‘All I remember is green fields,’ said Richey in an early interview, ‘blue skies and Clarks shoes with the compass at the bottom.’ According to what we heard from Rachel, and those who knew Richey at the time, freedom, innocence and enjoying the surrounding countryside were significant features in his young life.
Richey would spend time with his cousins and neighbours, making friends with brothers Andrew and Richard James who also lived on the street. Rachel tells us that the brothers now run a gym, nine minutes away from Church View. She suggests we call them for a chat.
Richard James is happy to hear from us and is enthusiastic about the chance to reminisce. ‘We were both the same age, and both had the same first and middle names so we had nicknames on the street. Because of our stature, he was Little Richard and I was Big Richard. He was a bit of a goody two shoes in some senses. We’d all be doing naughty things like knocking on doors and running away and trying to get him to join in, and he’d be shaking his little head.
‘But I do remember him standing up vehemently for his opinions and for what he believed was right, which would sometimes lead to pushing and shoving. I’ll never forget the time he brought out an antique Bowie knife. To this day, I don’t know where he got it from. He traded it to me for a pack of stickers. I always wondered if his parents found out.
‘A lot of the things said and written about him, I just can’t relate to. All this doom and gloom and rock star behaviour was at odds with the Richard I grew up with.’
It was in this close-knit, village atmosphere of Church View that the first stirrings of an obsession with music emerged. Richey’s love of the world of rock and roll could be attributed to his cousin Nick Edwards, seven years his senior.
‘Cousin Nick played guitar in a local band called Dark Star,’ says Rachel. ‘He had the rocker look of that time: long hair, big boots and a motorcycle. Every Saturday morning, when Richard and I were little, we’d go to Uncle Clifford’s where Nick lived and go up to his room and listen to Black Sabbath and Status Quo.’
By the age of ten, Richey had amassed an impressive vinyl collection, with The Police, The Skids and Blondie lined up in the bedroom he shared with Rachel. They would come home from school and use the turntable in the lounge when their parents were still at work.
‘During primary school, the first band he became a real fan of was the Boomtown Rats,’ remembers Rachel. ‘He bought all their singles and albums. Then through comprehensive he’d listen to a variety of music – he’d have Squeeze, Sham 69, Altered Images, Echo & the Bunnymen, Joy Division, Big Country, Nick Cave and The Smiths. Cousin Nick was an influence in terms of turning him on to rock at a young age – we wouldn’t hear that kind of music when we listened to the radio at home.’
Cousin Nick was also the first of the Edwards family to attend Swansea University, where Richey would later study. ‘I remember the summer of Nick’s A-level results really well because it’s when Richard broke his leg,’ recalls Rachel. ‘He was running out from Big Richard’s house and my Uncle Clifford ran him over. My uncle was devastated! When Richard came home from the hospital, he’d be screaming in pain some nights, reaching for my nan’s knitting needles to scratch an itch under his cast.’
Richey’s possessions include a piece of homework documenting this event and its aftermath. He recalls in detail the accident, which happened three days before his tenth birthday, just before Christmas 1978.
‘He was like Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol on his crutches that year,’ Rachel recollects. ‘He was off school for six weeks, and I imagine that brought him closer to my nan. When everyone on the street was in school or at work it was just the two of them. It was one of the rare times his school attendance wasn’t a hundred per cent, but he’d have the teachers send the classwork home and he’d complete it from his bed, which I think he enjoyed.’
Richey began his formal education at Pontllanfraith Primary School on Penmaen Road, and his reports describe a pupil who excelled across the curriculum.
‘I think he got the thirst for education and learning from my father,’ says Rachel. ‘My dad had the whole Encyclopedia Britannica collection, and bought Richard and me the Junior Encyclopedia Britannica when we were little. He never stopped educating himself and learning new skills.
‘Growing up, we’d see my father enrolling in night classes at Oakdale Comprehensive. He’d learn Spanish, Welsh and attend painting and drawing classes. Even up until he was 60 he was trying new things like tai chi, skiing and creative writing.’
At primary school, the nine-year-old Richey completed a project entitled ‘Shops in Blackwood’. Sherry and Graham were told at the subsequent parents’ evening that their son had gone above and beyond what any other pupil had submitted, and that the attention to detail for one so young was meticulous.
At the end of his time at Pontllanfraith Primary, Richey and two other high-performing pupils sat an examination to compete for a place at Haberdasher’s Monmouth School for Boys, a private boarding school 30 miles from Blackwood. Richey passed the exam and was offered a scholarship. He declined, claiming he’d rather stay with his friends in Oakdale. To this day Rachel ponders how different life might have been if he’d taken up the opportunity.
‘I often wonder what would have happened if he went to Monmouth school. Would a place like that have made him more positive about the future? Would it have made any difference at all? My parents never put any pressure on him to go and respected his decision, but he wanted to stay with his friends, and at the time, he felt life here was too good to give up.’
‘We had a fantastic childhood,’ recalls Richard James. ‘We’d always be out playing football or cricket or playing tennis in the lanes thinking we were Borg and McEnroe. We spent all our time outdoors building rope swings, dams and camping out.’
During school summer holidays, between the ages of 11 and 13, Richey had his first paid job, joining the James brothers and spending six weeks picking potatoes at nearby Williams Farm in Woodfieldside. When they’d finished their working day, they’d head down to another farm and spend their wages on glass bottles of cola.
Richey and Rachel also enjoyed traditional seaside summer holidays in Blackpool, Bournemouth and Tenby. However, the highlight for Richey must have been when he was 11 and he and his family went to Texas to stay with his Uncle Shane – a journey seldom made by families from South Wales.
‘When Richard joined the band, there was a big deal made about these boys from Blackwood who’d never left the British Isles, and the band made a point of telling the press none of them had ever owned a passport before – but that’s a myth,’ states Rachel. ‘Richard had a passport ever since he was little. We’d have holidays in Spain. When we went overseas, they were always big holidays because about 14 of the family and friends of the family would go. They were the best of times.’
When we ask about Richey’s childhood years, Rachel shares plenty that has previously remained private. Among the archive of papers and ephemera is a childhood Christmas list. Comics and Doctor Who annuals are among Richey’s requests, as is the table-top arcade game Astro Wars.
Richey’s love of comic books from an early age is confirmed by a clipping from the British publication 2000AD, most famous for its character Judge Dredd. In 1981 he entered his drawing of an alien into a nationwide competition and won first prize.
‘He was always very creative,’ remembers Rachel. ‘He’d keep a dream diary when he was younger and elaborate on his dreams by turning them into longer fantasy stories. One of the last times he came up to the house in Blackwood was to paint an old silver dustbin black, then he started decorating it with Joy Division lyrics. It’s still in the garage, half painted, still unfinished.’
When Richey was ten, there was a new addition to the family, a Welsh springer spaniel, which Richey named after the character from one of his favourite childhood cartoons. ‘We had Snoopy when he was tiny, the youngest you can take a pup away from their mum,’ says Rachel. ‘
We picked him out from a big litter, choosing him because he was so bouncy and spritely, and took him with us back to Church View.
‘Richard was besotted with him, and we’d take him for long walks after school. Sometimes he’d escape from the house when it was raining, and Richard would have to go chasing him up the fields to get him back. Both would come back absolutely drenched. He was the family dog but he and Richard were particularly close.’
Other family pets included two goldfish who, according to Richey’s diary jottings from the time, daily ran the risk of being devoured by Snoopy. Their gerbil was named after Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who during the Second World War commanded the Desert Rats in North Africa, where later Graham Edwards was stationed during his National Service.
Richey’s interest in his father’s military experiences crops up again in his first year at high school, when his class’s set homework was to write to the BBC television programme Jim’ll Fix It. A 12-year-old Richey asked to jump from a plane during a paratroop raid, and requested ‘if possible to begin the raid’ – which was ironic, given his later political beliefs regarding the dominance of the British Empire.
Richey’s own verdict on his pre-teen years was that they were happy and problem-free, a theme which runs throughout his personal correspondence and archive.
The Manic Street Preachers made plenty of controversial statements in their early career, but Richey delivered arguably the most shocking. Speaking to teenage music magazine Smash Hits, Richey famously declared: ‘Our manifesto is kill yourself on your thirteenth birthday!’ The interview was never published, but the journalist involved, Sylvia Patterson, stated that Richey went on to explain at length that unless you did, you were doomed to an adult life of exploitation and bitterness forever.
‘I don’t want to go through puberty,’ I cited my sister. She’s already acting like a nut. I see myself standing on a hill above a lonesome valley I’ll never be able to cross – I’ll probably never be this calm again.’
A Boy’s Own Story
– quoted in Richey’s archive, 1994
When Richey was 13, the family left the house where he had spent his formative years. With only three bedrooms at Church View, Richey and Rachel had shared a room. Now, with Rachel starting high school and Richey already a teenager, it was time to find somewhere more spacious. Making good money from their hairdressing businesses, Graham and Sherry bought a plot of land and employed a local architect to design their new house from scratch. The bungalow on St Tudor’s View was the centre of Richey’s world throughout high school, university and his time with the Manic Street Preachers. It has remained the family home to the present day.
‘There’s that interview Richard gave, where he says, “Then I moved from my nan’s and started a comprehensive school and everything started going wrong,”’ says Rachel. ‘I can see where he’s coming from, because when we left Church View we lost that sense of community, and we also left behind my nan, who we loved so dearly.
‘It was a big change, the start of coming home from high school and being by ourselves, and really the start of growing up. But, without meaning to sound belittling, it’s also that time when your hormones kick in, so I’m not really sure how different Richard would have felt if we had stayed at my nan’s.’
During this time, Richey decisively disengaged himself from attending the chapel where he had been a member since he was five years old. Speaking in 1994 he said, ‘I was made to go to church when I was young. You’re a little kid and you’re five minutes late or you miss a Sunday, and some appallingly fat old man in his eighties is screaming fire and brimstone in some little Welsh Elim Chapel. I could never reconcile that with what I’d read in the Bible.’
In 1994, bandmate Nicky Wire elaborated on Richey’s misgivings about the Church, commenting, ‘He’s always had this thing about it [religion]. I’ve never really talked to him about it, but he’s always made out that it really pissed him off and fucked him up.’
Rachel confirms that Richey attended chapel until he was 13 but never observed any signs that it visibly bothered him at the time. ‘Neither of my parents were religious but they sent us to chapel, as most parents would send their children back then. It was more a social thing and something for us to do on a Sunday morning. We did have a minister who was very evangelical, and over the top, but that’s how many ministers were in those days.
‘We’d then go to Sunday school and we’d write and draw our own interpretations of Bible stories. Richard never made a fuss about attending, and he was always very questioning, very agnostic. He may have not liked organised religion and certain doctrines within it, but he was open to the idea of a concept of something bigger, and of spirituality beyond how the Church presented it. For him, it was a more complex issue than being a believer or being an atheist.
‘For his last Christmas in 1994, he asked me to buy him wisdom literature – the book of Ecclesiastes – and shortly before he vanished, he bought the Gospel of John, which is why I wrote to all the British monasteries when he disappeared.’
When Rachel thinks back to Richey’s pre-adolescent years, she is unable to pinpoint with certainty any particular incident that might have changed the carefree young boy into such a troubled adult. ‘I’m aware something could have happened to him, a trauma he didn’t tell the family about. Some people keep those things to themselves. There’s only one incident and even then I don’t know if it was an incident, but it sticks in my mind to this day.
‘Richard was about ten at the time, and playing by himself in the woods. All of a sudden he came careering out of the trees screaming his head off, with tears running down his face. I’d never seen him in such a state. I looked into the woods and saw a boy who was in his late teens at the time but was known as a local oddball. Being so close to Richard, I felt inside of me something particularly bad had occurred because I’d never seen him so shaken. He refused to tell me what happened, but it was something obviously distressing that made him have such a reaction.’
On the surface Richey remained an entirely normal pre-teen. He was a keen footballer, and it was on the Gossard factory playing fields that he was to encounter his future bandmates – Nicholas Jones (aka Nicky Wire), and cousins Sean Moore and James Dean Bradfield – for the first time.
‘I first met him playing football when we were little,’ recalled Nicky Wire in a 2008 interview. ‘I lived on the different side of the street and we’d go on the field and play for this little crappy trophy my dad had found in a skip. He was a decent right winger. That’s my first memory of him.’
Nicky bestowed on Richey the nickname ‘Teddy Edwards’ after a cuddly character from children’s television. Richey was a school year older than James and Nicky, but in the same year as Sean, and all were pupils at Pontllanfraith Primary School. Yet Rachel recalls there was no notable interaction between them until her brother’s later adolescent years.
‘Richard, James and Nick used to play football together but they were more acquaintances than friends because of the age difference. Sean was the same age, and highly musically gifted, always carrying his trumpet around and hanging out with the school band, so he mixed in a different crowd to Richard.
‘I do remember the interviews when the band first came out and Richard and the three of them saying they’d all been best friends since they were five years old. Whilst I can imagine Nick may have been with James and Sean, I don’t recall it being the case with Richard. It may be that they wanted to create that “Stand by Me” narrative that would make a good story for the music press? I don’t know, but like Richard pretending he didn’t have a passport, it got them the coverage they wanted.’
All four boys would later attend Oakdale Comprehensive. Richey started there in September 1979, and his devotion to academia continued. ‘Whenever I do something,’ Richey would later explain, ‘I like to do it a lot. When I was 13, I did a Shakespeare project that was 859 pages long. Everyone else did six!’
Rach
el shows us her brother’s school exercise books, ranging from his first to his final year at Oakdale. Richey had covered almost every one in magazine clippings, pages and pictures from books and newspapers, or personal doodles. We pore over one of these, ‘Richard Edwards – 4TB – Essays, Letters & Spellings’, featuring his beloved Clare Grogan and early eighties pop new-wavers Altered Images. Straight away, startling content appears.
Inside is a story, ‘My Visit to the Hospital’, written in early October 1982. Set in ‘Gwent Hospital’, the narrator arrives and enters the ‘Pneumatology Ward’ (pneumatology being the study of spiritual beings, intermediaries between humans and God).
‘Mr James, put Edwards down,’ said Sister.
‘Why, why, why sis-sister?’ replied the mischievous patient.
The Trollies clattered along, nurses bleepers buzzed haphazardly, patients screamed and the ward seemed to be in chaos. On one of the patients bed was a bottle of usquebaugh. All of the patients seemed to be listening to a lecture by a tall, erect man. Then I remembered, this was a mental ward and lectures were part of the treatment. A black man had a tegument wrapped around his arm and he looked to be in pain. I hurriedly left the ward because a man was about to have his stitches removed.
I decided to go to the café for a cup of tea … waited in the queue behind a man with a big tarboosh on his head.
‘Cup of tea, please, luv,’ I asked. I sat in a corner table. The tea was foul. It tasted of dish water. I tipped it into a plant pot and I almost expected the plant to die. I sat there for a few minutes admiring the well grown plants, in particular the pennyroyal.
I was wondering whether I should check if the man was alright but decided that it was uncongenial to my timetable.
‘That hospital is busy,’ I thought as I walked down the road.
Usquebaugh, tegument, pneumatology, tarboosh, uncongenial? What really jumps out at us, though, is such an early use of subject matter that would arise again in the early nineties. ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ was a Nirvana song covered by the Manics on their last tour with Richey. The mention of pneumatology is very apt, considering Richey’s late obsessions with matters spiritual. Likewise the fact that there is a man having his stitches removed – presaging the scene, known to anyone familiar with Manic Street Preachers history, when Richey attended hospital after the ‘4 REAL’ incident. The bottle of booze. The lectures inside the mental ward, conjuring images of his stay at the Priory 12 years later. Reading it has a startling effect, and there is plenty more.
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