Richard

Title: Richard
Author: Ben Myers
Published: 2010 by Picador
Genre: Fictional biography
Pages: 6095 little Kindle app pages


So, umm... this isn't the truth, but it is what might have happened. This is the story of Richey Edwards, or Richey Manic, the fourth original member of the Manic Street Preachers, who disappeared 1st February 1995. 18 years ago. I personally don't remember reading/hearing about his disappearance -I do remember the 4 REAL thing though- at the time, but I was as out of current affairs then as I am now. I started to listen to the Manic's music around This is my truth tell me yours, which is still one of my favourite albums ever. Lately I've been listening to a lot of their music, and got curious.

Myers has based Richard on facts known about Richey and the Manic Street Preaches, but by his own words he has taken a lot of artistic freedoms with the story. I don't pretend to know enough of the band's background to comment on what's real or what I think is real, but I do know that this fucking book caught me by the throat and kept a tight grip until the very last page. A touching and sad story of a young man struggling with himself. Well written, too. The feelings and pain are real, even if the story isn't.

Apparently Espedair Street started some sort of a music biography trend for me: I've got two others on the To Be Read -pile.


   What once fuelled me - what drove this band of ours forwards - is now that which cripples me and renders me impotent in all ways: creatively, socially, sexually.
   Intelligence, boredom, sensitivity and despair are a deadly combination and it took weeks in an expensive rehab to tell me that all the drinking and the cutting were merely ways to stave off the deadly strain of boredom that arises when a creative ming is not put to use.
   Now that the drinking and the cutting have mostly stopped things are infinitely, noticeably, painfully worse; there is simply nothing left to stave off the boredom now. There's no brief drunken giddiness to fill the void and no hangover to drape my day over. No boozy, carefree nights out to romanticize later and get nostalgic about.