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Manic Street Preachers’ Nicky Wire has said he is still “emotionally floored” by the loss of his bandmate, Richey Edwards, almost 30 years to the day since he disappeared.
The Welsh guitarist – described by The Independent as “the heart and bruised soul of the rock group – vanished on 1 February 1995, aged 27, and is widely presumed to have taken his own life.
However, his body was never found, leaving behind myriad unanswered questions and a lack of closure for his surviving bandmates. He was legally declared dead in 2008.
Ahead of the release of a new album, Critical Thinking, on Friday 31 January, Wire and frontman James Bradfield found themselves reflecting on Edwards in an interview with The Observer.
“There are so many myths in rock’n’roll and we were steeped in them,” Bradfield said. “I remember Richey going missing, and then two weeks later, just thinking, ‘Oh, is this it? Are we that story now?’ These things happen in rock’n’roll. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, it’s us. F***. It’s us.’
“And then you reproach yourself and you go, ‘No, it’s his parents, it’s not us. It’s his sister, it’s not us.’ It was just… ‘I can’t believe this. I can’t actually f***ing believe it.’”
He said he believes the band made it through because of their work ethic: “Find the chord, dig in. The simplest answer. We went through a lot, but also it was like, ‘You signed up for a tour, son.’”
Wire revealed that he still thinks about Edwards constantly and imagines what he would be doing now: “He wrote so much, it would just have been endless articles and essays,” he said.
“A lyric like ‘PCP’ [in which Edwards wrote about self-censorship amid the fear of falling foul of political correctness] is such a portent of what’s happened.”
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Edwards and Bradford had been due to fly to the US for a promotional tour on the day of his disappearance.
In the fortnight leading up to 1 February 1995, Edwards withdrew money from his bank account, checked out of the Embassy Hotel on Bayswater Road at 7am and took his wallet, keys, passport and some Prozac.
His passport was discovered at his apartment in Cardiff, while his car was found abandoned at a service station near the Severn Bridge two weeks later.
“The public engaged with the disappearance of Richey. They read the articles, tried to understand what happened,” Jo Youle, chief executive of the charity Missing People, which has worked with Edwards’ sister Rachel to raise awareness of missing persons cases, told The Independent in 2020.
“And they saw some of the family’s pain… it is very similar to the pain of other families with somebody missing, who might not be as high profile.
“That awful sense of just not knowing. Swinging between, ‘Maybe we’re going to get an answer, we’re going to hear from them one day,’ to hopelessness and then swinging back again to, ‘Maybe we’re going to hear.’ That ambiguity is hard to live with. As it goes into years – how do you then metaphorically walk away from that?”
If you are experiencing feelings of distress, or are struggling to cope, you can speak to the Samaritans, in confidence, on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email jo@samaritans.org, or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch.
If you are based in the USA, and you or someone you know needs mental health assistance right now, call the National Suicide Prevention Helpline on 1-800-273-TALK (8255). This is a free, confidential crisis hotline that is available to everyone 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
If you are in another country, you can go to www.befrienders.org to find a helpline near you.
