‘Everyone wants me to chop up my arm on stage. It’s just like they’re waiting for a car crash to happen. What a shit thing to be remembered for.’
Richey, letter to Jo from Bangkok, 1994
Richey’s letters to Jo were chaotic, angst-ridden adolescent rants, reflecting inner turmoil. This was a contrast with Nicky Wire, who acknowledges that the once inextricably close friends had drifted apart. ‘I was in quite a happy place, at the time. I had got married, just bought this little house. I had been living with my in-laws up until then. So, I had no problems at all with Richey writing probably 75 per cent of the lyrics. The references he was coming up with as well; I don’t pretend to even know half of them. He was reading five books a week. I was still stuck on [Yorkshire cricketer] Fred Trueman’s autobiography or something. I just wasn’t on my game so much.’
Wire’s relaxed, debonair mood contrasted dramatically with Richey’s encroaching life-or-death crisis, as shown by the latter’s comments to MTV: ‘The last album was called “mature”, which is something that I find difficult to live with. But I guess it was. I mean, the older you get, the more life becomes miserable. Definitely. All the people you grow up with die. Your parents die, your grandparents die, your dog dies; your energy diminishes. You just end up a barren wasteland, trying to find something new; which never really occurs.’
Further compounding Richey’s bleak post-Bangkok mood, an urgent phone call from Graham Edwards informed him that his close university friend had committed suicide. Suffering with the pain of unrequited love, Nigel Bethune was in London when he took his own life.
‘Nick told me that Richard was in absolute awe of Nigel doing what he did,’ says Rachel. ‘He was upset about it but also carried a deep admiration for the fact someone he knew could do something so powerful. Nick said it was almost like Richard was jealous that Nigel had the guts to do something like that.’
‘All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.’
Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence, 1985
Nigel’s suicide contributed to Richey’s dark and devastating 1994. The impact is confirmed in letters that Rachel received from Nigel’s sister after Richey’s disappearance. With Nigel and Richey both gone from their lives, Emma Bethune and Rachel got together for an emotional meeting in London. Rachel brought along photos of the two boys, previously unseen by Nigel’s family, some of which are reproduced in this book. It also emerged that, on hearing of his friend’s death, Richey wrote a heartfelt letter to the Bethune family, his devastation all too clear.
Nigel’s suicide, after a perceived rejection, entrenched Richey’s own deeply ingrained trepidation about the lethal instability of love. With his one-time ally in the ‘Anti-Love’ pact, Nicky Wire, now firmly bedded down in domestic bliss, Richey may have felt pressure to prove he was capable of something serious and lasting. Nigel’s death had Richey focus on the closest thing he had to a proper partnership. But the forecast for any possible future with his on-off girlfriend Jo was unpromising.
‘Trust me [are] two of the most frightening words brought together. Like hands up or look out.’
Richey’s archive, 1994
A member of the Manics’ road crew recalled Richey continuously warning him off talking to Jo. ‘He had massive trust issues when it came to the people he was meant to be close with. He pleaded with me not to try and shag her. She was too important to him.’
In a letter that Richey sent to Jo from Thailand, he responded to Jo’s attempts to allay some of his paranoid fears that were throttling their relationship. ‘“Say what you mean.” I know you always say that to me. Tell me. Listen. I am not hiding a dark secret. I just can’t cope with even simple things. You are the first person I’ve met who I believe (not think – BELIEVE – important difference here) I can trust implicitly. But I find it hard, so hard to reconcile that with what goes on in my head. I respect you, I love you, I love every millimetre of your flesh, your beauty. Your beauty. I cannot understand why you would talk to me / stay with me / be faithful to me. I don’t know anything.’
After the death of Philip Hall, the events in Bangkok and Nigel’s suicide, Richey’s fraught emotions reached peak sensitivity, heightening his sense that he might never overcome his jealousies and form a lasting relationship. One badly timed insult to his fragile state was all it might take to push him past the brink.
Two months after his return from Bangkok, Richey was back home in his Cardiff apartment when Jo phoned him from Italy, where she was holidaying. She told Rachel later, ‘Speaking to him, he didn’t seem all there. He sounded like he was in another dimension.’
As with his previous girlfriend, Claire Forward, Richey’s intense jealousy was sparked by the slightest hint of something going on between the object of his affection and other men. With Jo so far from home, nothing could help Richey’s deteriorating state of mind. Her efforts to phone him over the following weeks met with no answer – either he was refusing to pick up, or something was seriously wrong.
‘Then I spoke to Graham,’ says Jo. ‘He sounded so cagey; he just said Richard was unwell and his nerves were “shot to pieces”. Right that second, I knew it was serious, something awful. I thought he was probably dying.’
Chapter 8
Negative Capability
‘I no longer see people. I see only blood and guts wrapped in soft skin.
The kind of men who marry girls who can’t speak their language.
Why can’t I think of nothing, instead of all these stupid things.’
Richey’s archive, Priory notes, 1994
Inspecting Richey’s 1994 address book, most of the entries are of friends, family and music business contacts, plus some female acquaintances. Pasted across the opening two pages are images cut from an unknown graphic novel.
A man in white shorts is slumped over a wash basin in a squalid bedsit apartment. A group of his friends burst open the door and find the room spattered with blood. ‘Marty?’ A girl picks up a piece of paper. ‘Look, he left a note. Listen to this. “There’s Nothing Left!” On the next image, another friend enters a bathroom, where they find a message has been scrawled in huge red letters across a mirror: ‘It’s Not Funny Anymore’.
Above these comic-book images, someone has scrawled down an instruction: ‘Don’t bother with the X’s.’ It is not Richey’s handwriting but that of Lizzy Gould, former secretary at Hall or Nothing Management. She used the address book in 1995 to ring his contacts in the hope of finding some clues. Names marked with an X – of which there are plenty – are those already spoken to, who came up with nothing.
It is uncertain whether Richey pasted the pictures into his address book before or after his mental collapse. But they are another example of his propensity for viewing even the most harrowing moments in his life in terms of their narrative potency. Unlike earlier obviously private address books, this last one has aspects that seem to anticipate it one day having an audience. The illustrated scenes depict a possible analogous representation of a most fateful episode in Richey’s life – his suicide attempt in the summer of 1994.
Until now, many have doubted whether Richey had ever actually tried to end his life, but when Rachel hands us a copy of a thin, worn paperback book, inside the front cover is Richey’s brief and matter-of-fact farewell note. Addressed to nobody in particular, it reads: ‘No music to be played. Only immediate family to come (includes band & Jo & Dan). Maybe a poem – Tulips by Sylvia Plath. I LOVE YOU. I’M SORRY I JUST NEEDED TO FEEL SOMETHING MORE.’
The slim volume in which Richey penned these parting words was a 1984 Penguin edition of Sir Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play, Equus. It tells the story of a psychiatrist who attempts to treat a conflicted adolescent boy with a pathological and religious fascination with horses. Dr Martin Dysart sets out to cure the teenager, but questions whether the treatment might have the effect of crushing the child’s passion and individuality in later life.
The play’s main themes deal with modern society and its expectations of normality, together with repression’s role in the cause of madness.
‘He’ll be delivered from madness. What then? He’ll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband – a caring citizen – a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!’
Dr Martin Dysart in Equus, Sir Peter Shaffer
On the afternoon of the 18 July, Richey phoned his mother and confessed that he’d done something he might regret. His parents immediately sped down from Blackwood to his dockside flat in Cardiff Bay.
They discovered his apartment in total disarray. Empty drink bottles, rubbish strewn across the floor and graffiti daubed all over the plain white walls, most of it pertaining to the recently deceased Kurt Cobain (Graham later had to re-paint the walls white). Richey was lying in a bath filled with cold water, coloured by the blood seeping out of his forearms. On the edge of the bath rested a block of cannabis and an empty vodka bottle.
In terms of a musician’s rock ’n’ roll breakdown, this scene draws instant analogies with the cult film Pink Floyd – The Wall. The 1982 musical drama centres on Pink, a troubled rock star who suffers a breakdown in his hotel room during an episode of heightened mania. Having sunk into a depressed and dissociative state, Pink loses his mind as the film progresses, and his inevitable collapse results in the band’s manager and paramedics breaking down the hotel door to revive him, just in time for his next performance. Richey had his own copy on VHS, the synopsis on the back reads:
The movie tells the story of rock singer ‘Pink’ who is sitting in his hotel room in Los Angeles, burnt out from the music business and only able to perform on stage with the help of drugs. Based on the 1979 double album The Wall by Pink Floyd, the film begins in Pink’s youth where he is crushed by the love of his mother. Several years later, he is punished by the teachers in school because he is starting to write poems. He slowly begins to build a wall around himself to be protected from the world outside. The film shows all this in massive and epic pictures until the very end where he tears down the wall and breaks free.
Graham and Sherry took Richey immediately to Cardiff’s A&E unit, at that time situated at the Royal Infirmary five minutes away. Because Richey was still under the influence of cannabis and vodka, the doctors could not assess him. Concerned about letting him go back to his flat alone, they allowed him to spend the night at his parents’ in Blackwood providing he returned the following morning for assessment.
Rachel was then living and working in Cardiff and the next day she joined Richey and her parents in the infirmary waiting room. ‘The first thing I thought was that he didn’t look like himself,’ she says. ‘He was dishevelled and his hair was unkempt. It was long, matted and curled under at the back. He wasn’t making much eye contact but I noticed the hair in between his eyebrows that he used to shave had grown. He had tears in his eyes but he wasn’t crying. He just seemed totally impenetrable, like everything had become so deeply internalised that he didn’t even try to speak.’
‘If a goldfish has a five second memory and it takes the fish 60 seconds to suffocate out of water – does the poor goldfish think he/she has spent its entire life gasping for air? La tristesse durera – this sadness will last forever???’
Richey’s archive, 1993
Richey was called in to see the consulting psychiatrist. Rachel doesn’t know what was said in the room, but when the family were called in an hour later, they were told that Richey was suffering from severe depression, he needed serious medical attention, and he had agreed to be voluntarily hospitalised on the psychiatrist’s recommendation. There was a space immediately available at Whitchurch Hospital, an NHS psychiatric institution in the suburbs of Cardiff.
For people across South Wales, the word ‘Whitchurch’ has long signified more than just a northern area of their capital city. It conjures up its infamous mental hospital and generations of rumour and gossip. For many, the threat of being ‘sent to Whitchurch’ was enough to rein in eccentricities or bad behaviour in children and adults alike.
In Edwardian red brick, dominated by the instantly familiar green copper-domed water tower, the hospital’s Gothic structure was known to anyone in Cardiff – and conjured up all the worst suppositions of what went on inside. Straitjackets? Electric shock treatments? Padded cells? Welsh novelist Trezza Azzopardi wrote about the hospital in The Hiding Place, in which the young protagonist views the Whitchurch of the 1960s with terror, and many who faced confinement there feared never seeing the light of day again. By the 1990s, the hospital’s daunting reputation had scarcely improved.
‘The place was renowned in the Valleys when we were growing up,’ says Rachel. ‘It was quite foreboding, because you’d hear people saying “They’ll end up in Whitchurch!” if someone was acting a bit strange or out of character. It was a bit like when people mentioned the Bedlam of old.’
Rachel and her parents drove Richey to the hospital on the outskirts of Cardiff. ‘He cried on the way there,’ remembers Rachel. ‘He sat in the back seat just looking out of the window forlornly. We couldn’t get any sense out of him.’
He was admitted to Whitchurch on 19 July, walking into the hospital with the support of his family. ‘It was a crumbling red-brick building with a really haunted feel about it,’ remembers Rachel. ‘The corridors seemed to go on forever, they were long but claustrophobic. The décor was cracked, all peeling paint and echoing voices. Richard was shivering despite it being summer because it was such an old, cold place.’
Richey was soon checked into a mixed sex ward on W1A – a long room with 25 beds, and only a thin curtain separating each for privacy. He would later tell the music press about his time in Whitchurch. ‘I think NHS hospitals are people banging off the walls in long corridors. 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 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.’
‘It was horrible,’ James told Select magazine. ‘People have got this strangely romantic Cuckoo’s Nest image. It’s not even that disciplined, it’s just a floatation tank for people who can’t cope. They’re in stasis, in limbo, kept stable with doses.’
Rachel recalls Richey’s frustration at the time. ‘Every visit I made he’d say the same thing: “All they do is come around on drug runs and tell me to loosen up.” He said there was nobody there to talk to, and a few of the nurses even told him to go and see the new Flintstones film so he could “cheer up” and “have a laugh”, which obviously didn’t go down well with him.’
Marginally more constructive was one nurse’s suggestion that Richey read a book, Depression and How to Survive It (1994) by comedian Spike Milligan and the popular television psychiatrist Anthony Clare. ‘I went into town and bought that book on his asking,’ says Rachel. ‘I took it back to him and remember looking at the cuts on his wrists and saying, “You must be in so much pain,” and he snapped back that it was nothing compared to the pain he was feeling on the inside.
‘I think Richard identified with Milligan because they were both so sensitive to everything. In the book Milligan is described as skinless and a lot of things that wouldn’t concern others would end up really worrying him. At the time, Richard was engulfed by worry and anxiety, and didn’t seem to have the ability to cope with even the smallest of problems, let alone the bigger ones.’
During Richey’s more lucid moments he continued with the artwork and upcoming promotional material for the Manics’ next album, The Holy Bible. ‘He was still working despite being in hospital,’ recalls Rachel. ‘He was mak
ing phone calls to the album designer and re-arranging lines ready for the printed lyric sheets. We kept telling him to take a break because he didn’t need the stress, but he was a perfectionist when it came to his work. He just couldn’t switch off or relax. It was like he fluctuated between two states – being flat and depressed or being anxious and depressed.’
James Dean Bradfield said in an interview to Melody Maker at the time of Richey’s hospitalisation: ‘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. Problems that I’d just snip off with f***ing scissors in two seconds flat really get to Richey. A misprint on a lyric sheet, or whatever, would just upset him so much.’
‘Last time I went to Cardiff I saw the drunks outside the market. I heard lipstick girls saying “That’s disgusting.” I did not see the same thing. I saw a victim of society, I see my responsibility, I accept the blame. I spend hours asking myself why, why, why and then, then I spent hours asking myself why those girls didn’t care?’
Richey, letter to Claire Forward, 1988
‘He was overly idealistic,’ remembers pen pal Alistair Fitchett. ‘Very much so, and I feel Richey perhaps could never have gotten to the stage where he could overcome this almost adolescent-like idealism when it came to the ways of the world.’
‘So you’d rather know the truth and be mad?
No, I just want the truth to be different.’
Richey’s archive, Priory notes, 1994
‘I’ve never thought about this until recently, but ever since his adolescence Richard was always referencing One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Suddenly Last Summer, Betty Blue, and films about mental patients and institutions,’ remembers Rachel. ‘Was his hospitalisation a self-fulfilling prophecy? Was it a statement he felt he had to make to go in tandem with the album?
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