THIS SECTION IS NOT CALLED FROM DESPAIR TO WHERE 4 page

'I've never been late for anything,? said Edwards. 'I've never missed a flight, I'm not indisciplined. I'm not a member of Happy Mondays or Primal Scream or whatever. I'm always on time. I haven't got many things to cling to, but I cling to that. That's what pissed me off about missing Reading and the German gigs, I had nobody else to blame. It was my fault, and I accept it was my fault.? There had previously been talk of Richey possibly being fit enough to return for Reading Festival at the end of August, but as the month progressed this became more unlikely. 'I think he feels deep down it would have come to this whether he'd been a teacher or a bank clerk or anything, but I personally think being in a band has accelerated it,? said Bradfield to the NME that summer. Bradfield felt like his visits to see Edwards made him a psychiatrist for half an hour. He also felt that if Edwards were not well enough to retake his place in the band, then they'd cancel the autumn tour.

The Manics that took to the Reading Festival stage were an angry, pissed-off trio. Not only had Richey failed to improve sufficiently enough to play but the day would have been Philip Hall's thirty-fifth birthday. The headliners that year were Cypress Hill, Primal Scream, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Britpop was still gathering steam with Pulp, Elastica, Gene and Echobelly appearing lower down the bill. Courtney Love's band Hole played in tribute to Kurt Cobain and Hole bassist Kristin Pfaff, who had both died that year.

Before the Manics played their set, they were interviewed in their caravan backstage. Getting the obvious question out of the way first, Nicky Wire's update on Edwards' condition was 'Since he reached the zenith of shitness he's improved.? James Dean Bradfield explained that they hadn't seen such serious problems approaching, and that they had had to take a sharp intake of breath. In a separate interview, Sean Moore said that they had reached the point where they had nothing left to lose at Reading: '[I] thought we'd go out in our own little blaze of glory.'

The band took to the stage as the hazy glow of the setting sun was just breaking through the day's clouds. A gentle breeze blew across the combat netting. James Dean Bradfield was wearing camouflaged waterproofs while using one of Richey's guitars on some songs. The panda-eyed Wire wore desert-camouflage khakis and the massive stage seemed even bigger with only the three of them on it, At the rear, Sean Moore in his backwards baseball cap looked like he was sat up in the cockpit of a tank rumbling into the festival masses laid out before them. As the final words of 'From Despair to Where' were screamed into the gathering gloom, those present didn't realise that these lyrics would provide the headlines most frequently used in relation to the band over the next eighteen months. Stuart Bailie, reporting for the NME, wrote, 'you watched, dismayed, when the Manics played as a three piece at Reading, fans and colleagues around you weeping at the tragic significance of it all. And of course, you heard many terrible rumours.'

In early September, Richey finally checked himself out of the Priory ? against medical advice. At the time, Dr Desmond Kelly was head of the Priory. He believed in 'divine providence'; Richey had been encouraged to partake in drama, had been told to keep a log and read Believing in Myself.[30] Edwards took his reading responsibilities seriously but his talking about them made the others feel uncomfortable. He also started reading the Bible again, and would quote sections of Ecclesiastes and Leviticus. ?A lot of letters I've got have said, "Oh, it's natural, it always happens to poets." Which is fucking bullshit. When you're in the places I've been in, the first place especially, it's just any job, any occupation. Housewife, bricklayer, plumber, somebody who works for South Wales Electricity Board, whatever. It doesn't pick or choose people who pick up a pen. When you write something down, it's not like, here we go. It's something nobody really knows anything about, apart from that some things work and some things don't, to stabilise you again. It's very romantic to think, "I'm a tortured writer", but mental institutions are not full of people in bands. They're full of people with so-called normal jobs.?'

People coming out of rehab are highly vulnerable and need a strong support network,' says Shelley Assiter. 'It is very dangerous for a musician to go straight back on tour because they are returning to their old lifestyle, and I would say ninety-nine per cent of them will then relapse.' Richey Edwards left the Priory with one aim on his mind: to be well enough to join the rest of the band on their autumn tour.

XI

THE BIBLE

September 1994

Richey Edwards was still a patient at the Priory when The Holy Bible was released on 30 August 1994. With that wonderful thing people call hindsight, the album has been held up as Edwards' requiem, his suicide note, his long goodbye. But although he wrote a lot of the words, about 25 per cent of the lyrics were Nicky Wire's and all of the music was Sean Moore and James Dean Bradfield's. That said, it's still very difficult to have any sense of objectivity about this album and to evaluate it without thinking about Edwards' legacy.

Both Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire provided track-by-track commentaries on The Holy Bible, with Wire's entering the public domain with a full page in the 27 August issue of Melody Maker. The bassist's comments were longer and a little less cryptic than Edwards', but both were fascinating ? if slightly disturbing. Not content with that, two-page adverts featuring the entire album's lyrics were placed in the music press. With Edwards' mental and emotional state becoming tabloid fodder and the news that he'd written most of the lyrics, the questions about the songs' autobiographical nature were quick in coming. Equating the singer (or in this case, the lyricist) with the song can be a dangerous game. Having previously written about Beck and Michael Stipe, I quickly learned that fact and fiction merge like a nasty motorway slip-road. The blurred lines between Edwards' reality and everyone else's were difficult to identify, but it's fair to say that many of the songs were taken from his own experiences, if not being directly autobiographical. He'd never plummeted to 4 stones, 7 pounds in weight, but he could relate to that.

As with Gold Against the Soul, the sound of The Holy Bible was markedly different to that of the album that came before it. While the overt metal and glam of Generation Terrorists had been replaced by the classic rock sounds of Gold Against the Soul, this time they had been swept aside for a grungy rock, influenced not only by current trends but also by the source material that had influenced the likes of Vedder and Cobain. James Dean Bradfield's revisiting of Wire, Magazine and Joy Division is evident from the first couple of songs, even if the language is a bit stronger.

'For sale? Dumb cunt's same dumb questions,? James Dean Bradfield sang to open 'Yes'. Before that, a snippet of dialogue about everything being for sale had been added by Richey Edwards from a Channel 4 documentary he'd seen about prostitution, called Pimps, Pros, Hookers and their Johns. Musically, this is styled as a solid rock song with metal-like guitar parts, and is quite uplifting if you don't listen to the words! Lyrically, Edwards is talking about his life of the last couple of years. His view had long been that life revolved around doing something you didn't want to in order to get things that you didn't really need ? and so the cycle continued, and then you died. He mentions purgatory in the song ? something that would linger with him after leaving the Priory and a word he would literally tattoo on himself later in the year. 'We feel that we've prostituted ourselves over the last three or four years,? said Nicky Wire, 'and we think it's the same in every walk of life. You do get to a position when you're in a band where you can virtually do anything you want, in any kind of sick, low form. It's not something we've particularly indulged in, but it is a nasty by-product of being in a group.'

'He's a boy, you want a girl so tear off his cock,? said the song. Edwards could barely conceal his contempt for the power that celebrity could bring, harking back to his experience at Cardiff's Metros club with Stephen Gatehouse. 'Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit'sworldwouldfallapart'was the band's first overtly political song for a while and was a title taken from a Lenny Bruce quote. ?It compares British imperialism to American consumerism,? explained Nicky Wire. 'It's just trying to explain the confusion I think most people feel about how the most empty culture in the world can dominate in such a total sense.'

So two tracks in and they'd covered prostitution and American politics, but then the real heart of the album began to be revealed with 'Of Walking Abortion'. The title came from Valerie Solanis' description of men. The uncredited spoken-word introduction was key: ?I knew that someday I was gonna die. And I knew before I died two things would happen to me. That, number one, I would regret my entire life. And, number two, I would want to live my life over again.'

The problem as Edwards saw it was that we'd learned nothing from the past. That dictators such as Mussolini, Hitler and Horthy bad been allowed to ascend was not an accident but was somebody's fault. There was spilled blood that stains everyone, he wrote, and when the question of who is at fault was asked, the answer is loud and clear ? 'You fucking are!'

Not many people in rock were writing about sex and desire in terms of suffering. The 'She' of 'She is Suffering' is 'desire'. What sounds like a gentle song is actually Richey Edwards' outpouring of pain and has deeply sinister undertones. Edwards writes that 'She' is scarred into a man's soul, that it's 'Nature's lukewarm pleasure.' The nature of beauty had also been a tortured question that Mishima had addressed in the 1960s. 'It's kind of like the Buddhist thing where you can only reach eternal peace by shedding every desire in your body,' said Nicky Wire. 'I think the last line, "Nature's lukewarm pleasure", is Richey's view on sex. I can't really explain it, but that's the way he sees it.'

'In other Bibles and Holy Books no truth is possible until you empty yourself of desire,' added Edwards. James Dean Bradfield would perform stirring acoustic versions of this song while promoting the album.

'Archives of Pain' opened with another spoken-word piece, this time a recording of a mother of one of the Yorkshire Ripper's victims. This is a pro-death-penalty song, which might have come as a surprise to some fans, especially since both Wire and Edwards contributed to the words. Richey Edwards can often be analysed as having a victim persona, but here he hits back: 'Pain not penance, forget martyrs, remember victims.? A list of killers is read out with the blunt message, 'Execution needed'.

Wire and Edwards worried a lot about the song and worked on it endlessly because of the tricky subject matter. ?It was written as a reaction to the glorification of serial killers,? says Wire. 'In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is made into a hero in the last scene of the film - people feel sorry for them.?

'There's a book by Michel Foucault with a chapter called "Archives of Pain". Richey and I did that book at university, and it had quite an influence on us. It talks about the punishment matching the crime. But the song isn't a right-wing statement, it's just against this fascination with people who kill.? Meanwhile, Edwards' explanation of the song was more succinct: 'Bentham's "Panopticon" ? visibility is a trap. Foucault ? Savagery is necessary.?[31]

?It appeals to me, but you shouldn't only bring back capital punishment,? Edwards said several months later. ?It should be compulsory that your body be kept, have oil poured over it and be torn apart with horses and chains. It should be on TV, and four- or five-year-olds should be made to watch it. It's the only way. If you tell a child, "That's wrong", he doesn't really learn. But if you show a body being ripped to shreds, after Blue Peter, he's gonna know.'

'Revol' is a fascinating and possibly confounding song. James Dean Bradfield has commented that he would have to know what a song is about before he could sing it, although he and Nicky Wire have said they don't know what 'Revol' is about. Musically it's one of the heavier efforts on the album and the lyric is fast and dizzying. Taken at face value, the song seems to be a list of political leaders coupled with strange comments on the failure of personal relationships, but that would be all too simple wouldn't it? 'Some of it's beyond my head,? said Nicky Wire. 'He's saying that all of these revolutionary leaders were failures in relationships ? probably because all his relationships have failed!'

It was common knowledge that Richey Edwards weighed little more than six stones when he was first admitted to hospital in 1994 and that he'd been down to about that weight during his university finals. This offered him direct insights into the workings of eating disorders. Although the numbers are slightly different and the words are sung from a woman's perspective, '4st 7lb' is another closely autobiographical lyric. Like self-cutting, this was another expression of self-control, but was thought to be the weight at which an adult body would give up and die.[32] 'I wanna be so skinny that I rot from view/I want to walk in the snow/And not leave a footprint' are pretty harrowing words by any measure. 'I'm not sure what the textbook definition of anorexia is,? said James Dean Bradfield, 'but you don't expect a twenty-five-year-old man who's five foot seven to weigh six-and-a-half stone. Anorexia is the ultimate negative vanity. It's a schizophrenic disease whereby you don't know whether to love or hate yourself, which is Richey down to a tee.'

'Mausoleum' and 'The Intense Humming of Evil' were, in the words of Richey Edwards, 'brother/sister' songs, both addressing the Holocaust and both inspired by the previous year's visits to Hiroshima's Peace Museum and the concentration camps at Dachau and Belsen. The visits had deeply affected all of the band, bat as usual Edwards felt it more deeply than most. The humming of evil was the 'humming silence' that they heard at Dachau. The scratchy post-punk almost constantly playing on the band's stereos while recording the album included the two Joy Division albums. 'Mausoleum' opens like a long-lost Joy Division song before exploding in anguish. Likewise, 'The Intense Hurnming of Evil' opens with a long industrial grind that recalled some of Joy Division's experimental percussion.

The previously released 'Faster' follows 'Mausoleum', and then comes another respite ? musically, at least ? with 'This is Yesterday'. Its mellow guitar and rhythm parts belie the intense melancholy of the lyric. One American review claimed that 'The lyric describes nervous breakdown from the point of view of the sufferer', but it was the twisted-around view of someone longing for the ampler world of childhood. Once the echoes of 'This is Yesterday' fade into oblivion, we get another song about looking back ? 'Die in the Summertime' ? but this time it's musically threatening and lyrically harrowing. While Edwards claimed that the song was about fondly remembering youth from the point of a pensioner, it also fits well with Edwards' feelings. He's looking back at childhood pictures, happy that the lines of age are yet to appear and content with infant pastimes.

'There's lots of disturbing images,? says Wire. "'Scratch my leg with a rusty nail/Sadly it heals?/ A tiny animal curled into a quarter circle". It was one of the first songs we wrote for the album, and I found it pretty disturbing when Richey first showed it to me. Now, of course, it's even more so, and I think this and "4st 7lb" are pretty obviously about Richey?s state of mind, which I didn't quite realise at the time. Even if you're quite close to someone, you always try to deny thoughts like that.?

After the concentrated personal outpourings across the album, '?.?.?.? was perhaps a strange choice to close proceedings. The title is a play on words ? Politically Correct, Police Constable, Portuguese Communist Party ? but it is essentially a song about censorship and freedom of speech. Edwards felt strongly that anything should be allowed on TV, and that no one had the right to decide what was 'good' or 'bad' taste. 'Obviously, "PC" as an idea is inherently good,? said Nicky Wire. 'So is socialism and so is communism, and they ended up being abused. A lot of PC followers take up the idea of being liberal, but end up being quite the opposite.?

Richey Edwards had taken control of the album cover before his hospitalisation. Again he'd scoured art galleries looking for an image that he felt fitted his lyrical vision. At the Saatchi Gallery, he saw a striking piece by 24-year-old Jenny Saville ? Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face). It showed an obese woman in her underwear from either side and from the front. Edwards thought it would be perfect for the album cover, but the gallery wanted £30,000 for the picture. Unperturbed, he tracked down the artist and spent half an hour talking to her about his vision of the album and talking her through it, track-by-track. At the end of the phone call, she said he could use it for free.

By this time, the Manics' stock had fallen to the extent that when I looked back for the Q magazine review, I had to skip back and forward between a few copies before locating it. The review wasn't even listed on the contents page, although Status Quo, June Tabor and Edie Brickell were! Eventually I found it ? a couple of inches tucked away on about page fifteen of the review section ? but at least Tom Doyle had liked the album. He gave it '4/5', adding 'The Holy Bible proves the Manics to be a band who can subtly reinvent themselves at every turn.' This enthusiasm spread across the critical spectrum: 'the Manics' finest attempt to put militancy into music,? said Vox ('8/10'). Simon Williams, writing in the NME, said, 'it isn't elegant, but it is bloody effective' ('9/10').

The critical praise received by The Holy Bible was not translating into big sales, but many reviews cut straight to the point and linked the lyrics to Richey's personal troubles. Its current status as something of a lost classic is no doubt partly because of what happened to Edwards. In retrospect, some critics' observations were unnervingly accurate. In Melody Maker, Simon Price called it 'the sound of a group in extremis. At crisis point. Hurtling towards a private Armageddon. It's Richey's album.' Roy Wilkinson, in Select, said it 'might be a little too close to home', but Craig Fitzsimmons, writing for Hot Press, went further still. ?The Holy Bible is a profane, mean, angry-as-hell powerhouse of an LP,' he wrote. 'They're literate as hell and they're angry about something. It's recommended, except for those contemplating suicide.'

In Anton Corbjin's filmabout Joy Division, Control, he took extracts from several letters that Ian Curtis wrote to his Belgian girlfriend, Anike, and distilled them into a single harrowing correspondence. Towards the end of the film, shortly before his suicide, Curtis is seen writing the letter in his typical capital-letters-only script. 'I saw Apocalypse Now at the cinema, I couldn't take my eyes away from the screen,? he wrote. 'On the record there's Marlon Brando reading The Hollow Men, the struggle between man's conscience and his heart until things go too far, get out of hand, and can never be repaired. Is everything so worthless in the end? Is there any more? What lies beyond? What is left to carry on?'

Richey Edwards often wrote in a similar style: his manifestos sent out to fans were usually in capitals only. Ian Curtis was probably Richey Edwards' biggest musical hero. Apocalypse Now was probably Richey Edwards' favourite film ? it's fair to say that he was obsessed with it. The Manics, circa 1994, with their military costumes, warfare face paint and army-camp netting, was straight out of the film. 'When someone phones you up at five a.m. five times a week asking if General Kurtz is telling the truth in Apocalypse Now then you know something's gone wrong,? said Nicky Wire about his band mate's fixation.

At the start of the film Martin Sheen's character smashes up his hotel room, cutting and smashing himself into a bloody mess. Sheen is sent further up the river into the jungle to track and kill the notorious General Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando.

The further Sheen went, the more suffocating madness he found, until Brando himself was confronted, hidden in the shadows of his temple-like encampment. This was Heart of Darkness for the Vietnam generation.

During the autumn leg of the Manics' 1994 tour, Richey Edwards found and purchased the exact same make and model of camera used by the photojournalist played by Dennis Hopper in the film. Edwards toured Europe with it hanging around his neck. No one confirmed whether or not he ever used it to take photos. While in his Dennis Hopper phase he also had more tattoos added to his arms, one of which simply read 'I'll surf this beach' ? a line from Robert Duvall's maverick character in the film. The links to Apocalypse Now didn't end there: in Richey Edwards' last ever photo shoot, which he allowed to take place inside his Cardiff flat, he posed in front of a large, framed poster for the film.

XII

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 232