Richey's Astoria '94 Set List Quotes / Musical Ideas For LP After The Holy Bible

[R*E*P*E*A*T Fanzine]

Hi Everyone,

Another post from us!

Just in case this may be of interest to you as well, we also recently posted the following on our social media pages...



Quotes chosen by Richey for the 1994 London Astoria shows


In the moving and revealing radio documentary interview entitled, 'My Brother Richard' (uploaded to SoundColud on March 27, 2020), Rachel Edwards spoke to Ray Meade about life in the 25 years since the disappearance of Richey. She remembered the final London Astoria date on December 21, 1994, recalling: "I absolutely agree that it was Richey's goodbye."

Therefore, do you think the set list quotes chosen by Richey for the December 19, 20 and 21 gigs, are prescient?

Astoria Night 1 - "You are now within a foot of the extreme verge" - King Lear.

Astoria Night 2 - "I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity" - Simone de Beauvoir.

Astoria Night 3 - "I believe in alcoholism, venereal disease, fever and exhaustion. I believe in the genital organs of great men and women. I believe in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom. I believe all memories, lies, fantasies, evasions" - J. G. Ballard.

*Quotes courtesy of MSPpedia



JDB on Richey's proposed musical direction for a follow-up to The Holy Bible


R*E*P*E*A*T is continuing to add newly-discovered info to our Holy Bible Facts article, and all of these updates will be uploaded at a much later date.

However, we thought that the following details may be of interest to readers now. You will already know that as a potential follow-up to The Holy Bible, Richey famously expressed a desire to create a concept album which he described as "Pantera meets Screamadelica." With MSP's musical maestro and sonic architect, Bradfield, since countering with doubts over whether the group would have produced such an LP: "I was worried that as chief tunesmith in the band, I wasn't actually going to be able to write things that he would have liked. There would have been an impasse in the band for the first time born out of taste."

Now, in a brand new interview from September 2020, James has expanded upon this further in a Q&A with Record Collector, who queried if he thought the Manic Street Preachers' determined endurance is a result of Edwards' disappearance in 1995, making giving up unconscionable?

"It's a difficult question... I don't know. It's well reported that Everything Must Go [1996's two-million-selling commercial breakthrough] became what it did because of Richey going missing. Richey saw the next record as being this mash-up between Nine Inch Nails, Screamadelica and Berlin. I didn't want to do that record. And we'd never had that experience in the Manics before. And we never did, because Richey went missing. And it's interesting to think, how tense would I have become? How tense would Richey have become? I remember having a vague conversation, saying, 'That's pretty out there, Android' - we had nicknames for each other. But I couldn't have made that record. And I don't think Nicky and Sean wanted to make that record, either. So, it's a question that stretches into the future, isn't it? With four, does it become harder to agree with what the sound of your band is? Perhaps there was a small sign that it would have. I think Richey wanted the music to be more experimental and confrontational. He wanted music that sometimes challenged people to turn it off. That could have led somewhere brilliant. But I am obsessed with melody and musical movement. And Nick doesn't care to admit it, but he's pretty obsessed with melody, too. So perhaps it would have been harder to be 13 albums in, with four of us."



Hope these topics may generate some discussion amongst fans.

Thank you for your time & Stay Beautiful,

R*E*P*E*A*T