Richey Edwards of The Manic Street Preachers

0:00If you can't wait for new episodes of this podcast and you're in the UK, more episodes are available now. first on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Our subject today is one of music's most enigmatic and alluring legends. Fears are growing for the safety of the Manic Street Preachers guitarist after his car was found abandoned at the Seven Bridge service station. Richard Edwards, or Richie, the lyricist and guitarist with the band The Manic Street Preachers, disappeared from a London hotel on 1 February 1995. His empty car was discovered near the Severn Bridge some days later. Though he was declared legally dead in 2008, his body was never found.

0:47For years, his bandmates continued to pay a quarter of their earnings into his bank account and would set up his mic on stage for gigs. Today, the Mannics enjoy global success and have gone on to be one of the most enduring bands from that era, but many believe they would not have got there without the intense and magnetic force that was Ritchie. Nominating Ritchie Edwards is the photographer Kevin Cummins, who began his career shooting David Bowie and Joy Division and has created some of the most iconic images of musicians and bands of the last half century. Kevin, you've worked with so many iconic musicians and rock stars.

1:29Why choose Richie? When people think about Richie, it's in the way that you've opened the programme, which is that he disappeared. And I think nobody has looked beyond that for quite a long time and the fact that he was a very good writer. Was he an easy person to photograph? Oh, he was a gift, actually, yeah. He was very interested in popular culture and music references. The first time I photographed them for the cover of the magazine I worked for, New Musical Express, they went out the night before and asked girls in a nightclub to give them love bites so that they'd look trashier on the photographs.

2:09And I once wanted to photograph him with Marilyn Monroe ink stamp all over his body to play with the idea of iconography. And he was really into it. He loved it. You rubber stamped him with Marilyn Monroe? Yeah, about 300 times. What was he wearing? He was naked from the waist upwards. He wore trousers. We didn't go below the waist ever at the enemy. It was very puritanical. Can you just describe him to us? He had quite a haunting face, actually. He was very beautiful to photograph. Very expressive, dark hair, dark eyes. is both he and Nicky Wire were a joy to work with. And the first picture we did for the NME cover, we didn't even put the singer on it, we just put Nicky and Richie on the cover, which was unheard of.

3:05His face had a sort of beauty, a bit like Rudolf Nureyev in some ways. Yeah, I agree, actually. I photographed Nureyev, actually. Oh, did you? Yes. Yeah, and again, very haunting, very strong look. Let's have a listen to his voice. apologies for the quality of these clips. All books were just as exciting to us as records. There wasn't much difference. William Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Mojjack Kerouac, Camu. Our romances have been just like total power and that we've just got nothing to lose because we're securing the knowledge that we already lost a long time ago. He sounds shy, softly spoken. Very softly spoken.

3:48and obviously, you know, they had their moments tearing places up, but they were much more interested in sitting down talking to you about literature. Also listening to that is the music journalist Simon Price, author of a biography of The Manic Street Preachers. We've talked about his startling appearance, but what impression did he leave on you apart from the appearance? He was the most intelligent rock star I've ever met, which might be setting the bar low, but he was a hugely impressive man in terms of his mind. He had this kind of magnetic charisma about him, this real kind of rock star beauty.

4:29It's interesting to hear Kevin use the term iconography because Ritchie transformed himself into a rock icon. He wasn't a musician. He didn't really play guitar. James Dean Bradfield, the singer, famously said that what Ritchie provides is just a bit of clatter behind him. but he gave them so much more than that he was the visual focus of the band but also their kind of propaganda minister he was the one who would send these really compelling letters to music journalists because it was a time that rock music had fallen into a kind of drugged out slump where everybody just wanted to get out of their minds and have a good time and not really say anything and the Mannics had grown up in South Wales at a time when it was impossible to be that complacent.

5:20They'd grown up witnessing the miners' strike. Yes, quite. And when you met Ritchie, you basically just had to press record and off he'd go and you knew, even though he was very softly spoken, you knew that what you would have at the end of the interview would be absolute gold. In terms of his actual participation in the band, he was more like a mascot in some ways, wasn't he? I mean, is that unfair? He wrote the lyrics. He did. And that's the most important thing. I mean, some bands will write lyrics that are fairly nonsensical, but rhyme. Richie wrote angry short stories, almost, and poetry.

6:00And the shapes he threw on stage were more important than any noise that might come out of that guitar. How do you mean shapes? Well, you know, star jumps and angular poses. He called it the geometry of contempt. That's how he described it. And the way they presented themselves was quite provocative with sort of spray-painted slogans on their clothing, leopard print blouses, the make-up, the hair, which was going against the grain in the late 80s, early 90s. Most people were sort of dressing down and wanting to look like they were waiting in a bus queue. It's really funny you say that because when I asked Joy Division how they wanted to be photographed the first time I did a session with them, they said standing at a bus stop.

6:44Tell me, either of you, about the Ritchie reading list. They were working class autodidacts. I mean, Ritchie got 10 A grades at O level, 3 A grades at A level, went to university, got a degree in political history. Which he hated, didn't he? Yeah, well, I think what he hated about university was the other students, the fact that they were just rampaging around getting drunk when, to him, the idea of being at university was that you had access to the greatest minds in history. Why wouldn't you take advantage of that? But every Mannix record sleeve would have literary quotes on it and he would reference poets and novelists in their lyrics and in interviews.

7:21And all of this came together so that if you were a true Mannix fan, you had to know about things like The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau or The Virgin Suicides by Geoffrey Eugenides. And I think it's quite interesting that all these years later, there's a phenomenon of Mannix Street teachers. Lots of Mannix fans have grown up to be schoolteachers, and I think that's because of the way that Ritchie tried to sort of pay it forward and pass his learning on to his audience. When I was in my teens, I would listen mainly to David Bowie and Scott Walker. You know, I remember particularly a Bowie song where he mentioned Cahill Gibran, and I had no idea who that was.

8:02And so after school, I went to Manchester Central Library and looked it up, and Bowie educated me in the way that the Mannics educated their audience a lot and I really, really admire that in them. I'm just thinking about my own teenage years. It was Cliff Richard. I mean, you wouldn't have gone and locked anything up after hearing Cliff Richard. Let's go back to the start of his life. When and where was Richard Edwards born? He was born on the 22nd of December 1967 in Blackwood in Gwent, which was a mining community and he went to Oakwood Comprehensive School, the same school as Nick Jones who became Nicky Wire and James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore who ended up being his bandmates and he basically spent his time as a child doing what kids do, playing in the stream, kicking a football around in the local field but it's just when you hit your teens in a place like that that you suddenly realise there's absolutely nothing to do.

9:02It was a cultural backwater and And yeah, he was quite disparaging about South Wales. But also there was a recognition that if South Wales was a scrap heap, it had been made into a scrap heap by the policies of the Conservative government, which made 80 % of his community unemployed. And he spoke a lot about seeing former coal miners with their big gnarled hands having to retrain and learn to type, and there were no jobs to even make use of that. So all of this played into their early kind of lyrics and their political mindset. Nicky Wire was also at Swansea University with him. Is that where the band began?

9:48The band had already begun without Richie's involvement. He would sort of drive them around from time to time. But they soon realised that this guy is just, even though he's not a musician, he's just too great an asset to leave on the sidelines. They had to bring him in somehow. How did the band first get noticed beyond the valleys? Well, it was these letters they wrote to the music press. Ritchie would send letters to, say, Bob Stanley at Melody Maker, Stephen Wells at the NME, John Robb at Sounds, telling the music press that, you know, we've got it all wrong, that the bands were writing about complete rubbish and that we needed to listen to them.

10:27They didn't even have a record deal. That was great, that, because you'd get these postcards telling us that we should go and see them. They had more to say than anyone we'd put on the cover in the last two years. And when we did go and see them, they were right, in a way. I mean, I have a real problem with the way music's perceived, where we just see rock musicians as juvenilia. it's something that you get out of your system in your youth and then you go on and do something serious they saw that they could change the way the music press perceived rock and roll music He famously said this I will always hate slow dive more than Hitler and he said the Pet Shop Boys make the worst kind of English pop like when you're walking home from the pub and you're down on your knees staring into a pile of your own sick That's how they make me feel.

11:23Well, I think he's wrong about Pet Shop Boys. I don't think he believed that half the time. No, no, I think he was just grabbing attention. I think the full quote is something like, Catholics hate everyone, Methodists and Baptists hate each other more than they hate the devil. We will always hate Slow Dive more than we hate Hitler. Slow Dive being a sort of middle-class Thames Valley shoegazing band. This is why their press profile in the first year or so was way, way out of proportion with their actual record sales. They were just a journalist's dream and a photographer's dream. Once they shocked everyone into noticing them, people started asking whether there was any substance or if it was all just posturing and hype.

12:06Simon, tell us about the for real incident, figure four real. This was an incident that happened after a gig in Norwich when the enemy journalist Steve Lemac was sent to interview them. and he put it to them that, you know, playing devil's advocate perhaps, that they were fakes because there was this idea that maybe they were just all talk, they were all mouth, that they were frauds in some way. How can I believe that you're for real? And Richie was obviously quite hurt by this and they carried on talking and Steve didn't notice at first, I don't think, that Richie was cutting the numeral four and the word real into his forearm.

12:49and there was a big debate at NME I'm not sure if you were there Kevin about whether or not to publish the photo well I was I mean the next day my editor who liked the idea that we could be tabloid at times he said this should go on the cover and quite a lot of us argued against it and he said but it'll sell and I said but no it's exploitative and that photograph should not have been taken, I'd have just taken him to hospital. I would not have taken a photograph of that. What do you think? Well... We're not war photographers. Well, to put it in context, he did have a history of self-harm. There are lyrics in Mannix Records that say things like, I hurt myself to get pain out.

13:37So this was part of who he was. So in a way, cutting his arm wasn't as extreme an act to him as it might seem to the rest of us. And I've got to say, I ran into Richie and James Dean Bradfield in Cardiff a couple of weeks after the incident, and they were kind of joking about it, the fact that the number four is a very deep cut, but then after that he realised he'd gone a bit too far, and they're quite light scratches after that. So, I mean, Kevin, there's something I wanted to ask you. Did you take the photos in Thailand, where he again had scratched his chest with some ceremonial knives that were given to him by a fan.

14:17I felt that was slightly different in that a fan had sent a miniature set of ceremonial swords up to him as a gift with a note saying, will you cut yourself on stage? And Richie was outraged by this and he said, why would he think I would do something that public? And then towards the end of the gig, I went into the dressing room, maybe thinking I'd get a picture of Richie looking hot and sweaty, and he cut himself on the chest with one of the swords. It wasn't a deep cut, it was just surface scratches, and it looked like the notes of a piece of music with the blood dripping down. I took a picture of him in black and white like that, and I understand that it could be seen in a very similar way to the for real moment but it was almost like a decorative scratch.

15:17I'm beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable about this in that I'm sure he didn't mean to sort of lead a craze in any way but would he have been aware of that? Would he have cared about that? Yeah, there's no getting around the fact that there were young fans who copied what he was doing. On the other hand, self-harm wasn't invented by Richie Edwards, and the fact that he was quite public about doing that meant that there would be young fans who were going through that who could see him and think, well, he understands me, he understands what I'm going through. and in the history of rock and roll there have been cases where self-harm was quite performative Iggy Pop for example cutting his chest with broken glass and all of that with Richie it wasn't like that it was much quieter, more subdued it was private a lot of the time I remember the last time I interviewed him he hated the idea that because he sometimes cuts himself up and he was in this kind of punk rock band that people assumed he was this wild man of rock and roll running around screaming and that kind of stuff.

16:29And we've heard his voice, we've heard how softly spoken he was. It wasn't like that. It was kind of private suffering in some ways, but suffering which he externalised and wrote about in his lyrics and then made public. Which is why I felt we should not have used that photograph. There's nothing nice in my head. The adult world took it all away. From despair to where, which Ritchie wrote the words for. Did he believe that? Did he find the adult world difficult? He did. And this record, the second album, is where everything turns inwards. He starts writing about himself. And that was something the Mannics never originally did.

17:10To begin with, everything they wrote was very political. They'd write lyrics like hospital closures kill more than car bombs ever will. Very provocative. The song Motorcycle Emptiness, which is still usually their opener of their live set, is this six-minute epic about the soul of a man under modern capitalism. But around the time of the second album, we see this introversion happening and he was really struggling just with the human condition. Listening to that lyric, I'm thinking of Dylan Thomas and I'm thinking not just of the musical but also the poetic tradition of Wales. We shouldn't overlook his Welshness, should we?

17:49Coming from Manchester myself, this northern working class background is very similar with the mining communities and so on around there and I think Richie brings that out eloquently. But Manchester always had credibility you see and Wales was a laughing stock it was and I can say that because I grew up there and I know the way that that we were treated we were seen as the kind of last nationality that you could you of and early Mannix reviews are full of jokey headlines about sheep and daffodils and all of that and Ritchie was very aware of that and he sort of got his retaliation in first by really sort of disowning Welshness and he would say in interviews that he never wanted to be considered one of those Welsh bands Yes, Dylan Thomas did the same Land of my fathers, my fathers can have it he said.

18:42Yeah, but he had bigger ambitions and didn't want them to be a localised concern He took the band to Auschwitz, I believe. I think it was Belsen and Dachau, but whichever one it was, it's absolutely right that most rock and roll bands on tour in Europe would just be out partying in the local city rather than going to look at a concentration camp. So he did take himself almost willfully to darker places than his mind was already going. And this, again, fed into his lyrics on their third album, The Holy Bible. There were lots of references to the Holocaust and to tyranny, to genocide, as well as his own personal suffering, songs about self-harm and anorexia.

19:25And in some way, he seemed to be drawing a comparison between the two. Kevin, you were sent with the band to Thailand in early 1994. It's been mentioned already. The band's manager and friend, Philip Hall, had just died of cancer. Huge blow to all of them. It was also around this time that Kurt Cobain killed himself. and then one of Richie's best friends from university also hanged himself. Here's Nicky Wire talking about Richie at that time. I think the first time that he seemed more out of control. Richie was always a very controlled person, but it almost seemed just something in his head had clicked.

20:04And I think it just the manifestation of Richie's maybe is disintegration was just unbelievable artistry. Because he was writing so much, you just felt whatever happens he's going to maybe that he writes the best novel ever it might not be that he maybe he'll find lyric writing too easy or something you know you just felt that his writing had become to such a level and he's writing so much of it the amount of culture that he was consuming in a pre-digital age he had this mobile typewriter which of course wasn't mobile at all he was literally a typewriter with a handle and he'd get out of his bag with a bottle of Jack Daniels in there as well.

20:45It was real Hunter S Thompson stuff. He was drinking quite a lot by then. Well, I've been on tour with Oasis. He wasn't drinking a lot compared to some bands I've been away with. I mean, I could see several parallels, really, with Joy Division. With Ian Curtis, the other members of the band said, Well, we just used to sing along and play the music. We never really analysed his lyrics. If we had a done, maybe we'd have done more about it. Well, there's drinking and there's drinking, isn't there? In 94, Ritchie was in quite a bad way, not just with alcohol but with self-harm and with anorexia. And he did spend some time in Wichich Hospital in Cardiff and then the Priory in Roehampton.

21:37But I think there was this idea around the band that it was better to keep him within the band circle where they could keep an eye on him than just sort of cast him out. And I know that some people might look at that in hindsight and say that there was maybe a duty of care, that somebody should have taken him out of that situation. But maybe we're a bit more aware of these things now than we were at the time. What do you think? I agree with you and also there's a great tradition of writers like Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and nobody says oh but he was just an old drunk whereas with rock stars they always want rock stars to behave badly and I think it's difficult, they were kids, you've got to remember that when we were in Thailand, you know, Richie was 26 maybe.

22:30and there is this stereotype of the tortured artist the sort of self-destructive alcoholic writer I remember asking him about this and I admitted that maybe I was a bit too susceptible to this idea that you can't have the genius without the pain and all of that and he said to me that when he was in Whitchurch Hospital it wasn't full of poets it was just full of people like postmen people with normal jobs and that really brought it home to me it's a ridiculous concept really isn't it Completely. It would seem remiss not to talk about the song Kevin Carter, given that it's about a photographer called Kevin.

23:05Simon, what was Ritchie talking about in that song? Well, Kevin Carter was an award-winning South African photographer who made his name taking photos of kind of human atrocities, really. His most famous photo, the vulture and the little girl, was taken during the Sudan famine of 1993. but the fact that he was taking these harrowing images and winning prizes for them really troubled Kevin Carter, it seems. And at the age of 33, he took his own life. And this is something that I think, in a weird way, Ritchie could empathise with because he was always writing about the horrors of the 20th century and bearing witness to these things.

23:53The thing with Richie is, it's as if he was missing a layer of skin or a layer of armour that the rest of us have. He was very vulnerable, very emotionally open to things. He overthought everything and he overfelt everything. And the character of Kevin Carter was something that really resonated with him. Would you have taken that photograph, Kevin? The picture of the child with the vulture about two yards away is a really harrowing image. but if I was a war photographer it's exactly the kind of picture I would do because I'd want to draw attention to the absolute horrors out there You can't entirely categorise war photography one thing, pop photography another It's surely a dilemma that must haunt the career of any photographer To what extent are you actually part of what's happening and to what extent are you simply recording?

24:45I take pictures to build iconography. I take pictures that people want to put on their bedroom walls and there's a real difference. In hindsight it seems significant that during 94 Richie was walking around with a massive camera around his neck. The song Kevin Carter didn't emerge until after Richie's disappearance. Only in hindsight can we look at it and think well maybe that was the reason. Hmm. His dog died in January 1995, and on the 1st of February, Ritchie was supposed to be flying to America. Simon, tell us what happened. They were staying, the band, in the Embassy Hotel in Bayswater, and Ritchie, without telling anyone, just left his room, got in his silver Vauxhall Cavalier, drove down the M4, and that's the last anyone knows of what happened to him.

25:39The car was found just near the Severn Bridge. It was, and obviously that leads a lot of people to draw the obvious conclusion that he jumped from the bridge. There are quite a few clues pointing in other directions, and it's so horribly inconclusive for his friends and family. Are we convinced? Are you convinced? Well, as time goes on, it looks worse and worse, doesn't it? but certainly at the time I believed that there was another possible explanation. You know, maybe it's clutching at straws and maybe it's wishful thinking, or certainly maybe it was at the time, to believe that Richie had just taken a decision to disappear and start a new life.

26:21But tragically for those who were close to him, nobody knows. The death of his dog caused enormous upset that people maybe don't give credit for. It's like losing a child to some people. and I do find it hard knowing how compassionate Richie was. Would he leave people hanging on for 30 years? I don't know. The Mannix continued without Richie after a hiatus. They came back with the album Everything Must Go. Simon, how much of that album was written by Richie? Well, Richie left behind a pile of lyrics for the band and some of the songs on the album were already in production. And it ended up being that about half the songs on the album have some input from Richie one way or another.

27:08What's his legacy? I think Richie will always be there for a certain kind of young person to discover. He's one of those icons of alienation, one of those great poets of despair, like Ian Curtis, like Kurt Cobain. And I think that that is the greatest gift, is that he'll always be there for people to discover the genius of his work. My thanks to Simon Price for being our expert and to Kevin Cummins for nominating Richie Edwards. Goodbye.