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Originally Posted by Son of Stopped
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Every review or interview that comes out makes me shake my head and raise my eyebrow more. This is insane. Did no-one read this back and think ‘this is insane’?
It’s totally understandable to not want Richey to be defined by his illness, but I think the vast majority of us who care enough to have more than a passing interest in his story already don’t do that. And as has been said, not wanting someone to be defined a certain way is very different to dismissing professionals’ opinions - though there is a time and place for that, I think Priory doctors who had observed and spoken to Richey for several weeks had at least a decent idea of his state, and grounds to suggest a borderline diagnosis - in favour of trying to find a non-mental health reason through your own conjecture.
For what it’s worth I’m not sure I think Richey was borderline, I myself have been given that diagnosis and thought ‘no, that’s not remotely correct’ because it just wasn’t, not because I was resisting a diagnosis. But that doctor saw me for one hour ever. But - again, only from what I know as a fan obviously, so just fwiw - I really, really don’t think Richey was on the spectrum. Like, the exact opposite, if that makes any sense. That’s how much I disagree with the idea.
This book seems to be really pushing Jo as ‘Richey’s girlfriend’, which I don’t entirely get, though maybe for lack of context. In his final interview, so January 1995 - if it’s Jo he’s talking about - Richey says himself that it wasn’t A Relationship, he’d only kissed the person once or twice, and seemed to rationalise that he should love them, but had never told them he did - so did he, or was he trying to convince himself he did? His wording is very curious. He also says earlier in the interview ‘...
if I were in love with a woman...’ and later that he considers relationships at his age ‘not love’ (No disrespect meant here, he clearly cared for this person in some way, just pointing out discrepancies.) He also repeatedly dismisses relationships and his capacity to be in them, and at the end of his last videoed interview - end of November 1995, so about two months earlier - he all but cuts off the interviewer asking him if he dreams of settling down and having kids to say no and explain quite insistently that his goals lie in fulfilment of self-expression through his writing.
Also. Richey was obviously especially unwell for most/all of 1994. Before he was in hospital his self-harm has gotten completely out of control, and after The Priory he seemed almost psychotic at times in his behaviour - the threatening to cut his fingers off, banging his head against a wall til he bled, etc. Surely that is no fit state in which to be starting a relationship - never mind the rest of his issues, with groupies etc - but we’re meant to think he had a girlfriend, rather than perhaps a friend/someone he was interested in, and take seriously his proposal to them? That sounds like another desperate, unwell flail of a gesture, like when he said after Nicky got married that he would too. He clearly wanted stability, love, happiness - makes total sense in those terms - but his actions seem desperate and not of the right mind, trying to force circumstances, like he wants these things to just happen for the sake of it rather than because it was right/he was in the position for them to. When his capacity to make choices is being questioned, why not with regards to this as much as anything else?
This all seems to contradict the book’s angle, though of course public vs private Richey are different - but it’s still Richey. It’s the same person. So he seems at best VERY mixed up about all this, which, yeah, we pretty much knew.
I find it amazing that SHR has the nerve to talk about the dismissing/demonising of Richey fans when she was so in that business herself in the past, particularly with the person who runs the Cult Of Richey website! ‘You can admire him without being a cliche’ is pretty much the modus operandi of that site - looking at what Richey was interested in and exploring the references/intentions in what he was trying to say. Which is one of the things this book is meant to be doing, ironically.
Why would Jo speak to Rachel/the authors for the book but refuse to let them see the box Richey left in his hotel room? Don’t we basically know what’s in it anyway? I can’t understand what reason she’d have for withholding it. Her choice obviously, but it seems odd. This sudden Vivian - why were we never told about her before, if she’s so important? How do we know Richey tried to give her his passport if no-one can get hold of her? If he did, why wasn’t she immediately like ‘um, you’re going to America literally tomorrow, this is rather weird, maybe I or you need to talk to someone’? Why let James very publicly take the huge weight of having been The Last Person To See Richey if he wasn’t? I’m sure some blanks of context etc will be filled in in the book, but some of this just straight up makes no sense, with or without explanation.
As others have said, the lampooning of the band is tasteless and upsetting, and seemingly grounded in... nothing. The pushing of this agenda that they weren’t really friends, they exploited Richey, they’re withholding information one bit is jaw-dropping. They love that boy to pieces and it’s horrifying that the one direction from which dismissal of that, and demonisation of them, is coming from is something with Rachel’s blessing.
Richey seeming well to the band and not well to Jo is... really not surprising? He was all over the place. He was struggling. Mental illness changes constantly. This doesn’t disprove anyone’s opinion of how he seemed at the time, or mean someone knew him better for thinking differently. The same with all these super best friends Richey apparently had that we didn’t know about and who know him so much better than the band - of course he had other friends, of course some of them knew him well, but why does that have to mean the band didn’t? Why do you want to discredit them so badly? They wouldn’t ‘lose’ information about Richey from the PI they hired, Wire keeps bloody everything, I think he’d have hung on to vital information about his best friend’s disappearance.
There seems a real wilful disconnect with the band, they’ve been decided as the villains of the piece so they’re going to be, we won’t reach out for clarification or help or anything, because they’re just BAD. I understand wanting to separate Richey the person from Richey the rockstar, but they were so much more to him that just his band mates. You CAN’T separate the band from him. The myth, the public image, yes. Three of the closest people to him who knew him most of his life, no.
Nicky mentioned JD Salinger and wanting to go and live in a bunker just as much as Richey did. As others have pointed out, there’s several things like Richey’s school report being held up as proof of his aptitude in History and Art, when actually he’d done best in French. His archive is so vast and hard to choose the most significant items from to include in the book, yet the contents of an old washbag have apparently been deemed more interesting and relevant for our knowledge than diary entries from the weeks before he went missing? Of course if privacy/respect is the reason for not sharing very personal information then that’s entirely fair, but so much being given to us here seems unnecessary - and potentially embarrassing for Richey - vs stuff it might actually be helpful for us to know. What on earth is this about Richey having several bands lined up but choosing the Manics?! What? He couldn’t play guitar very well, what other bands would be interested? He’d already been writing with Nicky for years. Just what.
I fully cannot at Richey being in Israel because he’d mentioned wanting to visit in passing and got tattoos of the circles of hell?! Why would he have gotten them for such a bizarrely disconnected reason and not, you know, the actual circles themselves/Dante/all the related stuff which he was very interested in? Why not just... go to Israel, if you wanna go so badly, instead of getting veeeeery vaguely related tattoos? He said several times that he didn’t much enjoy travelling and would rather read about places (though that should possibly be taken with a pinch of salt). He also got an Apocalypse Now tattoo, does that mean he’s in Vietnam or Cambodia? ON A BEACH??? A Manics fan would be laughed at for this kind of nonsense. But a hairdresser agrees so what do we know!
And the story about Richey driving to the ‘Yes’ video editing then leaving after 5 minutes - I’m assuming at least one of the band were there? So he potentially drove cross-country for a few minutes of company with a person or people he apparently didn’t like anymore, when he had other bffs he could have gone to. He repeatedly phoned Nicky in the early hours to hand-wring at him, instead of anyone else. James went to see him almost every day he was in hospital because he didn’t give a shit, and Richey didn’t tell him to go away out of sheer politeness. Etc etc etc.
I fear all our very valid and reasoned criticism is going to be either ignored, or vehemently rejected as jealousy, refusal to accept the difficulty of the task at hand in writing such a book, blind Manics fandom, personal vendetta... anything but legitimate. I can’t believe a book we had such high hopes for, that could and should be what Rachel wanted it to be, is such a freaking car crash before it’s even been published. Everything about and around it is odd. Deeply, deeply odd. There’s such a weird mixture of things coming out - new, sketchy information it doesn’t make sense for us not to have known all along being insisted upon, attacks being made on established facts, random people and mad theories being presented as authorities while the band apparently know fuck all... this does not seem remotely a righting of wrongs or setting the record straight, it seems an agenda-heavy rewriting of history. Which is depressingly ironic, is it not.
I guess we have to remember that as much as we as a fan base have always massively respected, admired and felt for Rachel, her version of things is also a version. That’s not to insult or discredit her - everyone can only have a version, no matter how close, informed, invested. Furthermore, her version is, I think it’s fair to say, being seriously skewed here.
I... did not mean to write such an essay. But this has all been eating me up the last few weeks. I think it has a lot of us.