The Disappearance of Richey Manic 20th Anniversary

There was something in the wording of a quotation from James Dean Bradfield. I jolted in my seat and put my cup of tea down. It was 12.38 on the clock. The cafe's owner looked at me with a wordless 'yam owroight, me luv?'

And I didn't know if I was. It was like the world came into sudden focus. Richey had been missing for weeks already. He wasn't going to come back, was he? This was actually for real. A sharpened world, pivoting just slightly on its axis of reality.

I nodded to the lady and stared long and hard at the half-page picture printed there of Richey Manic. Black and white pixels displaying big Welsh eyes in panda-esque kohl and mascara.

MY Richey. The man who, just seven months before, had contributed most of the lyrics to The Holy Bible, the album which changed everything for me. He'd shifted then from 'a bloke who looks vaguely cool in a band I sort of like' into practically becoming my own personal Taliesin. The One Who Told it as it Was for those of us who could not.

I was still riding the initial crest of that. Listening to The Holy Bible with an intensity way past obsession, scrambling mentally up the life-lines cast by Richey Manic.

Then he was gone.

Possessed of a fierce intelligence, Richey enrolled at University of Wales, Swansea. He was based at the Cardiff campus, where he lived during his scholarly tenure. He was there a full year before his best friend (and later fellow band-member) Nicky Wire.

Something in Richey seemed to give there. His sister recalled how he was increasingly 'flat' each time he came home. Nicky arrived to find Richey apparently woefully out of his depth.

Not academically. He was not only writing his own essays, but Nicky's too half of the time. But socially. He couldn't get his head around the fact that the largely middle class student body wanted to party. He thought university would be all about study groups filled with intellectual conversations, and he was starved for them.

Richard James Edwards graduated from University with anxiety, anorexia nervosa, alcoholism, and a 2:1 in Political History. The promise of a high-paying job, for anyone armed with letters after their name, never materialized. This was still Thatcher's Britain and there are no graduate jobs in the Welsh valleys.

Blackwood's male population, including most of the band's fathers and elder brothers, were out of work miners. In a parallel universe, each band member would have been a miner too.

The Manic Street Preachers have intimated that they began with a 'color by numbers' strategy for infamy and fame. Basically they spent their days and evenings holed up in James and Sean's bedroom (the pair are cousins and Sean Moore lived with the Bradfields since childhood). While the music lovers listened to record after record to determine what worked, Richey sat piled up with magazines, biographies and history books.

He studied what successful bands and individual artists did to become famous. He made notes. He devised a formula for fame and presented it to the rest of the Manics.

But the strategy also provided a brilliant cover for Richey's increasingly erratic mental state. He could always claim that certain omissions of sanity were all part of the act. It inserted uncertainty into the minds of concerned family members. Even the band, who were with him almost 24/7, were sometimes blind-sided.

All of the issues that Richey James brought back from university were exacerbated out on the road, living in the full glare of public expectation. Things, which in a Welsh miner might have been caught early on and given succor, were not only misread in a publicity-seeking punk rock star, but openly encouraged.

Like the infamous '4 Real' incident, on May 15th 1991 in Norwich, wherein NME journalist Steve Lamacq accused the Manic Street Preachers of faking their whole punk ethic - being controversial for the sake of controversy (ssshhh!) - and that their feelings of political outrage and angst didn't run too deeply.

Then he sat there mesmerized, as Richey very, very calmly spoke, articulating with precision eloquence that the band really did mean it. All the while cutting the slogan '4 Real' into his own forearm with a razor, creating an injury which would require eighteen stitches to fix.

Yet it's hard to see the beginnings of things that have slowly escalated to that point, when you're too busy living it. We're all much wiser with hindsight.

By the time the Manics reached Europe, none of them were particularly inclined to brush off Richey's excesses. He was losing weight at an alarming rate, swamped by anorexia again. He was constantly drinking, starting each morning with the pssssht of a lager can opening. In Hamburg, Nicky walked backstage to find that Richey had cut open his chest again, this time requiring thirty-six stitches.

They cancelled the tour to whisk Richey back to Britain, where he was persuaded to enter the Priory.

The Priory was pretty much THE rockstar refuge back in the nineties. It was where junkies detoxed, alkies dried out and every other disorder was brought into check. So the artist could return to the machine and continue making money for their record companies.

He was forced to connect with deity anyway, over and over again. Despite all of his issues, Richey was painfully polite with an inherent need to please. He did it, because he didn't want to put his doctors and analysts out.

But with a mind and personality like his - intellectual, obsessive, addictive, intense - Richey couldn't just dabble. He dived into spirituality with the same keen focus with which he did everything else. And THAT messed with his mind.

Or, as Nicky later put it, 'The Priory is a mixture of all pseudo-God and religious boll**ks and doctors trying to cure you. (Richey) quickly realized that the cure means having to destroy the entire entity that you are.'

Richey tried desperately to believe in something, which all his instinct and reason told him didn't exist. When he couldn't make the connection, it felt like yet more rejection and failure. Moreover, it was pretty much spelled out to him that if he couldn't participate properly - in one of the highest ranking health clinics in the country - then he would never be cured.

It was in this context that Richey wrote the lyrics in Faster: I know I believe in nothing, but it's my nothing.

The Priory might have helped with the physical self-harm, but he emerged with a brand new diagnosis of nervous exhaustion. It took him a while to understand again that it was alright not to have to believe in a god.

By January 1995, Richey James was deemed well enough to resume his position within the Manic Street Preachers. On the last day of the month, he and James Dean Bradfield checked into a London hotel, each in their respective rooms, ahead of flying out to America the following day.

The band were finally set to break the States. But when James arose in time to catch the plane, he found that Richey had already checked out. It was February 1st 1995 and that receptionist had the last confirmed sighting of the man.

Most people thought he'd be back. He'd disappeared before, returning after two days wondering what all of the fuss was about.

On February 1st 1995, James Dean Bradfield made a few 'phone calls to alert relevant parties - and attempt to track Richey down - then caught his flight to America as planned. No doubt replete with a few choice curse words directed at his errant friend, whom James expected to follow him later in the week.

This was a big deal for the Manics. All indicators said that, in 1995, America was ripe to receive them. They could easily have become the biggest band in the world. But Richey never did turn up.

For a while there, the police didn't even want to hear about it. Richey was a grown adult and he'd patently taken the decision to disappear.

And fans like me took days, weeks, even months or years to get our heads around the fact that this was really happening. It wasn't a lost weekend, or a few days holed up somewhere, hiding from the fact that he had to go to the USA and be famous. (He'd told his Mum on the phone, the night before, that he really didn't want to do it.)

Was Richey now dead? No body ever surfaced as proof. Is he still out there in the world, watching from afar as the Manics filled stadiums?  It's a comforting notion. But he'd also be witnessing his distraught family's periodic appeals, and Richey wasn't the type to let someone suffer so badly on his behalf, especially his family.

These are questions which have filled a limbo for twenty years. We're no closer to knowing. But I wish we were.