The Holy Bible 9781501331701, 9781501331732, 9781501331718

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THE HOLY BIBLE Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration —The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough —Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love—NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do 1 well to check out Bloomsbury’s “333” series of books—Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http:​//www​.bloo​msbur​y.com​/ musi​cands​ounds​tudie​s Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: Hamilton by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Switched on Bach by Roshanak Kheshti Timeless by Martin Deykers Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner Blue Lines by Ian Bourland Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler xx by Jane Morgan Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick Boy in Da Corner by Sandra Song Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal and many more… 

The Holy Bible

David Evans

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright ©  David Evans, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. 121 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. Cover design: 333sound.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-3170-1 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3171-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-3172-5 1

Series: 33 3

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For Ed and Elma

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Contents

Track Listing Prologue

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Introduction 1 Scars 13 The Bigger Things 27 The Preacher 39 This is Yesterday 53 Machines 65 Into the Black 79 Portals 93 Cardiff Afterlife 103 Epilogue 117 Acknowledgements Notes Resources

121 122 135

Track Listing

  1. Yes (5:00)   2. Ifwhi​teame​ricat​oldth​etrut​hforo​neday​itswo​rldwo​uldfa​ llapa​rt (3:40)   3. Of Walking Abortion (4:01)   4. She is Suffering (4:43)   5. Archives of Pain (5:29)   6. Revol (3:04)   7. 4st 7Ib (5:05)   8. Mausoleum (4:12)   9. Faster (3:55) 10. This is Yesterday (3:57) 11. Die in the Summertime (3:05) 12. The Intense Humming of Evil (6:12) 13. P.C.P. (3:56)

The jungle is alive and I am scared of what I will find in it and what it will find in me – but I must go on. I realise it’s noon, and that time is running backwards again. —Peter Milligan, Kano, 2000 AD #830, 1993

Prologue

It’s an odd place for a rock concert. Squatting in the centre of the Welsh capital, Cardiff Castle is part ancient relic, part Gothic-revivalist fantasy. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Marquess of Bute used his coal-mining fortune to convert some rambling Norman-era ruins into a luxurious private residence, complete with bell tower and flying buttresses. And now, on a stage that sits incongruously upon the manicured lawns, Manic Street Preachers are engaged in a gothic revival of their own. ‘In these plagued streets of pity you can buy anything!’, bawls singer James Dean Bradfield, carving out power chords on his low-slung Les Paul. To his left is bassist Nicky Wire, silent and lugubrious behind aviator shades. Watery green light filters in through camo-coloured drapes, lending Sean Moore’s drum kit a sickly, sub-aqueous tinge. Devotees jump up and down in the front row, twirling their feather boas aloft. Further back, punters watch with an air of bemusement, sipping warm beer in the early evening sunshine. A pause. ‘This is The Holy Bible. … It’s not, er, a summer garden party album’, says Bradfield, a little apologetically. During ‘Mausoleum’, a song about Dachau, the novelist J. G.

P R O L O G U E

Ballard’s plummy English voice is piped in over the speakers: ‘I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and then force it to look in the mirror.’ Meanwhile, lads who’d grown drunk waiting for ‘You Stole the Sun from My Heart’ stumble into the portaloos to throw up. But then there’s a shift in mood. The sun sinks behind the battlements and that familiar riff issues from the amp-stacks, bracing as an Arctic wind: ‘Faster’. And suddenly the band have whipped the crowd into such a frenzy that you fear the whole ersatz edifice will come tumbling down on their heads. Wire allows himself a wry smile. Later, after an interval, the Manics return to the stage to play a very different, more relaxed set of songs. ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’ draws whoops of recognition. Bradfield picks out the Welsh national anthem on his guitar. Fireworks erupt during a climactic rendition of ‘A Design for Life’, illuminating the ramparts in charming pinks and purples. Wire tries to smash up his bass, but fails miserably; his back is giving him gyp. He heads backstage for a paracetamol and a cup of tea. The fans cheer him off, before filing out over the castle’s drawbridge and down towards the lights of St. Mary Street, humming the hits, those early songs from that old, old album almost forgotten. Almost.

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Introduction

Manic Street Preachers never exactly fit in. When they emerged from South Wales with their debut album Generation Terrorists in 1992, their leopard-print outfits, political sloganeering and widdly-woo guitar riffs already seemed out of date amid the musical movements du jour: Madchester, Shoegaze, Grunge. Critics tended to dismiss them as a quirk of pop history, about as relevant to the zeitgeist as that other Welsh throwback, Shakin’ Stevens. But when The Holy Bible came out, in August 1994, it felt more than just anachronistic. Rarely has a major record been so spectacularly out of step with its cultural moment. This, after all, was the year Britpop took off; the year of girls-whodo-boys and boys-who-do-girls; the year of the New Lad and his lairy pursuit of sex and drink; the year a former barrister named Anthony Blair began remaking the Labour Party in his own primped, twinkle-toothed image. The dominant mood was a sort of willed optimism. ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, as D:Ream helpfully put it.

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In this jovial atmosphere, Manic Street Preachers made an album that elevated deep thought to something like a moral imperative. At a time when Blur’s Damon Albarn was telling Loaded magazine he’d given up on reading in order to concentrate on ‘football, dog racing and Essex girls’, The Holy Bible urged us to ‘analyse, despise, scrutinize’. A photograph on the back cover of the LP depicted the band in military outfits and smeared face paint. They looked earnest and slightly gaunt, like extras from a war film who’d been secretly shooting up between takes. Sonically, too, the Manics stood apart. The favoured production style of the era, typified by Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, was lush, expansive. The Holy Bible, by contrast, sounded harsh and claustrophobic; listening to it felt like being trapped in the bowels of a giant machine, surrounded by clanking pistons and rattling rivets and vats of bubbling oil. It was the kind of music the post-punk pioneers might have made – although even Ian Curtis would probably have looked at a song title like ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ and deemed it a tad overdone. The man chiefly responsible for The Holy Bible’s exaggerated seriousness was Richey Edwards, the Manics’ waif-like guitarist, lyricist and wit. Richey was treated for depression, alcohol addiction and a suspected eating disorder soon after he finished writing the album’s lyrics, and they refer obliquely to his own experience. But his songs also peer outwards, addressing issues that lie beyond the scope of traditional rock: capital punishment, suicide, gun violence, political correctness, religious fundamentalism, genocide, the sexual proclivities of dictators, Cold War paranoia. Like 2

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Sylvia Plath, Richey runs together personal traumas and world-historic tragedies, often in the same lyric. Part of his intention was to puncture the sense of complacency he saw in Britain in the mid-1990s. First teaching of The Holy Bible: Things Can Actually Get Worse. The Manics had always written about heavy subjects, or ‘culture, alienation, boredom and despair’, as they once defined their own thematic territory. Nevertheless, it was clear from the opening track of The Holy Bible, ‘Yes’, that there was a new element of danger in their work, and maybe even the band themselves didn’t know quite where it would lead them. An adulatory review in Select magazine concluded on a prophetic note: ‘Let’s hope [Richey] realises that, with a record of such unsettling, morbid resonance as The Holy Bible, no further gestures are required.’ On 1 February 1995, as the Manics prepared to travel to America to promote the album, Richey vanished. Two weeks later, his grey Vauxhall Cavalier was found in a car park near a bridge that spans the Severn estuary between England and Wales. Fans sifted the lyrics for clues to his whereabouts, but to no avail. Richey remains missing, presumed dead. In his absence, The Holy Bible has been likened to Joy Division’s Closer and Nirvana’s In Utero: the valedictory statements of brilliant, troubled young men. The comparison is inexact, though, because the stories of Curtis and Cobain have a finality that Richey’s lacks. As the journalist Taylor Parkes once wrote, when the Manics could have been the full stop at the end of rock ’n’ roll, they chose instead to scribble a question mark… *** 3

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… or maybe it was an ellipsis. Just as Joy Division adapted their sound and continued as New Order following Curtis’s suicide, so the three remaining Manic Street Preachers went on to achieve substantial commercial success after their friend’s departure. Their rapprochement with the rock mainstream after 1994 was considered an act of unforgivable apostasy by the so-called Cult of Richey, a loyalist element of the band’s fan-base. But to my mind their post-Edwards career was distinguished by something more like a negative theology. They paid tribute to The Holy Bible by averting their eyes from it, speaking around it. At first, it is true, the Manics sounded nothing like the band they used to be. Though their magnificent comeback album Everything Must Go used lyrics Richey left behind, its clashing brass and surging strings were more akin to ELO than PiL. Their biggest seller, This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, featured – wait for it – a whistling solo. By the late 1990s, having forsaken androgyny and power chords for casual sportswear and tasteful acoustic fretwork, they had begun to be tainted by association with the dregs of Britpop. To anyone who was unaware of their history, the Manics appeared to be little different from Stereophonics or Travis or Ocean Colour Scene (now there’s a litany of horrors to rank with anything on ‘Archives of Pain’), or sundry other guitar bands that chugged along in the wake of the Gallaghers’ big, ponderous mothership. The Manics had become almost as big as Oasis, and almost as ponderous. They rounded out the decade with two Number One singles, a headline slot at Glastonbury and a sell-out show to celebrate the turn of the millennium at 4

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Cardiff ’s rugby stadium, where beery mayhem outweighed any lingering fin-de-siècle angst. But then came Know Your Enemy, an awkward record that aimed to recapture the punk ethos of the Richey years; listening to it was gruesomely compelling, like watching a paunchy thirty-five-year old try to pull on an old pair of jeans. A tenth-anniversary reissue of The Holy Bible followed, and later, Journal for Plague Lovers, which set some of Richey’s unused lyrics to new music. By 2014 the Manics were ready to go all the way: they would mark the twentieth birthday of the Bible by playing the album live and in sequence. The tour culminated in a homecoming gig the following summer, beneath the watchful eyes of the gargoyles at Cardiff Castle. Anniversary concerts are a funny thing. They threaten to turn pop music – whose greatest strength has always been to catch an instant as it passes, to distil a sense of now – into a musty and reminiscent artefact. As Simon Reynolds has observed, British culture’s twenty-first-century obsession with revivals and remakes may indicate a deeper creative exhaustion.1 But given the harrowing nature of The Holy Bible – and its personal resonances – the Manics’ decision to play it live was clearly not a straightforward case of nostalgia (and considering its relative commercial failure the first time round, still less a cashing-in). Watching these three ageing rock stars re-enacting their finest hour in the Welsh capital, I was reminded of a poem by R. S. Thomas. In ‘Welsh Landscape’, Thomas accuses his compatriots of being preoccupied with the past: Wales, he writes, is a land of ‘towers and castles’, whose people take an unseemly pleasure in ‘worrying the carcase of an old song’.2 5

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But those arid lines don’t quite capture what was going on during that June evening in Cardiff. As James Dean Bradfield hopped about on stage beneath the crenellated walls, fingers scurrying spiderishly up the neck of his guitar, he was conjuring the old songs into vigorous new life. There was solemnity, yes, but also a little self-deprecating humour. The occasion wasn’t fun, exactly, but it wasn’t mournful either. The swells of emotional tension and release were extraordinary. The air fairly crackled. *** The story of The Holy Bible is the story of four young men learning to come to terms with history: the world’s and their own. In this book I want to tell that story. I’ll be exploring how the album was made, how it fits into the shape of the Manics’ career, and how it relates to wider culture. This means that, like the band themselves, I’ll be speaking around The Holy Bible almost as much as I speak directly about it. (If you’re looking for a more detailed and forensic investigation of the lyrics than is provided here, I can highly recommend the recent book Triptych, a collection of longform essays on the album.)3 For my purposes, I assume no prior knowledge; my hope is that readers who are new to the record might come away with a sense of why it means so much to so many people. For the initiated, meanwhile, I aim to offer a fresh perspective. If I have an argument to make, it’s that there is a certain unacknowledged Welshness to The Holy Bible. The Manics’ Cymric turn is generally agreed to have come later in their career, when they began to fly the red dragon on stage and 6

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opine on the composition of the Welsh Rugby Union squad.4 In the Richey era, they disavowed Wales and embraced a European outlook. They would have approved of Dylan Thomas’s quip about the land of his fathers, to the effect that his fathers could have it. Look closer, though, and you see The Holy Bible is altogether drenched in Welsh drizzle. The Manics hail from a region known colloquially as the Valleys, whose ridged landscape harbours rich veins of coal. In the nineteenth century a network of mines opened, unleashing an economic boom. But by the time the band formed in the mid-1980s the Valleys had endured decades of industrial decline, and Margaret Thatcher’s drive to shut down the remaining collieries precipitated unrest. Today South Wales is battered and neglected, its lovely countryside studded with some unlovely towns. Richey’s lyrics allude to economic ruin, social decay and cultural loss, in the Valleys and beyond. The Welsh have a word for this sort of compulsion to look back: hiraeth (pronounced ‘here-eye-th’). The term is often misunderstood. It’s come to be associated with a mawkish pining among the Taff diaspora – Dylan in New York, seeking Laugharne in the bottom of a whiskey glass; Richard Burton sunbathing in Puerto Vallarta, dreaming of the Port Talbot mists – but hiraeth has more to do with time than place. As the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru (University of Wales Dictionary) has it, hiraeth encompasses a sombre palette of emotions including ‘grief or sadness after the lost or departed, longing, yearning, nostalgia’, as well as wistful homesickness.5

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The Holy Bible is full of ‘grief or sadness after the lost or departed’, the darker species of hiraeth. ‘The Intense Humm­ ing of Evil’ and ‘Mausoleum’ are written for history’s victims; they are, in part, songs of mourning and remembrance. And there is that simpler sense of ‘longing’ or ‘yearning’ for the past on those lyrics in which Richey slips into the voice of an older man, such as ‘Die in the Summertime’, whose rheumyeyed narrator strains to recall happier times: ‘Childhood pictures redeem, clean and so serene  /  See myself without ruining lines / Whole days throwing sticks into streams.’ Much has been said about the Manics’ saturnine, backwards-looking tendency. But that’s not the whole picture. There’s another Welsh word: hwyl (‘who-will’). It denotes an access of inspiration and energy, an ‘oratorical, passionate fervour’.6 Think of Burton declaiming Shakespearean monologues in his pomp: eyes aflame, brow beaded with sweat, every word he speaks springing the coiled potential from the last. Richey’s melancholy, reflective lyrics are punctuated by others that thrum with hwyl, in which he is alive to possibility, flexing his lyrical muscles and using his command of language to create anew. Tellingly, ‘Faster’, the album’s centrepiece, contains both of these moods. Richey revisits adolescent anguish (‘soft skin, now acne, foul breath, so broken’) and proclaims his power to shape the present with his eloquence: ‘I am an architect … stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer / I spat out Plath and Pinter.’ Like ‘Faster’, The Holy Bible as a whole oscillates between hiraeth and hwyl. I’ll be referring back to these two words throughout the book. No doubt readers with a surer grasp of the Welsh 8

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language than I will quibble with my usage. Others will, perhaps, feel a cultural cringe, given that hiraeth and hwyl have become rather sentimentalized markers of Welsh identity. To be clear, I have no truck with nationalism; I have in mind a more specific, regional point of view. Nor do I wish to trap The Holy Bible within any kind of reductive prison of Celtic interpretation. My guiding idea is simply that hwyl and hiraeth will help us to explain how an album that traverses such gloomy themes can sound so utterly, wonderfully lifeaffirming. The Holy Bible’s roots in South Wales might also account for how distinctive it was, in the days of Blair and Blur. Take the record’s gestures to post-punk. Earlier in the Manics’ career, Bradfield’s high-powered riffage had emulated Slash – or, at his most indulgent, Steve Vai – whereas on the Bible he is closer to Bernard Sumner or John McGeoch, whose silken guitar work threaded a link between Public Image Ltd., Siouxie and the Banshees and Magazine. Sean Moore’s drums evoke early Simple Minds. Nicky Wire’s bass-lines wriggle in the loam at the bottom of the mix, like Jah Wobble’s. That the Manics turned to the music of the late 1970s and early 1980s on The Holy Bible was no accident. The skittish rhythms of post-punk were perfect for conveying Richey’s lyrical manoeuvres between stasis and propulsion. What’s more, many of the bands of the post-punk era were, like the Manics, based outside of London’s metropolitan centre, hailing either from the industrial cities of the Midlands and the North (Gang of Four, Bauhaus, Joy Division, Magazine) or Scotland (Simple Minds, Orange Juice, the Skids). The Holy Bible can be seen as a belated Welsh contribution to 9

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post-punk, one informed by the band’s own experience in the Thatcher-ravaged mining towns of the Valleys. Above all, The Holy Bible shares an ethos with the postpunk groups, a determination to ‘question everything’, to use Reynolds’s phrase.7 This sceptical stance is part of the reason why it stood out as it did at a time when pop music was replete with affectation and irony. It also explains why the album has traditionally appealed to girls and boys in their teens. Isn’t questioning everything the default mode of the moody teenager? *** Moody teenagers like me, I suppose, back in the early years of the new century. I can’t remember the first time I heard the Manics – I was uninterested in music when they were all over the radio in the late 1990s. But I remember the first time I listened to them. I was fourteen, and was playing ‘A Design for Life’ on repeat through tinny earphones while staying with my grandparents in the Valleys town of Merthyr Tydfil. I no longer lived in Wales, having long since moved with my parents and siblings from Cardiff to a dull commuter town in the Home Counties. I was studious, but hated my school – a big comprehensive in which keeping your head down was the preferred survival tactic. Problem was, my head was covered in conspicuous ginger curls. And my soft skin was riddled with acne, which didn’t help either. My school was the kind of place that made you ashamed of how you looked, how you thought. You quickly learned to stuff any evidence of academic achievement down the bottom of your rucksack. 10

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Enter Manic Street Preachers. Here was that rare thing: a reader’s band. ‘Libraries gave us power’, they sang. ‘A Design for Life’ was the gateway drug, leading me towards the earlier, harder stuff, and The Holy Bible was hardest of all. I sought out all its reference points: Orwell, Plath, Ballard. I read up on Soviet iconography. I discovered Sartre’s Nausea, whose lonely young protagonist is mocked for his red hair (I winced in sympathy). I flicked through Miller and Mailer, swallowed Plath and Pinter. The album was like a portal through which you tumbled into the vaults of the literary canon. You blinked, dusted yourself off, set to work. I was by no means the only one. The Holy Bible had a huge impact on a generation of kids for whom reading came to be associated with a rock ’n’ roll frisson. As well as investigating where the album came from in this book, its cultural allusions and musical influences, I’ll be exploring its afterlives, the effect it has had on its creators and fans since its release. Here, too, that hwyl/hiraeth dichotomy will come in useful. For some, the record was a galvanizing force. For others, Richey’s fixation on death and loss was not a salutary example. As for me, The Holy Bible brings a mixture of happy and not-so-happy memories. But standing in the crowd at Cardiff Castle, I was transported back to a deliriously exciting phase of my teenage years, when I would return time and again to the album’s first song. The title suddenly rang true. Because as I listened, and the questions proliferated like strange blooms, and I cast around for answers in films and books and music – most of all this music, this dark, exhilarating music – one word came repeatedly to mind, and the word was … Yes. 11

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Scars

Blackwood is scarred industrially, economically and politically. Everything about Blackwood stands as a reminder of fifteen years of decay. That affects your worldview for the rest of your life, wherever you go. —Richey Edwards, 19941 To his schoolmates at Oakdale Comprehensive, Nicholas Jones presented something of an enigma. Known as ‘Wire’, on account of his sinewy frame, he was simultaneously a bookish introvert and a lavishly talented, show-pony footballer. At home he dressed up in his mother’s blouses; out in Blackwood he strutted about with his hair spiked up in tribute to Sid Vicious. Friends informed him he looked more like Limahl from Kajagoogoo. In his early teens, Nicky snubbed a trial at Arsenal in London – a self-described ‘mummy’s boy’, he feared travelling so far from home – and turned his attention from sport to poetry, partly by way of response to political events on his doorstep. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government had been slashing subsidies for the coal industry, wreaking economic havoc on South Wales and other mining districts

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across Britain. In March 1984, Arthur Scargill, chief of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), announced a strike. Blackwood was particularly hard hit when the pickets went up. Nicky’s father, an ex-miner who had been forced to retrain as a builder during an earlier round of pit closures, gathered the family to watch the BBC’s television coverage of the demonstrations. Orange plastic buckets were passed around at Oakdale to collect loose change for the miners’ cause.2 But, in March 1985, the strike ended in defeat. Several pits closed around Blackwood and local unemployment rose to Steinbeckian levels. The despondent atmosphere fed into the first Manic Street Preachers song. Shortly after the strike, Nicky met his friend James Dean Bradfield during the school lunch break. The pair had discussed forming a song-writing partnership, and Nicky shyly produced his first effort; it was a poem-cum-lyric scrawled in his looping cursive, with the title ‘Aftermath ’85’. ‘There was something about “that so-called woman”, which was obviously about Margaret Thatcher’, James recalled. ‘I think he was plotting her downfall even then. I went home that night and wrote my first ever song. ... [That’s] where it all started, I suppose’.3 ***

Overlooked by medieval churches and mouldering mines, Blackwood lies 13 miles from Cardiff in the Sirhowy Valley, Monmouthshire. Founded in the early nineteenth century by John Hodder Moggridge, an English industrialist, it was originally conceived as a model village, with cottages and allotments leased to families at more-or-less affordable rents. 14

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As new coal seams were discovered in the Valleys, collieries and ironworks opened and thousands of people entered the region to find work. The landscape was transformed. Hills were gouged and crested with slag heaps, trees were felled and tar-black chimneys went up in their place. Exploitation was rife and living conditions appalling. On a visit to nearby Merthyr Tydfil in 1850, Thomas Carlyle – not a writer known for soft humanitarian sympathies – was aghast at the sight of ‘fifty thousand grimy mortals, black and clammy with soot and sweat ... ah me! It is like a vision of Hell, and will never leave me, that of these poor creatures toiling all in sweat and dirt, amid their furnaces, pits and rolling mills’.4 The grimy mortals were housed in sandstone terraces that settled in undulations along the slopes. Class-consciousness blossomed, and Blackwood became a stronghold of Chartism, a movement aimed at obtaining political rights and influence for the workers. In November 1839, a group of Chartists met at the Coach and Horses tavern to plot a rebellion that became known as the Newport Rising. Nearly 10,000 miners marched down through the rain-lashed Valleys to the Westgate Hotel in the centre of Newport, where they demanded the release of Chartist prisoners. The Queen’s soldiers opened fire on the crowd and twenty-two men were killed; after the cordite fug had dissipated, more than 200 were arraigned. It was the last mass-treason trial in British history. The miners continued to organize following the Chartists’ defeat and conditions gradually improved, although the work remained treacherous. In 1920, Parliament started a Miners’ Welfare Fund, financed by a tax on coal production, 15

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which directed money towards swimming baths, welfare halls and scholarships. The miners themselves authorized wage deductions to pay for cultural institutes that stocked collections of literature and screened films. The Blackwood institute, opened with funds raised by Oakdale Colliery in 1925, featured an auditorium, a dance floor, a library and reading rooms. ‘The miners’ institutes of South Wales were one of the greatest networks of cultural institutions created by working people anywhere in the world’, writes Jonathan Rose in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Other places in Britain established similar organizations, but ‘there was a special ferment in the South Wales coalfields, rooted in [a] peculiar cultural environment’.5 Wales had a long tradition of weaver-poets and troubadours, and the country’s pervasive nonconformist Christianity encouraged reading and selfimprovement. Icons of culture and politics emerged. Richard Burton, a coal-miner’s son, rose from the pit-town of Pontrhydyfen to become Hollywood’s richest star. Aneurin Bevan, a collier who selected books for the miners’ library in Tredegar, went on to found the NHS as Health Minister in Clement Atlee’s post-war government. Regional pride coexisted with a commitment to internationalism: in the 1930s, hundreds of Welsh miners joined volunteer militias to fight against General Franco’s fascists in Spain. But as the mining industry declined in the second half of the twentieth century, so too did the miners’ institutes and the communities they served. Successive governments did little to provide alternative sources of employment and 16

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the area slowly depopulated. The leavings of the mines still marked the landscape, rendering it desolately beautiful – and dangerous. In 1966, a spoil tip loosened by rainwater slid onto the village of Aberfan near Merthyr, killing 144 people, most of them schoolchildren. An inquiry blamed the National Coal Board for extreme negligence, although Aberfan was made to pay for it: £150,000 was lifted from a memorial fund for the victims to clear the remaining tips. The money was only returned to the fund thirty years later. In the 1970s, the critic Raymond Williams sardonically imagined a future for the region as a vast heritage site, like the Welsh folk museum at St. Fagan’s writ large: ‘A nostalgic colliery cage would rise beyond the tannery. An out-ofdate ironworks would share a stream with the weaving. A depressed and ravaged country ... would find its cultural reincarnation in the lovingly preserved material relics of an open-air museum’.6 And as the Manic Street Preachers observed, a museum is what the place resembled by the time of the Miners’ Strike, a last great flourish of workingclass resistance. In James’s account, ‘Aftermath ’85’ was concerned not with the violence and recriminations of the pickets but with ‘the debris left after [the strike]’,7 which only added to the industrial detritus that littered the Valleys, the tumulus-like lumps of slag, the rusted vertebrae of dead machinery. Growing up in these surroundings tinged the Manics’ approach to politics, though not in any straightforward way. While they were angry at the way their community had been treated, didactic ‘Red Wedge’ protest anthems were never their style. They had seen the marches, heard 17

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the speeches, tasted the defeats and came away wanting to write about the emotional and historical dimensions of political engagement. A common strand of DNA connects the first Manics effort with later songs such as ‘The View from Stow Hill’ (2014), which examines the traces of the Newport Rising in the pocked brickwork of the Westgate Hotel: ‘You can still see the bullet holes, you can still sense a little hope / Crushed dreams and the martyrs too / Silent, ghostly, still so confused.’ The disillusionment evident in those lines will be familiar enough to anyone who has lived in a decaying industrial town, from Sheffield to Wigan to Glasgow. But in Nicky’s eyes the Welsh experience was distinct, had a particular flavour. ‘Our angst springs from coming from South Wales’, he told Q magazine in 2007. ‘It’s a longing encapsulated in the Welsh word hiraeth. The Irish can usually see the better side of things. They have a sense of wonder. The Welsh don’t. We think everything is going to turn out shit.’ Like many people educated in South Wales in the 1970s and the 1980s before the revival of the language, the Manics are not native speakers, but hiraeth, like cwtch (snug, or cuddle) and bach (small), is one of those Welsh terms that have seeped into everyday life in the anglicized Valleys. As Nicky points out, the word implies both a plaintive yearning and a morbid tendency to linger on desolation and loss. It’s not difficult to see how hiraeth could take hold in a place where the ravages of history are visible in the contours of the land, and abandoned factories and ruined churches stand as reminders of a vanished era. ***

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The effect of the Miners’ Strike on the young Manics was all the more poignant because it represented the end of a peaceful childhood. The four members of the band all went to Pontllanfraith Junior School and Oakdale Comprehensive, and would meet for football matches on a pitch owned by a nearby factory. Nicky and James were joined by two older boys: James’s cousin Sean Moore, who had moved in with the Bradfields after his parents’ divorce, and Richard Edwards, known as ‘teddy’ for his cuddly demeanour. Richey was from a family of Methodists, who took him to church three times a week from the age of seven. There he was drilled in the Old Testament by nonconformist preachers. Although he stopped attending when he hit his teens, he was able to quote swathes of Leviticus and Ecclesiastes into adulthood. He later spoke of the influence of those ‘fire-andbrimstone’ sermons on The Holy Bible. Academically precocious, Richey escaped from the Book in novels: George Orwell was a particular favourite. Invited to sit the entrance examination for a scholarship to a prestigious private boarding school in Monmouth, he passed easily, but then decided to stay on at Oakdale with his friends. He and Nicky achieved among the best GCSE results in the school. The others focused on music: Sean was a member of the South Wales Jazz Orchestra – he played the cornet on NUM marches – and James was busy developing into a virtuoso self-taught guitarist. Soon after buying his first instrument he had learned to play by ear every lick and arpeggio on Exile On Main St. from ‘Rocks Off ’ to ‘Soul Survivor’. When Nicky handed him ‘Aftermath ’85’, then, he was ready to compose tunes of his own. 19

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Forming a band was one way to evade the boredom and occasional brutality of life in a small mining town. As James recalled, Blackwood could be a tough place for a group of androgynous teenagers who had already begun to try on glam-rock makeup: ‘Friday and Saturday nights were for fighting, getting pissed, fucking somebody up against a busstop. And then you had the Miners’ Strike, which was at some points pure violence.’8 The Manics aligned themselves with Blackwood’s traditions of literacy and self-education. Nicky’s brother, the poet Patrick Jones, worked in the local library, and he provided them with reading material: books gave them a way to explain the world around them, and the means of imagining a different one. For a while the band was more of an amorphous literary-theatrical collective known as ‘The Blue Generation’. They would convene at Pen-y-Fan Pond, a murky reservoir on the outskirts of town, to read the Beats and swig cider. Once they resolved to focus on music, they organized a line-up that featured James on lead guitar and vocals, Nicky on rhythm guitar, Sean on drums and a punk named Miles ‘Flicker’ Woodward on the bass. Another friend, Jenny Watkins-Isnardi, briefly joined as a singer in the summer of 1987, but Richey was not yet officially involved. (Letters he wrote around this time suggest he moved in separate social circles to the other Manics during their mid-teens, rather contradicting their later insistence that they were always an inseparable gang of four.9) To hone his vocal technique, James took to busking outside St. David’s Hall in Cardiff, where an elderly passer-by genially 20

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described him as a ‘manic street preacher’. Critics have pondered the eminent fitness of the name: it has been taken to denote the band’s ‘urban urgency’, their ‘amphetaminespiked renunciation of dreampop’s sleepiness’.10 That’s as may be, but the old Welsh fellow probably had in mind something closer to home than dreampop and amphetamines. He had clearly noticed a bit of hwyl in the young busker. In translation hwyl is just as slippery as hiraeth, but the novel Garthowen (1900), by Allen Raine (pseudonym of Anne Puddicombe), has the classic definition: it is a ‘peculiar gift’ of the ‘preacher’ characterized by ‘a sudden ecstatic inspiration, which carries the speaker away on its wings, supplying him with burning words of eloquence, which in his calmer and normal state he could never have chosen for himself ’. This ecstatic quality was associated with the rhetoric of Welsh politicians and churchmen, especially the kind of nonconformist ministers who left such an impression on the young Richey. Hwyl connotes a relish for language, an alertness to the inherent music of words. It also refers to a more general sense of creativity, snap and wit. Originally derived from a term for a breeze that inflates a ship’s sails, hwyl is all about forward momentum; it’s the energetic counterpoint to the retrospective gloom of hiraeth. ‘These are the poles of the Welsh condition, which swings perpetually between elation and despair,’ as the great travel writer Jan Morris puts it. ‘The Welsh fluctuate between hwyl and hiraeth, crests of exuberance and troughs of desolation’.11 I’m a little wary of Morris’s claims to have hit upon an immutable truth of the national character, but you can 21

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certainly trace those perpetual mood swings in the Manics’ work. And ‘crests of exuberance’ is as good a phrase as any to describe the scenes at their first live appearance, which came at the Crumlin Railway Hotel in early 1986. Clad in tight white jeans and t-shirts covered in spray-painted slogans, the band zipped through eight songs, including covers of The Undertones’ ‘Teenage Kicks’ and Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’. The crowd started hurling bottles in protest at the bum notes, and by the end of the gig the stage was covered in a mulch of broken glass. As far as the Manics were concerned, it could scarcely have gone any better. ***

Later that year, Richey left for Swansea University to study Political History. Although he got into the spirit of things during Freshers’ Week, he took his education extremely seriously. Most evenings he would retreat from the Students’ Union to his room to sip a vodka orange and work his way through another fat tome on Soviet-German interwar relations, the subject of his dissertation. (His tutor remembered him fondly as a ‘good, polite, pleasant student’ with an extra-curricular interest in fanzines.12) He eventually graduated with a 2:1, but struggled with anxiety during his exams. When Nicky moved to Swansea to pursue his own Politics degree he discovered Richey was scratching his forearms with compasses, ostensibly to aid his concentration while revising. The band came as a welcome distraction. Nicky had taken up the bass after Flicker was dropped, and Richey was invited to join the Manics as a rhythm guitarist. More important than his musical skills – rudimentary at best – were his 22

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sense of style, his knowledge of pop history and his ear for a soundbite. Words had a way with him. Richey and Nicky began writing lyrics together at their mildew-speckled digs in King Edwards Road. The Situationist movement that spurred the 1968 student protests in France – and, under the aegis of Malcolm McLaren, formed the intellectual basis of punk – was an early reference point, especially the practice of détournement, the mischievous redeployment of cultural materials in new contexts. It was left to James and Sean, the Manics’ musical wing, to smooth these angular screeds into songs. During the summer break from university, the four friends would convene on the Bradfield-Moore bunk bed in Pontllanfraith. Fuelled by a dyspeptic mixture of fish-finger sandwiches and Babycham, they devised a fresh template for Manic Street Preachers. Like Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust (‘a cross between Nijinsky and Woolworths’) they would combine high art and cheap glam; like The Clash and Public Enemy, their songs would be overtly political. Above all, they believed pop’s future lay in the untapped potential of its past. Richey took it upon himself to send out press releases to London music journalists, declaring the band to be ‘the only young kids in UK channel boredom to realise the future is in tight trousers, dyed hair and NOT the baggy loose attitude scum fuck retard zerodom of Madchester’. In 1989, one of the Manics’ breathless missives found its way to Steven Wells of the New Musical Express, who stifled a chuckle long enough to listen to the enclosed tape of their first single, ‘Suicide Alley’. He promptly made it his record of the week. The band arrived in London to play a clutch of 23

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pub gigs, and the ramshackle vigour of their performances caught the attention of Philip Hall, who signed them to his management company Hall or Nothing. Soon enough the Manics had a deal with independent label Heavenly, home of dance-pop trio Saint Etienne. The Heavenly singles remain among their finest work. First was ‘Motown Junk’, whose sleeve displayed the famous photograph of the rusted pocket-watch salvaged from the rubble of Hiroshima. Opening with a Public Enemy sample that announces imminent ‘revolution’, this spiky seven-inch sounded invigoratingly odd amid the apathetic bliss-pop of the era – like a deracinated punk trying to pick a fight on Ibiza Wednesday down the Haçienda. The lyric is both a farewell to South Wales (‘Numbed out in piss towns / Just wanna dig their graves’) and a left-wing tirade against pop icons: ‘I laughed when Lennon got shot. ... Songs of love echo underclass betrayal.’ The Manics’ taboo-breaking was calculated. They were willing to offend their listeners so long as it made them think – or at least yielded a decent headline in the NME. (As their notoriety grew, the magazine put them on the cover and asked readers ‘Do you really, sincerely love the Manic Street Preachers? Or do you want to kick their heads in?’) In the follow-up to ‘Motown Junk’, the deliciously self-referential ‘You Love Us’, the band addressed their critics directly: ‘You love us like a holocaust / Same marketing problem as EST.’ While the Manics were doing their best to put the ‘piss towns’ of Wales behind them, their music still cleaved to the patterns of hiraeth and hwyl. ‘You Love Us’ is introduced with a sample from ‘Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima’, 24

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Krzysztof Penderecki’s atonal tribute to those who died in the atomic bombing. But the song concludes in a very different mode, filching the drum track from Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’, over which James chants an ebullient anti-capitalist mantra: ‘Fall to pieces when you can’t buy / Die passive electorate, die die die!’ If ‘You Love Us’ begins by honouring the memory of those crushed by history, it ends by gambolling through the debris.

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The Bigger Things

I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife. … I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience, it should be relevant, and relevant to the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on. —Sylvia Plath1 In May 1991, journalist and DJ Steve Lamacq was sent by the NME to interview the Manics after a gig at the Norwich Arts Centre, a deconsecrated Gothic church located down a cobbled street near the city centre. An admirer of the band’s early singles, Lamacq had found their recent statements in the press a bit grandiose. The Manics had declared their first album, once they got around to recording it, would shift somewhere between sixteen million and thirty million copies. Then they would sell out Wembley Stadium and set fire to themselves on Top of the Pops. If they survived the immolation, they would split up. The Norwich concert showed world stardom was a way off yet. The band performed to a pitiful crowd of just

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forty people, and they were in low spirits when Lamacq arrived backstage. He told them they should put a stop to the attention-seeking tactics and get on with making records. The interview descended into an argument about authenticity: the Manics pointed to the political issues they explored in their lyrics – the class system, institutionalized corruption – while Lamacq insisted the glam image was distracting. Richey was intensely frustrated. Part of the reason the band adopted a cartoonish presentation was because they knew they’d never have been noticed otherwise – South Wales was too far off the rock map – and now that they had, they were facing questions about their integrity. After his bandmates left he cornered Lamacq to try to convince him they meant what they said. ‘We are for real. When I was a teenager, I never had a band who said anything about my life. That’s why we’re doing this. Where we came from, we had nothing.’ As Richey spoke, Lamacq belatedly realized he had been carving his forearm with a razor-blade. The bloody incisions spelled out the phrase ‘4 REAL’.2 Lamacq called for help and arrangements were made to take Richey to hospital, where he would receive seventeen stitches. But not before photographer Ed Sirrs captured the moment for posterity. Despite – or because of – what we know about Richey’s fate, it remains a starkly beautiful portrait. Affecting a pout, he rolls up the sleeve of his lilac blouse to reveal his injuries to the camera. The picture resembles those Caravaggesque paintings of Christ exposing his wounds, with its chiaroscuro play of light and dark, the knowing, serene expression on Richey’s face. 28

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Did his grisly display convince the doubting Thomases? It didn’t really matter. A week later the Manics signed a deal with Sony/Columbia Records for £250,000. *** Manic Street Preachers’ first LP, Generation Terrorists, was released on 10 February 1992. An eighteen-track double album, it ran wildly over budget. Strongly influenced by Guns N’ Roses, James and Sean took Nicky and Richey’s lyrics and set them to bicep-flexing West Coast rock, throwing in a hip-hop-style remix from Public Enemy’s producers The Bomb Squad, a spoken-word interlude from Patrick Jones and even a duet with a former porn star, Traci Lords, on the proto-feminist anthem ‘Little Baby Nothing’. Other potential collaborators, including Kylie Minogue – and, presumably, a Mariachi band – turned them down. For the most part reach exceeded grasp. Too often, James resorted to empty virtuosity, fingers fluttering frivolously over his frets, in place of a good tune. The lyrics were a muddle of catchphrases and slogans, more like an addled ransom note than the intended Situationist bricolage. Yet there were enough superior songs on the record to repudiate Lamacq’s charge of style over substance: ‘NatwestBarclays-Midlands-Lloyds’, a prescient attack on the banking system; ‘Methadone Pretty’, a combination of hair metal and Herr Marx (the opening line ‘I am nothing and should be everything’ is a quotation from the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right). Best of all was ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’. An ambivalent critique of capitalism propelled by an elegant, looping guitar figure, the song is somehow lavish and desolate 29

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at the same time, like fireworks over a coalfield. The standout line is ‘survival’s natural as sorrow’, which James delivers with something that sounds suspiciously like joy. Survive is what the Manics did. Generation Terrorists performed reasonably well, charting just outside the Top Ten, but it did not sell sixteen million copies. As their dreams of superstardom receded, the band concentrated on touring and had soon developed into a supremely exciting live act, a mixture of political rhetoric, rococo guitar riffs and inadvertent slapstick comedy. James offered a football analogy for their stage set-up: he was the industrious centre forward at the microphone, while Nicky and Richey hustled up and down the flanks like a pair of flamboyant wingers. They attracted a cult following. Fanzines proliferated, many of them dedicated to parsing the band’s allusions to politics and culture (the sleeve of Generation Terrorists paired each song with a literary quotation, from Ibsen to William Burroughs). And there was, of course, a less highbrow reason behind their growing popularity: their considerable sex appeal. Groupies followed them like flocks of migratory birds. En route to a concert in Germany, the band’s tour-bus was rammed on the motorway by an especially ardent fan, who abandoned her car and ran through the traffic in pursuit of Richey’s autograph. Richey James – to use his new stage name – was by now recognized as the Manics’ de facto leader. He symbolized the band without having much to do with the fiddly business of actually making music. It was Richey’s kohl-rimmed eyes that stared dolefully from the covers of the music weeklies and his catty wit that enlivened their interviews. ‘Where we 30

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come from in Wales there’s this nonconformist tradition where Methodists always hate Baptists more than they hate the devil,’ he told Simon Reynolds in The Observer. ‘In the same way, we will always hate minor indie groups like Slowdive more than we hate Adolf Hitler.’ The self-conscious, acne-ridden boy from the Valleys was becoming the consummate pop icon. ‘This isn’t retrospectively canonising him, but he really was one of those people who walk in a room and have an aura about them, particularly if you knew who he was, how intimidatingly intelligent he was,’ says Manics biographer Simon Price, one of the first journalists to take the band seriously. ‘He had sheer physical beauty. He looked amazingly cool, like the greatest rock star in the world.’ But Richey grew tired of the adulation almost as soon as the ink dried on that big-money contract. His scant involvement in the recording process meant he was often left with little to do except work on the sleeve design and polish his lyrics, and boredom bit. By the time the band arrived at a live-in studio in Berkshire to make the follow-up to Generation Terrorists, he was drinking heavily and damaging his arms with compasses, razors and cigarette ends, indicating that the ‘4 Real’ incident was not – or not simply – a case of rock ’n’ roll exhibitionism. In interviews, he dropped his acerbic persona and began to speak in nostalgic tones. At the grand age of twenty-four, he was already reminiscing about the halcyon days of his youth, when he and his friends would play football on the old factory pitch and clamber up the slag heaps. ‘The only perfect circle on a human body is the eye’, he told the NME. 31

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‘When a baby is born, it’s so perfect, but when it opens its eyes, it’s just blinded by the corruption and everything else is a downward spiral.’ It came as no surprise when the death of innocence turned out to form the dominant theme of Richey’s lyrics to the Manics’ second album, Gold Against the Soul (1993). ‘I don’t wanna be a man’, as he puts it on ‘Life Becoming a Landslide’, a stately power ballad that depicts adulthood as a lifeless tundra (‘Ice freezing, nature dead’). Similar ideas resurface on ‘From Despair to Where’, but here the tune is more uplifting, a guitar riff and a boisterous string arrangement playing rough-and-tumble to catch the listener’s attention. ‘Roses in the Hospital’ is the record’s key track. Set to a propulsive glam-funk melody, the lyric is written from the perspective of a self-abusive patient in a hospital ward, whose thoughts turn to bigger things: ‘This century achieved so much / To make a voice no voice at all.’ When he first read it, Nicky understood this to refer ‘to the whole working-class democratic trade-union [tradition] … from Scargill to us’.3 He’s right about the class dimension in that line, but it’s also a good example of how Richey’s lyrics were becoming increasingly rich and multilayered, weaving in autobiographical elements alongside the political commentary in a way that foreshadowed The Holy Bible. When asked about the reasons for his own self-harm, Richey would variously hint that his cutting was a form of masochism, bringing him a near-sexual pleasure; or that the physical pain purged an inner turmoil, like a thunderstorm clearing the air. At other times he cited a more fundamental sense of voicelessness: ‘[It’s] really connected to the fact that 32

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you almost feel, like, silent, you have no voice, you’re mute. … Even if you could express yourself nobody would listen anyway.’4 In ‘Roses in the Hospital’, this feeling of futility is framed in terms of both psychological torment and class disenfranchisement. The song brings to mind Richey’s description of the band’s origins during his encounter with Lamacq (‘where we came from, we had nothing’). As well as its references to cutting and class struggle, ‘Roses in the Hospital’ gestures to a wider legacy of human suffering. Richey had been reading Sylvia Plath, whose posthumously published Ariel collection combines images of bodily mutilation with genocide and warfare: in ‘Daddy’, she imagines her tongue snagging on a barbed-wire snare at the Eastern Front. Similarly, Richey writes that ‘the West scratches onto my skin’, as if the welts on his forearms constituted the lurid outlines of a geopolitical map. He had come to see his own incipient depression as continuous with the sorrows of the world, from the economic devastation of the Valleys to the horrors of war. After flippantly invoking the Holocaust and Hiroshima in the Manics’ earlier work, he was now engaging with history in a more austere way. *** If Gold Against the Soul is troubled by the ghosts of the past, it features plenty of insurrectionary hwyl too. Nicky and Richey worked together on songs such as ‘Nostalgic Pushead’, which takes aim at the kind of sexist middle-aged men they came across in the music industry, while the title track is a tirade against a British Conservative government that would ‘close the pits’ and ‘dream of new ways to humble 33

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the poor’. A B-side from the period, ‘Comfort Comes’ (postpunk beat; svelte, vacuum-packed guitar sound), heralded a shift in musical direction. When it came to playing the album live, the Manics staged a sort of roving agitprop festival, bringing in two high-profile left-wing groups as support acts: Credit to the Nation, an anarchist rap collective best known for the racistbaiting single ‘Call It What You Want’, and Blaggers ITA, a ska-punk band fronted by reformed skinhead Matty ‘Blagg’ Roberts. Things went swimmingly until the first night. After a show at the Town and Country Club in Leeds, Roberts and his entourage confronted Melody Maker journalist Dave Simpson over an article that brought up his past in the British Movement. A scuffle ensued in which Simpson sustained serious injuries. The Manics denounced the violence and banned the Blaggers’ hangers-on, but the tour continued. In their own ragged way, the three bands were trying to highlight what they saw as a creeping complacency in British culture. At a time when the far-right British National Party was beginning to enjoy some electoral success, pop stars appeared happy to flourish the Union Jack – literally so in the case of Morrissey, who took to the stage at Finsbury Park in 1992 with the flag wrapped around his gold lamé shirt, delighting National Front activists in the crowd. Then as now, Moz had his apologists. In April 1993, a few months before the Gold Against the Soul tour got underway, Select magazine ran a cover story under the headline ‘Yanks Go Home!’, which made excuses for Morrissey and celebrated a new wave of home-grown acts such as Suede, Cud and Pulp, the vanguard of a movement that had already 34

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been given the name ‘Britpop’ by the syllable-averse tastemakers of the era. The design of the article was a pastiche of the Dad’s Army title sequence, with British bands cast as the Home Guard, repelling the incursions of Johnny Foreigner from America and Europe. Harmless enough, you might think, but in the Manics’ view all this flag-waving smacked of chauvinism. They would doubtless have agreed with their NME ally Steven Wells, who, in early 1994, argued that British music journalists’ deployment of such bulldog imagery was ‘at best naive and at worst casually racist … when Nazism and racism are undergoing a Europe-wide renaissance [it] verges on the contemptible’.5 The Manics saw signs of that renaissance when they played a series of live shows on the continent in the summer of 1993. Speaking to a US radio station soon after The Holy Bible’s release, James explained how this trip informed the album’s political themes: ‘There is a certain right-wing resurgence in Europe at the moment,’ he said, referring to ‘the nightmare’ of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National and the rise of the BNP closer to home. ‘The Second World War was barely 40 years ago. … What’s the point of being born if these things can come back?’6 In Germany the band visited the preserved concentration camps at Dachau and Belsen. They were all profoundly moved, especially Richey, whose studies in history had not entirely prepared him for the sight of the mass graves, or the iron gates at Dachau with their legend Arbeit Macht Frei. In October, the Manics reached Japan, where they visited the site of another twentieth-century atrocity: Hiroshima. 35

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Richey was fascinated by Japanese culture. He had been reading the fiction of Osamu Dazai and idolized Yukio Mishima, the writer, actor and filmmaker who instigated a tragicomic coup attempt against the government before committing seppuku in 1970.7 But the gruelling schedule was getting to him. He admitted he was going through a ‘bad period’,8 and in television interviews you could see the evidence in the archipelagos of cigarette-burns that spread across his arms. The gifts he was given by his adoring Japanese fans didn’t help matters. In Tokyo he received a ‘suicide doll’, accompanied by a sweetly written note asking when he was going to kill himself. Yet Richey ‘wasn’t just tortured’ during this time, according to Nicky. On the contrary, he was hitting ‘a peak of intelligence’, tearing through five books a week and filling journals with ideas.9 In early 1994, he moved out of his parents’ bungalow in Blackwood and into a new-build flat in Cardiff, where he could be alone to work. He sat at an Olivetti typewriter overlooked by a collage that fanned out over the walls, juxtaposing figures from history and culture: Travis Bickle levelled a gun at Ian Curtis; Kate Moss exchanged glances with Eric Morecambe; Marlene Dietrich draped the soldiers of Stalingrad in her furs.10 Richey continued to adopt a collage-like approach in his writing, too, compiling literary quotations to insert into his lyrics. He assembled a library of audio recordings that he had sampled from old films and television documentaries to complement each song. All this material was organized with a sense of thematic focus and discipline.

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For his part, Nicky was going through a brief creative lull. Recently married and immersed in blissful domesticity, he was happy to take a secondary role, contributing the odd line here and there. Surveying the issues Richey was writing about, he bestowed on the new record an appropriately cheery working title: ‘The Poetry of Death’.

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The Preacher

In the next two chapters I’m going to look at the lyrics to The Holy Bible, paying close attention to Richey’s use of language. I’ll examine the music separately, because that’s how the album was written, and because I think this approach does justice to each stage of what was a collaborative process. To be clear, I’m not trying to claim Richey as a poet, whose work stands inviolably apart from the contributions of the rest of the band. He wasn’t a poet any more than Sylvia Plath was a pop star. He paid little attention to form or structure, as poets must (even to disregard it); one line runs helter-skelter into the next, syllables pile up in knotty defiance of scansion. This is not intended as a criticism. The great thing about Richey’s lyrics isn’t that they aspire to poetry, it’s that they make you reconsider what lyrics can do. Many acclaimed lyricists – from Bob Dylan to P.J. Harvey, Joni Mitchell to Jay Z – are storytellers. Richey is more like an essayist or a speechwriter; he is usually addressing a subject and making an argument. In his 33 1/3 book on Gang of Four’s Entertainment!, Kevin J.H. Dettmar writes that each song on the album wrestles with an idea, functioning like a ‘think piece’.1 The same could be said of The Holy Bible, and part

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of what Richey was thinking about was a peculiar cultural moment. Around the same time as Richey was typing out his lyrics on his portable Olivetti, D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ hit Number One in the UK chart. The Northern Irish group had originally released the single to little fanfare the previous year, but in January 1994 a tweaked version of the song seemed to catch a shift in the national mood. Performing it on Top of the Pops, singer Peter Cunnah jumped around the stage with such puppyish exuberance he was out of breath by the time he took the mic. ‘I’ve found the cause’, he huffed, ‘and I think you could be my cure!’ So what was the cause of Britain’s ills in 1994, and where was the cure? John Major was still prime minister, having ousted Margaret Thatcher to lead the Conservatives to victory over Labour’s Neil Kinnock – Blackwood’s local MP – in the General Election two years earlier. But cracks had begun to show in the Tory hegemony. Major was an uninspiring, indecisive politician, and his administration somehow contrived to be boring despite all the sex scandals. The Conservatives gave the impression of being in office, but not in power, as the former chancellor Norman Lamont put it. By now the reverse was true of Labour. The new leader, John Smith, had built on Kinnock’s efforts to reposition the party towards the political centre ground, and he was considered by most commentators to be a prime minister in waiting. But after Smith died of a heart attack in May, the reformist baton fell to Tony Blair, a younger figure on the Labour right. Here was a politician made for the moment: stylishly coiffed, self-aware enough to add a hint of Estuary 40

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English to his public-school tones, as comfortable discussing royal protocol as he was teasing Noel Gallagher about his cocaine habit. Blair became Labour leader in July and immediately set about ‘rebranding’ the party to fit with the youthful, forwardlooking times. ‘New’ Labour would rid itself of Clause Four of its constitution, which outlined a commitment to common ownership of the means of production. The symbolism was obvious: the class conflicts of the 1980s lay behind us, and together we would march on towards the sunlit uplands of the liberal future. In 1997 New Labour romped to electoral victory with ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ as its official campaign song. Blair was keen to court the approval of pop stars from the beginning. During his speech at the 1994 Q awards, he told the audience that rock ’n’ roll is ‘an important part of our way of life’. And it didn’t take long for the Britpop aristocracy to welcome him as a kindred spirit. As John Harris writes in his fine account of the Blair-Britpop alliance, The Last Party, ‘Given that the indie world had always been loosely coupled with the political left, [Blur] and Blair were riding the same wave: a fervent desire for success, power and influence, expressed by people who had grown tired of living the ascetic lives of dissidents [in the 1980s].’2 The sense of change, with Labour streaking ahead in the polls and guitar music climbing high in the charts, generated real excitement. But it’s safe to say Richey despised everything this compact between pop and politics represented: the etiolated liberalism, the historical amnesia, the putative erasure of 41

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class difference, the lunkhead ‘reclamation’ of the British flag. Though his lyrics were written before Blair became Labour leader, he had seen which way the political winds were blowing. ‘I think the Labour Party are the biggest bunch of cunts on the planet’, he said in an interview with a fanzine in early 1994. ‘They’re selling everybody out, including themselves.’3 He branded Smith a ‘coward and a fraud’ for his attempts to reform the party. Having seen at first hand the failure of Labour politicians to resist the damage wrought by Thatcherism, Richey argued they should have become ‘more extreme’ in opposition. Richey didn’t like the Manics being portrayed as a Welsh band. He was fearful of what he called the ‘Kinnock factor’, in reference to the front-page headline in The Sun that mocked the Labour leader on the morning of the 1992 election (‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?’). And yet Richey’s lyrics to The Holy Bible are deeply marked by his formative experiences in South Wales. One way of looking at the album is as an attack on liberal attitudes from the perspective of a writer imbued with the hwyl of the Old Testament and the Old Left, the rousing rhetoric of soapbox and pulpit. *** Let’s start with ‘Faster’. The song is usually taken to be autobiographical, and to an extent it surely is. But it can also be read as a defence of working-class literacy against the kind of oikish stereotypes that were soon to become a Britpop commonplace. In the opening lines, the narrator contests his reputation as an unregenerate boor: 42

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I am an architect, they call me a butcher I am a pioneer, they call me primitive I am purity, they call me perverted. Like John Lydon before him (these lines carry an echo of ‘Anarchy in the UK’) Richey challenges the clichés of a scummy and illiterate underclass; his is ‘a truth that washes, that learnt how to spell’. And not just how to spell. In the chorus he goes so far as to assert his superiority over the whole literary establishment, like a marginalized scholar who gatecrashes a stuffy academic soirée to buttonhole the professors and upend the canapé trays: ‘I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer / I spat out Plath and Pinter.’ Had some ambitious avant-garde director made a film of ‘Faster’ in the 1990s, the central role might have been played by the likes of Robert Carlyle or David Thewlis. As Alwyn Turner observes, these actors spent the early part of the decade portraying ‘quick-witted, articulate men, with enough intelligence to resist the role of victim, but frustrated by their failure to find a place in society. … It was a type that occurred repeatedly in the culture of the era.’4 In fact Richey may have had Thewlis in mind when he wrote the song. In late 1993 he professed his admiration for Mike Leigh’s Naked, in which Thewlis plays the nastily erudite protagonist Johnny; Richey thought the film provided a necessary corrective to ‘patronising’, Carla Lane-style depictions of working-class life.5 If ‘Faster’s’ politics are mostly implicit, Richey’s Old Left stance is clearer on ‘P.C.P.’, whose title denotes, inter alia, the drug ‘angel dust’, police constables, the Portuguese

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Communist Party and political correctness. James Dean Bradfield has adduced the influence of the Welsh leftist tradition on this song, which he thought summed up Richey’s view that ‘the hard-driven Labour socialist attitude that came out of the Valleys is softening up, and we’re not quite fit for purpose at the moment’.6 Rather than a tiresome diatribe against ‘PC gone mad’, the thrust of ‘P.C.P.’ is that the dictums of political correctness are a distraction from true progressive work. ‘Systemised atrocity ignored as long as bilingual signs on view’, Richey writes, referring to how political resources in Wales were directed towards the (for him) trivial matter of Welsh-language road signs, even as the coalfields ran to ruin and unemployment spread like a virus. In brief notes to each song included in a programme distributed on The Holy Bible tour, he explained that PC ‘condemns the very [working-class] people it aims to save’. The critic and historian Rhian E. Jones, who has written widely on the Manics’ relationship to the cultural politics of the 1990s, unpacks Richey’s point in her excellent study of the album. She argues that ‘P.C.P.’ ‘targets, from a position of relative non-privilege, the cultural and political loss when language is flattened to an inoffensive and homogenous background noise’ by society’s gatekeepers.7 Jones points to the backlash against Glaswegian writer James Kelman’s novel How Late It Was, How Late, which won the Booker Prize in 1994 amid a chorus of broadsheet disgust over its demotic prose. The controversy highlighted how notions of ‘acceptable’ language were being used to delegitimize working-class voices at this time, even as working-class 44

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pastimes were being ransacked for their supposed cachet. (Think of Damon Albarn ostentatiously slumming it down Walthamstow dog track.) In response to the threat of being silenced, ‘P.C.P.’ summons a massive outpouring of linguistic energy, as if it were written under the influence of the euphoric drug with which it shares its name. There are allusions to high and low art (King Lear; the 2000 AD comic Judge Dredd), flourishes of surreal imagery and Biblical injunctions. There’s a relish in sound, with rat-a-tat alliteration and shifting assonance: ‘PC she says inoculate, hallucinate / Beware Shakespeare, bring fresh air.’ Richey is delivering a serious message, but there’s an element of glee in these lines. Like a preacher savouring the smooth vowels and hissing fricatives of his own oratory, he’s showing off, enjoying himself. *** The Labour Party wasn’t alone in its determination to move on from ideological battles in the mid-1990s. Shortly before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, American theorist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed ‘the end of history’, by which he meant the victory of the Western capitalist economic model over state-led alternatives. Over the following decade the phrase was co-opted as a liberal slogan, the Pol Sci equivalent of D:Ream’s Panglossian motto. As well as denouncing the empty euphoria of British culture, The Holy Bible takes issue with this wider political narrative. ‘Ifwh​iteam​erica​toldt​hetru​thfor​oneda​yitsw​orldw​ouldf​allap​ art’8 opens with a clip from an advert for a Republican fundraising event whose guests included Thatcher and Ronald 45

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Reagan, before proceeding to enumerate the social problems that linger on in the supposedly enlightened West. The lyric’s main target is the callousness of the pale, stale establishment: ‘Vital stats: how white was their skin?  /  Unimportant: it’s probably just another inner-city drive-by thing.’ But the song also criticizes the Brady Bill, or the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act, which was specifically introduced by the Clinton administration to curb gun crime. Richey appears to have opposed the law on two counts: first, that it was inherently unfair – black people found it more difficult to obtain gun licenses than whites – and second, that it was just another sop that did nothing to remedy the ‘systemised atrocity’ of racial inequality in America. Nevertheless, ‘Ifwhiteamerica...’ is emphatic that racism is not solely an American problem: ‘There’s not enough black in the Union Jack’, as the song puts it, paraphrasing the academic Paul Gilroy. As we have seen, the Manics thought the liberal optimism of the 1990s was masking a revival of nationalist sentiment in the UK and beyond, and it’s difficult not to read this line as a reaction to contemporary pop music’s unabashed embrace of the British flag. In a television interview in early 1994, the Manics described Morrissey’s flirtation with the BNP as the act of a ‘sad embittered old man’, and confirmed their involvement in an Anti-Nazi League concert in London. ‘I’ve studied history all my life’, said Richey. ‘[The Holocaust] is the most horrific event in world history. You’ve got to be prepared to say what you think.’9 Those visits to Dachau and Belsen in 1993, coupled with the 46

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evidence he had seen of a far-right resurgence across Europe, had a profound effect. Even as the West got drunk on the promise of political progress, Richey worried that history was shifting into reverse gear. Which brings us to ‘Revol’. This odd lyric matches twentieth-century politicians with various sexual acts (‘Brezhnev married into group sex’) before erupting into a series of barked slogans. Richey mentions Lebensraum (‘living space’), the ideology that drove the Nazis’ territorial expansion, and Kulturkampf (‘culture struggle’), a word originally coined to refer to the stand-off between Bismarck’s Prussian state and the Catholic Church. The chorus concludes with a pair of phrases in German and Italian (‘Raus raus [‘out, out’], Fila fila [‘get in line’]’), that are redolent of fascist aggression under Hitler and Mussolini. The overall tone is at once paranoid and comic, somewhere between The Night Porter and Carry On Up the Kremlin. The song is explicable, I think, in the context of Richey’s political concerns. The made-up title – an emasculated ‘revolution’, an inverted ‘lover’ – is an example of one of his lyrical tics on the album, a fondness for the prefix ‘re’ (‘regret’, ‘repented’, ‘recognized’, ‘reprised’, ‘revived’, ‘recovered’, ‘regain’, ‘remorse’). Derived from Latin, ‘re’ connotes repetition or backward motion; it often appears in the work of dark poets such as Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson, figuring the return of smothered emotions (as in Dickinson’s ‘Remorse is Memory awake’).10 With this in mind, the chorus of ‘Revol’ could be interpreted as a kind of Freudian nightmare of fascist politics, betraying Richey’s fears that the clock was winding back to the 1930s. 47

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Such anxieties were not as unusual as you might think in 1994. In April, a few weeks before the Manics played the antiNazi concert at Brockwell Park, Edward Luttwak published an essay in The London Review of Books entitled ‘Why Fascism Is the Wave of the Future’. Luttwak’s argument was that the ‘turbocharged capitalism’ unleashed by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s had brought the kind of dislocating changes that could create opportunities for extreme politicians; by ‘grinding down lives and grinding down established human relationships’, market forces were tearing holes in the social fabric through which fascists could poke their jackboots. (Perhaps significantly in this context, the essay also cited the rise of nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky amid the chaos of Russia’s post-Soviet economy.) But where Luttwak focused on economic reasons for these reactionary trends, Richey had begun to look deeper for the cause – in the depths of human nature itself. *** Richey admitted his lyrics betrayed the lingering influence of his Welsh nonconformist upbringing. ‘Religion has always been pretty central in my thoughts’, he told Stuart Bailie. ‘I’m surprised people think The Holy Bible is a strange title for an album. I was made to go to church when I was young ... some appallingly fat old man in his eighties [screaming] fire and brimstone in a little Welsh Elim Chapel.’11 Richey was not devout, but his writing is full of Christian iconography – donkeys, crucifixes, nails. And he seems to have absorbed an Old Testament conception of sin, along with a taste for the preacher’s hwyl, in the chapels of the Valleys. 48

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Take ‘Archives of Pain’. The title derives from a chapter of David Macey’s biography of the philosopher Michel Foucault, whom Richey believed to be an advocate of capital punishment. (This isn’t strictly true, but he was not wrong to detect an element of sadism in Discipline and Punish, Foucault’s baroque history of the penal system.) The song is, at first glance, an argument in favour of the death penalty, at least for serial killers such as Myra Hindley and Peter Sutcliffe, and fascists such as Zhirinovsky, Le Pen and Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, all names invoked in the song’s breathless chorus. The idea of rehabilitation is dismissed out of hand: ‘A drained white body hanging from the gallows / Is more righteous than Hindley’s crochet lectures.’ On the album, the track opens with a sampled quote from the mother of a Sutcliffe victim (‘God give life, God taketh it away…’) and the lyric imitates her Biblical phraseology. In his history of Welsh nonconformism, In the Shadow of the Pulpit, M. Wynn Thomas likens the all-seeing power of the Methodist god to the insidious surveillance methods described in Foucault’s work.12 That God-fearing sense of being watched, being judged, might explain some of the feverish tone of ‘Archives of Pain’. And there’s another Welshreligious echo in the song’s grotesque bodily imagery, which has some of the gothic tenor of Dylan Thomas’s poems of the 1930s (see in particular ‘All all and all’, with its phantasmagoria of worms, revivified corpses and bloodied machines). Critics have linked Thomas’s ‘Celtic Grand Guignol’ tendency to the ‘nonconformist repression’ that characterized his youth, as well as the political environment at a time when Europe was sliding inexorably towards totalitarianism.13 49

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A similar mingling of the religious and the political is evident in Richey’s lyric. Rather than a straight-faced call for capital punishment, I think ‘Archives of Pain’ is a rhetorical performance; it is designed to make us confront the idea that cruelty is a part of human nature, explaining the rise of serial killers and fascists alike. After all, the desire for vengeance parallels the murderous impulse itself. ‘If man makes death, then death makes man’, Richey writes, deploying a technique known as chiasmus or antimetabole, in which the second clause is the mirror image of the first. In form and content the line evokes the kind of reflection he wants his listeners to undertake. ‘There’s an overriding philosophy behind the whole album’, as Nicky later told the writer Dorian Lynskey. ‘Evil is an essential part of the human condition and the only way to get over it is by recognising all hypocrisies, all evils, recognising it’s in us all, which I guess is not a liberal view’.14 *** Many things set The Holy Bible apart during the Blair-Britpop summer of 1994: its obsessive wordiness, its acute historical awareness, its moral seriousness and its preoccupation with class. But most of all Richey’s lyrics were marked out by their confrontational tone. Trying to get at the reasons behind the peculiarly loose, postmodern mood that took hold in Britain in the mid-1990s, the sociologist Richard Hoggart observed that ‘the sense of external authority … has virtually gone; there are hardly any injunction-givers, finger-waggers, these days’.15 Well, in Richey Edwards the 1990s had found a finger-wagger extraordinaire. When he is in his fiery, hwyl mode, he leaves you feeling thrilled by the inventiveness of 50

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his language, awed by the scope of his knowledge and, at the end of it, slightly beaten-up. ‘Of Walking Abortion’ is the most terrifying of Richey’s spittle-flecked sermons. The title was inspired by the author Valerie Solanas, who is best known for shooting Andy Warhol. In her SCUM (‘Society for Cutting Up Men’) Manifesto, Solanas declared that man is an ‘incomplete female, a walking abortion’. Nicky wrote a first draft of the song that cleaved close to Solanas’s feminist viewpoint, but Richey revised it into a philippic against the entire species, which he depicts as stunted, malign and corrupt. The imagery recalls Orwell’s vision of the future: a boot stamping on the human face forever. Except in Richey’s version the boot is cheered on by a crowd of sweaty voyeurs, and the face betrays a flicker of masochistic pleasure: ‘Mussolini hangs from a butcher’s hook  /  Hitler reprised in the worm of your soul.’ His point seems to be that these dictators’ atrocities were only possible because millions of ordinary people colluded to make them so. He concludes with a bitter reproof: ‘Who’s responsible? You fucking are.’ There is a tension between Richey’s emphasis on innate human deficiencies, on the one hand, and his attention to political reasons for society’s problems on the other. And he surely knew that his view of people as inherently weak and abject – putty in the hands of dictators – was just as biased as the melioristic conception of humanity he wanted to contest. To introduce ‘Of Walking Abortion’ he chose a clip from an interview with Hubert Selby Jr., author of the novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, an unsparing portrayal of life in the American underclass. ‘I knew that someday I was gonna die’, says Selby, 51

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his voice cracking. ‘And I knew before I died, two things would happen to me. That number one I would regret my entire life, and number two, that I would want to live my life over again.’ As the academic Daniel Lukes has perceptively noted, Richey excised the second half of the interview, in which Selby spoke of his discovery of writing as a creative outlet. He emphasized the regret – and conveniently left out the hope.16 And here’s the thing: there was genuine hope in the mid1990s, despite the problems Richey anatomized in such pitiless terms on The Holy Bible. His fears that Western civilization would imminently collapse into fascism did not come to pass. Britpop yielded some decent records as well as a lot of crap ones. When that ‘bunch of cunts’ in the reformist Labour Party took office they implemented some important policies: the Minimum Wage; the educational initiative Sure Start; programmes that lifted millions of pensioners out of poverty; and devolution of powers from Westminster to the nations of the UK, including Wales. But as the twenty-first century has worn on, Richey’s angrier lyrics have attained a certain soothsaying quality. New Labour lost its lustre amid the bloodletting of the Iraq War. And thirteen years after The Holy Bible was released, turbocharged capitalism led to the financial crisis, the fallout from which appears to have uncovered some of the lurking horrors Richey wrote about. As I have been working on this book, the ‘Brexit’ vote has sparked hate crime; a racist demagogue has entered the White House; far-right MPs have taken up seats in the Bundestag; and Le Pen and Zhirinovsky have begun to slither across Europe’s headlines once again. Things can get better. They can also get worse. 52

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The Holy Bible is not all manic preaching. Richey’s lyrical broadsides alternate with more reflective songs that contain autobiographical resonances. Among them are ‘Mausoleum’ and ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’, which were inspired by the band’s visits to Dachau and Belsen in 1993. Disturbed by the eerie quiet of the German countryside surrounding the camps, Nicky and Richey collaborated on a first draft of ‘Mausoleum’ titled ‘No Birds’. But the final version is recognizably Richey’s work. There’s that characteristic tone of moral outrage, that supple authorial voice: Wherever you go I will be carcass Whatever you see will be rotting flesh Humanity recovered glittering etiquette Answers her crimes with Mausoleum rent. With the consonance in these lines (the repetition of the hard ‘t’ sound, accentuated in James’s vocal delivery), it’s as if Richey is tapping out an admonitory tattoo on the listener’s shoulder. He was probably influenced by Primo Levi’s ‘Song of Those Who Died in Vain’, a poem that was printed at his behest on the sleeve of Gold Against the Soul. Like Richey,

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Levi summons a chorus of the dead (‘We of the Marne, of Montecassino/Treblinka, Dresden and Hiroshima’), who threaten vengeance on history’s warmongers. Levi was one of Richey’s favourite writers. An Italian Jewish chemist and Holocaust survivor, he wrote sublime books about his experiences before his death (a presumed suicide) in 1987. Works such as If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table do justice to the heroism and dignity of the Nazis’ victims but, crucially, do not try to explain the Holocaust. In an addendum to his book The Truce, Levi wrote that the Nazis’ ‘words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. ... They are nonhuman words and deeds, really counter-human.’1 Richey’s belief that fascism revealed something about human nature led him to another writer whose work explored the darkest episodes of history. ‘Mausoleum’ samples a clip from an interview in which J. G. Ballard describes the aesthetic purpose behind his novel The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and then force it to look in the mirror.’ Interned by the Japanese in a Shanghai prison camp as a boy, Ballard had returned to Britain to devise a singular form of abstract, dystopian fiction that bore the traces of his ordeal. He wanted to make his readers see what humanity is capable of, once the trappings of civilization fall away. Richey felt a sense of affinity with Ballard’s literary project. In The Holy Bible tour programme he sets out the message of ‘Mausoleum’ and its ‘sister song’, ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’: ‘Reflection should be for everyone.’ He pointedly contrasts his approach with that of the film Schindler’s List, 54

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which had been released to broad acclaim the previous year. The ‘danger’ of Spielberg’s sentimental opus, Richey writes, lies in the way it focuses on a ‘merely flawed man’. In other words, the film allows viewers to contemplate the Holocaust from a position of relative comfort, never having to question their own convictions or confront the Nazi horrors too closely. In ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ Richey compels that questioning, imposes that confrontation. Once again he roves between different perspectives, opening in a disdainful manner that brings to mind a brutish SS guard patrolling the death camps. In the second verse he assumes the voices of inmates at Schloss Hartheim, where the Nazis murdered the elderly and disabled, and the victims of Sigmund Rascher, who conducted deadly medical experiments at Dachau: Arbeit Macht Frei, transports of invalids Hartheim Castle breathes us in In block five we worship malaria. Lagerstrasse, poplar trees Beauty lost, dignity gone Rascher surveys us butcher bacteria. Richey handles this delicate material with great skill. Notice the unsettling inversion of the contagion metaphor: the Nazis see the Jewish people as no more than ‘bacteria’, and they are ‘breathed in’ by Hartheim Castle, as if the place were some wheezing monster from Mitteleuropean myth. But the prisoners themselves welcome disease (‘we worship malaria’) as the only possible liberation from their torment.

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Richey’s willingness to imagine himself so deeply into these scenes of death and cruelty has led to some speculation that fascism might have held a special fascination for him.2 But I don’t think this lyric means to flirt with cheap controversy in the manner of the more outré punk records to which The Holy Bible is occasionally compared. On the contrary, it was intended to reaffirm the importance of remembering the Nazis’ victims at a time when Holocaust denial was a cause célèbre in the British press (in his programme notes, Richey denounced ‘revisionist historians’ who would question the truth of the Holocaust). Nevertheless, it seems to me that Richey does go too far, at the end of the song, in his efforts to jolt us out of our complacency regarding our own history. Consider the final line of ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’, which disputes the most sacred of Britain’s delusions – the cosy idea that nothing like that could have happened Over Here: ‘Churchill no different, wished the workers bled to a machine.’ The argument that Churchill was responsible for his own ghastly atrocities during the Second World War is not a frivolous one – evidence suggests his policies contributed to the Bengal famine of 1943, which caused millions of deaths and untold suffering.3 But Richey seems to be drawing a separate analogy between the Nazis’ crimes and the brutalization of the working classes at home. The people of South Wales have long questioned the veneration of Churchill, who, during his tenure as Home Secretary in the 1910s, deployed the army to put down a coal-miners’ rebellion in the Rhondda. There’s an intriguing parallel to the ‘Churchill no different line’ in an essay by 56

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Richard Burton, ‘To Play Churchill Is to Hate Him’, published in The New York Times in November 1974. Writing about his portrayal of the wartime leader in television drama The Gathering Storm, Burton describes Churchill as a ‘medieval bandit king’, a ‘vindictive toy-soldier child’, and likens him to tyrants including Lenin, Stalin and – yes – Hitler. The piece is written with the restrained fury of a Welshman who knew all about Churchill’s record in Tonypandy.4 Even Burton, however, did not go so far as to imply Churchill’s actions in the Valleys were ‘no different’ from Nazism: there clearly is a difference between the exploitation of the miners and the barbarity of the death camps. Coming at the end of such a subtle and serious lyric about the specific horrors of the Holocaust, the line jars. But it is instructive, in that it reveals the extent to which Richey’s background in South Wales framed his understanding of wider history. *** A few months after he finished writing the lyrics to The Holy Bible, Richey underwent hospital treatment for depression, alcoholism and a suspected eating disorder. It is unclear to what extent he was already suffering from these conditions during the writing process, although he was certainly under a great deal of emotional strain. In December 1993, the Manics’ manager and close friend Philip Hall succumbed to cancer, and Richey was affected particularly badly. During his treatment in 1994, nurses gave Richey a copy of Depression and How to Survive It, Spike Milligan’s memoir of his struggle with mental illness, co-written with the 57

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psychiatrist Anthony Clare. According to his sister, Rachel Elias, Richey identified with Milligan’s feeling of being ‘skinless’, as if he lacked a protective layer to shield him from the slings and arrows of a rock star’s fortune.5 I suspect that the savage empathy in his writing was enabled by this keen sensitivity. But if Richey’s skinlessness gave him the ability to articulate what was wrong in the world, it also allowed the world’s wrongs to impinge on his sense of self. As the historian Matthew Boswell has observed, artistic approaches to the Holocaust can be separated into those that adopt a ‘safe distance’ and those more difficult works that complicate our understanding of ourselves.6 Richey’s writing fits in the latter category. The lyrics to ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ and ‘Mausoleum’ show the visits to Dachau and Belsen struck him with the force of a personal bereavement. More than political tracts, these are mourning songs, in which Richey grieves for the ‘victims who have no speech’. He seems cowed by the enormity of the horrible events he describes, his lyrics petering out elliptically: ‘Never mattered – never counted – never be.’ These lines are full of that dark, all-encompassing form of hiraeth, the compulsion to linger in a state of ‘grief or sadness for the lost or departed’. The more Richey read about history’s evils, the more he yearned for the prelapsarian idyll of his childhood in the Valleys, before the irruption of the Miners’ Strike. And so we find that other kind of hiraeth on The Holy Bible, too: ‘longing, nostalgia’. ‘She Is Suffering’ is a Blakean song of innocence and experience (‘no thoughts to forget when we were children’) spoiled by some rather clunky imagery of carrion and rotting flowers. Similarly, ‘This is Yesterday’ – the one 58

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lyric on the album written mostly by Nicky Wire – delineates a blasted landscape of ‘ruins’ and ‘weeds’ before slipping into reminiscence: ‘I close my eyes and this is yesterday.’ The past can be a place of refuge, as well as a theatre of cruelty. Richey’s ‘Die in the Summertime’ resembles a negative image of ‘This is Yesterday’, a darker development of the same tropes. At its centre is an ailing pensioner, whose memories of childhood adventures are awash in remembered sunlight; there are crystalline images of scratched knees and sticks floating in streams. But in the second verse the mood of quiet reflection is disturbed by a bizarre non-sequitur: ‘a tiny animal curled into a quarter circle’. What to make of this? Given that the sepia-tinged atmosphere of the song recalls W. B. Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, the line might be a deliberate echo of the ‘dying animal’ to which Yeats’s narrator likens his withered body. Or perhaps the ‘curled’ creature is a reference to the ouroboros, the symbolic serpent that swallows its own tail. (In Jungian psychology, the ouroboros represents the fear of individuation that attends the path to adulthood.) But if there are folded layers of meaning here, the chorus would seem to leave little scope for interpretation: ‘I have crawled so far sideways  / I recognise dim traces of creation    /  I wanna die, die in the summertime.’ ‘Die in the Summertime’ continues to haunt Richey’s bandmates, who have admitted that they did not fully recognize the more autobiographical elements to his writing at the time. ‘[It’s] the most frightening song there, lyrically and musically, in that it does merge into prophecy,’ Nicky told John Harris in 2004. ‘They’re amazing lyrics, but there’s 59

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that idea that nothing gives you any pleasure anymore; that, post-childhood, life has been utterly empty. I still find it chilling.’7 Yet although ‘Die in the Summertime’ might hint at a suicidal state of mind, Richey stressed that it was written from the perspective of an invented character, that it contained a universal relevance. He was determined that his lyrics should look outwards, not simply hold up a mirror to his darkening inner world. *** As soon as Richey saw Jenny Saville’s Strategy (South Face/ Front Face/North Face) looming over him at London’s Saatchi gallery, he knew he had found The Holy Bible’s cover art. The painting’s parenthetic subtitle hints at its mountainous dimensions; the original work stands fully nine feet tall. The subject is an obese woman who stands in her underwear, contemplating her reflection in a mirror. But the orientation of the portrait means she is also turning her pitiless gaze on the audience, and tacitly inviting us to engage in a spot of self-scrutiny too. Originally quoted a fee of £30,000 for the rights to the image, Richey called Saville to explain the painting’s relevance to the record’s themes, and she was so impressed she let him use it for free. We don’t know exactly what was said on that call, but it’s likely that Richey drew attention to two lyrics on the album that combine introspection and social commentary in the Saville style. On ‘Yes’, he writes from the vantage point of a sex worker who spends her ‘sunless afternoons’ desultorily administering hand jobs. She displays contempt for her 60

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customers – ‘dumb cunts’ asking ‘dumb questions’ – and turns this loathing back on herself through a cyclical process of selfharm: ‘Can’t shout, can’t scream, I hurt myself to get pain out.’ It is difficult to tell where protagonist stops and writer begins, given Richey’s own cutting habit, not to mention his occasional claims that life in a rock band constituted an analogous sort of prostitution. As on ‘Roses in the Hospital’, Richey encourages us to view self-harm as essentially communicative in nature, as socially rooted. Getting ‘pain out’ is not merely about releasing it, but making it known, a substitute for shouting and screaming when you know you’re not going to be listened to. And this sense of voicelessness is understood in the context of a socioeconomic system that demeans and corrupts human relationships: ‘In these plagued streets of pity you can buy anything.’ To paraphrase Plath, ‘Yes’ is not just a narcissistic mirror-looking lyric; it is relevant to the bigger things. If ‘Yes’ is about exhausted acquiescence, ‘4st 7Ib’ is a song of wilful renunciation. It is told from the perspective of a female anorexic, who recounts her obsessive pursuit of the titular ‘target weight’. The opening verses turn on a queasy body horror, as the protagonist proudly describes the way fat and muscle recede and the flesh tightens around her frame: ‘Stretching taut, cling-film on bone  /  I’m getting better.’ Again, Richey is using an intimate character study to tackle a wider societal issue, in this case the pernicious idealization of attenuated supermodels such as ‘Kate [Moss] and Emma [Balfour] and Kristen [McMenamy]’. I said earlier that Richey wasn’t a poet. But ‘4st 7Ib’ does in fact demonstrate some of the formal care of poetry. While 61

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the opening lines are frantic, with an irregular rhythm and a muddled rhyme scheme, the final few verses have a greater uniformity, rhyming in couplets and alternating between iambic and trochaic metres (‘Legs bend, stockinged I am Twiggy / And I don’t mind the horror that surrounds me’). This structural control reflects the protagonist’s own ‘discipline’, as she resolves to pursue her programme of starvation to its grim conclusion. Using a skilfully sustained metaphor, Richey shows that the narrator sees anorexia as a kind of moral ascent. She wants to rise above the humdrum concerns of the ‘fat scum’ around her, to gain a ‘higher plateau’ where she might fade away completely into the thin mountain air. And this conceit yields the album’s most stunning image: ‘I want to walk in the snow / And not leave a footprint.’ Richey was an admirer of Tennessee Williams, and perhaps he had been inspired by a scene from one of the playwright’s lesser-known works, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (a rewrite of the more famous Summer and Smoke). The action takes place in a Mississippi town in the middle of winter. Looking out of the window one evening at a fresh blanket of snow, the lonely main character, Alma, is reminded of an ‘old proverb: “Before you love, you must learn to walk over snow – and leave no footprint.”’8 But if Williams was the source, Richey turned this metaphor to his own purposes, and it helps to illustrate the complex dynamic between presence and absence at the heart of ‘4st 7Ib’. Even as the anorexic dreams of starving until she vanishes from view, she emphasizes her desires (‘I want…’; ‘I choose my choice’). Though I don’t think the song can 62

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be accused of romanticizing anorexia itself – it is too cleareyed in its depiction of the debilitating physical effects of the disorder – the protagonist’s commitment to self-expression has a certain romantic flavour to it. The same goes for Richey himself. He may have been documenting his own nascent symptoms of anorexia in ‘4st 7Ib’, or adopting a more detached, journalistic mode. What we can say for certain is that he was still writing, still inventing, still leaving footprints in graphite and ink across his snowdrifts of paper. He retained a confidence in his ability to articulate both his subjective experiences and wider truths about the world. Perhaps a belief in the power of language doesn’t seem sufficient, in the face of the bigger things he wrote about – war, genocide, class struggle and mental illness. Maybe it wasn’t, in the end. But a faith in words is what keeps The Holy Bible away from the cliff-edge of nihilism. Decades on, Richey’s lyrics remain enduringly vivid, bracingly intelligent, austerely beautiful. They are not dim traces of creation; they are – to borrow from Yeats – monuments of unageing intellect.

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Soundspace Studios wasn’t the most salubrious of places. Located half a mile from Richey’s flat, the building sat among rat-infested warehouses in the Cardiff docklands. The area had once serviced a bustling port from which ships would depart laden with coal heaved out of the mines upriver. But by the mid-1990s it was a labyrinth of stagnant canals and lichened foundries, a haven for drug dealers and prostitutes. The setting could not have been more different from Hook End Manor, the grand residential studio in rural Berkshire where Gold Against the Soul was made. All that rock-star decadence had ‘rubbed off on the music too much’, according to James, who hoped Soundspace would enable the band to capture the bleaker tone of Richey’s lyrics on the new record. They saw themselves as ‘method musicians’, as opposed to method actors, plunging Brando-style into the squalor of the Cardiff docks.1 The weeks leading up to the sessions were emotionally fraught: James was dumped by his fiancée, Richey’s drinking had worsened and they were all still reeling from the death of Philip Hall. Strangely, though, the band look back on the recording of The Holy Bible as a ‘blissful’ time. Richey’s

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lyrics had given them a renewed sense of purpose, and they relished being so distant, literally and figuratively, from the Britpop party in Camden Town. ‘We felt really self-centred, in that we were totally going against everything that was happening outside. And sometimes that’s when we make our best records, when we’re cocooned,’ Nicky said.2 The Manics entered the studio in February 1994, under the mackerel skies of a Welsh winter. They kept to a disciplined schedule, arriving at ten o’clock sharp and working through until late afternoon, although James’s insistence on doubletracking each guitar part meant that he and engineer Alex Silva would regularly stay on until the early hours of the morning. ‘Quite often the night shift would be just me and James’, recalls Silva, whose dedication to the cause earned him a co-producer credit. ‘Part of our evening entertainment was peering through the letterbox at the goings-on in the streets outside Soundspace, where the ladies of the night would bring their customers. It was part of the insanity of making the album.’ The Holy Bible is routinely described as Richey’s masterpiece, an assessment that tends to overlook the fact that he didn’t play a single note of it. As the chief creator of the music, James’s role was just as significant. A reluctant frontman – he was the only one who could sing – Bradfield was more taciturn than his colleagues, which meant his contribution often went ignored by critics in the early days. But he brought an intellectual rigour to his work that matched the lyrics themselves. His music is by turns electrifying and mournful, furious and elegant – and unlike pretty much anything else in contemporary British rock. *** 66

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To understand how distinctive the album was, it might help to examine its sonic influences. James wrote the early demos while staying at his parents’ house in Pontllanfaith, where he began to rediscover the bands the Manics had listened to growing up in the Valleys: Wire, the Skids, Joy Division, Magazine, Public Image Ltd. Post-punk was not particularly fashionable in 1994 – the Britpop elite paid obeisance to the twin gods of the 1960s, The Beatles and The Kinks – but in a way the Manics were ahead of their time, as well as behind it. Ten years hence, every skinny-jeaned guitar act worth its salt was rifling through PiL’s Metal Box for inspiration. Unlike most of the acts associated with the ‘post-punk revival’ of the early 2000s, however, the Manics’ affinity for post-punk ran deeper than a taste for choppy guitars and gloomy lyrics. A couple of the original post-punk outfits were Welsh – Scritti Politti’s founder Green Gartside hailed from Cardiff, as did the three-piece Young Marble Giants, whose 1980 LP Colossal Youth was a minimalist delight. And post-punk was dominated by groups from places that were like South Wales in various ways: cities such as Sheffield, Glasgow and Dunfermline, whose mills and factories and shipyards were either dead or in decline. The geographic dispersal of the post-punk bands was, in part, a function of a belated cultural transmission: by the time the energy of punk reached the provinces the movement was already fizzling out like a dead star. But the kids who took up their guitars and synthesizers in Britain’s industrial heartlands in 1978 and 1979 were also responding to a period of political upheaval, as Jim Callaghan’s frail Labour government gave way to Thatcher’s rampant Tory one. 67

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The convulsions of British life under Thatcherism caused these bands to ponder both the pressures they were experiencing from above and the efficacy of the forms of resistance that came from below. To question, to think: these were the motivating forces behind post-punk. It was a type of music suited to intellectual curiosity and restlessness, confident in its ability to shoulder heavyweight concepts and themes. The late theorist Mark Fisher used the phrase ‘popular modernism’ to describe how post-punk combined innovation with accessible forms, an approach that rippled out into wider culture.3 As we will see, The Holy Bible features several allusions to the post-punk groups. More importantly, though, it shares that popular modernist ethos, marking it out as a singular contribution to the post-punk tradition rather than a pastiche. James has spoken admiringly of the way Simple Minds, ‘a bunch of working-class boys from Glasgow’, defied the snobbery of London-based critics to make thrillingly avant-garde work.4 It is no coincidence that The Holy Bible’s sleeve art mimics the faux-Cyrillic typography and stark black-and-white colour scheme of the Minds’ Empires and Dance (1980); the design was a gesture of solidarity with that record’s white-hot Promethean ambition – and a statement of intent at a time when reheated pub rock was in the ascendant.5 In one sense, the Manics’ decision to adopt a post-punk sound is another example of the album’s hiraeth, its nearpathological preoccupation with the ghosts of the past. Indeed, The Holy Bible could be taken as a case study in what Fisher calls (after Derrida) ‘hauntology’, a word he uses to refer to music that harks back to the possibilities of the 68

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1970s, a decade in which ‘culture was opened up to workingclass inventiveness in a way that is now scarcely imaginable to us’.6 That the Manics made it imaginable, at a time when stereotypes of proletarian illiteracy and boorishness were sticking their roots deep into British pop, is one of their great achievements. But The Holy Bible is not, finally, an imitation of Real Life or Chairs Missing, even if it belongs to the same lineage. With its bold and idiosyncratic sonic choices, it sounds remarkably fresh and vital two decades on. There’s hwyl in the music too. *** Both sides of Fisher’s post-punk equation – the popular sensibility, and the wilful creativity – are evident on the album’s first track, ‘Yes’. If the ascending melody in the bridge resembles the chorus to ‘Outdoor Miner’, Wire’s offthe-wall ballad about the lives of insect larvae, the verses are strikingly original. A tuneful guitar riff is played over a skittish drum track that moves between 4/4 and 3/4 time signatures, the better to convey Richey’s lyrical shifts between grandiloquence and depletion. ‘Looking at these lyrics, there were twists and turns in there. … And I just knew that the music had to twist and turn and convulse,’ James explained.7 The song ends with a guitar figure that loops like a stuck record, perhaps a subtle reference to the protagonist’s selfdescribed descent into a purgatorial ‘circle’. ‘Ifwhiteamerica…’ opens with an inverted version of the same riff, before developing into what James called ‘a demented version of “West Side Story”’, with a call-andresponse structure intended as a gothic take on Sondheim.8 69

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But there is nothing theatrical about the production – the drums are boxy and compressed, and the backing vocals bleed into the mix as if the whole thing were recorded in a phone box. It very nearly was. ‘The studio was tiny and full of illogical angles, like the inside of a cut diamond’, Silva says of Soundspace, and these spatial constraints suited the band’s intentions. Before the sessions began, they told him they wanted something that felt ‘angular and essential’, to provide a contrast with the opulent rock of Gold Against the Soul. The Holy Bible is interested in sound as texture rather than simply as notes or melody, and the album’s harsh metallic surfaces bring to mind the post-industrial landscapes of the Valleys. Simon Reynolds has written that the leading postpunk bands sought to capture ‘the bereft Ballardian beauty of their hometowns’: the eerie spaces in Joy Division’s music conjure the husks of the Salford mills; Cabaret Voltaire’s electronic effects replicate the clanking machinery of Sheffield factories.9 The Holy Bible goes a step further than these records by literally incorporating the sounds of Valleys industry. In 1992, Silva had worked with the Welsh theatre company Brith Gof on their production Haearn (‘Iron’), a site-specific performance that took place in an abandoned coal-works in Tredegar. Haearn depicted the birth of the working classes during the Industrial Revolution: the stage was wreathed in smoke; actors portrayed labourers tethered to giant machines; and a narrator sonorously declaimed passages from Thomas Carlyle’s Merthyr diary (‘These poor creatures toiling all in sweat and dirt, amid their furnaces…’). Silva travelled around the local steelworks collecting field recordings to create the 70

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soundtrack for the play, and he was able to repurpose these clips on ‘Of Walking Abortion’. ‘I edited the recordings of the steelworks until I had an envelope of white noise that I used as a rhythmical tool’, he says. And so, during the opening verse, James’s vocals are punctuated with the crunching sound of molten metal: ‘Life is … PHOWA PHOWA … lead weights pendulum died.’ Despite such moments, the album never fully explores the more extreme fringes of the post-punk style. Much as the Valleys discombobulate visitors with their mixture of sublime natural vistas and scenes of post-industrial decay, The Holy Bible combines unorthodox sound collage and life-affirming tunes. It’s instructive to compare ‘Of Walking Abortion’ with, say, The Pop Group’s ‘There Are No Spectators’, whose lyrics are so similar as to suggest a direct influence on Richey (‘There are no spectators / You are responsible whether you like it or not’). Where that song smacks of a stony-faced Gramsci student dourly reciting an anti-capitalist tract, the Manics shape their guitar noise and sampled industrial effects into something you can just about whistle. ‘She is Suffering’ has an even catchier motif – its palmmuted riff could be a soft-metal rewrite of The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’ – but it’s a weak song that never quite transcends its awkward lyric. Not so the glorious ‘Archives of Pain’. James’s guitars are spry and jumpy, spooked into flight by Nicky’s hulking, predatory bassline. Gradually the arrangement builds to a ferocious climax, capped with an extended guitar solo that resembles Big Country’s ‘Inwards’ accelerated to twice the speed. 71

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During the recording process, the band would occasionally pause to consider just how strange was the music they were making. While they were laying down ‘Revol’ – pitched somewhere between The Idiot-era Iggy Pop and a singalong at a Russian brothel – Nicky heard Blur’s ‘Girls And Boys’ on the radio, with its Europop groove and its lyric about drinking and shagging in Spanish beach resorts. ‘I thought, “Fuck, we’ve just written a song about group sex in the Politburo and really the biggest thing out there from an indie band is about going off on holiday in Ibiza. We couldn’t be fucking further from the musical explosion than we are now!”’10 It’s certainly difficult to imagine a song that ventures further from Britpop’s hothouse hedonism than the wintry ‘4st 7Ib’, perhaps the best example of James’s ability to summon a thing of grace and beauty out of dark lyrical material. The track opens in 7/4 time with a fuzzy guitar figure, feedback keening in the background like a zephyr over a snowfield. ‘I wanted the first part of the song to convey the freneticism of that vanity, and how it eats itself alive’, Bradfield said.11 But he also wanted to reflect the sense of control in the concluding verses, so he added a coda in which the tempo slows to an agonized waltz. The blizzard clears, the music describes cleaner melodic lines, and we join the protagonist on her journey towards a ‘higher plateau’. It isn’t long before we are plunged back into the industrial racket. Guitars and percussion click into place on ‘Mausoleum’, as on a production line; the effect is rather like being carried off into the bowels of a factory. During the breakdown at 3:23, when Ballard’s voice crackles into the 72

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mix, it’s as if the machines have been shut down to permit an eccentric superintendent to harangue his workmen, before the whole infernal apparatus grinds into gear once again.12 *** Some years later the Manics would draw flak for unveiling a slowed-down acoustic ‘reimagining’ of ‘Faster’, but in fact that version came close to how the song was originally written. James wrestled with the lyric while picking at a twelve-string acoustic in his parents’ kitchen, before inspiration hit: ‘I looked at the rhyme and meter … and thought “It’s got to be very regimented.” That Saul Bellow quote from Dangling Man came into my head: “Long live regimentation.”’13 On the record, the first thing we hear is a clip of John Hurt as Winston Smith in Michael Radford’s film version of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, his voice trembling over a skirl of distorted guitar, before the music sparks into life, propelled by a martial beat and obedient power chords. The opening line sounds echoing, distant, as if delivered from a far-off podium (‘I am an architect’); the second disconcertingly loud (‘They call me a butcher’). The pace quickens, and as we careen into the bridge the song seems to be moving too fast, overheating. But just as you fear the whole thing will buckle under the pressure, the band masterfully reassert control. Immediately before the chorus there is a delayed chord change from D to E, which allows the vocal emphasis to fall in the middle of the line: ‘I’ve been too honest with myself / I should have LIED like everybody else.’ On an album not famed for its pop sensibilities, it’s a hook to die for. 73

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In a chastening transition, ‘Faster’ is followed by the album’s saddest, loveliest track. ‘This is Yesterday’ is often played live as an acoustic interlude between more raucous material, but on The Holy Bible it is fully electric. During the second verse, curious noises fade in and out of the mix, like a robot on the fritz. Somehow this only amplifies the mood of hiraeth in the lyric – the wonder of the song is that it manages to evoke a feeling of quiet restraint using the sounds of machines. Given the somewhat primitive equipment available in Soundspace – an ageing Allen and Heath Saber mixing desk and a sixteen-track tape recorder – the band had to rely on a certain ingenuity to create the album’s oppressive atmosphere. They discovered that if they pressed hard on the guitar jack with sweaty hands it would produce a Theremin-like effect; hence the electronic trills and warbles that enrich the sonic texture, like the traces of a brush on an impressionist’s canvas. For the distorted howl that launches ‘Die in the Summertime’ – an otherwise simple pop-metal number – the band took advantage of a glitch in the guitar cable that turned the pickup into a makeshift microphone. Silva captured the sound directly from the amp as James screamed into his Les Paul, his teeth inches from the glistening strings. Such rough-hewn experimentation recalls the techniques of groups such as Einstürzende Neubauten, the German industrial band who wielded power tools and bashed hammers on drainpipes in lieu of anything so prosaic as a drum kit. But there’s also a sly sophistication to The Holy Bible. Take ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’, Sean Moore’s major contribution. The song opens with a taped recording of 74

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screeching metal, which is looped through an old BEL BD80 hardware sampler and overlaid with a snippet of narration from a Soviet documentary on the Nuremberg Trials (‘Now the victims will judge the butchers’). As the voice falls away, a squeal of guitar emanates from the mix and the drums kick in with a pattern that alludes to Joy Division’s ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’. James sings plaintively over the rhythmic clanging, but otherwise the track is comprised solely of drifting chromatics and atonal guitar noise, marshalled with all the precision of a symphony. Sean’s training in the South Wales Jazz Orchestra came into its own here; he spoke of the ‘minimalist delineation of modern song structures’ and the influence of Krzysztof Penderecki and John Cage.14 The scale of the ambition shows how far the band had come from ‘You Love Us’ and their crude sampling of Penderecki’s tribute to Hiroshima – now they were writing modernist threnodies of their own. It’s an appropriate treatment for Richey’s words, the aversion to melodic resolution or harmony matching the lyric’s refusal to draw any redemptive meaning from the Holocaust. But much as Penderecki gives way to Iggy Pop on ‘You Love Us’, ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ is succeeded by the simple power chords of ‘P.C.P.’. It’s a bracing finale, serving as a reminder that, for all its intellectual heft and reflective melancholy, this is a record with energy to burn. And so The Holy Bible ends, not with a whimper but a bang. *** Once the recording process was finished, the album was mixed by Mark Freegard at the Britannia Row Studios in 75

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Islington, where Joy Division had made Closer. Overseen by the band, Freegard took the Soundspace tapes and accentuated their flattened, suffocating quality, a deliberate rejection of the kind of lush arrangements and booming overdubs that characterized guitar music of the time.15 Select was later to describe the production as a ‘scrapyard carcrusher’, an apposite Ballardian phrase. The Manics thought of The Holy Bible as an ‘artistic statement’.16 Unlike their earlier work, which tried to smuggle difficult political truths into the popular consciousness with radio-friendly choruses, this album brought music and message together in a bristling whole. Nevertheless, they were quietly hopeful it would find an audience, even in the Parklife summer of 1994. Sure enough, the lead single, ‘Faster’ (technically a double-A side with ‘P.C.P.’), hit the pop charts at a respectable Number 16 on 5 June 1994, one place below C. J. Lewis’s cover of ‘Sweets for My Sweet’. The Manics were invited on to Top of the Pops the following week, where they revealed just how strange and intense a unit they had become during that self-imposed seclusion in Cardiff. Introduced by the BBC’s gurning vaudeville comedians, Vic and Bob, they opened the show on a stage draped in camouflage netting, framed by two burning torches that sent flames curling into the air above the heads of the teenyboppers. They were dressed in military gear designed to symbolize their newfound sense of cohesion, although the costumes were a jumble of different forces and historical eras. Decked out in desert fatigues, Nicky stomped his foot like a restless nag; Sean sat at his drums in a blue United Nations 76

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beret; Richey wore a sailor suit with the phrase ‘SLOUGH OF DESPOND’ Tippexed across the shoulders. Front and centre: James in a balaclava, flexing his biceps and snarling ‘I am an architect’ into the cameras. A record 25,000 people called the BBC to complain, aggrieved at the singer’s (apparently unintended) resemblance to an IRA henchman. It was a deliciously bizarre piece of Situationist method acting, a provocation to match anything the pranksters of the KLF ever came up with. One thing was certain, as James bellowed the final line: Wet Wet Wet had a tough act to follow.

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And from then on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent, Devouring the azure verses; where, like a pale elated Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks. —Arthur Rimbaud, ‘The Drunken Boat’1 The fish-and-sewage stink rose off the Chao Phraya river in fetid gusts, mingling with the odours of cooking oil and incense. Three Manic Street Preachers sat in a wood-and-spit boat that bobbed its way past the shimmering temples and half-finished office buildings of downtown Bangkok. Nicky had excused himself from the voyage, muttering darkly about the Marchioness disaster, but the other members of the band were keen to see the sights. Once the boat docked, the Manics and their entourage – which included NME journalist Barbara Ellen and photographer Kevin Cummins – set off into the neon jungle to slake their thirst. It was April 1994, the height of the Thai summer, and the Manics were booked to play two nights at the 2,000-capacity Mahboonkrong Hall. They were huge in Thailand, thanks in large part to the evangelism of DJ Wasana Wirachartplee,

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who had been bombarding the airwaves of Southeast Asia with ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ since 1992. Banners reading ‘FROM DESPAIR TO BANGKOK’ were strung up to advertise the shows, along with murals that depicted the band as square-jawed guerrilla fighters, framed by halos of barbed wire. It was an appropriate aesthetic mode, given their newly militarized ‘Combat Rock’-style image. Richey was an icon among Bangkok’s indie kids, who followed him around the city like troupes of Bobby Soxers. They were attracted to his reserve, his androgyny and his self-harm, according to Norasate Mudkong, editor of an alternative-music magazine titled Generation Terrorist in honour of the Manics’ first album. ‘It’s traditional that Thai people cut themselves, but they do it as a last resort, when they’re really miserable. It makes us sad for him and some young fans have copied it,’ said Mudkong, who also issued a warning to a certain British journalist: ‘If Steve Lamacq comes here, we will kill him.’2 Before the first gig, a Thai acolyte presented Richey with a box of ceremonial carving knives and a note instructing him to use them that night. Irritated at the idea he would mutilate himself on cue, he obliged anyway, disappearing backstage halfway through the show to slash his chest. Cummins captured a black-and-white photograph of Richey admiring his handiwork in the dressing-room mirror: slender and pale, the dark trails of blood matching his mascara, he looked pensive and beautiful, like a young Iggy Pop. When he rejoined the rest of the band there was a crush in the mosh pit and a fan was lifted out with a broken leg.

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It was an extraordinarily vicious performance. During a light-speed rendition of an early anti-royalist anthem, ‘Repeat’, Nicky defied warnings from the Manics’ minders and told the crowd that Thailand’s King, Bhumibol the Great, would ‘reign in hell’. He spent the rest of the night cowering in his room at the Novotel with the air conditioning turned up, fearing imminent arrest on charges of Lèse majesté. His bandmates, meanwhile, spent their evenings sampling Bangkok’s nightlife with the NME in tow. James, Richey and Sean had begun the trip by lecturing Ellen about Thai poverty and the obliviousness of liberal Westerners, but soon enough they were knocking them back alongside the pot-bellied Brits in Pat Pong, indulging in the kind of loutish misogyny they had previously railed against. Richey left on his own and later admitted he’d procured a hand job from a prostitute. ‘I don’t regard paying for sex as being that different to sleeping with a groupie’, he told Ellen. ‘It’s all done on the same functional level.’3 A hypocritical explanation to be sure, especially coming from a man who had written so sensitively about the plight of impoverished sex workers on ‘Yes’ – but the groupie analogy was telling all the same. Richey craved the stability and happiness Nicky had found in marriage but was afraid of being hurt. These emotional insecurities had begun to shadow his new lyrics. ‘Too Cold Here’, a B-side that surfaced a few months later, contained one of his most bleakly affecting lines: ‘It’s easier to make love to a stranger than to ask a friend to call.’ *** 81

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Even at their mouthiest and most obnoxious, there was an innocence about the early Manic Street Preachers. With their indifference to contemporary musical fashions, their puritanical aversion to hard drugs, and – as Simon Price rightly points out – their complete lack of irony, they could come across as charmingly guileless. They bought into the rock ’n’ roll myth of glorious self-immolation without pausing to consider how it might feel to get burnt. Nicky later identified the trip to Bangkok as the moment when things started to unravel: ‘Thailand certainly wasn’t a highlight but it’s a piece of history that stays with you. [We] can’t get rid of the bug that it left.’4 The band did a round of press interviews on their return to the UK, and it was evident Richey’s political views and cultural tastes were becoming more extreme. He (somewhat prophetically) wished death on John Smith and spoke of the allure of a cult movie called Tetsuo: The Iron Man, in which a Tokyo salaryman transforms into a libidinous robot. ‘I find it really sexy’, he said. ‘I think people are becoming more machine-like and that’s the imagery I like … sex and death are closely linked. Sado-masochistic imagery, bleeding.’5 Richey’s cutting had escalated and he was regularly drinking to excess. Kurt Cobain’s death on 5 April affected him deeply, and, on the eve of a television appearance later that month, he learned a friend from university had also taken his own life. Then there were the harrowing effects of playing the new material live. Never particularly comfortable on stage, Richey found The Holy Bible gigs especially difficult, perhaps because they forced him back into the patterns of thought that had yielded his darker lyrics. 82

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And yet, even as things fell apart, the Manics reached a point of maximum compression as a live act. There was an astonishingly tight performance at the Carnival against the Nazis at Brockwell Park in London, and they were even better at Glastonbury Festival in June. Taking to the NME stage on a bill alongside Pulp, Blur and Oasis, the Manics looked entirely alien, four Welsh freaks come to taunt the mud-caked hordes. ‘I say let’s build some more fucking bypasses over this shithole!’ shouted Nicky, clad in fatigues and pallid face-paint, like a revenant from the Vietnam War. James was on antsy, head-banging form, slashing at his Les Paul as if subduing a recalcitrant animal. Even Richey played competently enough, as became evident when the sound technician inadvertently turned up the volume on his rhythm guitar, giving Worthy Farm a blast of his barre chords. A storm blew in and rain soaked the sparking amps, but the band played on, oblivious to the risk of electrocution. *** In hindsight, it seems grimly fitting that Richey reached his psychological tipping point in front of The Big Breakfast, a television programme that proved the braying hedonism of the mid-1990s persisted even when the pubs were shut. During a break in the touring schedule, Richey was watching the show when a random clip of Lee Marvin singing ‘Wand’rin’ Star’ was played during a segment. He found himself fixating on the song’s oddly Sartrean lyric. ‘There’s a line in [it], “Hell is in hello”, and for two days I couldn’t do fucking anything’, he later explained. ‘What’s it mean, “Hell is in hello”? What are they trying to say? What 83

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is the point in that? Just little things. And then I realised that something was not quite right.’ He admitted that his ‘mind wasn’t functioning very well. [I] subjected my body to things it couldn’t cope with.’6 In July, Richey embarked on a binge of drinking and selfharm that endangered his life, before his parents came to his rescue. Whether this was a genuine suicide attempt or a ‘cry for help’ remains unclear, but he’d gone so far as to write a farewell note inside a copy of Peter Schaffer’s play Equus: ‘I love you. I’m sorry. I just needed to feel something more.’7 He was admitted to the NHS-run Whitchurch Hospital in Cardiff – an under-resourced institution that gave him drugs and little else – and later The Priory, an expensive private clinic in the London suburb of Roehampton. There he was medicated with Prozac to treat his depression, and his other ailments got more focused attention. He was encouraged to discuss his body image to rectify his disordered eating habits, which had caused his weight to drop to six stone. He also signed up to Alcoholics Anonymous, which effectively curbed his drinking even if he struggled with aspects of the Twelve-step Programme. The Priory has become synonymous with celebrity patients, and Richey’s stay coincided with visits from Sinead O’Connor, with whom he developed a rapport,8 and Eric Clapton, with whom he didn’t. Clapton was there to offer ‘peer support’ work; having heard Richey was in a band he went to his room to ask if he wanted to jam. ‘Just what I need’, Richey told James afterwards. ‘I’m going to be confronted by God, and God’s going to realise that I can’t play the guitar.’9 At his lowest ebb, he retained an endearing sense of perspective. 84

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For their part, James, Nicky and Sean have discussed the events of 1994 with a touching, bewildered candour. Even at the time, when the media was showing a prurient interest in Richey’s deteriorating mental state – some journalists went so far as to accuse the band of using their friend’s illness as a promotional tool to drum up interest in the new record – they responded to their situation with enormous dignity. There was never a hint of self-pity, but their helplessness was plain. ‘Everyone’s got a corner of their heart and mind you can’t get into’, as James told Caitlin Moran in The Times. They assured Richey he could continue as a non-touring member of Manic Street Preachers if he wanted, contributing lyrics and artwork without having to put himself through the ordeal of appearing on stage. He rejected the idea, vowing to get fit for a string of tour dates in the autumn. In his absence, the Manics signed up for a series of summer festivals as a lopsided three-piece, partly to raise money to pay for his medical bills. At Reading their performance was battling, pugnacious, like a football team that rallies together after a red card. But an abyss yawned on the left side of the stage. Disciples of the Cult of Richey spent the entire show staring into the void, refusing to acknowledge the rest of the band. The Holy Bible was released a few days later, on 30 August, while Richey was still at The Priory. By now the news of his hospitalization had been made public – ‘nervous exhaustion’ was the official line – and several reviewers expressed concern at the apparent parallels with In Utero, Nirvana’s final album before Cobain’s suicide. In Select, Roy Wilkinson wrote that ‘amid all the references to coma, carcasses, “walking abortions” and dying in the summer, sits the spectre of 85

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Richey, holed up in a private clinic, having drunk too much, eaten too little, and cut himself.’ If Richey had shrunk from view, his lyrics were in plain sight; The Holy Bible was promoted with an advertisement in the music press that printed every word across a doublepage spread. But the reviews also appreciated the vitality of the music. Whereas subsequent criticism has insisted on The Holy Bible as the last will and testament of Richard Edwards, critics at the time recognized it as the collective work of a band that had reached a creative peak. Tom Doyle of Q wrote that the album ‘proves the Manics to be a band that can subtly reinvent themselves at every turn’, while Simon Williams admiringly described it as ‘commercial suicide’ in the NME. This was half right. In fact The Holy Bible charted higher than either of its predecessors, at Number Six – some achievement for a record whose opening line turns on the word ‘cunts’ – but fell sharply thereafter. Released on the same day, Oasis’s debut Definitely Maybe swaggered to Number One. In September, Richey checked out of The Priory and rejoined the band for rehearsals at a farmhouse in Bluestone, near the picturesque Pembrokeshire coast. The NME’s Cummins visited to take pictures of the Manics posing windswept on the beach, along with a solo shot of Richey wrapping his burned and calloused arms around a statue, as if to keep from being blown away. Compared with the photographs from Thailand, he looks changed. Still beautiful, with his floppy fringe and designer stubble, but gaunt and tired, the boyishness gone.10 *** 86

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Richey performed creditably on tour that autumn. Dressed in a white jumpsuit scrawled over with lines from Arthur Rimbaud’s Season in Hell – ‘A man who would mutilate himself is well damned isn’t he?’ – he threw rock-star poses as in the old days. He also managed to stay off the bottle, cleaving instead to a punishing regimen of coffee and cigarettes. But he continued to cut himself to control his anxiety, and hinted that he would like to break his own fingers to avoid going on stage. In Paris, Simon Price caught up with the band to conduct an interview for Melody Maker. After a photoshoot with Tom Sheehan in the skull-lined catacombs beneath Montparnasse, Price met Richey in the Manics’ tour-bus outside the Bataclan on the Boulevard Voltaire. ‘He was secluded in the dark and gloom at the back of the bus’, Price says. ‘It was like being summoned to see Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.’ The analogy is well-chosen – Richey had grown obsessed with Coppola’s film – but he was keen to stress that his own problems should not be romanticized. ‘I was quite glad in a way to have some of my own preconceptions corrected – the whole romantic myth of the tortured artist, which I only half believed, but I did certainly half believe it’, says Price. ‘The old thing that genius and madness are two sides of the same coin. Richey said Whitchurch hospital isn’t full of artistic geniuses. It’s full of postal workers.’ And Richey never self-identified as a Kurtz-like oracle. He saw more of himself in another character in Apocalypse Now, Dennis Hopper’s photojournalist, who arrives in Vietnam to cover the horrors of war, only to find the horrors covering him.

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By December the clouds appeared to be lifting. With Richey seemingly on the mend, the band began preparing for a trilogy of pre-Christmas gigs at the Astoria in London. It was a small venue, and the feedback from the monitors was so loud they suffered nosebleeds during sound-checks. But the atmosphere was relaxed. ‘They were at the end of the tour, they were going to take a little break, and there was a lot of optimism’, says Price. ‘It was almost like the end of term, the last day of school.’ Not that the energy had dissipated from the band’s live performance. If anything, all the stresses and tensions of the previous twelve months were expunged here, in the heat and sweat of the Astoria. For the final show on 21 December, Richey wrote a set-list annotated with quotes from Ballard’s prose poem ‘What I Believe’: ‘I believe in alcoholism, venereal disease, fever and exhaustion. I believe in the genital organs of great men and women. I believe in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom. I believe all memories, lies, fantasies, evasions.’ As was his wont, Richey excised one of the more hopeful lines in the passage: ‘I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night.’ Starting with ‘Faster’, the band tore ferociously through a set that eventually collapsed in on itself like a car at a compacting plant. During ‘You Love Us’, Nicky smashed his bass fret-first against the stage, inspiring the others to follow suit. All told, the paroxysm of violence caused £26,000 worth of damage to instruments and lighting equipment. It marked the end of a draining, gleeful, cathartic concert, a world of 88

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truth and imagination made and then unmade, until the night could be held back no longer. *** Richey vanished on 1 February 1995, five weeks after his twenty-seventh birthday. He was last seen at the Embassy Hotel in London, where he and James were staying ahead of a promotional trip to America. When Richey failed to show on the morning of the flight, the porters unlocked his room. He had left behind his suitcase and a box, wrapped in a collage, with a note addressed to his on-off girlfriend, Jo. The package contained gifts, including videos of Mike Leigh’s Naked and Sidney Lumet’s film adaptation of Equus. Perhaps Richey left clues, here. The collage on the box featured an image of a Teutonic-looking mansion, which Nicky thought might be a tacit message as to his whereabouts. The films may or may not be significant. As we have seen, David Thewlis’s performance as an angry autodidact in Naked probably influenced ‘Faster’. And Equus clearly had a hold on Richey’s imagination. The play tells the story of a teenaged boy with a violent fixation on horses. As in Schaffer’s other work, the plot has a classical structure; the boy’s Dionysian passion is opposed to the stolid, Apollonian logic of the psychiatrist who treats him. The film version features one of Richard Burton’s great screen turns as the doctor; in the last scene, shot in extreme close-up, he confesses his fears that he is hollowing out his patient’s soul. ‘I’ll erase the welts cut into his mind by flying manes,’ he says. ‘[But] might as I may to make him an ardent husband, a caring citizen … my achievement is more likely to make him a ghost.’ 89

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Nicky worried the doctors in the private clinic had undermined his friend in a similar way: ‘The Priory ripped out the man and left a shell’, he later said.11 But Richey had seemed calm and in control of his actions in the weeks before his departure. The band spent a pleasant Christmas together in Blackwood. In January the Edwards’ beloved springer spaniel died, and Richey drove his sister to B&Q to buy a tree to mark his passing. Before leaving the family home he took pictures of his parents. Later that month, the band spent some time at a studio in Surrey recording demos for the next album, along with ‘Judge Y’rself ’, a song slated for inclusion on the Judge Dredd movie soundtrack (a job that must have pleased Richey, as a longstanding fan of the comic-book series).12 He was producing new lyrics and even recommended a fresh musical direction: ‘Pantera meets Nine Inch Nails meets [Primal Scream’s] Screamadelica.’13 Once the demo sessions were finished, he gave his bandmates small gifts and a folder of writing, before he and James drove on to the Embassy. Richey’s passport and wallet were found in his Cardiff flat after he left the hotel, indicating he returned there before moving on. Two weeks later, his car was discovered at Aust Services on the English side of the Severn Bridge; the battery was run down (he may have been living in it for a time), and there was a lock on the steering wheel, which might suggest he was planning to come back. The location led the tabloids to a more straightforward conclusion, with the headlines strongly implying that he leaped from the Severn Bridge. In truth, there is evidence for and against such a hypothesis. Richey had shaved his head before he disappeared, an act 90

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that is sometimes a preliminary to suicide. But a new haircut would have made him less recognizable if he intended to start a new life elsewhere. And he was fascinated by writers and artists who staged their own disappearances, including Rimbaud, who grew tired of being the enfant terrible of French poetry and fled to Africa, where he became the adulte terrible of the Ethiopian arms industry. Richey had also been reading an obscure Russian text called Novel With Cocaine (1934), whose pseudonymous author vanished without trace after submitting his manuscript to publishers. There were sightings of Richey, some more credible than others. Sinead O’Connor reportedly believed he was staying with a mutual acquaintance in Hereford (a dead end).14 He was even spotted in Goa and Fuerteventura, although, as Nicky pointed out, such exotic locations gave the story a patina of glamour that was far removed from the grey, Reginald Perrin reality of it: Richey took off in a Vauxhall Cavalier, not a Ferrari. It’s all too easy to picture his journey. There he is, scrabbling about in his pockets for change at the Severn toll, now pausing awhile in his car at the service station, Nirvana on the stereo. He winds down the window to let out the cigarette smoke and warms his hands against the heater’s little plastic grate. And then … what? Writers have speculated as to Richey’s fate, usually dwelling on the moments immediately following his disappearance. In Richard, a work of fiction written in Richey’s voice, Ben Myers imagines that he returned to Wales, where he was lost to the ‘blackened peaks and misty troughs’ of the Brecon Beacons, like a latter-day Owain Glyndwr.15 Iain Sinclair’s captivating postmodern novel Landor’s Tower also contains 91

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a sequence set near Aust, which is depicted as a waystation in the metaphysical limbo of the Anglo-Welsh borderlands, a place where lost souls are to be found ‘travelling nowhere, at the end of the world, waiting for a ferry that ain’t ever going to come’. Richey makes a brief appearance among the artists and hippies as ‘a bookman who, like Rimbaud, walked away’; ‘a doomed rock star, a performer with more language than the medium could use’.16 Sinclair has him trudging the estuarial mudflats, taking photographs of the bridge from crazy angles, as the water flows moodily by.

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Time at Aust was a backward spiral. Those influenced by us, by the clues we scatter in our random lives, act out what we imagine – and in doing so, ensure that we experience them first. —Iain Sinclair, Landor’s Tower1 In early 1995, The Guardian published a feature entitled ‘Is this music to die for?’ The article diagnosed a new seriousness in the relationship between pop stars and their followers. The missing Manic was likened to Kurt Cobain, whose suicide note famously quoted Neil Young’s line that ‘it’s better to burn out than to fade away’. Richey, it was argued, had effectively done both. So where did that leave his fans? As with Cobain, there were a few copycat cases. In 1997, a sixteen-year-old Manics enthusiast named Christopher Goodall drowned in the Severn after making a pilgrimage to Wales to retrace Richey’s last known steps. The coroner recorded an open verdict: ‘Clearly Christopher was influenced by this media pop idol and undoubtedly he was in a very disturbed state when he decided to go to the Cardiff/ Newport area – probably following what he had read about

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[Richey].’2 Other fans canvassed by the music press spoke of suicidal feelings. ‘Until I know that Richey is safe, I’ll keep starving, I’ll keep bingeing, I’ll keep dyeing my hair, I’ll keep cutting deeper and crying harder, and if there’s anything left when Richey comes home, then I’ll smile,’ one wrote.3 There were undoubtedly people for whom Richey’s spindly glamour was a dangerous thing – people who had fallen more than half in love with alienation, boredom and despair. Peter Doherty, an eighteen-year-old Manics fan who would later inspire Richey-like devotion as the raffish lead singer of The Libertines, addressed this cohort in a letter to the NME. Branding the Cult of Richey a ‘Cult of Nothing’, he urged its members to stop wallowing in memories of their hero and to move on. ‘With Richey went all feeble hopes of purity and guitars and profound graffiti,’ he wrote. ‘All fanzines must stop. Let it be known.’4 A more nuanced appraisal of Richey’s equivocal magnetism can be found in a comic-book series, Phonogram: Rue Britannia (2006), by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. At its centre is a bespectacled ‘phonomancer’ named David Kohl, who is able to travel into the past by playing songs on his Walkman. It’s a neat metaphor for how music shapes our perceptions: a chord change can transport us to a different time – and hold us there, if we let it. Phonogram deconstructs the collective delusions of the Britpop era: there are withering jibes about Kula Shaker and the Oasis gig at Knebworth. Gillen and McKelvie acknowledge the Manics as one of the few British groups of the period who really mattered – they are hailed as one of ‘the most inspiring and ridiculous bands in history’ – 94

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but also draw attention to the way Richey’s disappearance obscured their greatness with an overbearing mythology all its own. On one of his journeys back in time, David finds the ghost of his friend Beth, an uber Manics fan; the apparition represents the part of her psyche that will forever be in mourning for Richey. David leads her to the Severn Bridge and she leaps into the river, freeing the ‘real’ Beth to move on with her life. Kohl lingers at Aust, bitterly deprecating the fans who followed their hero like a ‘choir of wasted hopes. … There was always more to the Manics than Richey. He changed all that here.’5 *** Yet if there was always more to the Manics than Richey, there was more to Richey than the baleful rock myth. His influence was positive in many ways. He was someone young people could identify with, who understood their depression, their eating disorders, their need to assuage psychological distress with physical pain. Fans were far more likely to recognize him as a fellow sufferer than to follow him as an example. In most cases Richey merely said what they wanted to say, articulated what they already had cause to feel. In doing so he helped end ‘the conspiracy of silence’ surrounding mental illness among teenagers, as Caitlin Moran put it.6 Richey’s open discussion of his problems was particularly important at a time when British culture was pervaded by a cajoling hedonism. The Richey-era Manics provided an outlet for those who didn’t fit in at the Britpop party – the kind of party people appeared to be having on TFI Friday or 95

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The Big Breakfast, presided over by some cheery, beery bloke telling you to smile because it might never happen, even if it already had. The writer Rachel Trezise discovered The Holy Bible while growing up as a teenager in the Rhondda Valley, a place about as far removed from the 1990s’ Good Mixer vibe as it was possible to be. ‘At the time, because of Oasis and New Labour and all of that stuff, we were meant to be in a new age: “We’re all middle-class now, everything is fine now,”’ she says. ‘But in the Valleys we totally weren’t – we were still living in the shadow of Thatcherism. A lot of people were unhappy and weren’t allowed to admit to it – girls especially, with all the Lad Mag stuff going on. So Richey’s sentiments were something they could relate to. The Holy Bible says you’re allowed to feel those things. You’re allowed to be upset at the world.’ Trezise’s Fresh Apples, which won the inaugural Dylan Thomas Prize in 2006, is a collection of stories set in South Wales; it vividly depicts the region’s ‘closing-down coal mines and despairing, redundant men’.7 But the book also zings with linguistic vigour, wry comedy and intoxicating descriptions of the full-to-bursting elation of hearing a good rock song. Trezise has come to see The Holy Bible as a comparable work of Welsh culture – although it didn’t seem that way when she first heard it. ‘When it came out it felt, to me, completely international and cosmopolitan, not Welsh at all. But with hindsight you can see that all the politics and all of those emotions come directly from the South Wales Valleys.’ You didn’t need to be Welsh to fall in love with The Holy Bible, though. From Birmingham to Bangkok, the album 96

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inspired fans to read and write and create, even if they were initially drawn to the Manics out of a sense of affinity with Richey. Edinburgh-based novelist Ever Dundas was among them. ‘I was sixteen, and I was going through a difficult time; I was self-harming before I came across the Manics’, she says. ‘The fact that Richey was going through the same thing – and didn’t hide it – was important. And the album really spoke to me. I was brought up in the perfect Christian family, which I was struggling with, as I knew it was kind of a fake veneer. The Holy Bible really digs into that, digs under the veneer of polite society. To find this alternative Bible opened up a new world, a new way of being. Weirdly, it gave me hope and ambition.’ Dundas overcame problems at school to attend university as a mature student, graduating with a first-class degree. ‘I feel I owe that achievement partly to the Manics.’ Dundas continues to listen to The Holy Bible. ‘I find it invigorating’, she says, pointing to the way it introduced her to new cultural touchstones. ‘Like every other obsessive fan I fell down several Manics “rabbit holes”; I loved the fact they wore their influences on their sleeves – literally on their record sleeves. I owe my love of Ballard and Plath to them. And I was inspired by the fact that they didn’t differentiate between high art and low art – it all mattered.’ Dundas’s beguiling first novel, Goblin, offers an alternative history of the Second World War, hopping back and forth between past and present and weaving in allusions to H. G. Wells and the Dirk Bogarde film Death in Venice. ‘Adding these layers of intertextuality definitely came from the Manics’, Dundas says. 97

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In Retromania, Simon Reynolds describes how pop groups can act as ‘portals’, directing their fans to ‘a whole universe of inspiration and ideas beyond music’.8 Manic Street Preachers are perhaps the best example. Their records – and The Holy Bible in particular – acted as a kind of audio-visual guide to twentieth-century art and history. Fans formed clubs, started websites, organized conventions and worked together to hunt down sources for those recondite quotations. Early in his career, the Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller caught a snapshot of this fan culture with an exhibition called ‘The Uses of Literacy’ (1997). Deller had first become aware of the band in the early 1990s, when he caught a gig at the London Marquee, and was interested in how their music sparked new creative endeavours. ‘I thought the fans’ work would be a new form of folk art and pop art combined, and I knew the fans were special, they were a community in a pre-digital way’, says Deller. He named the project after Richard Hoggart’s seminal book on working-class life, partly because the band shared Hoggart’s preoccupation with class and partly because of the resonance of the phrase itself: ‘One use of literacy is in writing lyrics and inspiring young people.’ The exhibits were diverse: letters, sketches, poetry, black-and-white photography. One fan simply sent in her library, comprised entirely of works cited by the Manics, from Plath’s The Bell Jar to Primo Levi’s If This is a Man to the letters of Vincent van Gogh, each volume dog-eared and well-thumbed. In 1999, Deller curated a follow-up exhibition, ‘Unconvention’, at the Centre for Visual Arts in Cardiff. The aim, he says, was to ‘present [the Manics’] visual and political 98

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influences and references in one place at one time, with original artworks rather than copies, a mix of art and history together’. Pieces worth £40 million were loaned to the CVA, from Picasso to Edvard Munch to Jenny Saville. Even without the Manics’ official involvement, the exhibition became a hub of activity: fans arrived to pore over the paintings; art groups and left-wing agitators distributed pamphlets. The Pendyrus Male Voice Choir brought the hwyl. For a while anyone could step into the Manics portal and feel the whirligig cultural rush, whether or not they had ever heard the opening bars of ‘Yes’. *** My own route into the portal came via an unpromising source: a fag-end-of-Britpop compilation named Q Anthems, which was as bad as it sounds. I’d decided that, aged fourteen, it was high time for me to start listening to what I’d begun to think of as ‘proper’ music, and had bought the CD as a means of self-education. I took it with me on a family trip to visit my grandparents in Merthyr Tydfil. I remember lying in bed, struggling to sleep, looking out of the window at the shark’s fin shape of the lights across the valley. Skipping past Blur and U2 on my Discman, I reached ‘A Design for Life’, and that was that. Soon afterwards I got hold of a copy of Simon Price’s wonderful biography of the band, Everything, which taught me the history, and I worked back through the Manics’ catalogue towards The Holy Bible. I never identified with Richey to the extent some other fans did, but I was finding those teenage years very tough. I saw myself reflected in the mirror of the lyrics: ‘Soft skin, now acne’ (me too), ‘foul 99

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breath, so broken’ (check). There was an element of selfdisgust in this, and – as Richey knew – self-disgust equals self-obsession. But I also loved the album’s literariness, its unabashed flaunting of book knowledge. I’d never heard anything so wordy. I was your typical spotty swot, just then beginning to recognize the beauty of a well-turned sentence, and The Holy Bible taught me this was ok, even something to be proud of. I listened on repeat, but the music proved inexhaustible: moving, dark, nape-tinglingly exciting. The Manics got me through my GCSEs, then followed me to sixth-form college. I would hum ‘Yes’ and ‘4st 7Ib’ on the way to class, headphones in, the album spinning away evilly on that ailing Discman, which I could just about squeeze into the pockets of my jeans. I always worried about taking The Holy Bible out of the house, lest someone would spot the lettering on the CD and think I was listening to an audio version of the Good Book (this did actually happen, on one excruciating occasion). But it was a useful thing to have around, academically speaking. Those lyrics about history and politics weren’t a substitute for an education but they felt like a start, an entry point into a more serious, grown-up world. Studying English Literature at A-Level, we were asked to write a verse about the Great War. I pinched some lines from ‘Mausoleum’ (‘No birds / The sky is swollen black’) to describe the landscapes of the Somme – and reacted rather sheepishly when the poem received top marks. Getting into the Manics also gave me a new sense of identity. I began to embrace my Welsh background – partly because it helped me explain how disconnected I felt from 100

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my immediate surroundings in leafy, small-town England; partly because it brought me closer to the band. In my first year at Cardiff University, I decorated the walls of my room with a poster for the French erotic thriller Betty Blue, a niche Manics reference. (I hadn’t actually seen the film yet, but pretentiousness was part of the deal.) On Saturday nights I’d drag my friends down to Metros on Baker’s Row, a rock dive where James and Richey would sometimes let off steam after The Holy Bible sessions. You could buy a double whiskey and mixer for 99p, and – more importantly – the DJ was amenable to requests for ‘Faster’ or ‘P.C.P.’ When the Manics announced the ‘Past-Present-Future’ tour, on which they promised to revive some of the old Holy Bible standards, I splurged my student loan on tickets to follow them around the country. I remember elbowing my way down to the barrier at the Hammersmith Apollo when they unexpectedly played ‘Revol’, shouting ‘Raus Raus, Fila Fila’ like a deranged colonel, leaving my remarkably forgiving girlfriend to get swallowed up in the mosh pit behind me. Most people grow out of their teenage obsessions eventually. For whatever reason I didn’t: Manic Street Preachers are still my favourite band. There’s probably an element of arrested development in this, and maybe some of the hiraeth I’ve been talking about, that tendency to linger on what is lost to the past. After all, the Manics were already some way beyond their Holy Bible peak when I discovered them. My immersion in the band’s early work, I realize now, involved a sort of wistfulness for a time I never knew. Fresh and exciting musical trends rose and fell in the 2000s, and there I was savouring the artwork on my eBay-procured ‘She 101

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is Suffering’ single, reaching for a volume of Octavio Paz to cross-reference the sleeve quote. And now here I am writing a book about it. Portals can take you to new places. They can also hold you trapped. Then again, listening to the Manics instilled a sense of intellectual discipline and a love of language. The hwyl in the music spurred me on. I completed a doctorate on Herman Melville, a writer whose name I first came across on the cover of an early Manics single. And some of my happiest moments have been at their gigs, despite the fact I never caught them in their definitive guise as a four-piece. Bruce Springsteen once said that ‘people come to rock shows to be who they are at their most joyous, who they are at their deepest’, and I feel the truth of that statement when I see the Manics on stage, even as James’s hairline recedes further up his forehead, and Nicky’s wonky star jumps become ever more likely to shatter his fragile knees. While the Manics are always there, The Holy Bible itself comes and goes as the years pass. I regard it as their finest achievement and, whenever asked, I affirm it as my favourite record. But I find it too extreme, too intense to listen to on a regular basis – and maybe a little too prone to remind me of a difficult time. As the band themselves recognized in the years after Richey’s disappearance, life must be lived in a lower, more tolerable key.

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When he is asked to recall the weeks that followed Richey’s departure, Nicky Wire tends to compare himself to the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s novel Dangling Man, who sits despondently in his Brooklyn apartment, anticipating the draft. The band issued public appeals for information and even hired a private investigator to track Richey down, but otherwise there was ‘nothing to do but wait, and dangle, and grow more and more dispirited’, as Bellow puts it.1 Nicky was diagnosed with a stress-related illness; James found solace in drinking binges. During Richey’s treatment in 1994, the Manics had said it was inconceivable that they would carry on if he left the group – he was not just a bandmate, after all, but a friend, and without him their essential last-gang-in-town mentality would be irrevocably shattered. As the weeks turned to months, two things convinced them to change their minds. The first was the encouragement of Richey’s family, who urged them to re-enter the studio in the hope that it might prompt him to make contact. The second was a song. While they were tentatively exploring the possibility of making another album, Nicky handed James a pair of

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lyrics entitled ‘A Pure Motive’ and ‘A Design for Life’. They dealt with similar themes, so James elided the two verses. Worrying away at a melody to fit the words, he hit upon a kind of waltz – like ‘an old Motown record, a bit of REM, a bit of Ennio Morricone’2 – and excitedly telephoned Nicky to tell him he had written something that might be good enough to justify the continued existence of Manic Street Preachers. It was. Both an angry protest against the media’s distortion of working-class culture and a sad-eyed requiem for the welfare state, ‘A Design for Life’ is a masterpiece. Propelled by a melody that heaves and surges like the tide crashing against the Aberystwyth seafront, it also sounds so different from the claustrophobic post-punk of The Holy Bible as to be the work of a different band entirely. But the political anger and clarity of thought are still there, beneath the jukebox sheen. Take the opening couplet: ‘Libraries gave us power / Then work came and made us free.’ The first line is a nod to the slogan ‘Knowledge is Power’, which was carved into the frontispiece of Pillgwenlly Library in Newport as a proud statement of proletarian literacy. The second is a covert reference to another slogan, the one over the gates at the Nazi death camps – Arbeit Macht Frei – that Richey invoked on ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’. And the bridge repeats ‘Faster’s’ attack on boorish workingclass stereotypes: ‘We don’t talk about love, we only want to get drunk.’3 Whether listeners registered the bitter sarcasm in that line was something of a moot point. Released on 15 April 1996, ‘A Design for Life’ became a massive hit, selling 93,000 copies 104

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in its first week and soaring to Number Two in the UK chart. Only Mark Morrison’s ‘Return of the Mack’ kept it off the top spot. *** The album was released a month later. Like its lead single, Everything Must Go contains several subtle reminders of The Holy Bible. On the sleeve, designed by Mark Farrow, photographs of James, Nicky and Sean (drably dressed; their expressions unreadable) are arranged in such a way as to evoke Jenny Saville’s Strategy, while the title is underscored with a set of empty brackets, a typographical clue as to the record’s unspoken backstory. The idea might have come from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126, which ends with a pair of empty parentheses commemorating the mourned absence of the ‘fair youth’ to whom the cycle is addressed. Everything Must Go also features some of the Edwardspenned lyrics the Manics demoed before his disappearance. ‘Kevin Carter’ tells the true story of the titular South African war photographer, who died by suicide shortly after winning a Pulitzer Prize for his image of a vulture pursuing a starving Sudanese child. In Richey’s lyric, the bird becomes a metaphor for Carter’s presumed guilt at having won fame by documenting the world’s cruelty (‘vulture stalked whitepiped lie forever’) – a theme with obvious personal relevance. The music is stunning, yoking the lean guitars of The Holy Bible to a shoulder-waggling Bossa nova rhythm. Woodblock percussion mimics the incessant clicking of a camera shutter, or perhaps the chatter of insects in the African grass. Sean caps it all off with a gorgeous trumpet solo. 105

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The lyrics to ‘Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky’, a lament for animals trapped in captivity, and ‘Removables’, in which Richey hints at his own mind-forged manacles (‘Conscience binds you in chains’), are similarly morbid. But the music teases out an unlikely thread of optimism. In the chorus to ‘Removables’, James repeats the lines ‘All removables, all transitory / All removables, passing always’. On the first go he snarls the words over a sinister-sounding A-minor chord shift, railing against the passage of time; on the second his delivery is softer, with the melody ascending from C to F-major, as if he has found a kind of comfort in impermanence. And therein lies the difference between The Holy Bible and Everything Must Go. Nicky’s lyrics are as intelligent and culturally literate as Richey’s ever were, but they also carry a hard-won wisdom: too much history is bad for you, and sometimes it is healthier to avert your eyes. On ‘Enola/Alone’, Wire alludes to Enola Gay, the B-29 plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, before confiding halfapologetically that ‘all I wanna do is live  /  No matter how miserable it is’. The music playfully cuffs the listener round the ears, and James even allows himself an inarticulate howl of pleasure just before the chorus kicks in – the sort of rock indulgence that would have been ruthlessly excised from The Holy Bible. On the title track, Nicky writes directly about the band’s reckoning with their own past. He imagines sloughing off the husk of his memories (‘Shed some skin for the fear within’) and addresses the fans who were dismayed by the Manics’ decision to move on without Richey: ‘I just hope that you can forgive us / But everything must go.’ Guitars, brass and 106

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strings build to a crescendo, such that James’s vocals are almost drowned out before he has a chance to reach the pivotal line. ‘Freed us eventually,’ he cries. ‘Just need to be happy, happy.’ *** Everything Must Go became – to use the proper musicindustry terminology – fucking huge. The album yielded four further singles and sold more than two million copies. Having carped at the Britpop celebs for the last three years, the Manics were now beating Damon and the Gallaghers at their own game. At the Brit Awards in 1997, a bash that has gone down in the collective memory as the debut of Geri Halliwell’s Union Jack minidress, they won Best Album and Best British Group. ‘A Design for Life’ lost out in the singles category to The Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’, but the two bands buried the hatchet in the bar afterwards. The success was – to use a most inadequate cliché – bittersweet. The Manics had always wanted to get their songs into the mainstream and onto the radio. Now they had done it, but at a cost. ‘I can’t help thinking. … “Richey, if you could just have held on a little longer, things might have been a lot different. Maybe then you could have had all these things you wanted. You might have been happy,”’ said Bradfield.4 It’s tempting to imagine an alternate universe in which Edwards was dating Kate Moss, or staring at Chris Evans with undisguised contempt during an interview on TFI Friday. Then again, maybe the Manics couldn’t have taken the step from cult favourites to indie-rock royalty while Richey was still in the band. The simplicity and emotional 107

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directness of Nicky’s lyrics allowed James and Sean greater scope for melodic expression, and the hits flowed like water through an open dam. On the Everything Must Go tour, the sweatboxes of 1994 were replaced by echoing arenas, where fans in eyeliner and leopard-print were outnumbered by geezers in Ocean Colour Scene t-shirts. The Manics themselves dropped the camouflage costumes for casual clothes, and brought in a keyboard player to fill out the sound. But they deliberately kept Richey’s side of the stage empty, and James would carefully skirt around it whenever he strayed from the microphone to play his guitar solos. The academic Larissa Wodtke, who writes beautifully about the way the Manics ‘haunted their own future’ with The Holy Bible, describes this vacant space as an ‘absence made present. A negative index.’5 In the huge venues the band were now playing, this absentpresence was all the more difficult to ignore. Their biggest gig to date came at the gargantuan Nynex Arena in Manchester in May 1997, a few weeks after New Labour’s landslide victory in the General Election. They were still singing about politics and class struggle and the lessons of the past. But for a while they shared in that vertiginous feeling that gripped Britain at the time, the feeling that it might be possible – might be necessary – to escape our history, if only for a moment. Maybe things really could get better. When James sang ‘we only wanna get drunk’, some of the irony in those words was willingly discarded, to be crunched underfoot with the sticky dregs of 20,000 plastic beer cups. *** 108

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The euphoria of the Everything Must Go period didn’t last long. On the Manics’ next album, This is My Truth Tell Me Yours (1998), their music continued to develop away from the post-punk of The Holy Bible towards softer acoustic textures. History was crowding in again. They’d begun to be more open about their Welsh influences: there were references to Bevan, Burton, R. S. Thomas and the deluged village of Capel Celyn, which was flooded to make a reservoir for the industrial towns of northern England. Even the big hit single was drenched in hiraeth. Inspired by the Welsh miners who volunteered to fight for the republican side in the Spanish Civil War, ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’ is less a rousing anti-fascist anthem than a self-recriminatory portrait of Generation X. Nicky recounts a visit to Barcelona, where he is shamed by the sight of a veteran playing with ‘newspaper cuttings of his glory days’. It was a song Richey would no doubt have loved – and it sailed straight to Number One. The Manics couldn’t stop getting bigger, it seemed. In 1999 they headlined the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury and sold out a New Year’s concert at Cardiff ’s 70,000-seater Millennium Stadium, an event they named – with a nod to an anthology of Situationist writings – ‘Leaving the 20th Century’. From the outside it looked like a triumphant homecoming, but Nicky admitted ‘we didn’t enjoy it like we should have. We asked: “If we’re this popular, does it mean we’re shit?”’6 Affronted by their newfound fame, they began to flirt with a hard-line communist stance that they had never really believed in, even when they flourished the hammer and sickle to scandalize Middle England in the early days. The artwork 109

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for their next single, ‘The Masses against the Classes’, came in a sleeve emblazoned with the Cuban flag. And in 2001 they launched the Know Your Enemy tour at Havana’s Karl Marx theatre in front of Fidel Castro, who turned up backstage to speak to them before the show. Warned the music would be loud, El Comandante offered a memorable rejoinder: ‘It can’t be louder than war, can it?’ Despite Castro’s imprimatur, Know Your Enemy represented the end of the Manics’ commercial pomp – not because the buying public shunned its politics, but because it wasn’t very good. *** The Manics would still play the odd song from The Holy Bible, always with a perceptible sense of duty. James likened the album to ‘a cursed chalice … you can feel the lesions breaking out all over your body’.7 But its influence was in everything they did. Know Your Enemy was a clear attempt to recapture the youthful brio of the Bible era, even if it was comparatively flabby and bereft of ideas. In 2004, the Manics made a record called Lifeblood, which Nicky described as ‘The Holy Bible for 35-year-olds’. It wasn’t, but it held reminders of Richey, notably ‘Cardiff Afterlife’. The song transports us back to those recording sessions at Soundspace Studios with a swish of Welsh harp, like the sonic cues that presage flashbacks in a B-movie. ‘The paralysed future  /  This past sideways crawl’, Nicky writes, alluding both to those chilling lines on ‘Die in the Summertime’ (‘I have crawled so far sideways’) and to the gravitational pull The Holy Bible exerts on the band. That year they released a 110

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tenth-anniversary edition of the album, and played several of its songs on the ‘Past-Present-Future’ tour – those awkward hyphens indicating the contortions needed to keep the various stages of their career in touch. In 2008, emboldened by the success of a stupendous pop-rock comeback album called Send Away the Tigers, they revealed they had decided to use some of the lyrics Richey left behind. The result was a record that celebrated what the band called ‘the genius and intellect of Richard James Edwards’. Journal for Plague Lovers is deliberately framed as a sequel to The Holy Bible: the cover is adorned with a Jenny Saville painting; the tracks are introduced with sampled dialogue from films and documentaries; and a couple of the songs mimic the slinky post-punk guitars of ‘Faster’ and ‘Ifwhiteamerica …’. But there are also quirky pop anthems (‘Jackie Collins Existential Question Time’) and elegant acoustic numbers (‘This Joke Sport Severed’; ‘Facing Page/ Top Left’) that mark it out as something new. The lyrics, drawn entirely from the folder Richey gave his bandmates before he left in 1995, explore his typically abstruse cultural and political themes: Noam Chomsky’s writings about Vietnam; the Brando-Taylor melodrama Reflections in a Golden Eye, with its humid scenarios of dominance and abasement; the elongated spine of the nude in Ingres’s painting Grande Odalisque (‘Odalisque by Ingres  /  Extra bones for sale’). Richey’s supplementary notes, reproduced in the album’s booklet, confirm the prodigious intellectual range of his writing: he refers to H.H. Munro’s story ‘Sredni Vashtar’ (an Equus-like tale of a boy who worships a vicious 111

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polecat), the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and the fate of Oliver Cromwell’s disembodied head. On the whole, though, the songs on Journal for Plague Lovers are more obviously autobiographical than those on The Holy Bible. ‘Virginia State Epileptic Colony’ might have been written in the strip-lit wards of Whitchurch hospital: ‘Wake to strobes and half-circled light / Confusion lifts with potassium percolate.’ Other tracks are rifted with a lovely, self-deprecating wit: ‘Oh the joy, me and Stephen Hawking we laugh / We missed the Sex Revolution when we failed the physical.’ The album concludes with ‘William’s Last Words’, whose lyric was originally a long, stream-of-consciousness monologue written from the perspective of a sloshed Welsh singer at a wedding party. In the context, however, it becomes an intensely personal valediction, an exchange of mutual farewells between Edwards and his bandmates across the years. Nicky sings Richey’s lines, delivering a sandpapery vocal over a cello diminuendo: ‘Wish me some luck as you wave goodbye to me / You’re the best friends I ever had … I’d like to go to sleep, and wake up happy.’ In the light of all that we know, and all that we don’t, the song is almost unbearably moving. In November 2008, a few weeks after the Manics announced they were working on the record, the Edwards family obtained a court order to have Richey declared officially ‘presumed dead’. A lawyer for the family said that while they had long resisted the move, they now acknowledged that his ‘affairs have got to be sorted’.8 Richey’s sister, Rachel Elias, has since become an eloquent 112

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campaigner for the rights of missing people’s families. She has fought for relatives to receive better communication from police during an investigation, and raises money for The Missing People, a charity, as a member of its choir. She continues to search for the truth behind her brother’s disappearance.9 *** For the band, too, closure would seem a remote prospect. Richey is forever absent; he is always there. But Journal for Plague Lovers did at least release them to engage with the legacy of The Holy Bible more freely. When the album’s twentieth birthday came around, they were ready to mark the occasion with another deluxe boxset and – it was rumoured – an anniversary tour. If the Manics took a long time to confirm the news, their reluctance appeared understandable. They had continued their late-career resurgence with the impressive one-two punch of Rewind the Film (melancholic tender-soft acoustic songs, laden with hiraeth) and Futurology (experimental post-rock, full of vim and vigour and hwyl), and perhaps they would not want to delve into the past once more. But in December 2014 there we were, at the Roundhouse in London, confronted by a stage lit up in lurid greens and hellish reds, camo netting dangling from the rafters. No half measures. When the band emerged, wreathed in dry ice, they were dressed in the military regalia of old. James donned a sailor suit, a little tighter around the midriff, now. Sean settled his UN beret upon his greying head. Nicky daubed his cheeks with war paint one last time. 113

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They were astonishing, those nights. Never has Nicky’s description of the Manics’ music – ‘a sense of melancholic victory’10 – rung truer than it did then. I attended three of the gigs and each time the early songs were immaculately played, but slightly stiff. Every syllable sung, every gristly bass note present and correct, not much interaction with the crowd. We all knew why we were there. But halfway through there was a noticeable shift, and the day-of-remembrance solemnity gave way to pure rock ’n’ roll zest. Songs that had rarely been played live were resurrected by some black magic as crowd-pleasing anthems. Nicky took to chanting ‘1-2-3-4’ before the chorus of ‘Mausoleum’, inviting fans to join him in a macabre singalong: No birds! No birds! And all of a sudden those lines were invested with the same cathartic pleasure as the chorus to ‘Everything Must Go’. Fans around me were crying, whether from joy or sadness it was difficult to tell. What made those anniversary concerts so special, I think, was that they enacted the tension that is there on The Holy Bible itself: on the one hand, the impulse to look back into history; and on the other, the desire to inhabit the present moment with words and music. The Holy Bible 20 tour reached its climax at Cardiff Castle the following summer. Some of the Bible’s power dissipated slightly in the open air, and the casual fans who turned up to hear the hits seemed baffled, at first, by the fervour of the Richey contingent down the front. But Nicky’s tribute to his absent friend drew an emphatic cheer: ‘This album could never have been made without the beauty, the intelligence, the poetic genius, the ferocious journalistic skill, of our greatest lyricist, Mr. Richard Edwards.’ 114

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Later, as the sun set and the band tore into ‘Faster’, a wave of energy coursed through the crowd. Those fiery words – I am an architect – were sung in unison. And in that instant the two sides of Manic Street Preachers, the exuberance and the sorrow, the hwyl and the hiraeth, were as one in the twilight.

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Conceived by the actor Michael Sheen and the writer Owen Sheers, The Passion of Port Talbot was an ambitious theatrical event staged in the eponymous town over the Easter Weekend of April 2011. Thousands of non-professional actors joined Hollywood stars to perform a modern version of the Gospel of St. Mark beneath the twinkling lights of the steelworks. The plot centred on the activities of a sinister corporation, ICU, which threatened to seize Port Talbot’s resources. Sheen played the Teacher, a Christ-like sage who led the resistance against the company. During the ‘Last Supper’ at the Seaside Social and Labour Club, a group of musicians took to the stage in disguise, finally throwing off their balaclavas to reveal themselves to be the Manic Street Preachers. They played a rousing set before the ICU goons arrested them for sedition. The Passion of Port Talbot demonstrates how the combustible energy that propelled the Manics through The Holy Bible era continues to ripple out in strange and unpredictable directions. Sheen’s first encounter with the band came when they last donned balaclavas, to play ‘Faster’ on Top of the Pops in 1994. That performance stayed with him. ‘It was a combination of a few things coming together,’

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he recalls. ‘There was the gut punch of the punk influence, the raw, kinetic, visceral quality. But also the glam quality, that style.’ Sheen says the Manics taught him that political art needn’t be worthy or earnest, and showed him ways of drawing on history to illuminate the present. ‘The more I found out about them the more I realized their work is connected to the past, but only inasmuch as it focused your attention on the present. Socioeconomically, there are all sorts of struggles in Blackwood and the South Wales Valleys areas. But when you’re from that kind of place you focus your energy on the moment, precisely because of what is potentially holding you back.’ A Port Talbot native, Sheen invited the band to become involved in The Passion not only because they shared his Welsh heritage but also because the play owed something to their influence, in its tale of an industrial town responding to the threat of obsolescence with dignity, eloquence and cool anger. The project was ‘very much rooted in the community and was clearly taking a political stance – and a lot of that was coming from a place that had been influenced by my enjoyment of the Manics in the first place, so it came full circle,’ says Sheen. He credits the band with giving him a ‘sense of possibility’. *** In 2019 The Holy Bible is more relevant than ever. Its fevered warnings against nationalism have come to seem prescient amid the chaos of the Brexit negotiations and the recrudescence of far-right politics across Europe. A 118

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new biography of Richey, Withdrawn Traces, promises to generate fresh speculation about the personal dimensions to his writing. But more than anything else, it’s that ‘sense of possibility’ that keeps listeners coming back to the album. With its intelligence, its anger, its dark wit and creative verve, it remains hot to the touch and primed to spark new ideas into being. As for the Manics themselves, the future is uncertain. In the years since The Holy Bible’s anniversary celebrations they have occasionally seemed to lack direction. They have commemorated Everything Must Go and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours in a similar fashion, and the pace of new work has slowed. Nicky Wire has repeatedly hinted that the end of the band may be near. The most recent studio record, Resistance Is Futile (2018), concludes with a song called ‘The Left Behind’, which I originally took to be a lament for towns like Port Talbot, hollowed out by the forces of globalized capital. In fact the lyric concerns Nicky’s fears about the Manics’ own redundancy in an era of digital streaming and data-crunching algorithms. The cover art is a colourized photograph of a samurai warrior arrayed in the luxurious armour of a bygone age – a rather obvious visual metaphor for a band conscious they may now be nothing more than a splendid anachronism. And yet here they are, still raging against political cant, still keen to share that naive pleasure in art and culture. The string-drenched choruses of Resistance is Futile pay tribute to Dylan and Caitlin Thomas and the photographer Vivian Maier – new portals to fall into. On tour they continue to clatter about with the same ragged sense of purpose as they 119

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did at the Crumlin Railway Hotel thirty years ago, though the production values have advanced since then. Nowadays they tend to walk out on stage beneath a giant screen projection that quotes Richey Edwards’s favourite playwright, Tennessee Williams: ‘Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going.’ It’s an apposite line. More than any other band, Manic Street Preachers make music that is preoccupied with memory. But somehow, improbably, they go on catching the present moment too.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Jeremy Deller, Ever Dundas, Simon Price, Michael Sheen, Alex Silva and Rachel Trezise for kindly agreeing to answer my questions. Interviews were conducted in 2017. Manic Street Preachers declined to be interviewed, but I hope this book goes some way towards repaying the debt I owe them for the pleasure and excitement their music has given me over the years. I would also like to thank my editors at Bloomsbury, Leah Babb-Rosenfeld and Kevin Dettmar, for their help, patience and encouragement. I am grateful for the support of my family and friends. Thanks especially to Allyn Evans and Luke Kelly, for boosting morale; to Jaimee Spencer-Bickle, for the Manics gigs; and to Molly Behagg, for everything. This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandparents, Edward and Elma Evans.

Notes

I am indebted to the Manics biographies by Martin Clarke, Rob Jovanovic, Martin Power and Simon Price. Special mention goes to Price’s Everything, a masterpiece of the form that I recommend to anyone who would like more detail on the band’s early career than I have been able to provide here. I have also gratefully made use of the archived press articles collected at www.foreverdelayed.org.uk.

Epigraph The text from Bad Company, written by Peter Milligan, appears courtesy of Rebellion. Bad Company created by Peter Milligan, Brett Ewins and Jim McCarthy, Copyright © Rebellion 2000 AD Ltd, All Rights Reserved.

Introduction 1. Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber, 2011). 2. R.S. Thomas, Collected Poems (London: Orion, 2004), 37.

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3. Rhian E. Jones, Daniel Lukes and Larissa Wodtke, Triptych: Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible (London: Repeater, 2017). 4. Discussions of the Manics’ Welshness usually focus on their later work. In ‘Little Empires’, a fascinating blog series on her site Velvet Coalmine, Rhian E. Jones explores Welsh identity through the prism of the Manics’ 1998 song ‘Ready for Drowning’. See also Richard King’s essay on the Manics’ Welshness, which locates an element of hiraeth in 2013’s Rewind the Film. (‘We may write in English but our truth remains in Wales’, October 2013; available on the band’s official website.) 5. Available at www.geiriadur.ac.uk/. 6. The phrase is from a speech by the academic Chris Williams, who reads Richard Burton’s diaries through the prism of hwyl and hiraeth. See ‘Hwyl and Hiraeth: Richard Burton and Wales’, available at www.cymmrodorion.org. 7. Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978– 1984 (London: Faber, 2005), xxiii.

Scars 1. Interview with Pete Paphides in Time Out, December 1994. 2. This detail is referenced in Simon Price’s Everything (A Book about Manic Street Preachers) (London: Virgin Books, 1999), which remains the most exciting and vivid account of the band’s early years. 3. Quoted in Carling Homecoming documentary, Channel Four, first broadcast November 2002.

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4. Quoted in Jan Morris, The Matter of Wales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 274. 5. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 248. 6. Raymond Williams, Who Speaks for Wales?: Nation, Culture, Identity (Cardiff: University of Press, 2003), 6. 7. Carling Homecoming. 8. Ibid. 9. See letters to friends published in Jenny Watkins-Isnardi, In the Beginning: My Life with the Manic Street Preachers (London: Blake Publishing, 2000), 299–308. 10. Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 75. 11. Morris, The Matter of Wales, 244. 12. See Rob Jovanovic, A Version of Reason: The Search for Richey Edwards (London: Orion, 2009), 68.

The Bigger Things 1. Interview with Peter Orr, 1962. See Orr (ed.), The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets (London: Routledge, 1966). 2. I am indebted to Simon Price’s thorough and vivid account of the incident in Everything, 46–56. 3. Interview with Lime Lizard magazine, August 1993.

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4. Dutch radio interview, November 1994. 5. Quoted in John Harris, The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), 134. 6. This fascinating interview, a recording of which can be found on YouTube, dates from James’s promotional trip to the United States in early 1995. 7. The sleeve art of Gold Against the Soul is an homage to a book of prose and avant-garde photography called Barakei (Killed by Roses), on which Mishima collaborated with Eikoh Hosoe. 8. Price, Everything, 113. 9. Quoted from interview in Mastertapes: Manic Street Preachers, BBC Radio Four, first broadcast 17 November 2014. 10. You can glimpse this collage in the photographs of Richey’s flat included in Mitch Ikeda’s Forever Delayed: Photographs of the Manic Street Preachers (London: Vision On Publishing, 2002).

The Preacher 1. Kevin J.H. Dettmar, Entertainment (New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 2. Harris, The Last Party, xvi. 3. Interview with Scathe fanzine, 2 February 1994. 4. Alwyn Turner, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s, (London: Aurum, 2013), 426.

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5. See Simon Price, ‘Richey’s Men of the Year’, Melody Maker, December 1993. 6. Mastertapes interview. 7. See Rhian E. Jones, ‘Unwritten Diaries: History, Politics and Experience through The Holy Bible’, in Triptych (London: Repeater, 2017). Jones also discusses the Manics’ opposition to class stereotypes in her brilliant polemic Clapdown: Popcultural Wars on Class and Gender (London: Zero Books, 2013). 8. ‘Ifwhiteamerica...’ appears to have been more or less a joint effort between Richey and Nicky, although we know that it was Richey who supplied the ‘Brady Bill’ coda. As with many of the songs, Wire also contributed the title, which is a quote from the comedian Lenny Bruce. 9. Interview with Caitlin Moran on Naked City, Channel Four, first broadcast April 1994. 10. The literary critic Daneen Wardrop has explored the Gothic/ Freudian elements in Dickinson’s handling of the ‘re’ prefix. See Emily Dickinson’s Gothic (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 156. 11. Quoted in Stuart Bailie, ‘The Art of Falling Apart,’ Mojo, February 2002. 12. M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010), 112. 13. See John Goodby’s introduction to The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, Centenary Edition (London: W&N, 2016), xxvii–xxix. 14. See Dorian Lynskey’s chapter on The Holy Bible in his superb book, 33 1/3 Revolutions per Minute (London: Faber, 2011).

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15. Quoted in David Stubbs, 1996 and The End of History (London: Repeater, 2016), 286. 16. See Daniel Lukes, ‘Fragments against Ruin: The Books of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible’, in Triptych (London: Repeater, 2017), 221–5.

This is Yesterday 1. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man/The Truce, trans. Stuart Roof (London: Abacus, 1991), 395. 2. Richey would occasionally give this impression in interviews. As Simon Price writes, ‘During the writing of the album, Richey confessed to an appreciation of the aesthetics, if not the ethics, of fascism, and told me of his admiration for Dr Hassan El Turabi, who had implemented a hardline Islamic code of Shariya law in Sudan.’ See Everything, 142. 3. See Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War Two (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 4. ‘To Play Churchill Is to Hate Him’, The New York Times, 24 November 1974. 5. See Simon Hattenstone, ‘Without You: What It’s Like to Be the Sibling of a Missing Person’, The Guardian, 11 April 2015. 6. In an exceptionally acute chapter on The Holy Bible, Boswell discusses ‘Mausoleum’ and ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ as examples of ‘Holocaust impiety’. See Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 124–30.

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7. Quoted in John Harris, ‘The Commitments’, The Observer, 21 November 2004. 8. ‘The Eccentricities of a Nightingale’, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (New York: New Directions, 1990), 28.

Machines 1. See interview included on the DVD of the tenth-anniversary edition of The Holy Bible, 2004. 2. Mastertapes interview. 3. See Fisher’s beautiful book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), 26. 4. Emily Mackay, ‘Reinventions of the Near Future: James Dean Bradfield’s Favourite LPs’, The Quietus, 23 September 2014. 5. A handful of the Manics’ contemporaries also rediscovered 1970s influences during this time, notably Suede, Pulp and Elastica. And there was, of course, more to the mid-1990s than guitar bands. Most of the best and most inventive British music of the time was being created in Jungle, House and Trip hop, genres that sometimes went overlooked amid the lumpen indie recidivism of the day. 6. Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 26. 7. Quoted in Maria Schurr, ‘Talking “Method” Recording and Youthful Delusions with the Manic Street Preachers’, PopMatters.com, 14 April 2015. 8. Quoted in Keith Cameron, ‘Chapter and Verse,’ sleeve notes to The Holy Bible twentieth anniversary edition, 2014.

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9. Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again, xxv. 10. See Dan Martin interview, NME, August 2014. 124 11. Quoted in Cameron, ‘Chapter and Verse’. 12. During a pause in Ballard’s delivery you can hear a brief chirping sound, perhaps a sweaty finger drawn along a guitar string. This may be an ironic reference to the song’s original title, ‘No Birds’ (which had to be swapped when the band realized PiL had written a track with the same title). The sound also establishes a subtle sonic link to ‘Mausoleum’s’ ‘sister song’, ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’, whose opening bars feature squeaks of guitar feedback that resemble birdsong. 13. Quoted in Cameron, ‘Chapter and Verse’. 14. Ibid. 15. Tom Lord-Alge produced a beefier alternative version for an intended US release. Alge’s mix was available in bootleg form for years before surfacing on the official anniversary editions of the album. It’s much prized by fans, although to my ears it forsakes the qualities that are so distinctive about the original: if The Holy Bible could only have been made in a post-industrial environment like South Wales, the American mix sounds like the product of Seattle or LA or any other hard-rock stronghold. But the US executives at the record company were satisfied. Where they had previously treated Manics releases with disdain – juggling track-listing, re-recording drum tracks, revising the artwork – they were apparently confident Alge’s version of The Holy Bible would go down well on college campus radio stations. It is certainly possible the album would have found a following in university towns, just as the Manics’ post-punk forebears Gang of Four had won a small but devoted audience with Entertainment! 129

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fifteen years earlier. But Richey’s disappearance meant it was never released, and the proposed US tour never happened. 16. Quoted in Harris, ‘The Commitments’.

Into the Black 1. Rimbaud: Complete Works, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 131. The text is republished with permission of University of Chicago Press; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. 2. Quoted in Andrew Smith, ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’, The Face, June 1994. 3. See Barbara Ellen’s brilliant account in ‘Siamese Animal Men’, NME, May 1994. 4. Quoted in Carling Homecoming. 5. Quoted in Miranda Sawyer, ‘Sexy?’, Select, September 1994. 6. Quoted in Stuart Bailie, ‘Manic’s Depressive’, NME, October 1994. 7. This detail was revealed in January 2019, in Victoria Segal’s Times review of a forthcoming biography of Richey, Withdrawn Traces: Searching for the Truth About Richey Manic, by Sara Hawys Roberts and Leon Noakes. 8. See Martin Power, Nailed to History: The Story of Manic Street Preachers (London: Omnibus Press, 1994), 144. 9. Quoted in Andrew Collins, ‘One Foot in the Past’, The Word, January 2005.

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10. These photographs are included in Kevin Cummins’s beautiful collection Assassinated Beauty: Photographs of Manic Street Preachers (London: Faber, 2014). 11. Quoted in Stuart Maconie, ‘We Shall Overcome’, Select, July 1996. 12. The song, ‘Judge Y’rself ’ never appeared in the film, but it surfaced on a later Manics B-sides compilation. It would have fit neatly on The Holy Bible, what with its ‘P.C.P.’-esque guitars and lyrical preoccupation with blades, crucifixions and selfdiscipline. 13. Quoted in Price, Everything, 175. 14. See Jovanovic, A Version of Reason, 236. 15. Ben Myers, Richard (London: Picador, 2010), 392. 16. Iain Sinclair, Landor’s Tower (London: Granta, 2001), 155.

Portals 1. The material from Landor’s Tower by Iain Sinclair is reproduced by kind permission of the author. 2. Jovanovic, A Version of Reason, 260. 3. See Andrew Mueller, ‘Manic Depression’, Melody Maker, April 1995. 4. The letter dates from May 1997. See ‘Culture, Alienation, Boredom and Despair’, NME, January 2005. 5. Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, Phonogram: Rue Britannia (Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2016). 6. Caitlin Moran, ‘Cries That Won’t Go Away’, The Times, April 1995. 131

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7. Rachel Trezise, Fresh Apples (Cardigan: Parthian, 2005), 74. 8. Reynolds credits Mark Fisher and Owen Hatherley for originally developing the concept of pop-as-portal. Reynolds, Retromania, 132. James Cook also describes the Manics as a ‘portal band’ in his wonderfully enjoyable memoir of 1990s music, Memory Songs (London: Unbound, 2018).

Cardiff Afterlife 1. Saul Bellow, Dangling Man (London: Penguin, 2001), 12. 2. Quoted in Jon Savage, ‘A Design for the Future’, Hall or Nothing [Press release], February 1996. 3. The previous year, Pulp had released their album Different Class, which covered similar ground. The Manics always spoke rather coolly about Pulp, unfairly lumping in Jarvis Cocker’s arch, salacious tales of Council Estate life with Blur’s Cockerney stereotypes. But Different Class, and especially its hit single ‘Common People’ – a furious response to Albarnstyle class tourism – proved Cocker knew what he was talking about. On this subject, I recommend Owen Hatherley’s brilliant book Uncommon People (London: Zero Books, 2011), which explores Pulp’s place in 1990s culture. 4. Quoted in Maconie, ‘We Shall Overcome’. 5. See Wodtke’s essay ‘Architecture of Memory: The Holy Bible and The Archive,’ in Triptych. Wodtke argues that it is the Manics’ ‘archival’ tendency that leads them to continually return to their previous work. 6. Quoted in Martin Clarke, Manic Street Preachers: Sweet Venom (London: Plexus, 2009), 203.

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7. Ibid. 8. ‘Manic Street Preachers’ Richey Edwards Legally Dead’, NME, 24 November 2008. 9. In early 2018 Richey’s family disclosed they had discovered Richey crossed the Severn Bridge in the early hours of the morning on the day of his disappearance, not the afternoon as the police originally believed, which may open up a new line of inquiry. See ‘New Information Uncovered in Richey Edwards Case’, The Guardian, 9 February 2018. 10. Quoted in Lynskey, 33 1/3 Revolutions per Minute, 621.

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Resources

The Missing People Website: www.missingpeople.org.uk Helpline and text: 116 000 Email: [email protected]

Also available in the series

1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign ‘☮’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard

12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing…  by Eliot Wilder

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The byrds’ The Notorious byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle

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A lso available in the series

57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris 58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond…  by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles

73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer 89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall

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A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Ró s: () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley

106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia 119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli

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A lso available in the series

121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker 123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch 125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton 126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Bjö rk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay 128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin

129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony 131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman 132. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel 133. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow by Samantha Bennett 134. dc Talk’s Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson 135. Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry 136. Odetta’s One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson

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