Richard James Edwards remains one of the most notorious figures in the 1990s British rock scene, not only for his masterful lyrics (which make up much of the band’s early work up to their magnum opus The Holy Bible):
And also making up for a lack of skill with guitar with a rather colorful life, from his responding to an NME journalist questioning his punk credibility by carving the words “4 Real” into his arm, to his infamous disappearance in February 1995.
He checked out of London’s Embassy hotel on February 1, and entered Wales that same day. Nothing about Richey’s whereabouts is certain after that, except that two weeks later, his Vauxhall Chevalier was found abandoned at a service station walking distance from a known suicide spot, with only burger wrappers, family photos, and a toll booth reciept indicating he crossed over into Wales hours before he supposedly checked out of the hotel in London. Due to his history of depression (evident in both his lyrics and off-stage behavior), and especially given the location he abandoned his car, many fans (myself included) assumed he ended his own life.
But many hold out hope. Even Edwards’ bandmates set aside a trust fund containing 25% of the band’s royalties in the event of his return. The trust fund ceased to exist in 2005, and he was declared legally dead on 23 November 2008. But still, several hold out hope he’s still alive, and recent evidence suggests they may actually be on to something.
Withdrawn Traces: Searching for the Truth About Richey Manic , written by Sara Hawys Roberts and Leon Noakes will be released by Virgin Books on January 31. It’s the first book about Richey (of many) to be written with the cooperation of his family.
One of the most interesting newly-exposed threads in this case came when Noakes was having a haircut in Cardiff and, after broaching the subject of Richey, the hairdresser told him “he’s actually living in a kibbutz in Israel, everybody knows.” Sara would later bring up the subject and said this: “We gave this theory no particular credence until Rachel raised the same idea – yes Richey had been going on about heading to that part of the world just before he vanished.” His interest may have been sparked when he made a friend in Whitchurch Hospital in Cardiff while staying there months before his disappearance. She was an artist and academic in her twenties who eventually moved to Israel.
Rachel also points to two tattoos Richey received on his biceps around the same time of etchings made by C.W. Scott-Giles to illustrate Dorothy L. Sayers’ translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. One on his left bicep was prominently shown in photographs of the era showed this map of the Ninth Circle of Hell. The other one on his right, less prominent in Google Image Search, showed the prominence of Jerusalem in Dante’s cosmology, showing it at opposite ends of the world to Purgatory. This suggests that he could be signalling that he planned to leave his life in the rock world and find peace in Israel. Of course, that other one of the Ninth Circle of Hell suggests that he could be signalling his descent into Hell, possibly by suicide, but the suicides are in Dante’s Seventh Circle (Second ring, see Canto XIII of the Inferno).
In addition, they perused Richey’s archives
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist) and found that he was really obsessed with disappearance, from his schoolwork, from schoolwork from when he was thirteen and mentioned “Escaping over the Severn Bridge,” to books in his collection with dog-eared pages talking of disappearance and exile, an obsession with authors who had become recluses or exiles like J.D. Salinger or Arthur Rimbaud, and even a package of gifts he made to an ex-girlfriend the night before he disappeared, which included Novel With Cocaine, a novel by a mysterious Russian author who submitted the novel to its publisher and was supposedly never heard from again (except that, according to Wikipedia, he seems to have been an emigre who returned to the USSR in 1942 [of all years!] and died in Yerevan in 1973.)
There is also apparently a history of reclusiveness in the Edwards family, with a Great-Aunt who eventually holed up in her childhood home and became a hermit until she died in her eighties, and an uncle in America who went to Texas to become a professor and went off the grid for five years.
After a discussion about Syd Barrett, Rachel and the authors latched onto the idea that Richey had undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome and that he chose to engineer his own disappearance because he knew he couldn’t cope with life as a rock star, although that seems like a bit of an overkill plan, especially given that he could probably have just quit the band like Syd Barret, or even potentially just become more of an in-house lyricist like Keith Reid or Peter Sinfield, but then again, I’m not Richey.
At any rate, there’s a lot of strange points that shed new light on the mystery, and while I’m not convinced that a lot of it is conclusive evidence that he faked his own death (or at least engineered his apparent suicide), it does certainly argue the point better than anyone else I’ve ever seen.
The book can be pre-ordered here for the Brits here, and here for the Yanks.
