Withdrawn Traces

by Sara Hawys Roberts

  ‘One night, I knew he was hiding something from me, he wanted to tell me. It took until dawn for him to say that he wanted to chop off his fingers. This was no joke. He was serious, he was scared. He said he felt like he had no choice! It took hours of reasoning and persuasion for him to rationalise. He felt he had no control over his thoughts. I had never seen him like that before, it was frightening. He kept knives and choppers under the bed, they’re still there! Who could I speak to? I’ve tried talking to the others.’

  Richey would further expound on his anxieties to Jo about the American tour that was coming up in the New Year. He was dreading he’d be exposed Stateside as a fraud, due to his inability to master the guitar. He talked of Steve Clark, the ex-Def Leppard guitarist who once broke his own knuckles on a wash basin to evade performing.

  That autumn, he also became increasingly fascinated by Dennis Hopper’s portrayal of a photojournalist in Frances Ford Coppola’s epic Apocalypse Now – even buying an exact replica of the camera used in the film and wearing it around his neck in the same fashion. Hopper’s character was based on Sean Flynn, son of the legendary Robin Hood actor Errol. After vanishing while on a photo assignment for Time magazine in Cambodia, he was immortalised by The Clash with a track called ‘Sean Flynn’ on their 1982 Combat Rock album. Believed to have been captured and murdered by communist guerrillas, Flynn was never seen again. Fourteen years later, his mother had him declared dead in absentia.

  ‘He would have been more than aware of the link between Dennis Hopper’s character and Sean Flynn,’ says Rachel. ‘The year before Richard went missing, Flynn’s mother died and his disappearance would have been news all over again.

  ‘By the end of that year, Richard kept going on about Apocalypse Now to anyone who’d listen. He’d love telling me how, after filming, Marlon Brando left Hollywood and virtually disappeared. He just gave up on fame and went on hiatus for ten years to live on an island away from everybody and everything – indulging himself by doing whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and putting no restraints on himself. He ate constantly, becoming really fat in the process and there was nobody around to judge him or tell him what to do. I think Richard wished he too could go past that point of caring about his own body and appearance, and live a life free from the judgement and scrutiny of others.’

  ‘Have you ever considered, any real freedoms?

  Freedoms from the opinions of others.

  Even the opinions of yourself?’

  Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now

  Mark Hambridge had seen little of his friend since moving to Minehead in 1991, but when they were reunited shortly before Richey’s disappearance, he, like Rachel, was regaled with Richey’s latest passion.

  ‘Apocalypse Now was his “last obsession” as I call it, and there must have been some real significance in that. He was very obsessive about things, and always for a reason. Everything always held more layers of meaning for him than the average person. He always made his passions public, because he wanted you to hone in on them, and with Rich the ambiguity of the messages were always there for you to decipher. He’d have a way of layering meaning on meaning, and liking to sit back and watch you figure it out for yourself.’

  When asked by Melody Maker for his recommended Christmas reading material in December 1994, Richey named Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, the book upon which Apocalypse Now was based. He told the magazine, ‘Any book that has an impact on me, I re-read it and write out all the lines I like and memorise them.’

  What might have been the reasons behind Richey’s concentrated efforts to draw the attention of his family, friends and fans to these works; a book and film which explored society’s corruption and its exploitation of the individual, along with the twin themes of disappearance and exile? With his new-found admiration for the way Brando lived his later years, might Richey also have made the decision to similarly remove himself? Could his methodical and compulsive nature have conspired against his innate sensitivity to facilitate a calculating retreat into his own heart of darkness?

  One of the last photocopies Richey printed was of a black-and-white newspaper clipping of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in the 1962 film, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The two women portray sisters, former well-known actresses, now hiding in obscurity and living as recluses. Underneath the photograph, Richey wrote out an excerpt from Heart of Darkness. He made several further photocopies and kept them in his last known folders of writing.

  ‘Seepy Seepy Bye Bye’

  Hubert Selby Jr, The Demon

  – comment on Richey’s set list, 7 November 1994, Frankfurt, Germany

  On 7 November, the band commenced the second half of their tour overseas, supporting the androgynous forerunners of Britpop, Suede. It was during these three weeks on the road that the strains between Richey and the band became even more evident.

  In Suede’s authorised biography Love and Poison, lead singer Brett Anderson remembers his time with Richey during the ill-fated tour. ‘He was the only one of the band who wasn’t very sociable. I think I spoke to him once. My memory of him is just being withdrawn.’

  Suede’s newly recruited teen guitarist Richard Oakes recounted that while he made every effort to strike up conversation with Richey, most gave him a wide berth. ‘Richey obviously had all his problems and he was always quiet so nobody ever went near him. We were on our bus waiting to go and the Manics’ bus was parked next to us and it was bitterly cold. And somebody from our crew came on and said, “That guy from the Manics is sitting outside in his pants!” And everyone was like “Pffff, what a weirdo!”

  ‘I thought to myself, “I’m going to go and talk to him!” I went down and said to him, “Aren’t you absolutely bloody freezing?” and he said, “Yes, but I want to be.” So I was like “OK … are you enjoying the tour?” And he had this laminate round his neck with a list of dates and he pointed to the ones he’d enjoyed, this one, this one and this one.

  ‘He said, “This must be amazing for you, you’re so young, you’ve come straight from school, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” And I was aware the whole time that while I’m having a great time on my first tour with Suede, this lot are on the point of breaking up. And I’m speaking to the reason that they’re breaking up.’

  Years later, Nicky Wire would identify this period as an all-time low for the band, telling Select magazine, ‘It was probably the worst time I’ve ever experienced in my life. In some respects, it was worse than when Richey actually disappeared, because he was on the verge of madness.

  ‘And James just didn’t stop drinking. It was just absolute fucking hell. I said to James one night, “I’m going to leave”, and he went out, got wazzed out of his brain and couldn’t even fucking remember what I’d said to him. Everybody was totally oblivious to everybody else’s needs.

  ‘Every morning I woke up and wanted to go home. Richey had stopped drinking, he’d come out of hospital and he’d just started smoking 65 cigarettes a day. And I can’t stand smoke. I’m not having a go at him: he was fucked out of his mind, smoking that much and drinking about 30 cups of coffee a day. Everything was bad.’

  James: It’s a bad time to go to the tour bus. Richey’s teetering. He’s always teetering, really.

  Simon Price: Has he gone to bed?

  James: The abyss.

  Sean: Richey doesn’t go to bed. He goes to the abyss.

  11.45pm. James wants a drink. ‘But I can’t. Our bus is leaving at 1am, it’s not fair to drink in front of Richey, and there’s nothing sadder than getting drunk for four hours on a tour bus, then going to sleep.’

  12.00am. James: ‘I really want a drink.’

  12.05am. James is wearing a ‘Kill ’em All – Let God Sort ’em Out’ T-shirt. ‘I feel like a caged animal.’

  12.10am. James punches the wall, very hard, very fast. Everyone jumps.

  From ‘Ooh, Aaah, Street Preach-Ah!’, Melody Maker, December 1994

  With the band and cre
w maintaining their distance, and the majority of journalists being kept at arm’s length, it was halfway through the tour before things reached breaking point. Their appearance at Amsterdam’s Paradiso fell flat and left the band feeling more dejected than ever – all apart from Richey, who was oddly upbeat after having carved a gash into his torso and declaring, ‘I feel OK now.’ With more than a few journalists having made the trip to report on the tour’s upcoming finale shows in Germany and Austria, Sean hastily ushered them to a local night-spot and away from the chaos ensuing behind the scenes.

  ‘There was an atmosphere during the whole tour when the journalists weren’t around,’ recalls the band’s roadie. ‘I even heard Richey lose his temper and raise his voice, something I’d never experienced before. He and Nicky were having a screaming match on the bus, and Richey was being threatened with being thrown out of the band. He was later given an ultimatum: if he cut again, he’d be out. The atmosphere was beyond bleak.’

  Fearing the intra-band tensions escalating, record company affiliates flew from London into Hamburg for the band’s penultimate dates. On the morning of 1 December, Richey was found outside the band’s hotel in Hamburg, banging his head against a brick wall, his face drenched in blood. The tour was terminated shortly afterwards.

  ‘You read the interviews from the time, and there are unspoken layers of frustration there,’ Rachel summarises. ‘What with Nick saying he wanted to quit the band, and James punching a wall and stating he couldn’t drink because of Richard. The way the band and crew normally toured had totally changed, and it must have been frustrating for them to have to abandon some of their more familiar habits to accommodate somebody who was in recovery.

  ‘It sounded like a hard time for everybody and I imagine Richard felt like a burden. Their friendship was really being put to the test, and because of the commercial failure of The Holy Bible, the future of the band was obviously in jeopardy.’

  During the last dates of their blighted European tour, Nicky began presenting James with sets of his own completed lyrics. One of these was the future album track, ‘Further Away’. Describing it as an ‘almost love song’, the band would admit after Richey’s disappearance that the lyrics represented a moment of freedom, a song the band could never have written in their earlier years. Having mainly co-written with Richey before, Nicky’s own ideas for the next album possessed a mellower and more commercial touch; one that was on an entirely different trajectory from Richey’s, who at the time slipped the band a note reading, ‘Ideas for the next album: Pantera meets Nine Inch Nails meets Screamadelica.’

  James would later comment, ‘Richey wanted to continue with the darkness of The Holy Bible, but the rest of us felt that would be falling into caricature. We wanted to breathe a bit more. He wanted complete creative control, and we [the band] would never survive that.’

  When the Manic Street Preachers first burst onto the music scene, Richey was considered the de facto band leader. By the end of 1994, was it possible he felt demoted, his opinion now counting for far less? More importantly, to what effect did it determine the decision he would go on to make on 1 February 1995? For a man described by his bandmates as ‘adept at dramatic symbolism’, could Richey’s choice of tattoos during their final tour hold some significance?

  Along with his Useless Generation tattoo from the start of his time with the band, Richey added a further three inkings during the autumn of 1994. The first, on his lower bicep, had the words ‘I’ll surf this beach’, which was a line from his fixation, Apocalypse Now. The remaining two brandings were inspired by Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century epic, the Divine Comedy. One adorned his upper arm: a sphere of vines and roses, with smaller circles encompassed within, depicting the holy city of Jerusalem at the world’s centre, and below it the Inferno and Mount Purgatory. The Divine Comedy states that in order to gain passage to Jerusalem, one has to pass through hell and climb Mount Purgatory’s seven steps, each representing one of the seven deadly sins, with the implication that man must first pass through hell in order to gain salvation and reach Paradise.

  Richey’s third tattoo portrayed Dante’s ninth and deepest circle of hell, that reserved for the worst kind of sinner – the betrayers and the treacherous. Inscribed in the circle are the words ‘Traitors to their Lovers, Traitors to their Guests, Traitors to their Country, Traitors to their Kindred.’ Could such a bold statement possibly be read as a forewarning that Richey was to betray his friends and family with his disappearance? Or was it implying that he, himself, was at the mercy of the betrayers? For someone who took the band as seriously as Richey, it’s no great leap to imagine him adorning his upper arm with such messages and communicating his sentiments in his usual cryptic manner.

  ‘We didn’t speak much about his new tattoos,’ remembers Rachel, ‘but he did mention wanting to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the New Year. He’d tried to get out of the first part of the US tour in February and asked if Nick could go in his place to do the promotional duties, but [Nick] said he didn’t want to go, and perhaps that’s because Nick wanted to put distance between himself and the commercial failure of The Holy Bible.’

  Before the climax of the Holy Bible tour, Jo paid one last visit to Richey’s Cardiff apartment. Even though it was daylight, he insisted on drawing the curtains and sat her down in front of the television. Before leaving the room, he pressed the ‘Play’ button on his video player and a pre-recorded VHS of a documentary featuring Joy Division began. It told the story of the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis, before going on to chart the band’s subsequent re-emergence as New Order. Every so often Jo noticed Richey popping his head around the door. Was she taking it all in? Was the message getting through? Such incidents take on greater significance in hindsight, and years later have left those close to Richey attempting to decipher what else he was trying to communicate.

  Was this some clue to suicide, or to survival? Was Richey suggesting that, should he commit suicide, the band would inevitably move on contentedly? Or could he have been telling Jo that he was too wise to expect to be loved more dead than alive? Had he thought himself out of the clichéd ending, a step ahead of the game, opting instead for survival and for something better?

  In 1996, James told Melody Maker: ‘One thing I know is that towards the end, Richey became very obsessed with some kind of victory over himself. He really didn’t want to be a loser. But, because we haven’t got a clue what the fuck happened to him, people can’t take that as a testament in blood, that he failed or he succeeded. All I know is that, as I say, towards the end, he was totally obsessed with this idea of victory. Which makes you think … it’s only an assumption, but … maybe he wanted to divorce himself from everything he created?’

  ‘I have always been hated for the right reasons and loved for the wrong ones. All my enemies have been rewarded and my true friends have betrayed me. They’ve wronged me and persecuted me and if I complained, it was always they were proved right. Sometimes I tried to revenge myself. I could never, never do it. I had too much pity to lay the enemy low. But they had no pity. I would prick them with a pin. They’d attack me with their bludgeons, their knives and their cannon and mangle my bones.’

  Richey archive, November 1994

  Richey played his final gigs with the band over three nights at the London Astoria. Before these shows, he did something he’d not done since the band’s earlier days and invited family, former home-town and university friends, and new contacts from his time at the Priory, to the finale on 21 December.

  ‘He asked me along numerous times but I couldn’t go because I was working,’ remembers Rachel. ‘He was really trying to get Rosie to come along too by any means possible, even though she was away from London at the time. In hindsight, I think he knew it was going to be his last show because of all the effort he went to in trying to get everybody down there.’

  The night climaxed in a last release of negative energies. The band trashed all their equipment, while photographer
Pennie Smith captured the last ever images of Richey on stage, beating himself about the head with the splintered remains of his hated guitar. He then proceeded to dive-bomb into Sean’s drum-kit as the rest of the band exited the stage.

  In 1998, Nicky Wire told BBC’s Close-Up documentary, ‘I really felt like “Something’s finished here,” and it turned out to be the last gig we ever did with Richey.’

  In the years that followed, the band were content to allude to a sense of finality after the Astoria gig. It was 2017 before Sean Moore finally confirmed on Escape from the History – a documentary detailing the band’s successful comeback after Richey’s disappearance – that the consensus among the group at the time was that they were as good as finished.

  ‘First The Holy Bible didn’t do as expected, and we knew we were on the back foot. We were just waiting for that moment for the record company to say that’s it, we’ve spent enough on you. I think with the Astoria when we trashed the gear, I think we thought that was going to be pretty much it for us.’

  If Richey was viewing the final night at the Astoria as the end of his time with the Manic Street Preachers, and a full stop on his time in the public glare, then he couldn’t have picked a better moment. With his twenty-seventh birthday falling the next day, he would have been all too aware of the pantheon of musicians, from Brian Jones to Jim Morrison, to Janis Joplin, to Jimi Hendrix, who had passed away at the same age and joined the ‘27 Club’. The recent death of Kurt Cobain had brought this phenomenon back to the fore, and reinforced the number’s mythic status in the world of rock and roll legends.