Everything Must Go — Manic Street Preachers
In the early hours of 1 February 1995, Richey Edwards, lyricist and guitarist with Manic Street Preachers, left London’s Embassy Hotel and vanished. Two weeks later his car was found next to the Severn Bridge, the major crossing between England and Edwards’ native south Wales. Edwards and the band’s singer and guitarist, James Dean Bradfield, had been staying in London as they were due to fly to New York the next morning to promote the band’s third album, The Holy Bible, which had been released in the United Kingdom the previous August. Bradfield flew to New York by himself, but the band quickly cancelled all further activity. Without Edwards it seemed the band’s short, but eventful, career was over.
Manic Street Preachers were a band before they ever picked up any instruments. The four friends grew up in the small Welsh mining town of Blackwood and became an inseparable group from an early age. Bradfield had become friends with bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire as they began school, forming an unlikely odd couple with the tall lanky “mama’s boy” Wire, towering over the small but pugnacious Bradfield. Drummer Sean Moore was Bradfield’s cousin, but they grew up as brothers, sharing a bunk bed in a room that would become the four boys’ clubhouse and later band HQ. Edwards lived a couple of streets over, the others affectionately called him “Teddy” due his soft, amiable features.
In a provincial backwater disconnected from the styles and trends of London and Manchester, the boys nevertheless became music obsessives. The 1980s was arguably the peak period for the British music press — with the country able to sustain three weekly papers dedicated solely to the latest indie and alternative music — and each week the four would forensically examine these publications for every detail, arguing over the merits of various bands, and developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of the era’s musical landscape. When it came time to try to gain the attention of the music press themselves they created dossiers on the country’s music journalists, detailing their likes and dislikes, and catering their polemic press releases to each writer’s specific interests.
Growing up films and books were considered just as important as music, and references to a wide variety of art would come to pepper their work. Yet it was politics that most forcefully drove the band’s ambitions. Their teenage years coincided with a tumultuous period in south Wales (and the UK as a whole). The Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher was determined to phase out the country’s nationalised coal mines and reduce the power of its trade unions. This led to a bitter year-long miners’ strike (1984–85) that tore at the nation’s fabric. As a region heavily reliant on the mining industry, south Wales disproportionately felt the consequences of Thatcher’s policies, and held out their strike the longest, yet ultimately their resistance proved futile.
For the four boys the lesson was clear; they needed to devise a plan that would prevent them from being at the mercy of the powerful and impersonal forces that emerged from London. Bradfield told the BBC in 1998 that the goal was to become “so intelligent that we would never get beaten” in the way their parents’ generation had. For this, Edwards and Wire would both obtain degrees in Politics from the University of Wales to give the band its intellectual weight, while Bradfield and Moore worked a variety of jobs to fund its creation. With a sound and political posture stolen directly from The Clash, and outfits borrowed from the New York Dolls, the band they created stood out as odd — if not absurd — during the height of Madchester. Yet this was the point.
The central idea of Manic Street Preachers was to be a band apart. To exemplify their own insularity as a gang — and sense of hostility toward the powerful industry they were attempting to conquer — their early manifesto pledged that they would never become friends with other bands, most of whom they claimed to hate in their press releases and various interviews. They defined themselves by what they were against, and this was almost anything that would get them attention. During the band’s first television interview Wire and Edwards — finishing each other’s thoughts — would declare that “we’ll never write lovesong, we’ll never write a trip-out, we’ll never write a ballad” (a line that would later become the chorus to Saint Etienne’s “Wood Cabin”), and claimed that it was actually the British tabloids they were seeking to reach, rather than gain the “easy critical respect” from the music press.
The closeness of the friends provided the platform for their unique division of labour. Edwards and Wire would write the lyrics, which Bradfield and Moore would then construct into songs. However, while Bradfield was the band’s singer and lead guitarist, it was Edwards who was effectively the band’s frontman. He was their Minister of Information; the band member whose education, articulation and vision for the band conceptually made him best suited for engaging with the press and promoting the band’s ideas.
This included his ability to make compelling — if not disturbing — statements of intent. In 1991, backstage after a show in Norwich, the NME’s Steve Lamacq questioned the band’s authenticity, with Lamacq’s indie ethos offended by the band’s glam outfits and ostentatious rhetoric. As Edwards explained that Lamacq’s perception of the band was wrong, he took a razor blade and calmly carved “4 REAL” into his arm. The wound required 18 stitches, and would be the first sign of what would become Edwards’ consistent displays of self-harm. The NME went into meltdown over whether it should run the pictures (it did, in black and white).
Two months later the band released a single that contained the line “I laughed when Lennon got shot” gaining themselves more shock value. Its follow up “You Love Us” baited the press and public further. For the band this antagonism was an essential part of their art. Their ambition was to not just become the greatest rock and roll band of all time, but to be a culture in and of themselves, to provide a series of clues and challenges for their listeners, and most importantly, be a force for radical political change. Whatever means necessary it took to accomplish this goal was all fair game.
However, until The Holy Bible the band’s mouths and mythology had been far more compelling than their music. Yet in some way this was by design. Inspired by the enormous success of Guns ’n’ Roses, for their debut album the band abandoned their tinny punk for a hard rock sound aimed squarely at middle America. The goal was to try and slip their subversive lyrics into global mainstream consciousness. They claimed their debut album would sell 26 million copies and inspire a youth revolution, and having achieved this aim they would subsequently break up. It didn’t, and they didn’t. And after a second album of tepid and slick stadium rock (minus the stadiums) the band seemed to be idle and idealess, destined to be remembered for providing some good quotes to the British music press, but for little else.
Yet as Edwards’ personal difficulties became more pronounced he was also entering into a period of intense creativity. He had taken over as the band’s primary lyricist, as well as becoming its creative director (he is credited with “design” in The Holy Bible’s liner notes, to be understood as not just as its visuals). This was again an odd approach for a band, given that Edwards’ guitar playing skills were such that he didn’t play on their records, and played simplified parts on stage. But he provided the band’s conceptual framework and direction, and artistically his vision was now crystallising into something far more substantial.
Abandoning the Trojan Horse of polished rock, instead the group would return to the bands they would obsess over together as teenagers; Joy Division, Public Image Ltd, Magazine, Skids, Siouxsie and the Banshees. When their record company offered them a studio in Barbados to record the album they instead chose a £50 a day hovel in Cardiff’s red light district. Here they would create an album of dark and abrasive post-punk, a sound that would better suit the dense and nihilistic lyrical themes that Edwards was writing. Delving into his deep well of cultural knowledge, Edwards would also collect samples from films, newsreels, documentaries that would introduce each track, providing the listener with a cultural marker for the songs that would follow.
The Holy Bible was a disturbing and deeply confronting album. The NME labelled it “vile”. It was an album that laid out the warts and gashes of the 20th Century, serendipitously seeming to follow the themes of Eric Hobsbawm’s Age Of Extremes; the historian’s account of the period from the first World War to the end of the Cold War. It contained two songs about the Holocaust (Mausoleum, The Intense Humming of Evil), alongside explorations of the masculine deficiencies that led to fascism (Of Walking Abortion), and the authoritarian lust for violence (Archives of Pain). Yet it was a stark illustration of Edwards’ mental state that the album’s most desolate songs (Yes, 4st 7lbs) were personal rather than political, as he struggled with anorexia, alcoholism, self-mutilation, and emotional isolation. Prior to the release of the album Edwards would spend 10 weeks in a psychiatric hospital for treatment for these issues (the others played the Reading Festival as a three-piece to cover his bills).
In retrospect, on listening to the album Edwards’ disappearance seemed inevitable. Or at least some other event that would create a schism within the band, despite their closeness as friends. Bradfield has subsequently stated that he felt he would no longer be able to write music that would please Edwards, whom he believed wanted the band to become more extreme. While on The Holy Bible he had done an extraordinary job of musically interpreting Edwards’ vision, the sheer weight of the album, a weight Bradfield disproportionately carried as the singer/guitarist, was something he felt he couldn’t repeat.
But it was also the weight of Edwards deterioration that was straining the band. Just prior to Christmas 1994 they would play three consecutive shows at London’s Astoria theatre. During the final show, in a cathartic release, they would destroy all their equipment, as well as the Astoria’s lighting system, causing £26,000 worth of damage. It felt like the end of something. By February Edwards was gone.
As half a year passed without any sign of his return the three remaining friends decided to reconvene as a band. Wire had given Bradfield some new lyrics, and one song in particular stood out as something they felt “deserved to be heard”. Encouraged by Edwards’ parents, they also thought that reviving the band might create the conditions for him to resurface.
As a statement of the band’s resurrection, A Design For Life was an extraordinary single. A song that retained the lyrical intent of The Holy Bible, but smoothed out the rough edges, creating a mature assertion of the band’s proletarian origins and an ironic retort to the way the British working class were perceived. Its bold opening line — “Libraries gave us power” — was adapted from an engraving above the entrance to a library in Newport, Wales. The song’s Spector-esque waltz gave it an anthemic feel, but without being overwrought. It was both sardonic — “We don’t talk about love, we only want to get drunk”, and sincere — “I wish I had a bottle, right here in my pretty face, to wear the scars, to show from where I came.”
The song catapulted the band from music press curios to mainstream appeal, peaking at number 2 on the UK charts. Although the band would bristle at any association with Britpop — the lyric was written in response to what Wire saw as Britpop’s bastardisation of working class culture — the sound was adjacent enough to find an audience within the era’s dominant musical environment. The band’s initial goal of reaching a wide audience with literate and subversive songs was finally starting to take shape.
Following the dense and claustrophobic sound of The Holy Bible the band wanted their music to “breathe a bit more”, and Bradfield wanted to be a different singer; to actually be able to sing rather than scream and spit. And so Everything Must Go was another musical reinvention; an album of elegant reverb-heavy alternative rock, one that pivoted the anger and nihilism of The Holy Bible into an understandable deep sense of melancholy, but also a display of resilience. Bradfield described the album as “wistful resistance”.
After the highly coordinated imagery of The Holy Bible, with the band styling themselves as an insurgent group; dressed in military outfits, with camouflage netting adorning their stages — alongside Edwards’ highly curated sleeve — they now opted for a conscious non-image. Always aware of musical history, they took inspiration from the design of New Order’s first album, Movement, and sought to project a blank, no-frills, appearance. The focus would simply be on the twelve songs on the album, all other ideas would be sidelined for now.
While Edwards may not have been physically present for the album, five songs feature lyrics by him (two co-written with Wire), with these songs having existed as demos prior to his disappearance. However, even in Edwards’ lyrics there was a noted shift in approach. Gone was the torrent of words that would often have Bradfield engaging in heroic feats of vocal gymnastics to try create a workable song structure. Instead his lyrics had a more conventional rhyme and metre, making them a much better fit for the more spacious sound the band was developing.
Yet his fascination with tragedy has not abated. The song Kevin Carter focused on the South African photographer who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his photo of a starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture, waiting for the child to draw his last breath. The burden of what Carter had witnessed (and been rewarded for) led to his suicide several months after accepting the prize. Alongside this, the album’s centrepiece, Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky, explored the plight of animals kept in captivity, written after Edwards had seen a documentary on the state of the UK’s zoos. Although it is not hard to also read the lyric as an allegory for Edwards’ time spent in a psychiatric hospital.
Beyond Edwards’ direct contributions his presence looms large over the rest of the album through Wire’s lyrics. The title track directly addresses the band’s continuation as a three-piece, an earnest plea to both Edwards and the band’s fans for forgiveness for carrying on without him. While the song Australia was an expression of Wire’s desire to get as far away as possible from the situation that had befallen the friends. Bradfield and Moore channelled this sense of escapism into the album’s most upbeat moment; creating music of escalating momentum designed to be played in the background of sports highlights (a goal they’d achieve). Enola/Alone brought the blunt reality of the situation to the fore with the bitter assertion that “All I want to do is live, no matter how miserable it is.”
The album’s two concluding tracks — Further Away and No Surface All Feeling — give a greater sense of the stress the group had been under leading up to Edwards’ disappearance. Despite seemingly addressing the situation both songs were actually written prior to the event (Edwards even played guitar on the demo of No Surface All Feeling, some of which was included in the song’s outro). Famously close, these songs are an indication of how dispirited Wire had become as Edwards’ health deteriorated. Wire would tell The Guardian in 2009 that aside from the gravity of Edwards’ disappearance, “the real tragedy is when you lose someone kinetically, someone you’ve known since he was five, you’ve done all those things with and you feel you can’t communicate.” Wire would subsequently write a number of songs about his lost friend, with “Your Love Alone Is Not Enough” from the 2007 album Send Away The Tigers being the standout.
Everything Must Go would gain the band both critical and commercial success. All four singles from the album would become top 10 hits in the UK, with the album achieving Triple Platinum status. The band may not have achieved its initial revolutionary goals, but with songs about Sylvia Plath (The Girl Who Wanted To Be God) and Dutch abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning (Interiors) they had finally brought their erudition into the mainstream consciousness, at least in the UK and through parts of Europe.
They had also created a deeply human album. While their combative posture had often given the impression of the band as snide and inhospitable, this had always been a front, a tactic they used to gain attention. Although it was also a defence mechanism, born from their deep suspicion towards the political and cultural powers outside of their provincial origins. However, Everything Must Go lowered the veneer, it gave the band a greater sensitivity, and also a sense of vulnerability that they had previously been reluctant to display, although without any self-pity.
While Edwards’ lyrics on The Holy Bible had been astonishingly honest, they weren’t exactly inviting, and often too intense to be empathetic. With Everything Must Go the band had little choice but to acknowledge their loss, confront their mortality, and to present themselves in a more inclusive manner. It was this less confrontational approach that allowed them to achieve the kind of mass communication that they first dreamed of in Bradfield and Moore’s bedroom.
After Everything Must Go, although the band would write the odd great song, they would enter into an extended period of malaise and misdirection. Making a series of albums that would be anaemic (This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours), incoherent (Know Your Enemy), and indifferent (Lifeblood, Send Away The Tigers). Occasionally making naïvely ambitious grand gestures, like playing in Cuba and meeting Fidel Castro (the folly of which would be subsequently noted in the song Next Jet To Leave Moscow), but mostly easing into a comfortable and unchallenging existence.
Despite his body never being found, Edwards would be declared legally dead in 2008. The decision would provide the impetus for the band to use a folder of lyrics he had given Wire a few weeks before his disappearance, which the band had previously not felt comfortable using. With Edwards once again anchoring the band, they seemed rejuvenated and refocused. The Steve Albini-recorded Journal For Plague Lovers would return to the more abrasive sound of The Holy Bible and be the most consistent set of songs they would release since Everything Must Go.
As a band created out of an insular personal solidarity in the face of powerful historical forces, the tragic loss of Edwards had a profound effect on the band not just emotionally, but also conceptually. While on Everything Must Go’s title track Bradfield pleaded for the band to be “Freed from the memory, escape from our history”, as a band all too aware of History, there was a knowing sense that this was impossible. Yet there was an opportunity for the band to evolve their approach, to find a new way to transmit their ideas. While The Holy Bible remains the band’s great didactic artistic statement, Everything Must Go was the sound of the Manic Street Preachers embracing the art of conversation.
