Withdrawn Traces

by Sara Hawys Roberts

  ‘He was always the first to admit he wasn’t very good at playing guitar,’ says Rachel. ‘So maybe that did add to him having one foot in the band, and the other one on the outside in the beginning.’

  Regardless of Richey’s lack of guitar virtuosity, the nascent Manics soon realised he was essential to the mix. ‘We didn’t know how,’ Nicky would later say, ‘but we knew Richey had to be a part of it.’

  ‘Today is a cold miserable pissing down Friday night in Swansea. Everyone has gone down to the pub but I can’t see the point anymore. I don’t want to get pissed, I don’t want a girlfriend. I just want to be a guitar hero in a new music-social-political revolution. Anyway, seeing as my future depends to every extent on my guitar ability I’ve got to do lots of practice and I love the prospect of it. Of achieving something worthwhile.’

  Richey, letter to Mark Hambridge, December 1988

  In September 1988 Richey, Dan and Nigel moved into what they called a ‘squat’ on Swansea’s King Edward’s Road. Along with Dan’s course-mate, Mark, the three also co-habited with two live-in landlords, a couple who claimed they had psychic powers.

  This pair neglected the property and its tenants to such an extent that the environmental health department paid them a surprise visit not foreseen in their crystal ball. The house was declared uninhabitable, so the 1989 term started with a move to halls of residence in Hendrefoelan, a student village, where Nicky was also living. Dan christened it ‘nightmare city’ in an article for the campus magazine, describing it as ‘like living inside the noisiest cardboard box, where French students all drink and yell’.

  Richey’s verdict was the same: ‘I used to get woken up constantly by pissed-up students coming home thinking it would be really funny to rampage up and down the corridors knocking on everyone’s door, or deciding to have a party in the kitchen at 1am. Pathetic. It reminded me of my first year of comprehensive, all these little idiots whose idea of a good time involved sitting round reciting Young Ones sketches to each other.’

  With Richey’s finals looming, and pressure mounting, he took to booze as the only remedy for sleepless nights.

  ‘Obviously he was drinking before university,’ says Rachel. ‘But I remember when he came back for the holidays, there’d be some nights after going down the Red Lion, where he’d be up all night vomiting and lying down flat on the bathroom floor. He’d get in such a state that my mam would have to get him up and sort him out. I don’t think he could tolerate alcohol very well, and if his uptake went higher in that final term, I don’t think it would have been productive for him in any way.’

  At the end of Dan’s article, he describes his friend Rich, ‘the nutter that he is’, joining a ‘raw spirit, anti-nihilist band’, and it was during this time, by now living under the same roof as Nicky in Hendrefoelan, that Richey’s involvement with the band accelerated.

  Still a part of The Blue Generation, the two began co-authoring lyrics for the first time. In 1998, Nicky told Esquire magazine: ‘Sitting in a room writing lyrics together. It was an unbelievable sensation. I was having a bit of a rough time women-wise and we’d just sit around listening to dodgy records and writing songs together.’

  These rough times were alluded to in a summer 1988 letter from Richey to Claire Forward, wherein he described his admiration for the way Nicky dealt with his heartbreak following a (temporary) split from Rachel Bartlett – a grief-stricken Nicky joyrode a car drunk, being let off with a police caution after ‘rolling the car down the street a few paces’ and then abruptly falling asleep at the wheel. ‘When Rachel finished with Nick – he stole a car. Look – here’s the difference, Rachel did nothing. When girls and people in Risca finish, do they care, does it hurt them?’

  With Richey feeling unable to commit to a relationship and Nicky’s year-long romance ending, the two bonded. Pouring their energies into the band, they committed to shunning romance altogether and would empower themselves with a combustible cocktail of poetry, politics and rock. One of their first lyrics, ‘Anti-Love’, expressed the new credo with the fervour of a freshly minted manifesto.

  ‘Forget Girls. They are too complex/Manic Street Preachers have next to no songs about girls and they will never have another one. From now on there will be no romantic lyrics of love or unrequited love, no personal statements just direct, hard statements about the state machine. About the repression of violence, of the oppression of disaffected youth, of stupid idiots who beat each other up, of a government that sells misery as if it’s a commodity that we need (and makes a million while doing it).’

  Richey, letter to Mark Hambridge, 1989

  It was clear that for Richey rock music was a personal saviour with the potential to effect social and political change. The crucial turning point, and his decision to align himself with the Manic Street Preachers is seen in correspondence with his college friend Stephen Gatehouse. What emerged in his letters, as evidenced in Jenny Watkins-Isnardi’s book In the Beginning: My Life with the Manic Street Preachers, was that the way forward was on his doorstep all along.

  ‘When the majority think of “punk” they think of that Oaf in Sid ‘N Nancy/To me Punk is ISAAC NEWTON. Ok – MANIC STREET PREACHERS – I don’t know why everyone HATES me for associating with them. I really don’t understand it (or maybe I know only too well). You know what NIETZCHE says about pathological hatred. Whatever you think of them it’s obvious that they got the songs to smash this fucking apathy.’

  Gatehouse was then drumming for Blackwood band Funeral in Berlin. Every town in Wales had its own goth-metal punk outfit who played a few gigs but never managed to break beyond a small home-town following. Before Richey joined the Manic Street Preachers, Funeral in Berlin were the bigger local band. Richey gave several people the impression of sitting between both camps.

  ‘I remember when Funeral in Berlin were playing gigs and they were the headline act,’ says Mark’s ex-girlfriend Joanne Haywood. ‘They were the ones who were going to be famous and the four-piece Manics with Flicker used to support them. Not many expected the Manics to eclipse them.’

  Despite Stephen Gatehouse originally being a part of The Blue Generation as ‘Stevie-boy Gee’, it wasn’t long before he had his Blue membership revoked. ‘There was an animosity between Stephen and the band after he wrote into Impact magazine under the pseudonym David Geary,’ says Mark Hambridge. ‘In his letter he did praise the band for their ideas, but slated Nick for being “full of shit”, saying how annoying it was to see him getting coverage. It seemed to me, after that, like Richey may have felt he was being pulled in two directions, what with knowing Stephen from college and now having the Manics as friends.’

  When Richey came back from Swansea for the holidays, he spent more time with Nick, James and Sean, even choosing to spend his twenty-first birthday with James on a night out in Newport. The night was to end in violence at the town’s newly opened McDonald’s.

  ‘It was to do with a gang of lads mistreating an employee there,’ Adrian Wyatt recalls. ‘James and Richard stepped in and said something, and were assaulted. If you’re a certain kind of person, and quite sensitive, I think a violent attack like that is bound to have some sort of effect on you.’

  Rachel remembers hearing from her parents that her brother was visibly shaken after the incident. However, James suffered the worst of the injuries, having to undergo surgery at the Royal Gwent Hospital to wire his damaged jaw. The band’s progress and James’s singing were put on the back burner over Christmas, and the following six weeks.

  After the festive period, Richey returned to Swansea and chose to study the module ‘German–Soviet Relations in the Inter-War Period’, specialising in fascism, the rise of Nazi Germany and Russian foreign policy. It would contribute to a large portion of his overall mark, and the pressure began to weigh heavily on him.

  James and Nicky noticed a marked difference in their friend. His weight plummeted as his self-harming became more evident. ‘The first time I ever saw Richey c
utting himself was in university, revising for his finals,’ James told the NME in 1994. ‘And he just got a compass and went like that (draws invisible blade across arm).’

  Richey weighed just six stone when he sat his finals. He later described this time to the press: ‘That was the skinniest I ever got, during my finals. But again, that was all about control. I suddenly realised that I can’t go in to do my finals pissed. So the way for me to gain control was cutting myself a little bit. Only with a compass – you know, vague little cuts – and not eating very much.’

  By this time Richey really was shunning nights out, preferring to stay in reviewing documentaries. These included 1989’s John’s Not Mad, which explored Tourette’s syndrome through the eyes of its sufferers. He would later write about this in 1993’s ‘Symphony of Tourette’ – echoing sentiments he had written about years earlier, that Tourette’s was a modern disease, and due to an individual’s reaction to a stifled, politically correct society.

  He dedicated significant hours to earnest correspondence with music enthusiasts from around Britain. One was Alistair Fitchett, a Scottish fanzine writer he met through the publication Hungry Beat, created by a mutual pen pal, the Dartford-based Kevin Pearce.

  Richey sent Alistair reams of letters eagerly putting across his views on the future of music and politics. He spoke passionately of his projected future with the Manic Street Preachers, while raging against the conformity expected of university graduates to acquire a nine-to-five job and his agitation at business companies looking to ‘buy up eager young souls’.

  Captivated by Richey’s sales pitch of the band from the very beginning, Alistair was especially impressed by his rhetoric. ‘Richey was much more about the art of being in a band, the art of popular culture, and of making more from music,’ says Alistair. ‘He knew how it all worked; he was willing to do the whole clichéd rock and roll smashing of his guitar if it meant getting his message across.

  ‘A lot of our correspondence was recommending music and books to each other. I remember he’d quote Rimbaud to me a lot. It seemed like typical teenage stuff at the time, falling in love with the doomed poet and wanting to replicate that, but in his case it went on to be so much more. I remember a poem he sent me called “I am solitary” – it was about 19 pages, but there was a real heart to it, and a real drive to all his correspondence. I recognised that he came across as more of a great artist than a musician.’

  Back in Blackwood, Richey was undecided on whether to pursue a life in music, asking those around him whether he should just ‘go serious’ and apply like his uncles to teach or become a postgraduate researcher. Before his graduation, it was a real quandary for him. Should he continue in academia or take the road less travelled, a riskier foray into the world of rock?

  ‘Apollo without Dionysus may indeed be a well-informed, good citizen but he’s a dull fellow. He may even be “cultured”, in the sense one often gets from traditionalist writings in education … But without Dionysus he will never make and remake a culture.’

  Jerome Bruner

  ‘It was like he purposely had two separate lives and two drastically different sides to him,’ recalls Joanna Haywood. ‘I always thought he’d go into teaching or something more studious, so when he told me, “I’m gonna be in a band and call myself Richey”, I was like “Really?!”

  ‘He just didn’t seem the type. He was so shy and more academic. I think he put on a persona to be in that band, just to be able to get up there and have the confidence to do it. I remember once he said to me, “I’m going to dye my hair ginger and shave my head because skinheads have power” – and the next day he did exactly that. It was odd how he could just add and drop parts of himself at times, like an actor dressing up to play a role.’

  In June 1989 Richey received his degree result. Having been obsessed with getting a first, and after a tense final year where he’d dropped to six stone and turned to self-medicating in order to sleep, he was devastated to learn that he’d be leaving Swansea with a 2:1.

  ‘We could have bet our lives he’d get a first, the way he was working in the second year,’ says Jemma Hine. ‘When we heard he’d got a 2:1 we thought there might have been some kind of mistake … but sadly, that wasn’t the case.’

  ‘We were all pleased for him,’ says Rachel, ‘but he was so upset. He kept going on about wanting to explore the examination process that determined the marks between a first- and second-class degree to find out where he’d gone wrong. He was particularly angry because someone else he knew got a first, and he kept telling my mam that he’d worked “much harder” than him and it didn’t make sense. That to me was so Richard!’

  Renowned and lauded for his work ethic and intelligence, to Richey this result felt like a setback. Barely masking his deep perfectionist streak, he later denounced his academic accomplishment as ‘not a 100 per cent success’.

  Richey would now immerse himself completely in the band. Breaking through to musical success and potential rock infamy would represent a fresh start, a new mission to throw his energies behind and whose inevitable triumph would surely reverse any recent defeats. From his initial contribution as de facto manager, and despite his limited guitar-playing ability, he was now a fully fledged Manic Street Preacher.

  ‘After Rich hung on the periphery for a while, he really threw everything he had into it,’ remembers Adrian. ‘He told me that music wouldn’t be a long-term career choice, because he found bloated, corporate rock like the Rolling Stones embarrassing. I recall Nick said that a 30-year career in music was disgusting, so they were all about stoking a fire, setting it ablaze and walking away at the height of it. Plus the fact Rich really didn’t enjoy playing his guitar, so that was another reason to get in and out the music world fast.’

  Rachel sees it differently: ‘He turned not being able to play into his strength, it became his signature and he deliberately made a point of it to show how shallow the industry was, and how you could become a success if you had the right formula in terms of aesthetic, spirit and attitude.

  ‘There were plenty of competent and talented guitarists and musicians in Blackwood and around South Wales trying to make it big on the scene, but it didn’t matter, he knew that you needed something more if you were going to break the mould. The band always said that the music came second to their words, and that the music was there as the most popular means to carry that message.’

  Years later, Nicky would share memories of Richey’s increasing involvement with the band and his input into their future aesthetic, during their time residing in Hendrefoelan. ‘We almost poisoned ourselves,’ he admitted. ‘We were in this little room with only half a window open and we were spray-painting these white T-shirts for the band, and realised we felt really ill from the fumes.’ The motifs on the DIY shirts included KILL YOURSELF ON VALENTINES DAY, CULTURE SLUT, AESTHETIC DEBRIS and another, USELESS GENERATION, which Richey would have tattooed on his arm two years later.

  Richey understood that this forthright form of communication through uncompromising slogans would be the best way to spread the band’s revolutionary spirit and convert the masses. ‘We don’t want to reach the music papers, we just want to reach the Sun, the Star, the Mirror,’ he would tell Snub TV a year later. ‘That’s what most people read. We’d rather be sensationalised than just be another NME band and get critical respect.’

  ‘Malcolm and Bernie were anti-intellectual … That’s why they went into Situationist politics. Situationist politics is merely sloganeering – second rate sloganeering at that – all pulled out of the 1960s dustbin.’

  John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs

  Returning home from Swansea, Richey funded his role in launching the Manics by taking a summer job mowing grass for Islwyn Borough Council. ‘The council used to advertise seasonal work for students,’ remembers Rachel. ‘It was much easier to get a summer job back in those days. He did this a few times when he came back from Swansea. He’d get up early and a van woul
d take him and a handful of other boys around the borough. He’d mostly work with the strimmers, and my mum remembers when he came back from the Showfields in Cefn Fforest saying he’d been strimming the ground and came across a pool of vomit that splashed all over him and his face mask!’

  By autumn Richey was signing on for Job Seeker’s Allowance, but staff at the local dole office failed to sway him from his main purpose.

  ‘The band were practising at James’s house a lot at the time, but occasionally they’d come over and use the garage at my mam and dad’s,’ says Rachel. ‘I was in university in Cardiff during that period, but I remember my dad wasn’t too happy about him joining a band.

  ‘My dad was traditional in the sense that he expected Richard to get a respectable job. Richard felt he could apply theory with what he’d done with his degree to the world of arts, but my dad was old-fashioned and didn’t think this was the best path for him to take.’

  Evidence of Richey’s dedication to the band is compiled in two quilted A4 pads dating from 1989 to 1991, documenting his role in busting the band out of Blackwood.

  Glued into these books are vast lists of booking agents, promoters, solicitors, radio stations, music venues and recording studios, along with recorded delivery certificates for mailings to potential management companies. Also included are the names of London music journalists that Richey would target with personalised letters. He succeeded in striking up correspondence with several, including then NME journalist Steve Lamacq, who later commented, ‘I’m sure they telephoned and wrote to loads of people around this time. I’ve got a letter from them and so has John Peel. Mine was scribbled on yellow A4, a scrawly note that savaged the shoegazers, the Madchester scene (including the Roses and the Mondays) and rejected the whole “trip out and tune out” mentality of the time.’