THE GREEN, GREEN GRASS OF HOME 4 page

While Richey's drinking at Swansea had increased, his eating had dropped away ? as had his weight. By the summer of 1988 he was being described as skeletally thin, but despite his frail physique he was starting to describe himself as the Manic Street Preachers' roadie. This essentially meant that he'd occasionally helped Nicky Wire carry his equipment around Swansea. He'd been spotted back at the Crosskeys College canteen working on a flyer for the Manics. His meal that day consisted of a cup of hot water with some lemon juice squeezed in. One of his favourite meals was what he called ?white noise' ? ? baked potato with rice end sweet corn. Of course, he also ate his fair share of Pot Noodles.

B? the time of their first ever demo sessions in June 1988, band were a three-piece. Local Blackwood musician Glen Powell had a small set-up called Sound Bank Studios. Powell had once played with Jimi Hendrix in New York. The band booked in to r?cord ?Suicide Alley?, a song about nigts out at the Newbridge Rugby Club disco, which inevitably ended in violence between the metal fans, rugby players and alternative types. 'When I first met them they were very Clash-based,? recalled Powell 'I helped them get that stereo guitar sound.' Only Sean Moore and James Dean Bradfield played on the first song, with Bradfield adding all the ?different guitar parts. Over a few weeks they demoed a number of songs that would later surface on their debut album. 'They were a good bunch of boys really,' adds Powell, 'Even though they used to look really aggressive. If they owed me £20 for a session, the next time they came in they'd put it down on the table before anything else. You could trust them.?

An Issue of Impact magazine[7] from the autumn of 1988 gives as the first glimpses of the band. In a piece penned by Patrick Jones and titled 'On The Edge?, he bemoans the lack of any music venues in Blackwood while meeting several local bands, including On The Edge, Stoned Lazy and the Manics. The band are referred to as a three-piece and mention is made of them busking on the Blackwood High Street, although an accompanying photograph shows Richey with the other three seated at a cafe table in the same outfits that would grace the cover of their first single: tight white jeans and leather jackets. The letters page is an entertaining read, with one letter from Nicky Wile [sic] of Swansea. The letter is really just a teenage rant/advert for the Blue Revolution group of writers and their forthcoming play Tearproof. Elsewhere, ?Seany Dee? and ?Jamie Kat? (Moore and Bradfield, to me and you) wrote in about the Blue Generation, mentioning that Ritchie Vee (Edwards) and Stevie-boy Gee (Gatehouse) are among their number. It?s hard not to smile at their trying-too-hard plug for their forthcoming gig at Newport: ?Steal car, hitch a cloud and motor on down to the beat of the street.? The final letter worth mentioning came from David Geary of Blackwood. Writing about Nicky Wire, he says, 'Granted he is a talented guy and his band is good but he is completely full of shit?knowing what he's like it?s really annoying to see him getting coverage in Impact.? The future Manics were up against it in many ways. Luckily they had supportive families, which helped to send their children to university but musically the bands of choice for most of their own age group were hard metal and pomp rock. With a community that was more interested in Bon Jovi and Black Sabbath, the Manics' punk sensibilities were anathema. These music fans were the same 'townies' who would see Richey and Nicky walk into a pub and wonder what planet they'd just dropped off.

For Richey's final year and Nicky Wire's second year, they shared a house on King Edward Road in Swansea. 'He was the most dedicated student,? Wire told the NME. ?I remember sitting in his room eating a Fray Bentos pie and chips he'd cooked me, reading NME. Another time we almost poisoned ourselves. We were in this little room with only half a window open and we were spray-painting these white T-shirts for the band, and realised we felt really ill from the fumes.'

James Dean Bradfield kept in close touch with Edwards and Wire in Swansea and Edwards would often visit him back in Blackwood. ?When I'd go and visit Richey and Nick down in Swansea University, Richey would be there at the weekend with all the Sunday papers, kneeling on the floor, circling things and cutting them out,? said Bradfield. 'He was a classic careening-around-his-subject kind of student. He was really earnest at the end of the day; he'd say, "My Mum and Dad worked hard to get me here and I'm not going to piss it up in the Uni Bar."? Bradfield was still working in bars in the evenings and practising during the day. He'd now learned Guns ?N? Roses' Appetite for Destruction from start to finish. Apart from the politics of Big Flame, McCarthy and Gang of Four, Edwards hated most current bands but fell in love with the strutting of Axl Rose and Slash. 'Bands were written about in the music press as if they would change your life,? he said. ?You?d go and see them, and there would be twenty people there, and the bands would be fucking shit. Every song, total and utter rubbish. We just found it sad, forlorn. Then we would go home and look at our old videos of The Who and The Clash, and that meant so much more to us.?

?At the time we?d only really been playing old records and it just seemed there was nothing much going on. There were millions of little indie bands that had nothing to say and people would say ?Rock music is dead?, but whenever we went out, everybody was wearing metal T-shirts. In the provinces, rock music never dies at all. Rave and acid culture is very much a city-based, middle class kinda culture. Of course there?s a lot of working class youths into raving and fashion but at the same time there?s at least half as many people from the same generation into rock bands. Basically, Appetite for Destruction was the first time we realised that rock wasn?t dead. We had the Stones, The Who and The Clash and we?d really basically given up on hearing a new rock record that we'd really like. When we heard this it was just so instant and exciting. All these little indie bands just used to sand there and look to crap. We wanted to look as exciting and pretty as them! People accuse rock bands of all kinds of different things but take a record like "Welcome to the Jungle" and it said more about the way we felt inside than a thousand so called intellectual, articulate bands.'

During the Christmas break, Richey and James set off for a night out in Newport to celebrate Richey's twenty first birthday. Early in the evening they stopped by a McDonald's for some food. Reports differ as to what actually happened next and how it was precipitated but a group of local lads numbering between ten and fifteen either burst in and attacked them 'for what they were wearing?, although it was usually Nicky Wire who dressed the most outrageously, or just for the heck of it or (if you believe the version
in In the Beginning) because James picked the tight and came off worse. What we do know for sure is that Bradfield ended up with a broken jaw, while Edwards was knocked down and took some kicks and punches but was OK. The fall out was that Bradfield had his jaw wired and couldn't sing for six months.

'On a Friday or Saturday night, mindless violence is just the acceptable thing,? said Edwards. 'Fifty-two weeks of the year, you go to a pub and put a glass in somebody's face.'

During this Christmas break, Richey began to feel alienated from the circle of friends that he'd had since the Crosskeys days. The following spring he wrote to Steve Gatehouse and complained that everyone hated him for being associated with the Manic Street Preachers and that they disagreed on his views about bands and music. This rejection of his ideas was still eating away at him months later. In his final year he was moving on from bands such as Hanoi Rocks, which he'd loved the music of even if he didn't like the band's Dionysian lifestyle. 'Listening to them now brings back lots of memories,? he said. 'Everyone else used to be out at the pubs getting pissed and we'd be locked away in our bedrooms playing these records. They just made a noise that we really liked. It was purely for the music, not for their rock' n' roll lifestyle. That's why Public Enemy made such an impact because although Hanoi Rocks summed up our youth, it never really said that much, we just loved them. There was always something missing and when we heard Public Enemy we realised what that was. We realised we had to do something.?

1988's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back really hit a chord with Edwards. 'This record came at completely the right time in our youth,? he said. 'There was nothing really saying anything at the time, nothing really contemporary anyway. At first we were put off by all the sexist bullshit and were never quite sure how to take the band, but once we got this record it really blew us away. I mean, a song like "She Watched Channel Zero?!" with lyrics like "Her brain's controlled by a twenty-four-inch remote" just summed us up. We were spending all of our days stuck in front of a TV with nothing to do and this really hit it home to us.?

Back in Swansea, Edwards was on the last stretch to his finals despite the distraction of living with Nicky Wire who was more interested in the band than his studies. Richey started helping out with some lyrics for the new songs, even though he wasn't actually a member of the band yet. 'People can't understand,? Wire told Esquire in 1998. 'Sitting in a room writing lyrics together. It was an unbelievable sensation. I was having a bit of a rough time, women-wise, and we'd just sit around listening to dodgy records and writing songs together.' Before his finals, Richey wrote to Steve Gatehouse that the batch of new songs included 'Motorcycle Emptiness', 'Sunglass Aesthetic', 'England is Still a Bitch', 'Ruthless', 'Whiskey Psychosis' and 'Colt 45 Rusty James'.

Edwards still considered it a privilege to be able to sit in a nice library and read books all day. He would sometimes go out for dinner with his lecturers, wearing a strange combination of a jumper and leather jacket. He still struggled with acne and was taking medication for his skin.

During his final year Richey had to choose a 'special subject' that would contribute to a large portion of his final mark. He chose a course entitled German-Soviet Relations in the Inter-War Period, which was run by Dr Eleanor Breuning, who was also assigned as his personal tutor. 'We taught a special subject which was very intensive and he took my special subject,? says Dr Breuning. 'So I got to know him quite well. Single honours students almost always had the special subject tutor as their personal tutor. He was a very good student, and what we used to do in our capacity as personal tutors was to have a one-on-one interview at least once a year, with all of our personal tutors, and then write a little report. What one did was ask them things like, "What's your home life like?", "What are your ambitions for the future?", "Do you have any problems with your work at the moment?", and "What are your extra-curricular interests?" I remember very clearly that he said he was into fanzines. Now, I knew what a fanzine was because I'm very interested in the language of popular movements, so I wrote all of this down and it was then reviewed by my professor, which was normal, who put a query mark in the margin; he obviously didn't know what a fanzine was! He didn't tell me straight out that he was involved in popular music, just that he was into fanzines and I think he almost deliberately lived two lives, one of which was his life as a student, into which he threw himself very fully. He was always on time with his essays and I would have said he was a top-of-the-range 2:1 student, a good, diligent, polite, pleasant student, but I think he kept his other life rather apart from all that. I remember he was slenderly built, quite thin-faced, but very normal in his dress; he didn't stand out at all from the student body. You can never tell how they are going to turn out, all you can do is buff up their minds a little bit.'

Edwards had to take eight papers as part of his finals and was examined on all of the subjects that he'd studied in years two and three of his course. The special subject contributed 25 per cent of his final grade. 'Obviously you couldn't expect a group of six or eight undergraduates to have both German and Russian,? explains Dr Breuning. ?So for the purpose of the course I put together a portfolio of selected documents, which I had translated for them. So they were studying raw documents and we would go through these together in my office in our very small group. I would explain how a historian would interpret the material and set it into context and [Edwards] was really into the course, he understood what was going on, and quite responsive. I can see that he would be annoyed with his fellow students, why they didn't buckle down with their books ? he must have felt something of an outsider.?

He was so dedicated to his studies and his aim of a First Class degree that he took control of every aspect of his life that he could. He managed to slow down his vodka drinking and his eating to the stage that he was sober enough to revise at night, but everyone around noticed how his weight had dropped. He also started to exhibit other forms of self-control. James Dean Brad held was visiting during Easter 1989 as Richey was doing his final weeks of revision. While sitting around a table Richey almost unconsciously reached over and picked up a compass, which he used to score his forearm over and over, drawing blood. Bradfield was shocked at the display and the sight of his almost emaciated friend but didn't say anything. ?The lowest I?ve got down to is just under six stones,' Richey later admitted. That was my third year at university, that was the skinniest I ever got, during my finals. But again, that was all about control. When it came for me to do my finals, I suddenly realised that I can't go in to do my finals pissed. So the way for me to gain control was cutting myself a little bit. Only with a compass, you know, vague little cuts, and not eating very much. Then I found I was really good during the day. I slept, felt good about myself, I could do all my exams. I got a 2:1 so I wasn't a one hundred per cent success, but I got through it, I did it. I remember James came down to see me in the Easter holidays before I did my finals. I wasn't very healthy then. But I did alright in my exams.'

Despite saying that he 'did alright', Richey was devastated that he didn't get a first. It was the only time he hadn't come away with the top grade in an exam. 'Being Richey, anything he believed in and wanted to do he dedicated himself to it until he had mastered it,? recalls Sally Killian. 'I remember how ill he looked during his finals, he worked so hard [to get a first]. Anything less wasn't good enough.' Before his exams Richey had written again to Steve Gatehouse, saying, 'Only one thing to know about exams ? if you know you're intelligent, why worry? To consider failure during a three-hour exam is to admit you are intellectually inadequate. That has been the basis of my academic life.' Now, it was the summer of 1989. Richey had failed to reach the top for the first time in his academic life. Was he now, by his own definition, 'intellectually inadequate'? Did he consider himself a failure? He had no job, no clear idea about a career. He was twenty-one years old and weighed six stones. What was Richey Edwards going to do with his life?

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Date: 2016-06-12; view: 248