,? said Edwards. '[His] desperate craving for power at any cost. Labour were told by a right-wing press that they had to move towards the centre. But they should have more extreme. In areas like Blackwood, Labour's always going to win even if a cheese sandwich stands for election.?

It was in this growing climate of anger and disgust that Richey Edwards started his final year at Oakdale Comprehensive. He was growing ever more bitter at the education system, too. 'Comprehen?sive school was the most depressing time for all of us,? he said. ?They either write you off or fit you in. If you're not academically gifted, it's, "Fuck you." If you are, it?s, "The banks are coming in next week for a talk, and we think you should go."? Whatever he was going to do in life, working in a bank was not on the agenda. Not ever.

When the newly elected government announced a forthcoming series of pit closures, it had to know that there would be a backlash from the mining unions. They had already backtracked after similar strike action had been promised in 1981. When a national miners' strike was started on 12 March 1984, everyone knew this would be a desperate struggle with the entire UK mining industry potentially at stake. Three days later, 150 of 170 mines were on strike with union leader Arthur Scargill whipping up militancy on picket lines across the country. In South Wales, almost 99 per cent of the miners remained on strike despite deepening economic despair.

Like everyone else in South Wales, the future Manics were affected by the strike as it stretched across 1984. The news was filled with stories about the strike, and fighting continued both verbally and physically. Nicky Wire, as would become his wont, spoke out about the events to Q magazine years later. 'Streets divided,? he said. 'If a man went back to work his house would be covered in paint. Fair enough. I'm proud that the Welsh were the last miners to go back to work. Quite cool.? What wasn't 'cool' were the lives lost on the picket lines, the families split by the strike, the taxi driver who was murdered for taking a strike-breaker to work. The strike was many things, but cool wasn't one of them.

The turmoil and fall-out from the strike prompted Nicky Wire to write his first political piece ? a poem/lyric be titled ?Aftermath ?84?. Sean Moore played his trumpet on NUM marches. ?The strike was all around us and it was on TV every day for a year,? explained James Dean Bradfield. 'When the Yorkshire miners started turn-coating I'd find myself shouting at the telly, "Scab! Scab!" We felt the working class had let themselves down just as much as the government had. So we came to feel we were part of a culture that didn't exist any more. We wanted to believe in something and couldn't find anything to believe in. We wanted to attach some newfound intelligence or some newfound theory to the place and the class we came from. But we were always confused, always contradictory, always very suspicious. Suspicious of the smell of the burning martyr.?

Richey didn't comment directly about the strike but be he was scathing about the Labour party. 'Neil Kinnock is our MP' he spat. 'His constituency house is in the same street as James' - and he's such a tosser. Party politics always seemed irrelevant to us. We got obsessed with cultural politics ? it seemed more relevant, the real issues like how futile life is, how fucked up modern society is. In terms of music, we just went back and rediscovered the great bands. Everything else seemed boring and worthless. Dance music passed us by. The clubs in Newport are just about drinking and fighting ? there's no "One Love" vibe there.?

Edwards now turned to the writings of Marx and Lenin to go alongside his growing interest in rock stars, as a consequence of what he was seeing on the streets of his own town. In the summer of 1984 he took his O-Levels, gaining ten straight 'A? grades. He decided that taking A-Levels and moving on to university was his way out of Blackwood, and signed up to begin at Crosskeys College that autumn. 'Blackwood is a shit hole,? he said. ?The only way to escape was to create your own reality.? Rickey seemed, in the early interviews he gave, to be portrayed as being shaped by a nondescript little British town with little hope and nothing to do. He talked of the depression woven into the fabric of South Wales but there were hundreds, if not thousands, of similar places existing across the Isles in the 1980s. Coal mining had ended in South Wales but this had also ended in many other parts of the country or else it had been steelworking or shipbuilding. The manufacturing industries were disappearing, leaving the unemployed to fend for themselves. Edwards saw that using his education was his ticket out of this perceived hell.

On the miners? picket lines, the pitched battles continued. There was fighting outside parliament in June, and when the High Court ruled the strike unlawful it only fanned the flames. The strike eventually ended on 3 March 1985, just under a year after it had begun. In the Blackwood region, twelvw pits were closed by the end of the dispute causting local unemployment to skyrocket to 80 per cent. A form of regeneration would eventually come in the shape of soul-destroying light-industry jobs paying minimum wages on short-term contracts that people would take because they were desperate. Seeing the crushing of the older generation made a mark on them all.

***

The speed of modern lide can be troublesome and frustrating. I think the internet is squarely to blame. People expect instant answers. Emails, it seems, should be rwplied to before I?ve finished hitting the ?Send? button. How thw heck did someone research a book in 1983? Hours at the library, writing letters, waiting months to get a reply, before moving on to the next one. It would drive me mad. I wrote to Crosskeys College in advance of my trip to South Wales, asking ? a long shot, I know ? if anyone still there remembered a student called Richard Edwards. I explained who I was, what I was doing and what had happened to Richey after he left Crosskeys, just in case they didn?t read the news. I got a letter back a few weeks later. The nice lady wrote, ?If Mr Edwards could contact he colledge, in writing, to give his permission that we may be able to help??

Steve Gatehouse started his A-Level studies at Crosskeys with Richey in September 1984. He?d taken O-Levels at Blackwood Comprehensive and had been unaware of Edwards until then. Before long, they grew to be friends as members of the self-styled Ian-McCulloch-clothes gang that populated Crosskeys in the mid-1980s and also included Sean Moore in their ranks. Floppy fingers and long overcoats were the order of the day.

?Richey and Sean were a year older. They were the two wierdos,? explained Nicky Wire. ?People would look at them because they had strange hair and wore odd clothes. They were into Echo & The Bunnymen before us, and Richey was into Nick Cave.? Echo & The Bunnymen were the first band that Edwards went to see with Sean Moore and James Dean Bradfield.

'Richard very much kept himself to himself,? recalls Gatehouse when discussing the first year of their A-Levels. 'He was, however, always pleasant, polite and good conversation An early indication of how disciplined he could be, and which caused much amazement and mirth at the time, was when he was asked out by a much-lusted-after female McCulloch look-alike. He politely declined, explaining that he wouldn't have the time for dates until he had finished reading the complete works of some author or poet.'

On one level the story might just prove how shy and inexperienced Edwards was with members of the opposite sex. Nicky Wire remarked that they were 'retards' when it came to girls and that most people assumed they must be gay, although Wire started seeing Rachel (who he'd later marry) at the age of sixteen. Wire and Edwards could often be quite nasty to classmates in order to prove their intellectual superiority, so this story is also totally believable: Edwards was intent on giving himself a well-rounded cultural education to go alongside his academic one. Reading as much he could, often the 156 bus from the bottom of his hill to college and back. Between lessons. At lunchtime. ?We put into three years everything that took the Rolling Stones twenty,? Nicky Wire later claimed. ?It?s just the way we are; we are the modern people.? Edwards almost couldn?t read the books fast enough. George Orwell. Albert Camus. Tennessee Williams. William Burroughs. J.D.Salinger. Warhol. Debord. Kerouac. Ginsberg. Larkin and Rimbaud. But he also loved a good book on the history of rock. Greil Marcus (Mystery Train), Charles Shaar Murray (Crosstown Traffic) and Albert Goldman (The Lives of John Lennon) were just some of his favourites.

The Richey-Edwards-Reading-List^TM could almost be viewed as compulsory for some A-Level courses. A quick web-search will locate pages devoted to listing the books be read and talked about in interviews. Indeed this author spent many hours exploring and going back to the books that Edwards had felt important. Digging into the obsessions of one's subject could be a way of invading their thought processes, and to some extent I think this approach proved fruitful. But in other ways it proved contradictory and frustrating.

To begin with, ail of the future Manics immersed themselves in the Beat Generation. 'I'm Catholic and I can't commit suicide,? said Jack Kerouac. 'But I plan to drink myself to death.? Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs would also be read and reread with a reading of Ginsberg's 'Howl' later being used on stage.

Richey, well versed in the H-blocks, immersed himself in several texts that addressed autobiographical musings on incarceration. One of these, Borstal Boy, was by Brendan Behan who originally went to England to be an IRA bomber and later explained that, ?I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.? His book covered three years in detention and the characters he met while locked up. In Miracle of the Rose, Jean Genet considered a prison spell he served late in the 1920s, while Kafka's The Trial saw Josef K one step away from being locked up.

When I became involved with some advance discussion about my research for this book I was attacked on some internet forums for writing about someone's pain and hurt. I responded by using Kafka, ? Richey favourite, who said that ?I think we should read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.? And I didn't even think that my (this) book was going to wound or stab anyone. But some of the ones I was reading did just that. In Dennis Cooper's harrowing Frisk I read about the 'perfect fodder for interest in sexual death'. Edwards would later tell Select magazine that, 'Sex and death are closely linked. Sado-masochistic imagery, bleeding?I find it attractive, I find it? sexual.? This was taken to the extreme in Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden. These themes were also bubbling under in another of Edwards' favourites, J.G. Ballard's Crash, which mixes sexual perversion drawn from the act of crashing cars and the representation of humankind's ability to destroy itself by use of something that it created itself. Another Ballard classic, The Atrocity Exhibition (which also provided the title for a Joy Division song on Closer), was gobbled up by Edwards and, in an unusual framework, told of a doctor at a mental hospital having a mental breakdown. Edwards was such a fan of this book that he would use a snippet of Ballard reading from it on a Manic Street Preachers album in 1994. Some books proved to be a waste of my time, but others ? such as The Bell Jar caused my cup of tea to grow cold while I turned page after page. Then I went back and read some of them again. Edwards was drawn to the pain evident in the writing of Sylvia Plath, and in particular The Bell Jar, which mirrored his own imminent step into the adult world. Richey had devoured Bret Faston Ellis' Less Than Z??? on its UK publication in 1986, possibly inspired by the widely published quote from USA Today that called it ?The Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation'. Salinger's withdrawal from public life was a source of constant fascination for Edwards; writers' real lives were often just as important to him as the books he enjoyed ? if not more so. He would have known this, too: just a brief flick through the names reveals things that can be pulled out and held next to Edwards' legacy. I think that it serves to hold up some of these now, just at the point in the story when Richey was accelerating his reading, and to let them hang in the background as his own story unfolds. Was Edwards influenced so much by these books and authors that they changed the direction of his life? Or, was he inherently like these characters and to therefore drawn to them for that reason?

Malcolm Lowry was a self-destructive favourite who had been a heavy drinker and who'd slashed his wrists and later committed suicide with the use of sleeping tablets. James Baldwin had turned his back
on religion during hit teens and suffered in adulthood because he was black and gay in 1950s?America. His book Another Country fused several elements that Edwards was interested in. Set in Greenwich Village during the 1950s, it is based on the story becomes involved in an abusive relationship that leaves his girl

in a mental hospital and him considering suicide. In a harrowing passage, he eventually walks to the centre of a cold and windy George Washington Bridge before throwing himself off.

In later life, Edwards was drawn to Japanese writers but as a teen he read his share of Russian texts. Dostoevsky?s Notes from Underground was one of Edwards? preferred books; its unnamed narrator seeks pain. This is now regarded as being one of the founding works of existentialism, inspiring the form of others Edwards staples such as Joseph Heller?s Catch-22 and Ralph Ellison?s Invisible Man. Another link in Edwards? tastes was found with the discovery of Ellison being inspired to become a writer after reading Eliot?s ?The Waste Land?. Ellison?s Invisible Man concerned a young African-American man?s search for a place in the society that ignored him.

What do all these books tell us? Edwards was intelligent, he was interested in mental health, suicide, disappearing, existentialism, outsiders, rebels and revolutionaries. In the end, it might be that ? even after close research ? we confirm only what we already knew; any life is merely the sum of many tiny interactions that build up a picture. So and so was born here, he went there, he read this book, he watched this film, then he was gone.

***

As College progressed, Gatehouse and Edwards started venturing out to gigs further afield as their music tastes expanded. Alongside Echo & Bunnymen and Joy Division, Edwards was interested in The Smith, That Petrol Emotion, The Housemartins and the C86 crew. ?Richey often quoted The Wolfhounds,? recalls Steve Gatehouse. ?We were also into The Weather Prophets, Primal Scream and The Wedding Present ? we bought George Best together from Derrick?s in Swansea and also saw and met them at The Mars Bar in Cardiff. He also made me a compilation of McCarthy and Wire, who he loved. He regularly bought indie fanzines and discovered The Darling Buds before me. The first of the many times I saw them was with Richey. We also went to see The Smith together at the Newport Centre, when Morrissey was dragged off stage and the gig was cut short.? As Edwards grew more obsessed with music ? he was musically inept, so could see no way into it for himself yet ? he would go on ever more difficult trips to see bands, once driving all the way to Nottingham on his own to see The Jesus and Mary Chain. He was involved in some social circles, however. One of his group of friends at the Red Lion started dating a girl by he name of Rrbecca Williams. She and her group of friends were soon aware of this beautiful but under-confident bloke', as she puts it. He seemed unite comfortable talking in female company and seemes completely unaware of how attractive the girls found him. He was also quite open about his vanity. 'He would amuse us by constantly asking our opinion about his appearance and his chances with various girls,? says Williams. 'I remember him wearing flowery neck scarves in an attempt to cover spots on his neck and incessantly asking me if they were visible.?

***

In the autumn of 1985, Richey was approaching his eighteen birthday as he started his second and final year of A-Levels and was joined at Crosskeys by James Dean Bradfield and Nicky Wire, who had matched Edwards? haul of ten ?-Levels. These were intelligent lads, well read outside of their syllabuses and striving, no aching, to get away from the town of their birth. The world was waiting for them and they were going to show everybody just who they were and what they could do.

James has been teaching himself in play the guitar and has mastered the Stones? album Exile on Main Street, while Sean Moore was taking an A-Level in music and was playing the trumpet in the South Wales Jazz Orchestra. 'We just wasted so many days playing [Exile on Main Street],? said Edwards. ?On song like ?I Just Wanna See His Face?, we didn?t really understand what Mick Jagger was saying but they were the biggest rock band in the world, you know! The thing was, on this album they sounded so lonely. I know our situation was completely different but it just seemed so completely represent what we wrer feeling. The songs are just so sad and lonely. They had everything at their disposal and they just didn?t know what they wanted to do with it. We had nothing at our disposal and we didn?t know what to do with it either! It?s a complete contradiction but it was like, we?re rotting away in a bedroom end so were they. They could have any groupie, any drug, any drink and it didn't matter and that's when we started getting really disillusioned. We were trying to work out what would make us happy amd I think everybody has felt that at some point in time.?

When they did get out of their bedrooms they would sometimes meet up at the man-made Pen-Y-Fan pond, which was filled with slimy green fish and claimed a couple of swimmers? lives. Still, it was a communal escape for the youth of the area ? the venue for school fights, outdoor parties and drinking. Many times it was the scene of a loss of virginti? on the nearby slagheaps, the constant dirty reminders of the recent sour history. 'They try to put grits over the slag heaps,? explained Richey, 'and every time it rains they turn into muddy slides ? the landscape is swallowed by a huge slip of blackness.' Today, they've been levelled; a neat removal of two hundred years of history.

?James and Nick quickly became part of our little group of indie kids, goths, punks,? recalls Steve Gatehouse. 'Nick was chatty and funny and usually wearing his "Cheshire cat grin", even when he was suffering some typical teenage crisis. James was a drama student, which seemed unusual as he was one of the most reserved individuals I'd ever encountered. However, he had a quiet self-assurance, always looked cool-as-fuck and, when he did speak, usually came out with a great one-liner.'

?For the first eighteen years of our lives we were living in an environment where there?s nothing to do,? said Edwards. 'We'd just go round each others' houses, talk, read and play and that's it. Like twenty-four hours the same every fuckin' day.'

The gang started experimenting with ways of expressing themselves. Nicky Wire had been doing a little bit of writing since the age ol twelve; his best piece was still the strike-inspired ?Aftermath ?84? and James Dean Bradfield thought it was brilliant. He and Wire strated doing some writing together. Meanwhile Richey Edwards inscribed a mammoth 24-page poem called ?Another Dead Eleven O'Clock' Later, he, Wire and Sean Moore attempted a play called Tearproof. ?Sean wrote a lot of the play, and James was doing drama at the time,? recalls Patrick Jones. 'We entered it into a play writing competition but we didn't win. It was about a gay boy who was very delicate and quiet and ended up being killed by a group of people who were all in a band together, actually. It was crap. At the end, the last image of him is covered with moths on stage. I might have to borrow that again.'

In 1986 they also saw a chance to have a go at the music business. Steve Gatehouse had formed a band called Funeral In Berlin with friends Nick Curtis and Craig Bruzas. A show at the Crosskeys Workingman's Institute literally changed lives. It seemed like the entire college turned up that night, as over two hundred were in the crowd ? including Edwards, Bradfield, Moore and Wire. Steve Gatehouse admits that it wasn't such a success because the band had a large local following, but more because the 'alternative types' had little else to do in the area. The band played a half-hour of Mary Chain-esque noise before smashing up their equipment. 'We caused the kind of rumpus that the Mary Chain themselves were causing in London,? says Gatehouse. ?The members of the workingman's club's committee were not happy! You'd have to come from such a place as the South Wales valleys at the time of the miners' strike to appreciate the effect such an event could have on our teenage minds. Only a few years previously, the Sex Pistols had been denounced as Satanists as they attempted to play in Caerphilly.' The gig was the talk of the college on Monday morning. Nicky Wire told Gatehouse that the gig had been an epiphany for him and that he, Moore and Bradfield had immediately decided to start a band of their own. They borrowed some gear from Colin Mills, a mutual friend, and drafted in local punk Miles 'Flicker' Woodward, who'd been in Nicky and James' year at school. Woodward was all black-leather studded jacket and spiky hair, a real old-school kind of punk. The earliest rehearsals took place at the Bradfield house with Woodward on bass, Wire on guitar, Bradfield singing and playing lead guitar, and Moore standing up to play two drums just like Bobby Gillespie in The Jesus And Mary Chain. 'Nick was writing lyrics, and he?d given them to James who could already play guitar quite well ,' says Woodward. ?We put them to music and started to tape them. I took a tape home, listened to it and thought, that?s quite good. A bit like Billy Bragg [but it was] just basic three-chord punk played on crap guitars with crap amps.? Richey Edwards was watching from the sidelines, unsure how he could contribure.

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 196