‘Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to join that stupid club.’
Wendy O’Connor, mother of Kurt Cobain, April 1994
One item in Richey’s archive is his last personal diary. Gifted to him during the festive season, the Marvel Comics pocket planner spans entries from Christmas Day 1994 through to the first week of the New Year, giving an inkling of what occupied Richey’s mind in the lead-up to his disappearance:
December 25th: See Mam. So many kind people + kind presents. Very very kind. Day is so normal. Good cut tonight. Got a throbbing pulsing underneath.
December 26th: Up late. Gave Snoopy a beautiful brush today. Bad phone call.
December 27th: Up really late. Home by 2. Nan. Watch US World Cup. Upsetting memory returns. Buy beautiful Winceyette Pyjamas.
December 28th: Up late again. Can’t believe it. No sleep for 3 days now bar a few stolen hours. Go to Bute St. doctors. Unbelievable down there. Go home, good dinner. Everybody is so very kind. I don’t deserve it. I am a bad boy. Unworthy. Watch Making of Snow White. Rachel comes around. Watch The Fly, Match of the Day.
December 30th: Get back, nearly crash the car, so tired and sleepy, go to bed at 6 o’clock and sleep til 1 o’clock next day—waking 4/5 times for a coffee / fags / beautiful hearing Jo. Drive to Swansea and visit old places. Feel scared only a little and happy remembering. Panic Panic.
‘The Christmas period was very normal,’ remembers Rachel. ‘A family event, the same as any other year – we exchanged gifts, we watched television and had a traditional dinner. Since the Priory, Richard was taking his commitment to alcohol abstinence very seriously; he didn’t even have Christmas pudding because it had the tiniest dash of brandy in it, but he was still restricting his food, so my mam was doing the best she could to feed him up.’
Adrian Wyatt remembers the last time he saw his friend, shortly before the festive season. ‘He was painfully thin. McDonald’s had just started doing salads, and he told me he was eating one of those every day. By that point he was certainly body dysmorphic. I remember him saying years before that the camera always added ten pounds, and I imagine being photographed continuously by the press couldn’t have helped that kind of mentality.
‘He was bright enough to be aware of his problems, which can be blessing and a curse. He had a wry sense of humour about it all and knew when to give a little smile. But every time I saw him he was becoming more and more subdued in his interactions. It was like he was having the life sucked out of him gradually and parts of him were fading away.’
On New Year’s Eve, Richey turned up on the doorstep of his old friend Stephen Gatehouse, who was still living with his mother. Reaching out at the height of his problems with the band, Richey had only recently made contact again that autumn, six years after Gatehouse infamously wrote into Impact magazine under the pseudonym David Geary. Stephen was out, but Richey surprised Gatehouse’s mother by staying on the porch for some time and sharing a cigarette with her instead.
The two reminisced over old times, when the Gatehouses’ was a hub of activity and usually packed with Stephen’s college friends, and former Funeral in Berlin bandmates. Richey apparently appeared grateful for the nostalgia and thankful for somebody to talk to. Half an hour after Mrs Gatehouse said goodnight and shut the door, she gazed outside only to see him still sat there, looking desolate and utterly dejected. Despite being at the helm of one of Britain’s biggest rock bands, Richey found himself alone and at a loose end on what would be his last accounted-for New Year’s Eve as his diary entry reveals:
December 31st: ‘New Year’s Eve: Wow. Another Big Wow – I am on my own. Some phone calls. Watch Woodstock and it just makes me sick. Not as sick as Jools Holland tho.
Richey’s diary entries cease on 8 January, save for one last scrawl on the 17th, three days after the death of his beloved dog Snoopy. The calendar notes a Lunar Full Moon phase, and Richey writes underneath it ‘Killing Moon’ – a reference to the best-loved song of one of his favourite bands as a teen, Echo & the Bunnymen. Or had he written it days beforehand, with the vague notion that, at some point between Snoopy dying and the forthcoming trip to America, he would be forced to make up his mind about his future and take drastic action?
‘January was the start of a really bad month for Richard, and Snoopy’s death was only one of the catalysts,’ says Rachel. ‘The dog had arthritis in his back legs for a while, but by mid-January he couldn’t walk. My mam rang me urgently to come up to the house because the vet was there and said he needed to be put down because he was in so much pain. I rushed up there but it was too late.
‘I’ll never forget walking into the living room and seeing Richard on the floor, curled into a half circle holding Snoopy’s body. He was hugging him tightly and sobbing uncontrollably. He was inconsolable, the most devastated I’d ever seen him. It’s one of those images that stays with you for life.’
Snoopy’s passing meant further beloved elements of Richey’s treasured youth were slipping away, and with them an innocence and happiness he felt he might never experience again. His dog had been by his side during his idyllic childhood and throughout his difficult adolescence, and had now died at the worst possible time. With one of the Priory’s councillors having recently identified Richey as suffering with unresolved grief years after the death of his grandmother, this latest bereavement doubtless stirred painful memories for him.
After the disappearance, the band told the NME that they’d viewed Richey’s mourning of Snoopy as a positive; something tangible and of the real world.
Nicky said, ‘He was well on his way before then. It certainly didn’t help, but something was gonna give. It gave in the summer, and it was just a question of whether he was gonna change it or not. He didn’t seem to get enjoyment from many things by the end. When he cried naturally, it was nothing to do with the Priory, it was just his pet had died.’
‘Yes everyone may think I’m daft but I don’t give a SHIT. As long as my friends still like me I don’t care. When I got back Sat night I suddenly realised Snoopy has been faithful and loyal to me longer than anyone.’
Richey, letter to Mark Hambridge, 1987
When Mark Hambridge caught up with Richey in the days after Snoopy’s death, he was one of the first to see his friend’s drastic change of image. ‘My car broke down in Gloucestershire, so I rang him because he was the kind of person you’d call in an emergency. He got a taxi to pick me up from Tewkesbury Services and take me to his place down the Bay. I’d not seen him since he’d come out of the hospital, and obviously I was apprehensive because of everything that had been said in the press. So, when he opened the door I got a bit of a shock because his hair was totally shaved, and he was wearing these striped concentration camp pyjamas.
‘At first, I noticed a distant look in his eyes, but once we started talking, he seemed like his old self, so I thought that the shaved head and the pyjamas were just another look he was experimenting with – nothing profound about it. The Richard I knew was still there, just a little quieter, a little less forthcoming with his words. We picked up where we left off. He didn’t speak about the band at all, it just never came up. We spoke about the people we knew in college, our families, my kids. He was always very good around kids, very imaginative, very inventive, he liked children, and you could tell he wouldn’t mind having some himself.’
In a 1988 letter to Claire Forward, Richey had divulged why he had shaved his hair in the past and how the act always held a deep level of significance for him: ‘I had all my hair cut off after last Tuesday’s melting pot of despair. Remember, I said I cut my hair after every emotional trauma?’ Therefore, by 1995, to what extent was Richey’s newly shorn hair still an outward expression of emotional turbulence? Along with Snoopy’s passing and the band’s differing trajectory, there was also the emotional trauma of his relationship with Jo reaching breaking point.
In the days before Snoopy’s death, Richey visited Jo at her mother’s in
Walthamstow, east London. He asked Jo to marry him, and she turned him down. He stuck around for less than half an hour, then completed the seven-hour round trip back to Cardiff, after the two had mutually agreed to bring their sporadic four-year relationship to an end.
It was on his arrival back at his flat, in a fit of love-sick anguish, that Richey cut out a chunk of his hair. With a prominent bald patch now on display, Richey had no option but to proceed to shave off the rest of his hair the following day. When he told Nicky what he’d done, his friend’s reply was, ‘Now I know why they say you’ve got a personality disorder!’
‘Everything was collapsing around him,’ remembers Rachel. ‘He was shutting down because it was all coming at once – with Snoopy, the band and Jo. He would come home to Blackwood and sit around the house crying. Mam would take time off work to look after him and feel terrible when she had to leave him alone. She kept telling him that he was still young, and there were plenty of other girls out there, but he was adamant that Jo was the only one for him. He was convinced he’d never move on, he thought it would be a betrayal to do so.
‘After Richard went missing I spoke to Nick and he told me he’d had to tell Richard bluntly why Jo wouldn’t want to marry someone like him – because he’d spent the first two years of their relationship drinking and the rest cutting himself. Richard seemed oblivious as to how unwell he came across to other people.’
‘I can’t live without you. You can. You love someone because you dominate their life. All masochistic strivings have an aim – to get rid of the individual self. To lose control and to get rid of the burden of freedom.’
Richey’s archive, 1993
As we research this book, Rachel brings to our attention a copy of MOJO magazine from April 2016. It features a piece about the late Pink Floyd founder and renowned recluse, Syd Barrett. In it, his sister Rosemary Barrett looks back on her brother’s intense personality and extraordinary mind, while sharing her belief that he likely had a form of high functioning autism – Asperger’s syndrome (AS).
Like Rachel and Richey, Syd and Rosemary shared a bedroom in childhood, and Barrett’s sister recalls him ‘leaping from his sheets to conduct an imaginary orchestra’. This vivid image brings to mind one of the few family photos Rachel has released of Richey – a teenager at home in Blackwood surrounded by the trimmings of Christmas. He is caught in an unguarded moment, delivering an impassioned soliloquy. Dressed in striped pyjamas and an anti-Thatcher T-shirt, it is a rare view of Richey in the intimate company of his family, in parts vulnerable, yet equally bold and dramatic.
Throughout his time with the Manics, Richey revealed that among the band’s many nicknames for him were ‘Android’ and ‘Spock’. AS individuals often say they feel like ‘aliens among humans’ due in part to their highly logical way of thinking, entwined with a lack of understanding or inability to deal with emotions and protocols when it comes to interaction with others.
Those with Asperger’s speak of looking at the world through a different lens, and are often frustrated when they are misunderstood, feeling like they are talking in a foreign language to those around them. While 90 per cent of high functioning Asperger’s men lead ‘normal’ lives, their rigid behaviour can occasionally stand out in relation to their peers.
“It’s strange how someone could remember all those quotes …” Sean reflects.
“ … And the history of the fucking partition of Czechoslovakia …” Nicky adds.
“ … And could quote In Pursuit of the Millennium back at you …” says James.
“ … And you show him just a little snippet of music that probably doesn’t last more than ten seconds,” says Sean, “and within about two or three minutes he’d forget it …”
The Face, September 1998
Many with AS tend to interpret words and messages too literally, causing confusion. This correlates in parts with Richey’s obsessive nature when it came to analysing the seemingly unnecessary in the most minute of details. Speaking after his release from the Priory, he told the NME, ‘Nothing else happens in my mind, I just get swamped by one idea. I can just see one little thing on TV and that’ll be it. It can be anything, and then I’ll just stop functioning. I think, what does it mean? I’m intelligent, why can’t I understand that? Just a line in a film or a book, and I’ve lost it. The last one that happened, when I was hospitalised, was just a tiny little thing on The Big Breakfast from Lee Marvin singing that stupid song, “I Was Born Under a Wandering Star”. There’s a line in that, “Hell is in hello”, and for two days, I couldn’t do fucking anything. What’s it mean, “Hell is in hello”? What are they trying to say? What is the point in that? And then I realised that something was not quite right.’
When it comes to relationships, a great deal of emotional ideology for AS individuals is often learned or copied from television and films. They become obsessed by society’s version of ‘happily ever after’ and grow frustrated when life fails to follows the script. Some bail on relationships altogether because of the level of difficulty involved in processing their emotions, along with the grey area of second-guessing the complicated thoughts and feelings of others.
During Richey’s hospitalisation, James commented, ‘Richey was always much more into books and films than rock ’n’ roll. And I think those art forms are much more idealised. I think they influenced the way he viewed life, and the way he thought it would be.’
Many with Asperger’s seem more at ease immersing themselves in books or computers to evade human interaction. Closely related to that is the tendency for those with AS to pursue incredibly idiosyncratic interests, becoming fascinated by narrow and marginal pursuits and obsessions, to the point of confusion to anybody looking on.
Could a form of high functioning Asperger’s syndrome explain Richey’s renowned intellectual focus and his tendency to immerse himself deeply in the study of anything and everything by deftly applying more layers of logic to his chosen pursuit?
If Richey was on the autistic spectrum, might it explain some of the characteristic behaviours which were of great gain to the early Manic Street Preachers and spurred their meteoric rise to fame? His laser-eyed obsession with the logistics of show business, and his studious research on how to break into the music scene, accompanied by his organised dossiers on journalists, displayed a meticulous attention to detail more often present in the world of academia than that of rock and roll.
James once commented that in addition to Richey being ‘a very academic person’ who ‘loved routines and timetables’, he was also ‘amazing at giving good copy in terms of soundbites. He knew what to do when somebody put a Dictaphone in front of him.’
Was this micromanagement perhaps a tell-tale sign that Richey was so adept at being the perfect rock star because he had been obliged to enact so much of his life as a kind of performance in its own right? How much of Richey’s star quality was assumed naturally, and how much bordered on the studied technique of copy and imitation? The stereotype is that males with AS are far easier to spot than females, the latter having better coping mechanisms and social graces which enable them to cover their difficulties.
Clinical psychologist and Asperger’s expert Tony Attwood insists that while a male with Asperger’s will present himself as ‘agitated, clumsy and immature’, a female will be far more convincing at covering her condition through imitation and far better at ‘pretending themselves to be normal as an avid observer of human behaviour. She will learn what to do or say, how to copy others and so go unnoticed; unlike the AS boy.’ With Richey having a sister so close in age, and a special bond with his grandmother, might he have found it easier to mask his difficulties by mimicking, and copying more percipient female behaviour?
Looking back over his 1994 crisis, Richey commented that he had taken one valuable lesson from it – he had learned to stop putting so much effort into ‘being like everyone else’. If there was such an important internal change, mid-year, it may have begun to display itself
physically in changes to Richey’s outer appearance. In the last months of his time with the band, he appeared to be becoming younger and younger, smaller and frailer. If, in previous years, he had donned the garb of the stereotypical rock star, any traces of that costume were now unceremoniously dumped. What was left was the tiny, frightened, hyper-alert young boy that had perhaps been hiding away in there all along.
The interview Richey gave on Danish TV, his last ever televised interview, recorded in November during the second half of the European tour, seems to confirm this. Outwardly, he looks less worldly than when he first appeared on screen during the band’s formative years. Asked by the interviewer how he feels about the future, he gently answers, ‘Future. That’s a big nasty word, isn’t it?’ But the rest of his answer suggests that he has found – or is in the process of finding – a way forward for himself.
‘We finish touring in December; then, I think, we are going to Asia and America, early next year. And then … you know, being in a band is pretty much routine. Then we’ll write, we’ll record, and we’ll do the same thing all over again. The reason I am doing this is for the two months we have off, where I can just be in the flat on my own and write. I do nine months of touring, so I can get time to write words, that’s what I care about. It’s very nice staying in hotels, it’s very nice doing concerts. But it’s not as satisfying as writing something that encapsulates how you feel.’
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