THIS SECTION IS NOT CALLED FROM DESPAIR TO WHERE 1 page

1993

Some of Richey Edwards' favourite literary heroes were drunks. By 1993, Edwards was well on the way to joining them. Nicky Wire told Melody Maker quite bluntly that he'd seen his bandmate become an alcoholic over the past eighteen months. When Simon Price visited Edwards at the Hall Or Nothing offices in 1993, he was witness to Edwards drinking whisky from a glass being used as an ashtray; Edwards was so far gone that he was oblivious to the ash and knocked it back in one. Richey had steadily increased his consumption since the days of trying to get some sleep in Swansea. Now he drank to get to sleep, drank to avoid having to think about things too deeply, drank to fill time spent hanging around while on tour, drank to have the courage to get on stage every night. He wasn't usually a loud drunk, though.[23] ?I drink alone, which isn't maudlin,? he explained. 'I feel maudlin enough when I wake up in the morning anyway. I get in bed, drink vodka and flick channels. It sounds sad but it's the most pleasurable thing I can think of doing. And Tuesdays and Thursdays you've got The Prisoner, If You See God, Tell Him and Top of the Pops. I guess I drink three quarters of a bottle of vodka a day. I don't hate myself enough to be bombed out of my brain all day long. I just start at seven in the evening. I like four hours to pass slowly, till I feel my legs are dead and I can hardly move my head. It's a blur.?

Work on the songs for the Manics second album had started during the previous summer at Outside Studios in Wales. The band had also recorded some demos at Kent's Impact Studios with Dave Eringa, and these sessions had gone so well that they asked Eringa to produce the album. In early January the band tented a flat in Shepherds Bush and commuted out for more demo sessions at the House in the Woods studio in Surrey, a Gothic manor the band would record in again at a later date. The Sony were unimpressed when the band chose the unknown 21-year-old producer, but the Manics were insistent: at the end of the month the sessions for the album proper were booked at the residential splendour of Berkshire's Hook End Manor, and Eringa got the job. Equipped with 48-track mixing facilities, a swiniming pool and a gym, and set in luscious, landscaped grounds, this was a top-end set-up that left little change from £2,000 a day.

The band was keen to get the best out of the money being spent and utilise the expensive studio to its full potential. This approach is possibly why the album's songs suffered. Sometimes they used twenty-five microphones on the drums alone. Unlike on Generation Terrorists they actually played together in the studio (well, three of them did), rather than recording the individual parts alone and layering them together later. James Dean Bradfield was the driving force behind the album. When he wasn't singing his vocal parts alone in the dark, he worked long hours to push things along in the control room. Meanwhile, Richey Edwards spent his time at Hook Manor reading or laid out on his four-poster bed listening to Rod Stewarts Every Picture Tells a Story and drinking. He didn't suffer hangovers because he was drinking steadily all the time, getting only when he stopped. Each morning, he'd go for a swim and work out in the gym. Despite his slight frame, he wanted to a textbook physique. He was somehow able to keep to his exercise regime on just one meal a day, usually a jacket potato and grapes. He could achieve 1,500 sit-ups, and then lift some weights. Toning his body was another form of self-control, along with restrained eating and the self-cutting. Despite his high intellect, he couldn't escape from the media-constructed image of beauty and body shape. Things did catch up with him eventually and when Select's Andrew Collins visited the studio for an interview, Edwards passed out. He was, apparently, 'babbling to the end of the Smirnoff bottle'. 'Drink was his only recourse,? said Collins. 'It probably would have done him some good to have taken drugs. He never wanted to take E, bated the idea of it, he never wanted to take a drug that made him happy. He couldn't imagine anything worse than a drug that made everybody happy ? he didn't think there was anything good in everybody being happy and thinking everyone was OK. He preferred the traditional route of drinking to dull the pain.'

'Ecstasy is too designed to make you happy,? said Edwards. 'People I know who've taken E just want to be friends with everybody. I've got so much more respect for people who stick a needle in their veins. Someone who's drunk a bottle of whisky is more fucked up than someone who's smoked a spliff. But if you're gonna do it, do it properly. Take smack.' Despite this bravado, there's little or no evidence, or even rumour, that Edwards ever followed his own advice. Any drugs he did take were generally prescribed and when he did try smoking a joint Nicky Wire refused to speak to his bandmate for several hours. The band's initial 'no drugs' rule had been pretty much kept to.

When the Gold Against the Soul sessions ended, the band insisted that Edwards book himself into a private health farm to sober up before the touring restarted. It was reported that this wasn't something Edwards was interested in doing and he was practically forced into going there.

Musically and aesthetically, Gold Against the Soul was a radical departure from the metal-tinged Generation Terrorists. The overt influence of Guns?N'Roses was fading from the mix. The band's teenage influences were slowly being pushed aside, partly because they were growing up but also partly due to record company pressure that the band should move closer to rock's middle ground. Sony had invested a lot of money in signing the band, paying for the Generation Terrorists album and now funding the expensive sessions for a second album. They wanted some return on their money. The Manics? lives had changed so radically over the past two years that it was probably unrealistic to expect their music to stay the same. Some fans were bound to feel betrayed but this wasn't the same group that had first come up to London from Wales. The four small-town boys had grown worldly-wise in a hurry.

?It's definitely more personal,? said Edwards.'With the first one,'cos we'd wanted to be in a band so long we were really like hung up, really paranoid, wanted everything to be important, wanted everything to be like sound-bite type slogan. We were very influenced by William Burroughs, we didn't want anything to seem cinematic, we didn't want anything to really rhyme when you read the lyric sheet.'

The problem with Gold Against the Soul is that it didn't really challenge anyone or anything. Although their debut album had many faults, at least it was angry. For a band that had burst into the music press with a mega-attitude and lots to say, this new album had little to shout about. It was neither especially good nor especially bad. These different, older Manics were ostensibly dull. But at the time, Richey Edwards certainly thought they had made a progression. '[The album has] better songs all round, better sound,? he said. 'We'd been reading too much William Burroughs when we wrote the last album.' He went on to admit that there were lots of faults with Generation Terrorists as a lot of the songs had been written when they were quite young. They hadn't played in previous teenage bands to enable them to get the 'crap' out of their systems, so they were saddled with doing their growing up in public. Gone was most of the sound-bite, scattergun, sloganeering, and this had been replaced with middle-of-the-road safety.

All of the lyrics were credited as Wire-Edwards, but it was easy to see which ones Edwards had more input to. The album's opening track, 'Sleepflower', concerned his problems with getting to sleep, worrying about getting to sleep, sleeping pills, and the morning after. It was all there, wrapped up in James Dean Bradfield's heavy metal riffs. 'Sleep is constantly throughout every lyric I've written from the start,' said Edwards. 'It's a big thing for me because I?m scared to go to sleep because the things I get in my head, I don?t like. That's the reason I ever started drinking, to knock me out. I?ve tried sleeping tablets, but I don't really like them. I like the effect of drinking. I can get a blank sleep, be out for five or six hours and wake up and then do my job.?

Two singles quickly followed ? 'From Despair to Where' and 'La Tristesse Durera'. Although Edwards and Wire often worked together on the same lyric, the words of ?From Despair to Where' indicate Edwards writing alone on his bed, revealing that 'there's nothing nice in my head/the adult world took it all away'. The song follows the grunge template of a quiet opening verse that explodes into a loud guitar-driven chorus, giving the song an anthemic quality before the strings and heavy keyboards kick in. 'From Despair to Where? is unique in the Manics' catalogue: Richey Edwards actually played, briefly, on the recording. When the basic track had been put down, Bradfield got Edwards into the studio to add a bit of trashed background guitar work.[24] 'We cleared everyone out and it was just me and Richey and he did pretty well,? recalled Dave Eringa. 'He was nervous and he was like, "Oh, we're going to be here all night, Dave", but he just played it No one laughed at him. Except Richey at himself, of course.? If nothing else, Edwards could see the funny side of his musical limitations. 'La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)' came from Nicky Wire's reading of Vincent van Gogh's suicide letter, in which the painter wrote 'The sadness will last forever.? Set to a gentle Madchester beat, the song tells of growing old from the perspective of an elderly war veteran.

'Yourself' again addresses the question of being able to sleep and being in an 'alcoholic haze' and allows James Dean Bradfield to show off his growing vocal maturity.

?Life Becoming a Landslide' starts off with a woman's perspective of childbirth and progresses to Edwards' long-held view that growing up is the worst thing that happened to anyone ? ?I don't wanna be a man' ? then flashes back to Edwards' unhappy childhood encounter with pornography, and confirms his view that 'There is no true love.?

?Roses in the Hospital', as many pointed out, was very close to being a cover version of David Bowie?s 'Sound and Vision'. There are mentions of scratches on skin and the lin? 'Stub cigarettes out on my arm'. The song's title was picked out from one of the band's favourite films, Times Square.[25]

Elsewhere on the album, 'Symphony of Tourette' could be a sly admission from Nicky Wire, while the title track ends proceedings with a mixture of Mudhoney (well, this was 1993) and Black Sabbath.

Overall, the LP jettisoned the band's political rantings and attempted to focus in on something more personal: self-loathing and disgust with the world at large. These were sentiments held close to Richey Edwards' heart. Rather than expressing political opinions, he had become comfortable writing about his own hang-ups and problems. The album was more personal than the Manics' debut, but its personal writing was on the edge and made for uncomfortable listening for those who concentrated on the words. These words were gradually taking more prominence in Edwards' day-to-day world. On the attached press release, Richey wrote that he wanted 'to piss on the floor of Seattle', but in reality the album seemed to be moving towards that sound.

Japanese photographer Mitch Ikeda designed the unusual sleeve image, based on Yukio Mishima's Killed By Roses. The packaging contained just one piece of literature, in contrast to the eighteen quotes used on Generation Terrorists. The band chose Primo Levi's poem 'Song of Those Who Died in Vain'[26] for the inner sleeve. Obtaining permission to use this delayed the release date by four weeks. Sony were much more careful about this kind of thing after the problems with 'You Love Us' on Heavenly. The band portraits for the artwork were virtually caricatures; James Dean Bradfield in full scream, clenching his fingers, Sean Moore sitting quietly in a corner, Nicky Wire doing his best Sid Vicious impersonations and Richey Edwards slumped in the corner of a bathroom ? gazing dejectedly into a mirror, with some Polaroid photographs scattered by his side.

The album entered the UK Top 10, peaking at number eight but it wasn't helped particularly by its reviews. 'Ultimately, one suspects that the Manic Street Preachers will always struggle to write the songs to match their song-titles,? wrote Keith Cameron in Vox (rating: ?6/10?). Q magazine, in the days before it was all readers? questions and lists, feature-reviewed the album alongside The Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream and U2?s Zooropa (both of which the magazine liked) and Paul Rodgers' Muddy Waters Blues, which was awarded two out of four stars ? the same mark Peter Kane gave to Gold Against the Soul. Right from the off it was a case of their mouthy past coming back to bite them. 'One album too many for Manic Street Preachers?' Q asked. The answer seemed to come back as a resounding 'Yes': '?the cupboard looks to be already distressingly bare,? wrote Kane, adding that the album represented the 'sounds of a band digging in for a long-term career rather than knocking over a few of the statues. When will they ever learn?' Writing for Select, Stuart Maconie was more enthusiastic and gave the album a score of '4/5' (let's hope it wasn't him that came up with the headline 'Dai Harder!'], but even he couldn't help mentioning the one-album-then-split routine: 'They said they would split up after one record. They were lying. Good.'

The TV Tour to promote Gold Against the Soul began in May 1993. The band's new image was revealed during an appearance on Th? Beat. James Dean Bradfield was sporting a beret/cap, white T-shirt and leather coat, which, with his semi-designer stubble, left him looking like a combination of Bruce Springsteen circa 1975 and a thinner, angrier Zucchero. Sean Moore now had long hair and shades, possibly to hide his eyes from the bad shirt he was wearing, while Nicky Wire wore a white Marilyn Monroe T-shirt and Cobain shades. Richey Edwards probably looked the coolest, which wasn't difficult, with his Brian Jones haircut and open shirt over a black vest. During 'Yourself', he crouched by the back of the set ? seemingly with nothing to add ? but joined in with a bit of strumming later on. The accompanying interview segment got the on-screen captions of Richey James and Nicky Wire the wrong way around. This was a sure sign that the production crew didn't even know who was who, and signalled the distance the band still had to go to be famous.

These were the days when no TV request would be turned down by the Manics. The ITV children's show Gimme 5 saw them miming 'From Despair to Where' to a studio of twelve-year-olds and a puppet sheep. Saturday morning magazine show The Ozone sent Philippa Forrester to 'discover if the Manic Street Preachers are the most depressed band in the charts'.

?Are you a glum lot?' she asked, getting straight to the point. ?The charts are always full of quite happy, bouncy songs, it's good that people can go out and buy a song that they can get a bit maudlin to,? explained Richey. On Entertainment UK, he was asked about the '4REAL' incident yet again, more than two years after the event. The initial excitement of being in a band had well and truly dissipated. Now, it was in danger of becoming just another job. ?The rewards for what we do are nothing,? said Edwards. 'We get to do things like shopping and buy stupid little things, but tomorrow morning we will be bored again. When we first got signed, it was fucking heaven on earth. We thought we were never gonna have two boring seconds again, and it's just not true.?

The routine was set to continue for the foreseeable future: a repeated cycle of touring-recording-promotmg-interviewing-touring. The post-album routine was already becoming dull for Richey. Once he'd done something, he wasn't likely to enjoy being put through it again. He was of the view that human nature tended towards reducing everything in life to a routine, and that there was no escape.

The roller coaster started again when Gold Against the Soul was released on 20 June. Three days later, the band played a warm-up gig at the Marquee in London and the tour proper started in Leeds on 1 July. The initial summer dates had the Manics headlining a triple bill with Credit To The Nation and Blaggers I.T.A. The controversy started on the first night and - for a change ? the Manics weren't directly involved. The two support bands had been hand-picked by the Manics to add an exciting, uncompromising edge to the shows. Unfortunately this boiled over after the Leeds show when a Melody Maker journalist was injured after a scuffle with Matt (who was supposedly too cool to have a surname) from Blaggers I.T.A., resulting in some facial injuries.[27] The Maker and NME stood by their man while the Manics decided not to chuck the band off the tour. Despite keeping Blaggers I.T.A. on the tour, Richey Edwards made his feelings public. 'Morally, it was indefensible,? he said. 'We've had more than our fair share of bad press and stitch-up jobs but no matter what was printed about us, we'd never resort to smacking someone in the face. Blaggers say they want to put the Nazis out of business but I can?t think of anything more fascist than using physical violence to intimidate people whose viewpoint differs from yours.?

'We gave it a lot of thought and decided that sacking them would in itself be a fascist action. We don't agree with Blaggers, we don't particularly like Blaggers, but we'd be hypocrites if we censored them.'

During the summer, the Manics had more important worries on their mind. Philip Hall had been diagnosed with cancer back in 1992 and now he was undergoing chemotherapy at London's Cromwell Hospital. The band carried on: Dave Eringa joined up to play keyboards on the road and flesh out their sound. Yet despite often having eleven singles within the set-list, they weren't selling out the modest-sized venues. Richey Edwards was certainly not overjoyed to be touring again, especially given that the band was playing another series of festivals over the summer. When asked if he was happy to be back on the road, he answered, 'Er, no.? When Kerrang! asked 'What's your favourite moment onstage?' he replied, 'When we walk off.' His growing dislike of touring was exacerbated by playing at festivals. 'We never really look forward to the festivals, just because you never know what it's gonna sound like or what it's gonna be like/ he said. 'You know you get no sound-check, so you've got no idea what it's gonna be like.?

Edwards, like the rest of the band and crew, was given a tour itinery that mapped out the immediate future of his life in segments comprising a few weeks and often in minute detail. The bound, A5 booklet was filled with all the details that the band and crew would need and punctuated with Far Side cartoons, letters clipped from newspapers and assorted photocopied ephemera. On the day of the Leeds-to-Manchester leg, the quote of the day was 'Grim? Grim? It's so bad up here they don't even bother begging.? Additional information ?n the gig at Manchester read, ?Manchester is now renowned for being such a lovely safe place to b?, so make sure you leave equipment unattended outside, have lots of money stuffed in your pockets and of course leave the bus unlocked. Flak jackets are available from the Students Union to go to the bus after dark.? Later on, the itinery informed them, the band would be staying at the Embassy Hotel on London's Bayswater Road. This became the first of several visits there.

The Heineken Festival in Swansea's Singleton Park on 7 August could have been a triumphant homecoming. It was within walking distance of Richey's old student digs, but the reality was that free beer had been given out by the sponsors to the 10,000-plus crowd all day and by the time the Manics came on, the audience was a seething mass of alcohol-fuelled chaos. The stage was littered with broken glass, there was fighting in the crowd and a general feeling of tension and unease. It wasn't quite Altamont, but it felt nasty nonetheless. It didn't take long for Nicky Wire to get hit on the head with a glass bottle and need to be taken offstage for treatment. Tensions continued with the band threatening to pull out completely, but their angst-ridden, venomous set ended with Richey climbing the speaker stack, putting his arms out either side like a Christ figure and diving into the crowd. 'Cans are easy. I've learnt to hit them with my guitar,? said Edwards afterwards about the perils of projectile-dodging on stage. 'And plastic glasses I can catch in my mouth. But bottles are something else. In a way I wish they'd hit me instead of one of the musicians?I don't expect roses and petals at my feet, but the amount of grief we get is non-stop. Anything from Welsh bands complaining about betraying Wales by not singing in Welsh, to gangs of four blokes in Cardiff pouring lager over me and saying, "What are you going to do about that?" Tom Jones doesn't get it!'

Other festivals passed without any trouble before the band part in a surprise support act to Bon Jovi at the mammoth Milton Keynes Bowl natural amphitheatre. 'It's not the most obvious support in rock?n?roll history, is it?' Richey told Hot Press. ?We always enjoy a challenge and playing a gig where ninety-five cent of the crowd probably hate your guts has a perverse appeal' It also paid a good amount of appearance money, too. The two shows, on 18 and 19 September, also included ageing dreadlocked punk Billy Idol and soft-rockers Little Angels playing to the crowd of sixty thousand per night. As the first band on stage at three p.m., in broad daylight, it was always going to be difficult for the Manics, but they got virtually no reaction from the crowd and had finished their day's work by four p.m. Once offstage, Richey started downing pints of vodka and tonic and decided it would be a good idea to head out into the crowd to watch Billy Idol, where he was immediately surrounded for autographs. He did manage to stay and watch the show, punching the air to Idol's set in a drunken haze. Later on, Jon Bon Jovi offered a badly rehearsed 'thank you' to the support acts that he'd obviously not watched or even had the decency to check the names of, and he thanked the 'Maniacs' for opening the show. "When you've agreed to do a gig it almost seems pointless to rebel,? said Edwards.'We did agree, and played to 120,000 people who didn't want to know who we are or what we're supposed to be. But just seeing our "All Rock 'N' Roll Is Homosexual" T-shirt on a board made it all worthwhile!'

At the end of the month, Richey took the unusual step of donning a suit and tie. The occasion was Nicky Wire's wedding as he tied the knot with long-time girlfriend Rachel. Sean Moore had moved to Bristol with his girlfriend, and James Dean Bradfleld was now spending much of his free time in London. Things weren't how they used to be. Life was moving on and changing. Richey was unable to adapt to this. He did have a kind-of-girlfriend, though. She has only ever been referred to as 'Jo'. In his book on the Manics, Everything, Simon Price described her as a 'glamorous, stunning model-type from London'. Richey said she was the only person he'd slept with in 1993, 'the one person I've found attractive for two years. But I barely see her and we just talk.' Later, he'd say that he had only kissed her 'once or twice'.

In the mini-diary he kept for Select during the Generation Terrorises sessions, Edwards was bothered by things that would hardly register with most people. After reading the Sunday papers he wrote, 'Debbie Lang's impeccable boyfriend heritage ? David Bowie. David Essex. Andy Summers. Roger Taylor ? is marred by Climie Fucking Fisher. All this upsets me. Big Time.'Why would the boyfriend of someone he'd never met be so upsetting? He added that 'Today I would rather fell in love with a washing machine than a woman.'

***

In October, the band was back on the road yet again ? this time, to Japan for an exhausting thirteen shows in sixteen days. While the Far East might have been one of the places that Richey was more interested in visiting, he was still unhappy with touring in general. His argument was that he never got the time to really experience any of the places they were travelling through. ?I never find it exciting to go anywhere,' he said. 'You get much more true information from literature than from travelling. Like, if I want to know about France, I'll buy the book...I don't know if that makes me a moron.'

In Japan, the promotional posters for Gold Against the Soul and the tour all focused on Richey. Rather than a band photograph, the posters were grainy black-and-white portraits of Richey alone in head-and-shoulder side-profile. As became widespread throughout the Far East, he was the main focus of fans' attentions and hero worship. In Japan, he was given a 'suicide doll' with a note asking when he was going to kill himself.

Martin Hall joined the tour of Japan and witnessed the latest in Richey's growing list of vices ? smoking. Although he'd only started in September he was already up to a fifty-a-day habit, saying that when he liked to do something, he did it a lot. He was also still cutting himself as much as ever, as evidenced on Japanese TV. 'Richey's a private partier,' said Martin Hall. 'He parties just as hard ? but alone, with a bottle of vodka and a razor blade! It?s not the kind of party you want to be invited to.' The band didn't really know how to handle the growing list of Edwards' 'hobbies'. It's thought that they had never really confronted him about his cutting, preferring to turn a blind eye ? after all, it seemed to help him deal with stress and calm him down. The drinking was something they'd all done to excess at one period or another and smoking wasn't really a problem apart from Nicky Wire making an issue of theatrically wafting away the smoke if Edwards came too close. Edwards had always been skinny and so any further weight loss wasn't really noticed.

The eastern tour was covered on Japanese TV with Richey being interviewed in his hotel room. Sitting on his bed, wearing a grey beret, his exposed arms displayed horrendous scars, cuts and burns ? especially on his left forearm ? and he wore a bandage on his right wrist. His heavy, dark mascara gave him a haunted look and he'd taken to wearing rock-star Converse sneakers.

Now, my understanding of Japanese is pretty much non?-existent, but the clean-cut young man and woman introducing the shows were very enthusiastic and held up a large stack of letters that seemed to confirm the Manics' high standing in Japan. They read out important-sounding letters and postcards about the band. Then suddenly, inexplicably, the girl started talking in English and introduced the band playing live in a small club. Footage of them playing 'From Despair to Where' follows, and the whole place ? not just the first few rows ? was the stereotypical single mass of jumping bodies with hands in the air. Other clips included the machine-gun strobes of 'Sleepflower', while the girls squashed down at the front knew all the words to 'You Love Us'. The end of the concert sees Richey quietly watching Nicky Wire strip off his shirt and climb on top of James Dean Brad field's shoulders. As his two bandmates totter around the stage, Edwards rips off his guitar and really launches himself into the audience. It takes four security men to untangle and haul him back out.

Richey and Nicky were interviewed in the foyer of the empty club at the end of the tour. After long questions in Japanese the translations for the boys were edited out and we get to see their English replies with Japanese subtitles on the screen. For English-speakers, it was a case of trying to decipher what the question had been ? almost like the Two Ronnies' Mastermind sketch. We get to hear that Richey thinks there is no real reason to be unhappy in the First World, but there's a feeling that something is missing from his life. Richey chain-smokes through the interviews, and at one point he hitches up his sleeve to reveal a mass of fresh cigarette burns. He had taken to stubbing them out on his arm as well as cutting himself. He gladly proves that he knows the words for scars and burns in Japanese. He explains that the highlight of the tour for him was a visit to the Hiroshima peace memorial and that he thinks 'Japan has the most discipline of any country in the western world [sic]? as he lights up about his fourth cigarette of the interview. When asked to sign off to the camera he says, 'Give thanks and praises to the most high, love Richey.?

Back in Europe, the band visited the concentration camps at Belsen and Dachau on their days off. For Richey, having studied the Holocaust at university, these were especially moving visits. For the rest of the tour he went through a 'bad period', drinking and cutting more than ever. He was said to be necking vast amounts of Johnnie Walker whisky during the day. When they got back to the UK, the band insisted that he check into a health farm again. This was getting repetitious, but no one was sensing any greater danger as yet.

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 222