FEVER AND EXHAUSTION

December 1994

Hamburg, Germany, 2 December 1994. Hamburg, the city of The Beatles' early Star Club debauchery, a city where the Fab Four had surpassed the Manics' excesses thirty years earlier. But now the touring was pushing the Manics to emotional limits they'd never reached before, especially Richey Edwards. After the show at the Markthalle, they returned to their hotel. Early the next morning Nicky Wire awoke and found that Richey was gone from his room. He immediately headed down to the lobby.

'Where's Richey?'

'I think he went outside.'

At these words, Wire left the hotel to look for Edwards. He soon spied him standing outside, facing the wall of the hotel. As Wire approached he saw that Edwards was rocking slightly back and forth, in his pyjamas. He also noticed that there was blood running down the wall, and down Edwards, from a cut on his face. 'I want to go home,' said Edwards, and before Wire could stop him he rammed his head against the wall again. 'I want to go home,? he repeated. 'I want to go home.' Gently, Wire pulled Edwards away from the wall and managed to get him back inside the hotel. At that moment the European tour was effectively over.

The final dates of the European tour were cancelled, leaving almost three weeks of down time before the three high-profile shows planned for London. Cancelling these gigs was not really an option. Whether or not Richey would be able to play them was another matter as the Manics tour operation headed for home.

Richey Edwards' drinking seems to have made something of a comeback during the autumn. John Robb saw him in London. ?I interviewed Richey and Nicky shortly before Richey disappeared; it was in that hotel in London that he was last seen in [the Embassy],? says Robb. ?They were both sleeping in the same room but the vibe had changed and Richey was telling me he had to drink a bottle of vodka every night to fall asleep, which seemed a bit dramatic but not in a way you would think, "He's really on the skids." He was talking more darkly than a couple of years before but not in a way that you could tell what was about to happen. He had a bottle of vodka by his bed. He was saying things like, "I'm an alcoholic now", which I thought was quite strange because most people who are alcoholic don't realise they are.?

The Astoria on London's Charing Cross Road was the venue of choice when the Manics decided to play three massively anticipated shows on December 19, 20 and 21. It was hoped that these concerts would provide a triumphant end to what had been a terribly traumatic year. Richey Edwards' problems at the end of the European leg of the tour cast a shadow over what might happen in London. Perhaps the elongated break leading up to these shows would be sufficient to get Edwards into a state that he was stable enough to get through them.

The first two shows were being filmed by video-maker Tony van den Ende, who was also filming them in close-up during sound-checks at the venue in the afternoon. This footage would then be added to the film of the gig itself.

There was something about these three shows ? no one quite knew what it was ? but something was lingering just outside any conscious perceptions. During the concerts, a technical problem with feedback from the monitors meant they were all suffering from nose bleeds (much to Richey's glee), partly because the shows were so very damn loud. Afterwards they said that everyone felt that it was a 'moment' in their career, and Richey was peaking in his weirdness. During a break in the afternoon's filming, Tony van den Ende and Nicky Wire were chatting while sat on the drum riser and Wire was in a good mood, but then he glanced at his watch and that changed. 'Get a fucking move on!' he snapped and everything was hurried up again. Van den Ende later found out that this was because they absolutely had to finish by five thirty so that Richey could eat at an exact time. Nothing could be done that might upset the schedule.

During the actual shows the Manics were almost unrecognisable from the band that had struggled across Europe. The first two nights had eight or nine Bible songs in the set-list, a sprinkling of older singles, and James Dean Bradfield donning a Santa hat for solo renditions of 'Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head' and 'Bright Eyes'. Both nights ended with 'Motown Junk' and 'You Love Us'. The shows were adrenalin-fuelled, tight and ? despite a lot of the material ? joyous.

Richey would write out a quote on the evening's set-list and add a few doodles. On the last night he had written out a quote by J. G. Ballard, which began 'I believe in alcoholism, venereal disease, fever and exhaustion'. On this night, Richey was keeping back from his microphone. People commented that they could actually hear his guitar playing in the mix, and that it wasn't too bad. 'Faster', 'Yes' and 'She is Suffering' opened the show with a Bible-heavy one-two-three. James Dean Bradfield's solo slot even included Wham!'s 'Last Christmas', but the mood was heavy. Again the final song was 'You Love Us'. Whatever had been boiling up through the show, through the tour, and through the year, finally burst out in an orgy of delight and destruction. Richey began smashing bis head against his microphone; James Bradfield smashed his guitar and stormed off the stage; Nicky Wire demolished his bass and left. By now, Edwards' guitar and amp had been trashed. Finally, Richey, who had been bitting his head with a piece of broken guitar, used his body to crush Sean Moore's drum kit. It was his last public act as a Manic Street Preacher.

Afterwards, Nicky Wire said that those five minutes of release had been the best five minutes of his life. 'I was so nervous every night, that the end was just a relief,? he said. 'It was just brilliant. We were transported back to the days of "Motown Junk". Beautiful. It meant more than any of the songs. Until we saw the bill...' The cost was estimated at various stuns between £8,000 and £26,000.

Partly because of what would follow, these shows at the Astoria have become enshrined in poignancy. In 2007, the Observer Music Monthly listed the final night in its '25 Greatest Gigs Ever? feature. At the time, Caroline Sullivan (writing about the first night in the Guardian under the heading 'Bible of Hate') described Nicky Wire as Joey Ramone and James Dean Bradfield as Noddy Holder, ending with 'The sense was that it had been a ritual rather than a rock show, with the formerly central character of [Richey Edwards] now peripheral.'

The intensity of these shows ? combined with the empathy felt towards the band in light of the year they'd just suffered ? no doubt affected the group's placing in Melody Maker's end-of-year poll. The Manics were voted the 'Best Band' ahead of Oasis, Blur, Suede, Nirvana, R.E.M. and Pulp. They also picked up the award for 'Best Live Band'. The Holy Bible came second in ?Album of the Year', behind Parklife but ahead of Definitely Maybe. Richey Edwards made the list of 'Sex Symbol of the Year' and came second place in 'Man of the Year', behind Kurt Cobain.

The day after the final Astoria show was Richey Edwards' twenty-seventh birthday. As a keen student of rock history, he ? as much as anyone else ? would have been only too aware that this was the age reached by numerous dead rock stars. Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison all failed to reach their twenty-eighth birthdays, and of course Kurt Cobain had been twenty-seven when he shot himself earlier in the year. For Richey, there was no big birthday celebration this year ? just a ride back home with Sean Moore and the prospect of a quiet Christmas with his parents in Blackwood.

One of Edwards' favourite rock books was Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman's No One Here Gets Out Alive ? a close study of The Doors. The book ended with a vague suggestion that Jim Morrison might have faked his own death and vanished due to some irregularities over the paperwork and quick burial of his coffin. Morrison died in Paris, where he'd moved to reinvent his life as a poet and not be a rock star any more. Richey Edwards knew this story well, and it was not until Stephen Davis' book on Morrison (Life, Death, Legend) was published in 2004 that any lingering conspiracy theorists were put right.

In Arthur Rimbaud's case, vanishing was definitely what he did well. Seen as a teenage genius, he decided to change his life at the tender age of nineteen. By then he'd turned against adult life, against the religion that had been forced upon him as a child and against the life as poet. Camus had called him 'the greatest', yet he destroyed his papers and vanished into the ether; many presumed him dead for years afterwards. In reality, Rimbaud had set out on foot and visited Germany, Holland and Denmark before settling in North Africa and running guns. His influence as poet, hellraiser and binge-drinker spread to the Beat Generation writers in the 1940s and 1950s, and to the punk bands of the 1970s.

XIV

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