Difference between revisions of "Richey's Final Mystery - NME, 16th May 2009"
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'''NW:''' "The institutionalisation of beauty, and trying to be all those things that you're never gonna get to. This seems to say, 'I've given up on all that bollocks'. 'I've long since moved to a higher plateau' - I think that line from '4st 7lbs' really counts on here. On this album he really does reach that plateau of... the disgust has perhaps turned to ultimate realisation. Kind of got over the disgust and [quietly] just reached a new level." | '''NW:''' "The institutionalisation of beauty, and trying to be all those things that you're never gonna get to. This seems to say, 'I've given up on all that bollocks'. 'I've long since moved to a higher plateau' - I think that line from '4st 7lbs' really counts on here. On this album he really does reach that plateau of... the disgust has perhaps turned to ultimate realisation. Kind of got over the disgust and [quietly] just reached a new level." | ||
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+ | '''Marlon JD''' | ||
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+ | '''NW:''' "A few of the lyrics to this are stolen, well, borrowed from the film, Reflections In A Golden Eye. Marlon Brando does actually say in it (adopts Brando wheeze), 'I'd like to live without clutter, live without luxu-reee'. The film itself is beautifully shot. Richey did have a fascination with the idea of Brando, with someone that was so beautiful." | ||
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+ | '''JDB:''' He loved him because he was the idealisation in his mind of what the ideal man could be, but also because he turned to shit as well." | ||
+ | <BR> | ||
+ | '''NW:''' "Exactly, yeah. The idea that he walked around his island in a nappy, eating and fucking..." | ||
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+ | '''JDB:''' "That's why he's his kind of the perfect role model, because he rejected his innate beauty and talent and turned into Jabba The Hutt." | ||
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+ | '''Doors Closing Slowly''' | ||
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+ | '''NW:''' "'Silence is not sacrifice, crucifixion is the easy life'. It's just a classic Richey line. That's him pressing buttons that he knows he's pressing. His religious obsession or rejection of it is quite strange." | ||
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+ | '''JDB:''' "It runs deeper than you would ever have thought." | ||
+ | <BR> | ||
+ | '''NW:''' "It ran really deep and it's not something I don't think we've ever felt. Religious oppression, it just hasn't been a realisation in our time, in our country." | ||
+ | <BR> | ||
+ | '''JDB:''' "(Jokingly) No, we've always thought there's been a really good separation of church and state." | ||
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+ | '''NW:''' "(Laughs) Exactly. I mean, he went to Sunday school for a couple of years and he always talked about how he really hated it, but it does seem to have had more of an impact than just that." | ||
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+ | '''JDB:''' "I think the supposed beauty in religious art, like the depiction of death as being beautiful and glorious, kind of troubled him and inspired him by the same turn." | ||
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+ | '''All Is Vanity''' | ||
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+ | '''JDB:''' "I loved 'I would prefer no choice, one bread one milk one food'. That's showing his slightly unfashionable side, his left-wing authoritarian side: 'Sometimes I'd prefer to live in a utilitarian Eastern Bloc culture where I don't have to worry about choice and how glorious or glamorous I could be, I just wish I was restricted." | ||
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+ | '''NW:''' "And that still resonates with us so deeply today. The idea that there's so much choice now, that when we apply that to music, people think it's great that there's so much music and that's so obviously not the case because so much of it is utter drivel." | ||
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+ | '''Pretension/Repulsion''' | ||
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+ | '''JDB:''' "It mentions Une Odalisque by Ingres [a painting which caused scandal in the 19th century because of the way its female nude is unnaturally distorted], and talks about the idealisation of beauty, or 'What is ugliness?' I love the way that 'All Is Vanity' deals with one issue and 'Pretension/Repulsion' seems to resolve it for me. In a twisted way." | ||
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+ | '''NW:''' "It's one of the greatest rock couplets ever: 'Shards, oh shards, the androgyny fails/Odalisque by Ingres, extra bones for sale'. That's never gonna appear by anyone else. It shouldn't work, but it does. I just bow down at the altar of that as a lyric." | ||
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+ | '''Virginia State Epileptic Colony''' | ||
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+ | '''JDB:''' "You get the overall cynicism of treatment trying to subjugate the intelligence of the patient. Somebody saying, 'There's not one thing you've told me that is gonna make me better'. You get the overall cynicism of someone saying, 'Just get the fuck out of my room and let me try and solve these problems myself'. And it is heavily laced with sarcasm. I also feel it's Richey doing a bit of research here and integrating the story of the Virginia State Epileptic Colony [a US hospital that involuntarily sterilised 4,000 patients deemed 'unfit' to reproduce between 1920 and 1972] into his own experience." | ||
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+ | '''William's Last Words''' | ||
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+ | '''JDB:''' "It's important as a lyric, whether it's semi-autobiographical or about somebody else, because you spend an entire record sometimes listening to Richey speak in tongues, and on this lyric you get genuine traditional warmth. It's almost like reading a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem or something. And it gives you the hint that, during the process of writing all these lyrics, Richey hadn't lost his essential humanity. It sounds overblown, but that's the impression I get... It was the only time I ever got close to what you might call a soft-focus B-movie moment in the studio. Close-up: will you see a tear fall from his eye?" | ||
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+ | '''NW:''' "There's two ways I look at it. Either it genuinely is about someone else, because I know when he was in the institution in Cardiff, he was writing a lot. Either that, or it's a giant analogy from The Entertainer and Archie Rice, that sadness at the end of the career. I know he loved that film and it reminds me of that. But I didn't pick those lines out on purpose, it isn't like I wanted to make it seem more applicable to the situation, I was just drawn phonetically and in terms of the music, because I write quite simple songs. When I played it to James and Sean, they weren't shocked, but there was a lump in the throat. There is a sense of calm in it." | ||
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+ | '''Bag Lady (hidden track)''' | ||
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+ | '''JDB:''' "'Bag Lady' is the most reminiscent of 'The Holy Bible'. Perhaps that's why we shied away from putting it on the record, as well as just aesthetic symmetrical reasons. Sonically, it actually sounds like 'The Holy Bible', sounds more claustrophobic, crammed with just a bit too much stuff. And also because it's not as resolved, the lyric itself. This is the only lyric that really weighed me down, I wouldn't wanna inhabit that lyric too much. The push and pull between pretension and repulsion, between being vain and rejecting any notion of what is ugly or beauty, must have been exhausting at this point. On the record it rejects ideology, it rejects God, it rejects love, it rejects possibility. There you go! The perfect album for our worst economic downturn of all time." | ||
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+ | '''Richey's Bedroom Collage''' | ||
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+ | '''By Nicky Wire''' | ||
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+ | This photo (right) was taken in his Cardiff flat four or five months before Richey disappeared. The collage gave him comfort. We'd watched Prick Up Your Ears, where Alfred Molina plays Kenneth Halliwell, Joe Orton's lover, and his bedroom in the film was like this. Everything [on it] has overtones of tragedy, that idea of constant striving where the artist never thinks they've got there... | ||
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+ | '''1. Eric Morecambe''' | ||
+ | <BR> | ||
+ | We were all fans of Morecambe & Wise, it was just that thing of growing up in the '70s. But also there was a lot of hidden sadness to Eric Morecambe's life. People never hear about that. We watched hours of comedy. TV was just a huge part of our lives. | ||
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+ | '''2. Painting by Egon Schiele''' | ||
+ | <BR> | ||
+ | Sometimes a painter or a writer can illustrate something a lot better than a band can. It's like that stage when you're 15 or i6 and everything leads on to something else; Morrissey namechecking Oscar Wilde, or Allen Ginsberg being on 'Combat Rock'. Music is a huge educational tool, that's why we always namedropped so much. | ||
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+ | '''3. Kurt Cobain in a wheelchair at Reading 1992''' | ||
+ | <BR> | ||
+ | It's a brilliant image and a brilliant bit of sarcasm on Kurt's part. The first time we heard Nirvana we were completely floored - and completely gutted because they were so good. We were kind of glam-rock around 'Generation Terrorists' and it felt like we were totally out of step. But with 'The Holy Bible' it kind of felt like we were making the British equivalent of 'In Utero, a more claustrophobic, post-punky record. We were all obsessed with 'In Utero'. | ||
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+ | '''4. De Niro in Taxi Driver''' | ||
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+ | Taxi Driver is such an important film for every thinking person. That idea of training yourself and discipline, and of revenge. Richey's revenge was always verbal rather than physical, of course. | ||
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+ | '''5. Brian Jones''' | ||
+ | <BR> | ||
+ | He was a huge fan of Brian Jones. There was just something about the way Brian Jones was seen as the man with the ideas even if he didn't write the music. That film by Jean-Luc Godard about the making of 'Sympathy For The Devil'... Brian is a really sad and tragic figure. | ||
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+ | '''6. 'You Love Us' collage''' | ||
+ | <BR> | ||
+ | I love the idea of a collage within a collage. On tour, the PA monitors always looked so ugly, so he made about eight massive collages to cover everything, so that the crowd could look at them instead. The tour we did with Suede through Europe, the whole fucking bus was covered with it by the end. | ||
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+ | '''7. Francis Ford Coppola and Matt Dillon''' | ||
+ | <BR> | ||
+ | It's either from Rumble Fish or The Outsiders, which Francis Ford Coppola shot at the same time. Coppola looks amazing in this, he looks totally mad. | ||
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+ | <BR> | ||
+ | '''8. Drugstore Cowboy''' | ||
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+ | It's a good film, but it wasn't that fucking good! James was very into Matt Dillon at this point. There was that thing with Richey that he was drawn to this idealised vision of beauty, but that had all become utterly rejected by the end. | ||
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+ | '''9. Kate Moss''' | ||
+ | <BR> | ||
+ | He didn't admire her in a real sense, but in a 'vision of beauty' sort of way. He wasn't obsessed, but he did kind of see her as his ideal of female beauty. Well, that's what he said anyway. This is pre-Pete, of course. There's a real superficial aspect to a lot of these images, he wasn't getting meaning or depth from them. He was getting enough of that from himself, anyway. | ||
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Latest revision as of 22:09, 28 August 2018
Title: | Richey's Final Mystery |
Publication: | NME |
Date: | Saturday 16th May 2009 |
Writer: | Emily Mackay |
Photos: | Mitch Ikeda, Andy Willsher |
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When Richey Edwards disappeared, he left a book of lyrics in the safe hands of Nicky Wire and James Dean Bradfield. Now, just for NME, the Manics unravel the dense brilliance of the guitarist's words used on their new album.
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'Journal For Plague Lovers' Track by Track:
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Richey's Bedroom Collage
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