“…freed from the memory, escape from our history. And I just hope that you can forgive us but everything must go.”
– Manic Street Preachers, “Everything Must Go”
“…archivization produces as much as it records the event.”
– Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever
“That’s the gift of schizo.”
– Scritti Politti, “Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)”
In the aftermath of Richey’s disappearance, Manic Street Preachers created Everything Must Go, gently absorbing remaining fragments of Richey’s lyrics into an album that functioned as the band’s own sous rature. This absorption, or assimilation, is in many ways a liquidation of The Holy Bible. The music of Everything Must Go is a radical departure from the dizzying claustrophobia and disjuncture of The Holy Bible; rather, it is dominated by sweeping anthems and breathing room. For Everything Must Go, the Manics opted to use the production skills of Mike Hedges, who had worked with Everything But The Girl, the Beautiful South, and McAlmont & Butler, and traded the failed promise of post-punk for a Spector-esque wind of change. Absence took the place of excess; it was as though the band’s lack of knowledge about what had happened to their friend and bandmate had extended to the style of their art and lyricism. The band’s image also experienced an erasure, adopting non-descript clothing and album artwork composed of stark photography, including a void between the parentheses in the album’s title that emulated a lifespan with uncertain dates of beginning and end. William Shaw describes their look at this juncture as “aggressively ordinary” (84). The blankness offered both freedom and potentiality. At the same time, like The Holy Bible, Everything Must Go became an allegory of memory, difficult knowledge and the archive, and in so doing, didn’t quite fulfil the album’s title. As Derrida observes, allegory and irony often “say something quite different from and even contrary to what seems to be intended through it” (Memoires 74). Understandably, the Manics sought distance from the turmoil of The Holy Bible and the subsequent trauma of Richey’s disappearance. However, in consigning part of their identity to the archive to move on, they produced a spectral trace, a schizoid identity.
The Internal Split: The Schizophrenia and Vicissitude of Being Manic Street Preachers
Though the Manics have described their band identity facetiously as schizophrenic, usually in reference to the seemingly opposite musical styles they have adopted since The Holy Bible, or to the oscillation between being a tight machine and a hot mess onstage, I think it’s worth probing the idea of schizophrenia in relation to the band’s identity. In the reverberations of the traumatic touring of The Holy Bible, Richey’s disappearance, and the making and promotion of Everything Must Go, the band reinforced the break between The Holy Bible and the history held behind its bulk and their present incarnation. Talking about Everything Must Go, James said, “I think we realised there should be an end and we’ve either got to start again, which I think we have on this album, or end with dignity” (qtd in Cameron 74). Music journalists appeared to agree:
They need to find another ideal for living, one that allows them to see that being the Manics isn’t a life or death thing after all. […] The Manics — again, more than anyone else — will be aware of the frightening parallels between that monumental fuck-up and their own paranoia-riddled position. (Williams 76)
This declaration of detachment and a fresh start dominated the representation of the Manics in the public eye throughout the rest of the 90s, but the very separation that was so necessary also became the source of a seemingly overdeveloped self-reflection, that could be read through the lens of schizophrenia. Louis A. Sass describes schizophrenia as “imbued with hesitation and detachment, a division or doubling in which the ego disengages from normal forms of involvement with nature and society, often taking itself, or its own experiences, as its own object” (37). This type of compulsive self-evaluation, and even self-obsession, becomes apparent in the Manics’ artistic output and public face from this point on, as they negotiate what the band’s identity should be, perhaps even feverishly attempting to reach an “archive of pure language,” or an origin that can never be attained.
Talking to Stuart Maconie in 1998, James said, “If you think The Holy Bible was gratuitous and hard-going, imagine what The New Testament would have been like. It probably would have been a dead end ultimately” (qtd in “Everything” 99). This denial of a plausible and artistically fulfilling future for the band that made The Holy Bible, a future that crucially never came to pass, is reminiscent of the strategies utilized in dealing with difficult knowledge. Britzman observes that “strategies such as the discounting of an experience as having anything to do with the self and the freezing of events in a history that has no present” and “mechanisms of defense — undoing what has already happened and isolating the event in a time that has long past — are key ways the ego attempts to console itself” (119). Similarly, the schizophrenic “has severed bonds not only with reality but also with the entire content of his or her personal history” (De Bolle 23), living in an overly present present. This severance as a tactic of survival can also make way for something new via abjection; as Kristeva argues, abjection can also function as a form of resurrection that gives new life to the death drive, thereby transforming it (15). For Everything Must Go, the abject wasn’t the excess of difficult knowledge in the broader context of the world; the abject was the band itself.
The titular track is emblematic of the splitting strategy used throughout the album. Against production that has been blown out beyond its limits and oversaturated — the aural equivalent of staring at the sun — James sings, “freed from the memory, escape from our history, history / And I just hope that you can forgive us but everything must go / And if you need an explanation, then everything must go.” It is a plea to be released from the archive that has come to form the Manics’ identity. The music video for the song sees the destruction, rather than the dislocation, of time itself as clocks are smashed, audio tapes unspool, and cherry blossom trees shed their ephemeral beauty. In the documentary that accompanies the tenth anniversary edition of Everything Must Go, Nicky Wire describes the song as a “preemptive strike.” From a band that had always planned and anticipated its future in the present until there wasn’t a difference between the two, this action made sense.
In an alternate way, the biggest hit from Everything Must Go and the Manics’ biggest commercial hit overall, “A Design for Life,” a song which dispenses with reflections on personal memory and the current history of the band, acted as the cathartic release from The Holy Bible. Though less obviously a declaration of letting go of the past, this soaring paean to the working classes was actually the most decisive severing of ties to the previous incarnation of the band. Nicky’s use of language is succinct and fluid, and James and Sean’s music is correspondingly confident and full-bodied; it is the antithesis of The Holy Bible. The track’s declaration that “Libraries gave us power” was ironic in light of the rest of the song, but it was a tribute to the strength of the archive despite the problems that knowing too much can entail. Nevertheless, ambiguity and doubt did find their way into the rest of the record.
Aside from “Everything Must Go,” the lyrics of “Australia” are perhaps the next most explicit expression of the desire to escape the band’s history whilst simultaneously reclaiming it differently and under less challenging terms: “I’ve been here for much too long / This is the past that’s mine / I want to fly and run till it hurts / Sleep for a while and speak no words in Australia.” The silence of sleep and not speaking is telling; after the indigestible overload of The Holy Bible, the most effective way to move on was to cease with words altogether. There is a sense that words were once again inadequate, this time to testify to the trauma of losing Richey and the uncertainties bound up in consigning so much of themselves to the archive. These lyrics from “Australia” also gesture to ownership of the past, reinstating the need to remember and continually reclaim these personal memories. This ambivalence complicates the Manics’ manoeuvres in deciding how much should actually be remembered. The fear of the instability and loss of memory is evident in “Interiors (Song for Willem De Kooning),” which tells the story of the abstract artist’s experience of Alzheimer’s: “Who sees the interiors like young Willem once did / Your beautiful triangle of distortion / Now you seem to forget it so much.” One must also contend with the context of de Kooning’s painting process, which involved applying turpentine to his paintings and repeatedly sanding down the surface to reveal lost images of previous paintings (Leader 91). Taking all of these factors into account, “Interiors” is a song of loss, and the repetition and mourning of that loss. Likewise, “No Surface All Feeling,” a song already in progress before Richey disappeared, is less clear about the value of the past: “It makes me angry ashamed but really alive / It may have worked but at what price / What’s the point in looking back / When all you see is more and more junk.” This final track leaves the album on a note of introspection and re-evaluation that never really answers the question of whether there is a point in looking back.
The schizoidal attributes developed by the Manics, conceivably to provide escape from the “hyperconsciousness and selfcontrol” of The Holy Bible, “may, in fact, be an extreme manifestation of what is in essence a very similar condition” (Sass 10). The split in their identity, as read through Derrida’s theory of the archive and consignation of knowledge to the archive, is rife with various pressures, including repression and suppression (Archive Fever 78). These kinds of pressures, though necessary for moving on, end up producing more meaning and signifiers than they compartmentalize. In fact, “[w]e might say that schizophrenia is a disease of adaptation and one that adapts; it is the failure of semiotics and the remaking of semiotics” and possibly the inspiration for deconstruction itself (Herr 136). Apparently, the Manics couldn’t entirely leave The Holy Bible and its deconstructive methods behind.
Spectral Traces: Sublimated Returns
In the liner notes for the tenth anniversary edition of Everything Must Go, John Harris writes that at the core of the album “there lies a reminder that though cutting loose from the past is sometimes necessary, it is never nearly as easy as some people would have you believe.” No matter how much you split the subject, traces remain. The introduction to Everything Must Go, “Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Promenade,” is a somewhat difficult entry into the record, with its lyrics a combination of those left by Richey and new ones written by Nicky after he disappeared. The track becomes an allegory of the position in which the Manics now found themselves, and the ongoing struggle they would experience for the rest of their career. The belatedness of part of the lyrics echoes the time of otherness related to difficult knowledge. Despite the escape velocity into the future and the will to forget displayed in much of the rest of the album, the belated witnessing and dislocation of temporality that results from their trauma still haunts it. The archival promise built into the monumental ruin that is The Holy Bible lingers in both present and future, resisting closure. Derrida characterizes the archive as “spectral” and argues that it is “spectral a priori: neither present nor absent ‘in the flesh,’ neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met” (Archive Fever 84). This ambiguity of the archive is not a simple haunting; the archive exists in a strange temporality that can never fully be sought after or responded to. Any exchange or dialogue with the archive is fraught with gaps in visibility and understanding, as well as unexpected connections and dissociations. Though “Further Away” is ostensibly about Nicky’s loneliness when he’s on tour and away from his wife, it features the lyrics “feel it fade away into your childhood further away. […] The circular landscape comes back only with regret, only with regret / The more estranged I feel from my youth further away.” These lines complicate what would otherwise be a “love song,” a genre so avoided by the Manics. The cyclical movement of regret contradicts the spatiality of “further away,” even as the song repeats the tropes of childhood innocence and the loss thereof that are found on The Holy Bible, and on the albums that preceded it. There is a sense of repetition embedded in linearity; the spectrality of the Manics’ archive is both referential and dissociative.
Despite much of their work in distancing themselves from their past, the Manics cannot stop preservation and memory work from occurring in Everything Must Go. In “Enola/Alone,” which refers back to the palindromic doubleness of “Revol,” Nicky writes, “I’ll take a picture of you / to remember how good you looked / Like memory it had disappeared / naked and lonely within my fears.” He later explained to Stuart Maconie that “Enola/Alone” “stems from […] me looking at my wedding photos and seeing two people [manager Philip Hall and Richey Edwards] standing right by me who are not around anymore” (qtd in “We Shall Overcome” 85). “Enola/Alone” is preceded by “Kevin Carter,” penned by Richey, which tells the story of photographer Kevin Carter, his Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a vulture stalking a dying child in Africa, and Carter’s subsequent suicide. In juxtaposition, these two songs speak to the desires to preserve and reproduce time, and the unexpected consequences of such interventions, albeit in different ways. They both describe the haunting traces of photography, but the resolve to survive dominates “Enola/Alone,” whilst “Kevin Carter” embodies a foregone conclusion. The rest of Richey’s lyrics, “Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky,” “The Girl Who Wanted to Be God” and “Removables,” are evidence of the more compressed pockets buried throughout the otherwise open vistas of Everything Must Go. Accompanied by acoustic guitar and harp, “Small Black Flowers” is notable for its subtlety and quiet bleakness as it expands upon the abject, trapped position of prostitution in “Yes,” and applies it to the spectacle of incarcerated animals. In “Small Black Flowers,” reproduction is to be avoided in order to stop a torturous cycle: “wanna get out here you’re bred dead quick / for the outside […] harvest your ovaries dead mothers crawl.” Anteriority is enforced against one’s will. “The Girl Who Wanted to Be God,” apparently about Sylvia Plath, is performed against a backdrop of a manic, exaggerated anthem, the contemplative guitar arpeggios of “Motorcycle Emptiness” reappearing as rushes of sound that can barely hold together. It doesn’t have the assured pacing of other songs on the album, such as “A Design for Life,” “Everything Must Go” and “Australia,” and thus feels like an attempt to assimilate the unassimilable into the new framework. Similarly, “Removables” stands out from the rest of the album in its grunge aesthetic, which seems to drag somewhere below the surface. Its broken, stilted lines (“Killed God blood soiled unclean again / Killed God blood soiled skin dead again”) reflect the refracted style of The Holy Bible, and notes the same futility in attempting to stay in a fixed temporal position (“a bronze moth dies easily”) that appears in songs like “Die in the Summertime.” These seemingly less congruous songs written by Richey become a crucial memorial site within the schizoid consignment of identity, preserved even as they must be sublimated. Therefore, they form a sort of cryptic trace underlying Everything Must Go. Such a crypt “can be built as a monument or niche of a lost object preserved within the split ego” (Ihanus 123). The Manics’ defensive split produced as much as it jettisoned, and as much as the band continued to cope with the ramifications of their own schizophrenia, their fans, too, experienced a splitting of sorts, and in some cases, came into conflict with the band over what Manic Street Preachers should be. Due to the gaps in the difficult knowledge of Richey’s disappearance, bearing witness became an impossibility for both the band and their audience, leading to an ongoing identity debate and the interrogation of what kinds of lovely knowledge might have been created in its wake.
Belated and Indirect Witnessing: Memory Work and the Manics
The present absence of Richey endured even through the years immediately following his disappearance, when the band was most vociferously separating from their past. Speaking in 1996, Nicky stated, “We’ll never fill that gap. We’ll never get another guitarist. James will never go over to that side of the stage” (qtd in Maconie, “We Shall Overcome” 88); the space of stage right became a sacred site of remembrance for the band, but also a heightened, present absence for fans. In the documentary for the tenth anniversary edition of The Holy Bible, James describes his discomfort whilst playing Reading Festival in 1994 as a three-piece (at this time, Richey was hospitalized), which included the fact that some of the fans “were staring at the space of the stage where Richey should be, refusing to look at me.” This desire to look at the empty space usually occupied by an object perceived as valuable is arguably an expression of the connection between emptiness as an index of a sign that holds symbolic meaning; the absence ironically brings more meaning to the surface than was originally recognized in the object itself. In his discussion of the spectators who flocked to see the empty space in the Louvre from which the Mona Lisa had been stolen in 1911, Darian Leader posits that this incident makes manifest the split between art and the space it usually occupies, thereby prompting an interrogation of the usually unseen or hidden meaning in the artwork that typically isn’t in question. In becoming a signifier of totemic mythologies of tortured genius and martyred rock stars, Richey’s absence became an index for that signifier, whereby spectators intuit meaning even by staring into the void of the lost signifier. These mythologies then perpetuate a kind of lovely knowledge because they fit into an already established perspective and narrative of popular culture. Within the last twenty years, the proliferation of music magazine covers featuring Richey have played into this lovely knowledge, rather than confront the difficult knowledge his disappearance evokes.
Conversely, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s comic-book series Phonogram: Rue Britannia dissects this lovely knowledge in a loving fashion, using the context of the tensions and connections between cultural and personal memory and identity. Described by musician Luke Haines as a “meta romp through nostalgia,” Rue Britannia critiques the nostalgia industry of 90s Britpop along with the supposed mythologies about pop music that sustain it. One such mythology is that popular music can change your life in a magical or religious fashion. Protagonist David Kohl is a cynical former fan of Britpop, which is represented in the series by a goddess named Britannia who is said to have died over seven years ago. David is a phonomancer, a musical magician of sorts, who spends much of the series philosophizing about the Britpop genre, memory, and the indie snobbery that goes with it, or as he describes it, “I do intricate vivisection rituals on pop songs to better understand their totemic powers.”
One of the key sub-plots involves David and Manic Street Preachers fan Beth, a girl from his past. In the series, he first encounters her as an eyeliner-smeared, boa-wearing apparition standing on an overpass stubbornly waiting for Richey Edwards. She embodies the fans known as the Cult of Richey, a faction of fans that offends the Manics and other fans in equal measure. In Chapter 3, “Faster,” David meets the present Beth, who refuses to discuss the Manics and denies any past fandom, a sentiment which is further reflected in the disavowal and dismissal of Manics fandom by phonomancer Emily Aster several panels later. The fact that Beth is still alive implies that her ghost in the previous chapter is more of a consignment of memories, an exterior archive that allows her to forget and split her identity.
The final chapter, “Live Forever,” opens with a visual parody of the album cover for The Holy Bible, and concludes with David donning the garb of a Manics fan and returning to Beth’s exiled memory. In speaking with the apparition, David says: “Want me to take you after Richey?” She agrees, and they end up at the Severn Bridge, where Richey’s car was found abandoned. She becomes angry, saying, “Where is he? You said you’d take me to him.” David corrects her: “No, I said I’d take you after him. This is as far as I can go. And Richey’s not here.” After she insists that she feels Richey’s presence, David explains, “It’s a toll bridge. Entry point to Wales. Richey used it as an entry point into myth. That’s what you’re feeling.” He continues, “Richey’s defining aspect now is that he’s gone. If he came back, he wouldn’t be Richey anymore. Waiting for a man whose main characteristic is his absence is a stupid waste of time. And Manics fans are anything but stupid.” David then encourages Beth to follow Richey, and she thanks him before plummeting from the bridge.
As he begins to shed his Manics fan garb, David enters into a lengthy monologue over several pages:
I’ve tricked something like a ghost into committing suicide because I think that’ll help Beth. […] Richey’s not dead. Richey’s not alive. Richey’s gone. different thing altogether. Rock immortality. How do you obtain it? By being memorable. An untimely death just doesn’t cut it anymore. You need something a little more unprecedented to become ever-living narrative. Did he do it deliberately? Doesn’t matter. All that matters is the act was enough to make the idea of Richey into a god. The price was suicide without a note or a disappearance without saying he was alive. The price was being a shit. He didn’t owe us anything — and vice versa. That’s how pop works. Pop is for you. But his ascension put the people who loved him — really loved him — through a living hell. Belief is all-important in what we do. You believe, it burns, flickers and dies. The ashes mix with the soil and we call them memories. What do you do with a memory? The retromancers huddled around theirs as their world grew cold. […] And yeah, even I worked out that no matter how bad it objectively was… It’s how I was made.
Returning to Beth and her relationship with the past, he says,
All Beth did was fill her mouth with it until she couldn’t taste anything else. To enjoy the memory would be to betray it. No one can live like that, so that bundle of belief was exiled. All her ghost did was feed Richey’s myth. With her ghost gone, the memories should return. I hope it does her some good.
The final panels of the series show Beth waking up to “Motorcycle Emptiness” on the radio and finally being able to sing along with the song and go back to sleep with a satisfied look on her face. The “bundle of belief” that was exiled is Beth’s archival consignment, her schizophrenic act, which resulted in a literal spectral trace that remained even after its repression. This entire passage deconstructs the lovely knowledge surrounding Richey’s disappearance and refracts it through critical distance. As in The Holy Bible, eating becomes a metaphor for memory, but rather than a starving refusal and inability to assimilate difficult knowledge, Beth fills her mouth with the lovely knowledge of Richey’s mythology, and in so doing, feeds into it. Moreover, the Rue Britannia series analyses the concept of an unbridgeable gap of signification. Richey’s main characteristic of absence becomes the pre-emptive separation that makes the figurative and literal bridge in the series impossible to cross, leaving only a belatedness, or an “after” rather than a “to.” To find meaning, Beth’s spectre waits and looks for Richey, but it is only ever a looking at an absence, rather than engaging in actual witnessing. In the end, she is performing an assimilative, “imaginative sympathy,” in which “[w]e remember or anticipate our own pain and imagine the pain of the other” (Gaston 90) in an attempt to close an unfillable gap, which is only further exposed by the attempt.
By reading the lyrics of The Holy Bible, and some of those in Everything Must Go, you can intimate a sense of vulnerability and ambivalent exposure and exhibitionism in response to being the object of intense scopophilia by others, especially when they look at you as a suffering martyr. In a song like “Kevin Carter,” this interrogation of looking in relation to suffering and conscience is applied to photographs of distant atrocities. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag asserts that such images “cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers” (117); looking at images of suffering, as well as looking at suffering, are acts of distance, regardless of the immediacy implied by photography (118). Ultimately, in the act of all of this looking, we are often still left with the “Can’t understand, can’t imagine” (126), an acknowledgment of the unassimilable nature of difficult knowledge. All of this looking can also be read as the inability to witness, the imposition of surfaces and barriers that do not allow for direct signification, yet perpetuate the sense of a truer hidden meaning. In this second-degree witnessing, whether by fans, the media or the creative memory work of artists, the distance is necessary. As Felman and Laub observe,
such second-degree testimony is complex and can no longer be direct. Because it seeks above all to preserve the distance necessary for the witnessing (the inner distance of the radical departure), it requires not the involved proximity of memory (that of the submersion of the witness) but the distancing of this submersion through the reflectiveness of theory. (140)
In many ways, Gillen and McKelvie’s Rue Britannia assumes such a posture of theorization in order to cope with and critique personal and cultural memories.
Not only are fans impossible witnesses to the Manics’ trauma, but the band itself cannot be anything but belated witnesses. Moreover, this temporal dislocation is exacerbated by the fact Richey disappeared, but did not “die.” As Nicky explains, this lack of knowledge leads to a sense of delay: “It’s not like someone who’s passed away who you can think of in a different context. Being selfish about it, at least if you knew it was final perhaps all the grief would come out, because I’m not sure it has really, which is a bit frightening” (qtd in Lynskey, “Redesign” 100). Once again, Richey is a signifier whose index is absence. Discussing the possibility of using the lyrics left behind by Richey in 1996, Nicky revealed the limits of engaging with the difficult knowledge of their recent past and the barriers to bearing witness to Richey’s disappearance:
Maybe one day we could use them and do an album of those manuscripts, but we need to come to terms with what’s in there. There is some good stuff there… I know you can’t get much bleaker than The Holy Bible… but after that we didn’t think people were ready for songs about cutting the feet off ballerinas. There are no clues there as to what was going to happen. Let’s face it, you don’t need any clues for Richey. Ever since he carved “4 Real” on his arm, nothing would surprise you.
(qtd in Maconie, “We Shall Overcome” 88)
This lack of clues puts the band in an ongoing position of unknowing, and in many ways silenced the Manics regarding this difficult knowledge for nearly a decade. Since past trauma is “regulated, controlled, manipulated, and managed by stories” (Ihanus 123), the Manics worked incessantly at the narratives they told and repeated. These stories acted as what Derrida termed a récit, which is a narrative that “begins without a present event”; “[t]he repetition of the ré-cit marks at once a double affirmation and an impossible mourning. […] It is an affirmation – a re-citation – that is open to what remains to come,” but also “refuses any synthesis or reconciliation, a gaping opening” (Gaston 104). And in an effort to move on and avoid misusing Richey’s disappearance and memory, they often sublimated their difficult knowledge into other themes.
Following the unprecedented, almost surreal success of Everything Must Go, the Manics expressed anxiety over the band’s identity and continued to interrogate themselves. In 1998, this process resulted in This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, an album in which much of their soul searching and memory work was redirected at Welsh identity and history. The title itself, a quotation from Aneurin Bevan, signalled this transference. Their first number one single, “If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next,” concerned the Welsh who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, comparing their principles to the contemporary notions of a more inadequate, less principled Welshness, especially as felt by Nicky Wire personally. “Tsunami” told the story of the “silent twins,” June and Jennifer Gibbons, Welsh sisters who only communicated with each other, possibly as a response to the racist abuse they received as the only black children in the community. They were eventually sent to Broadmoor Hospital after committing arson, and only after Jennifer died, did June begin to speak to others again, seeing her sister’s death as a sacrifice for her release. This track could be interpreted as a certain kind of release in lyrical style post-The Holy Bible; however, besides “Ready for Drowning,” which alludes to both Richey’s possible drowning and the flooding of a Welsh village to provide water for Liverpool, the only song explicitly about Richey on the record is “Nobody Loved You.”
After the softer melancholia and mournful rumination on Welshness that defined This is My Truth, the Manics appeared to need to reconstitute the band as a version closer to the one that produced The Holy Bible. In a Q feature story called “A Redesign for Life,” Dorian Lynskey interviews the Manics in 2001 on the cusp of their release of Know Your Enemy. “‘The enemy for us was what we had become,’ says Wire. ‘What we had let ourselves become’” (96). Significantly, Nicky says that Richey’s memory “has informed the spirit of Know Your Enemy” (100). At the same time, Lynskey senses the dogged death drive inherent in the Manics’ work and concludes his article with “there is a sense that the end is, if not nigh, then in sight” (100). Ultimately, Know Your Enemy was an overly eclectic record that felt incoherent and stylistically confused. The album embodied the struggle against themselves, the problematic, seemingly disorganized side of schizophrenic hyper-reflexivity. Sass interrogates this possible paradox of over-thinking and self-reflexivity:
Could the disorganization in question be something more intricate, not a process of being overwhelmed by antagonistic forces but more of a self-undermining — like something turning in upon itself until, finally, it collapses of its own accord? If so, we might find the peculiarities of schizophrenic experience less a matter of brute contradiction than a paradox: the paradoxes of the reflexive. (8)
As the Manics said, the enemy was only themselves.
In producing Everything Must Go, such an unexpected and unimaginable following act to The Holy Bible, the Manics put themselves in the position of trying to follow an impossible act for the rest of their career. Another way of explaining the process of dealing with their identity quandary could be “archive fever.” Derrida delineates the terms under which archive fever is enacted: “It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (Archive Fever 91). Dorian Lynskey describes this impulse in more concrete terms: “Manics albums follow a cycle of sorts. Twice now they have released an agendasetting album followed by a compromised one, which then led to a turbulent, angry record” (“Redesign” 99). This pattern of recalibrating their identity to what they think Manic Street Preachers should mean, often predicated on the significance of The Holy Bible, is one of the most fascinating aspects of the band. In 2011, after ranking the top fifty of their own singles for NME, James speculated on the band’s next steps: “I think we will, as a band, reinvestigate ourselves as a concept” (“We Sanctified” 27). More than most bands, Manic Street Preachers constantly take stock of themselves. This hyper-self-reflexivity and anxiety over identity proves that they are not entirely haunted by Richey, but by themselves as a band.
In the same year that the Manics released the tenth anniversary edition of The Holy Bible, they put out Lifeblood, an underrated album that is positively haunted. Its music is ironically bloodless, eschewing guitar solos for washes of synth, but this static translucence quietly declares the ghosts of the past to be alive and well and living within the Manics. “Emily,” a track about suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, reveals some of the most telling themes behind the album: “The relics the ghosts all down so many roads […] It’s what you forget […] that kills you / It’s what you remember […] that makes you / We used to have answers / now we only have questions / but now have no direction.” This rumination on memory and forgetting expresses the significance of memory for identity, but it also interrogates whether the Manics’ artistic methods post-The Holy Bible were as effective and “true” as they should have been. The preponderance of unanswerable questions and lack of direction is a telling insight into the band’s ongoing memory work. The last track of Lifeblood, “Cardiff Afterlife,” is an apt tribute to this difficult work and the feelings of oscillating laterally rather than moving forward:
The paralysed future
The past sideways crawl
I must give up on this
It makes no sense at all
Makes no sense at all
In the Cardiff afterlife
We sense the breaking of our lives […]
And yet I kept my silence
Your memory is still mine
No I will not share them
Acquaintance through denial
For I witnessed a splendour
And evil that no one saw
And I felt kindness
And vanity for sure
This song reclaims the band’s memories of Richey and the ambivalence this reclamation entails, especially as it recounts the more difficult knowledge about him as a real person and friend. “Cardiff Afterlife” also recoups some of their witnessing of the events surrounding and immediately following The Holy Bible, and the silence this witnessing required; however, the use of “afterlife” still reinforces the belatedness of witnessing their own trauma, and the breaking of lives suggests the unanswerable aporia of difficult knowledge. Speaking about Lifeblood, James said, “we did find a different version of ourselves. Sometimes when you delineate and deconstruct, you find nothing, that’s the scary process. But we did find something (even if) we confused ourselves and our audience in the process” (qtd in Power 266). Lifeblood, in many ways, paved the way for an epiphany and the beginning of a return, as well as a more direct confrontation with the past.
On the tenth anniversary of Richey’s disappearance, NME asked Nicky, “Why do you think everybody hates the Manics ’05?” He replied:
I think people forget that we’re just completely aware. We don’t expect to be on the cover of NME, we don’t expect to be the band that we were ten years ago, we’re really comfortable with that. I spent months putting The Holy Bible reissue together, and there it is, a tribute to Richey, it’s a tribute to the band at the time. Lifeblood is The Holy Bible for 35-year-olds.
(“Nothing” 31)
At the same time, he acknowledged that “surviving has become a curse.” This survival becomes sur-vivre, the Derridean “living on,” which is in excess of life and death, and hovering somewhere above, on, or in between the two. The Manics’ récit of The Holy Bible and its attendant meaning for the band’s identity became stronger around the time of Lifeblood, as afterlife and survival collided with archive and revival. In the video interview included with the tenth anniversary reissue of The Holy Bible, James describes the album as the band’s “most definitive period,” and says that the reissue special edition was made because “as an era, it deserves to be represented this way.” By 2014, Nicky was saying “really Richey’s in all our lyrics” (qtd in Barry).
After a three-year break during which James and Nicky released solo albums, the Manics produced Send Away the Tigers, a record heralded as their “comeback.” They managed to blend the anthemic side of their identity with the more vigorous ambitions of their past. As described by Nicky Wire, the lead single “Your Love Alone” appeared to be a combination of apostrophe and prosopopoeia, a dialogue with the absent Richey Edwards. In one interview, he said, “I feel like Richey is my guiding light at the moment” (qtd in “Glastonbury” 20). The song “Indian Summer” contains the lines, “I guess we’ll have to test, until there’s nothing left / We said the truth was fixed, it’s lost without a trace […] Indian Summer, still hurt and broken / And leave all this material belief / Remember the reasons / The reasons that made us be.” The questions and fragmentation of Lifeblood remain, but with a renewed commitment to remember in the face of an ongoing future that remains strange because a pre-emptive end was both eluded and interiorized. Perhaps even more significantly, the band took to wearing what appeared to be military-style clothing again, and the typeface on the cover for Send Away the Tigers was a return to the Cyrillic font and reversed “r’s” of The Holy Bible. Then, on November 4, 2008, the Manics revealed that they would be releasing a new album featuring Richey’s remaining lyrics: “[m]usically, in many ways it feels like a follow up to the Holy Bible” (“Note”).