THIS SECTION IS NOT CALLED FROM DESPAIR TO WHERE 3 page

Carl Bevan of Welsh band the 60ft Dolls knew Richey and had witnessed his excessive self-perpetuating cycle of drink and depression. 'Richey was into some serious alcohol abuse, which seemed to be symptomatic of something ? which I can say, knowing piss artists and possibly being one myself,? he said. 'He liked nothing better then to get absolutely trashed. You'd see him in the Murringer or Le Pub, drinking a lot of vodka. His head was in his hands, or in an ashtray, or something.? Around this time the heavy drinking caused him to stop his daily exercise regime, but still being obsessed with having a flat stomach he decided the best way to keep one without exercise was to stop eating. By now Richey was not even interested in his beloved Sega Megadrive. The band decided it was time for his third trip to a health farm. 'Thailand was the first time that I felt something was going wrong,? said Nicky Wire. ?And then we went to Portugal and things were going awry. It's not as if it was a matter of time, but I did feel something was gonna happen.?

At the end of May the band released 'Faster', the first new track to initiate a summer build-up to The Holy Bible, which was due for release at the end of August. The song contained some of Richey Edwards' most quoted and analysed lyrics, but it opened with someone else's words ? a sample of John Hurt from the film 1984. 'I hate purity. Hate goodness. I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone corrupt.? The first lines of the song are Richey Edwards attempting to deal with being misunderstood and dissected in the press: he's an architect, he writes the songs and constructs the manifestos, but his self-harming makes him a butcher; he's a pioneer at the cutting edge of lyric writing but his lack of guitar skills make him seem like a primitive; he sees his actions as chasing purity but the very same actions get him accused of perversion.

The rest of the song is Edwards' condescending look down from his self-appointed intellectual perch. 'I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer/I spat out Plath and Pinter,? he claims, adding the chilling, 'I believe in nothing but it is my nothing'. Edwards claimed he was inspired by Yukio Mishima when writing the song. Psychologists sometimes say that the claim of being of superior intelligence to an impressive list of people is indicative of an impending collapse.

In early June, the band appeared on Top of the Pops to play 'Faster'. A caption on the screen revealed that this was the band's twelfth Top 40 hit and it was introduced by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. As the camera zoomed in across the studio, the viewers were greeted by two bowls of real fire on stands either side of the band. This was the first major opportunity for the band to reveal their new aesthetic look. Richey Edwards was wearing a sailor?s uniform, while the stage was covered in army netting and bathed in green light. Most striking, though, was James Dean Bradfield, who stood centre-stage, screaming live lyrics into the microphone, while the others mimed. He was wearing a black balaclava with 'James' written across the forehead. This single item of clothing, with its obvious IRA connotations, brought in more than 25,000 complaints to the BBC.

Bradfield's thinking behind the mask was, in fact, nothing to do with terrorism. He was undergoing the very personal strain of singing someone else's words and felt he needed a persona to hide behind as he inhabited the writer's brain. While actors wore face-paint, he chose a balaclava. The rest of the band's military attire had been built up over the preceding months. Sean Moore had chosen a United Nations blue beret, harking back to The Clash's Sandinista look. The 1994 military uniforms updated the band's 1990-91 era uniform of stencilled shirts and white jeans. 'The uniforms represent the control and discipline that we are trying to get back,? said Nicky Wire about the two traits that Richey Edwards thought were of the utmost importance. Edwards himself added a Soviet war veteran's medal to his own outfit, saying that the failure of communism reminded him of the band's own initial ' failure?. Another TV appearance was a short set for Channel 4?s Naked City music programme. It was filmed the day after Richey Edwards had heard about the suicide of his university friend, Nigel. He spent several hours crying down the phone to Hall Or Nothing's Gillian Porter and then had to put on a brave face to go and record the show the next day. But as the band ran through half a dozen songs live in the studio, Edwards was a ghost, lurking in the amplifier shadows and fading into the dry ice.

After the bleak madness of Thailand the band's next shows were in Braga, Portugal, a place that had distinctly unhappy memories for all concerned, and things weren't about to get any better. During their first visit they'd heard the news that Philip Hall had died. This time, they had to deal with Richey Edwards suffering from uncontrollable bursts of involuntary crying. 'We had to put him to bed one night 'cos he just burst out crying in the car,? recalled Nicky Wire. ?And then he phoned me up at about half-three in the morning and ? you know those terrible commercial presentations you get? Some American twat showing you how to flatten your stomach or something ? and we were watching that together, and it seemed so bleak and nondescript. We didn't have a row or anything, but he kept yapping and I was really tired. The next morning, he comes up to me and says, "Here you are, Wire", and he gave me a fucking Mars bar.'

Back in the UK, the Manics called in at Roadmenders in Northampton to play a warm-up show before their appearance at the Glastonbury Festival on 24 June. This was the first of a series of festival dates they had booked across the summer, culminating with the Reading Festival at the end of August. Glastonbury 1994 is now seen as the breaking point for Britpop to smash its way into the mainstream and go ballistic. Never again would Oasis, Blur, Pulp and Radiohead be able to play on the same stage on the same day. Oasis were some way down the bill and Blur's Graham Coxon got into the military spirit by wearing army gear and an American paratrooper helmet. The Manics were booked for the NME stage. James Dean Bradfield wore his balaclava and a sailor suit, while Richey Edwards looked extremely thin in camouflage trousers and green T-shirt. He thrashed and hacked away at his guitar on the smaller stage in darkness, the best way to see a band at a festival. 'I really enjoyed Glastonbury,' said Richey. 'I did actually enjoy the gig. More than everybody else in the band, really. I don't really enjoy many concerts. And then it was back to Wales...'

X

HELL IS IN HELLO

July to August 1994

Wire, briar, limber-lock,

Three geese in a flock,

One flew east, one flew west

One flew over the cuckoo's nest.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, written in the late 1950s by mental institution orderly Ken Kesey, told the story of Randle Patrick McMurphy, a man who faked mental illness to try and get an easier time of serving his prison sentence for battery. His free-spirited ways resulted in many confrontations with the female nurse who ran his ward, but he was determined to force his fellow, heavily drugged, patients to live their lives and have some fun. His heroic attempts struck a chord with the Manics, who wrote one of their earliest songs, 'R P McMurphy', about him.

The aftermath of an illicit party that McMurphy organised on the ward leads to the suicide of one of the young patients, Billy. McMurphy blames the nurse and attacks her, damaging her vocal chords and essentially silencing her voice of authority, but he is taken away and lobotomised. When he is returned to the ward his friend the Chief sees that McMurphy has been turned into a vegetable and smothers him with a pillow before making his own escape. McMurphy and Billy are dead, but the Chief flies the nest. The screen adaptation of Kesey's book was one of Richey Edwards' favourite films.

***

A competition in the NME's 11 June 1994 issue offered readers the chance to 'WIN MANICS' LATEST CUT!' The details below added: 'Signed by the band, and who knows, perhaps even bled upon in Richey's case.?

***

At the end of the 1969 movie Paint Your Wagon, Lee Marvin's character Ben Rumson is heading out on the road from No Name City, the gold rush town which has dried up. This being a musical, he breaks into song. 'Wand'rin Star' provided Marvin with an unlikely deep-voiced novelty hit around the world, topping the charts in the UK and keeping The Beatles' 'Let it Be' at number two. Marvin's delivery of the song wasn't the only quirky thing about it. The lyric, outwardly a simple lament from a drifter moving along, contains some interesting couplets. In the summer of 1994, Richey Edwards caught bit of a show on early morning TV. 'Do I know where hell is, hell is in hell-?,? sang Marvin. 'Heaven is goodbye forever, it's time for me to go.' Edwards was struck by what he'd heard; in fact, he couldn't stop thinking about it. '[It] was just a tiny little thing on The Big Breakfast from Lee Marvin singing that stupid song, "I Was Born Under a Wandering Star" [sic]. There's a line in that, "Hell is in hello", and for two days, I couldn't do fucking anything. What's it mean, "Hell is in hello"? What are they trying to say? What is the point in that? Just little things. And then I realised that something was not quite right.'

It was only with hindsight that Edwards could convince himself that he didn't have to spend the rest of his days searching for the meaning and that it was just a line in a song. He could accept that it was just a line but couldn't take his mind off the subject, everything else just faded into the background. That wasn't the only thing that had him mentally paralysed. 'I couldn't understand Prisoner in Cell Block H,? he said. 'It was doing my head in. And then I realised that I'm not stupid. I had to convince myself that I wasn't stupid. It was just a silly little thing. The little things, you see, are the worry, that put me in a mood that I can't really control. Nothing else happens in my mind, I just get swamped by one idea. I can just see one little thing on TV and that'll be it. It can be anything, and then I'll just stop functioning. I think, what does it mean? I'm intelligent, why can?t I understand that? Just a line in a film or a book, and I've lost it.' This was the frame of mind he found himself in when he returned from the Glastonbury festival.

One balmy night in early July, Richey called Nicky Wire, as he was prone to do. He didn't really make much sense but he rambled on for a while. It was like many of the other late-night calls he'd received, but, after he hung up, Wire was left with the nagging feeling that this time something really wasn't right. The next morning Wire called Richey's flat to make sure that things were OK. When he failed to get an answer, his suspicions rose. He called Edwards' parents house in Blackwood to see if Richey was there, but they hadn't seen or heard from him for a few days. Richey's parents decided to drive down to Cardiff and check things out.

They pulled into the central car park and went up the three flights of stairs. When they let themselves into the apartment they were shocked at what they found. The usually spotlessly clean flat was in disarray. It was soon clear that things were wrong and that Richey had been on a binge of drinking and self-harm. Drunk and bleeding from a heavy session of self-cutting, he was admitted to hospital right away. The music press was soon filled with speculation. Melody Maker later printed that 'Richey's spell in hospital began, one lurid rumour goes, after a suicide attempt. The myth goes like this: Richey tries the old slit wrists/hot bath method, and, surprised to wake up the next morning and find himself alive, phones up his mother to say, "I've done something a bit stupid?I think you'd better call an ambulance."? Whether any of this is true was never confirmed; in fact, most things that summer were denied. Despite these denials, later police files did reveal that Edwards had made at least one suicide attempt, and this was most likely it. Richey did later say that, 'In terms of the "S" word [suicide], that does not enter my mind. And it never has done, in terms of an attempt. Because I am stronger than that.' So maybe this was an attempt or maybe it was a mistaken judgement about what his body could actually take in terms of alcohol and self-harm.

Many things about Richey's last known months would later be judged alongside the songs on The Holy Bible. In this case, people looked back in relation to the song 'Die in the Summertime', with its harrowing lines such as 'Scratch my leg with a rusty nail/Sadly it heals.'

'I did feel that we were taking it so far with the record, and some of the lyrics were so self-fulfilling for Richey,? said Nicky Wire. ?Like "Die in the Summertime", I'm sure he felt that, "People are gonna say I'm a fake if I don't do something about it.?

'I wasn't in a very good frame of mind,? Edwards explained several months later. 'My mind wasn't functioning very well, and my mind was stronger than my body. My mind subjected my body to things that it couldn't cope with. Which meant I was ill. For the first time, I was a bit scared, because I always thought I could handle it. I've read lots of books about tolerance of pain, and pain thresholds. The euphoric agony, basically, is a sensation which your mind blocks off. You control yourself. It's all about control. About proving a point to yourself, which I did very easily, but then I realised that I couldn't do anything.'

?It came to a point where his self-abuse had reached a peak, in a lot of ways ? his drinking, he'd virtually become anorexic, his mutilation,? said Nicky Wire. 'Everybody just got really scared when we saw him. We're in a position where we don't know what to do.? The only thing they could do was get help. Everyone agreed ? the band, Hall Or Nothing, Richey's parents, and, luckily, Richey himself ? that he needed to be admitted to hospital.

By Richey's own thinking, he had been OK, but things slowly and gradually built up until he was out of control. The self-harming had always been his badge of self-control: when he cut himself he was showing himself and the world that he was dealing with things in his own way, and that he could handle the pain and control his body. When that mechanism for self-control broke down, so did everything else in his mind. A descending spiral into chaos quickly followed.

'There were contributing factors to his decline,? said Martin Hall. 'But now Richey says he would probably have ended up the same way regardless. The thing is, he doesn't see anything wrong in cutting himself. It makes him feel better. It's his way of releasing pain and his argument is, it doesn't harm anyone else. He was at the point, though, where no one ? not even himself ? knew how far he might go. If he had carried on without any help he might have ended up killing himself.?

'[Richey] has a very acute perception of things, and you can't lose that perception,? added James Dean Bradfield. 'It's just a matter of how you channel it. And this is it. It sounds insultingly flippant to say, "Oh these things happen" or something, but, basically, what is is. We all saw Richey's problems getting to a stage where things were gonna get very nasty, and now he's going to see a psychiatrist and try to nip that in the bud. That's the true story. Those are the facts.? Edwards was found a place at Whitchurch Hospital, the local NHS psychiatric unit. With an immaculate lawn in front of it, the hospital actually looked more like a stately home. Edwards voluntarily checked in. Nicky Wire visited every day, and Sean Moore and James Dean Bradfield also made visits. All were shocked at the state in which they found Edwards. He was dressed in pyjamas and wandering around aimlessly, 'drugged out of his skull', according to Wire. 'When they took him into the hospital, they said he was on the verge of anorexia,' said Wire. ?Anorexia is the ultimate act of self-control, total withdrawal, no one can get to you, a kind of suicide where you don't have to die.'

Sean Moore commented that Edwards was never seen once by a psychiatrist during his stay there; they seemed happy just to keep him under control by medication. Moore was sure that Edwards would get no better in Whitchurch and would have to leave sooner rather than later. Edwards had gone beyond the stage of being able to sit down with his friends to talk things through. He needed serious help and plans were soon made to move him somewhere else. 'NHS hospitals are people banging off the walls in long corridors,? reported Edwards. 'Long, endless corridors. In communal wards, nobody sleeps. They can give you as many drugs as they want, but the noises in there are pretty horrendous. Then the next day, you wake up, have your drugs and sit in a big communal room, and you don't hardly see any fucker. And then you just, if you're like me, try to keep out of everybody's way. Know your place. Don't get in anybody's shadow. When I got taken to hospital, they didn't know who the fuck I was, ?'know? I'm not in Take That. I'm not even in The Stone Roses. I'm in a moderately successful British band. I wasn't there in my Manic Street Preachers T-shirt. They didn't have a clue.?

There were rumours that Richey was still a danger to himself while in Whitchurch. He might have attempted suicide, or at least further self-harm, but these stories were never proved either way. Richey almost seemed to say something about this when discussing the ability to do what one wants to one's own body. 'The best thing is knowing that no one can do fucking anything about it,' he said. 'When I was in Whitchurch [long pause] People can't actually hold you down and force food into your mouth. They just can't do it. And someone can't be near you twenty-four hours a day to stop you doing something to your body. And ultimately they've got no right to anyway, because it is your body.'

Initially, the band agreed not to talk to Richey about business matters. 'To be honest, we were all quite numb to any sort of discussion about the group's future because we were too concerned about Richey,? explained James Dean Bradfield. But after a few days, Richey brought up this subject himself. During one visit, Edwards told Wire and Bradfield that he'd like to take a step back. He would continue to write lyrics and work on the artwork but would refrain from being a touring member of the band. The visitors agreed and said they'd go along with anything he wanted to do. 'I'd seen them down to the front door and when they'd gone, I was really upset,? Edwards explained later. 'I couldn't think what I was going to do. Because it's not enough for me just to do the words. I kind of think I'd be cheating on them, because the touring part is the worst bit, the bit that no band really enjoys. Its the thing that makes it feel like a job, because you know what you'll be doing in three months' time at two o'clock in the afternoon. I felt bad thinking, well, I'll just stay on my own in the flat and just write words. That's not enough.? That evening he phoned Nicky Wire in tears; he had to go back on what he'd said he wanted. He had to be fully involved in the band. It was his life. If he didn't have that, he'd have nothing. He promised to practise hard with his guitar playing and be ready for the planned autumn tour starting in September.

Alter eight days at Whitchurch, there was no visible improvement in Richey's condition; if anything, he seemed worse because of the medication. 'I didn't know what the fuck was going on,' he said. 'James will tell you, I couldn't even talk. I was just stuttering. I was taking medication, Librium and stuff. Though it calmed me down, because I could get to sleep at night.' It was decided that in view of his static condition, Edwards would be moved to the private Priory clinic at Roehampton.

The main hospital at the Priory consists of a general psychiatry unit, which deals with all types of mental illness. Separate to this are the Addictions Unit and the Eating Disorders Unit. The usual admission route is via a GP, unless the patient is known to the hospital from previous visits, but the GP referral route can be bypassed, particularly by famous patients who can simply turn up, pay their deposit and then be assessed by the doctor on call.

The Priory was and is the celebrity clinic of choice in the UK. It's a typical rock cliché. Rock star gets hooked on drugs and/or booze, embarks on a downward spiral, checks into rehab, comes out and starts the cycle all over again. Today, it is almost expected. Celebrity magazines seem to live on the stories of rehab and relapse. Do the clinics ever actually work? 'If a person is forced into rehab, it is almost certain not to work,' says addiction therapist Shelley Assiter, who has worked with many rock stars. It has to come from them. They have to want to stop being slaves to drugs. Some treatment centres make addicts share two or three to a room and undergo intensive one-to-one and group sessions,? says Assiter. 'The Priory does some good work, but it is so luxurious that people are basically imprisoned in a five-star hotel. It's no surprise that they leave and then relapse.? Edwards didn't volunteer to be admitted there, but he still had enough about him to agree to treatment.

One of the Priory's main weapons in addiction treatment is the well-publicised 'Twelve-step Programme',[29] which is also widely used by Alcoholics Anonymous, an organisation that Richey Edwards signed up to while in hospital. In the Priory Addictions Unit, there is a set treatment period after the completion of which ? if the patient remained abstinent ? they would be discharged and enter into an outpatients programme. Patients are encouraged to start and complete the programme together in groups.

When Richey was put on this programme in the Priory, it had already been in use for around forty years. He got through step one well enough (admitting that he had a problem and needed help), but steps two (admitting that a greater power should control him) and three (turning over his life to a god of his understanding) were problematic. Step two required that any intellectual self-sufficiency be jettisoned in favour of obeying a higher power, which meant that Edwards would have to surrender a core feature of his very being. His intellect had been his greatest weapon since his school days; how could he be expected to just drop that overnight? He had been against organised religion since he'd stopped attending Methodist services at the age of thirteen, so handing himself over to a god was also difficult. 'Step three is hard,' Richey told the NME?s Stuart Bailie. 'When you have to reconcile yourself to a god of your understanding. Step one is fairly easy, to admit. Well, it's easy to admit, it's hard to accept in your own mind. Because I do feel my mind's quite strong. Obviously not as strong as it could be, but step three was hard. It's gonna take a long time for me to figure out' Edwards explained that although some people take family members or pets as the 'god of their understanding' he was having a difficult time figuring out who or what to concentrate on. 'The closest I can get to it is nature, probably, but then nature is very cruel,' be said. 'It's a question of working it all out, which is why I did history, to try and work out the central point. A god of your own understanding, mine's not gonna be my dead grandmother or my pet cat, and it's not gonna be the Big Man upstairs. And I've got to understand what nature means. It's just a question of working it all out, and I've got a lot of time on my hands, so I can think about it.' Despite this apparent rejection of the Big Man upstairs, Edwards would be carrying around notes of Bible passages bier in the year, quoting them to the others on tour, and also had tattoos with religious themes added to his arms.

The fourth step could actually be described as exacerbating some of the problems that Richey was wrestling with. Making ?searching and fearless' moral inventories of himself was exactly the kind of self-critical over-thinking that had contributed to his depression in the first place. When the rest of the band visited, they noticed a change in Richey and they didn't think it was necessarily for the better. 'We all think that the Priory filled him up with a lot of shit,' said James Dean Bradfield. ?All the things the Priory stood for, in one way or another, Richey had ridiculed viciously in the past. Deep down, he knew it was crap.'

?The Priory ripped out the man and left a shell,' added Nicky Wire. 'They say they've got a cure in places like that, but all they do is completely change the person you are. I don't think that's a cure. And you could see him struggling with this, wondering if this was the only way. They loved him in there, because he's so intelligent and sharp-witted, and he got into it, played along with them. But they ripped the soul out of him. The person I knew was slowly ebbing away.? He did have some strands of humour left, however. In a possibly apocryphal story, Eric Clapton was working as a volunteer and popped in to see Richey at the Priory. Clapton apparently said that on his next visit he'd bring along his guitar. Richey Edwards is said to have told James Dean Bradfield, 'That's just what I need. I'm going to be confronted by God, and God's going to realise that I can't play guitar.' He also said that maybe he should put a cake on his head or talk to an imaginary giraffe to convince 'them' that he was mad. Furthermore, he was disappointed that his liver test results indicated that he didn't drink as much as he'd claimed.

Edwards was now a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, was being prescribed Prozac and was smoking around sixty a day. His weight was becoming a problem again, but the band offered some good-natured mockery and he took it in good humour. Gillian Porter from Hall Or Nothing smuggled him in some coffee and they sat around talking about various bands. Sean Moore took in a Nirvana song book and sat patiently with him, showing him the way through a couple of songs.

'Richey never had as many setbacks as a kid as me, he's more acutely intelligent than me, he's more beautiful than me ? and yet he has more problems,? said James Dean Bradfield. 'Problems that I'd just snip off with fucking scissors in two seconds flat really get to Richey.'

In its 6 August 1994 issue, the Melody Maker ran a story under the heading 'Manic Depression' and reported that Edwards was suffering from 'nervous exhaustion'. Outwardly, Hall Or Nothing were downplaying the issue. A spokeswoman was quoted as saying that he'd 'just had enough'. The official line was that he'd be in for at least a few weeks, he was 'a bit exhausted' and needed to rest. Later, it was hinted that things were actually pretty bad. On 8 August a statement was issued to the effect that Edwards was 'very ill' and that things had 'developed to a point where the band, but more importantly Richey, decided that he needs to seek psychiatric help to deal with what is basically a sickness'.

Band business continued, if not as normal, then with at least a smidgeon of normality. James Dean Bradfield and Nicky Wire popped into the MTV studios for MTV's Most Wanted, performing poignant acoustic renditions of 'She is Suffering' and '4st 7lb'. Filmed in noir-ish black and white, '4st 7lb', especially, was even more harrowing in this stripped-down setting.

In August, 'Revol' became the band's next single. The promotional video, directed by Chris D'Adda and given a cinematic feel, was obviously filmed before Edwards' hospitalisation. He appears with the others in his military uniform while they play the song in an airplane hangar. 'Revol', with its initially baffling lyrical content, hovered around the low twenties in the charts while Wet Wet Wet topped them with a dire rendition of the Troggs' 'Love is All Around'. Sony paid for a big advertising campaign to promote 'Revol', taking out full-page adverts to print the song's lyrics, and producing other ads that read:

THE WHITE LIBERAL

IS THE VD

OF THE REVOLUTION

In between visits to Richey, the Manics had kept a handful of festival engagements that they'd been booked for. Part of the reason was that they wanted to honour what they'd promised; another reason, which became more apparent as the summer wore on, was that they needed the money to pay Richey's bill for the Priory, which would amount to about £20,000. The first of these festivals was Glasgow's T to The Park on 30 Jury. Bringing in a replacement for Edwards was out of the question, so the three remaining Manics played on without additional help. On the day, fans were simply told that Edwards was ill. 'We haven't turned into one of these power trios like the fucking Jam or anyone like that,? Wire said from the stage. Privately, he said that he felt the appearance had been a 'massive spiritual betrayal'. Shows in Germany and Holland followed.

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 240