[4][5] The ninth Manic Street Preachers album, Journal for Plague Lovers, released on 18 May 2009, is composed entirely of songs with lyrics left by Edwards.
He'd allay my fears, which, I suppose in retrospect, is ironic given the anxiety that he suffered years later.Edwards attended Oakdale Comprehensive School, where he met future bandmates Nicky Wire, Sean Moore and James Dean Bradfield.
[citation needed] Following his release from the Priory in September, Manic Street Preachers toured Europe with Suede and Therapy?
[19] Edwards disappeared on 1 February 1995, on the day when he and Bradfield were due to fly to the United States on a promotional tour of The Holy Bible.
It is unknown if he intended to spend the cash during the U.S. tour or whether a part of it was to pay for a desk he had ordered from a shop in Cardiff.
[22][23] According to Emma Forrest, as quoted in A Version of Reason, "The night before he disappeared Edwards gave a friend a book called Novel with Cocaine, instructing her to read the introduction, which details the author staying in a mental asylum before vanishing."
Whilst staying at the Embassy Hotel in Bayswater Road, London, according to Rob Jovanovic's biography, Edwards removed some books and videos from his bag.
The package was addressed to Edwards' on/off girlfriend, Jo, whom he met some years prior, although they had split a few weeks earlier.
"[25][26] The poem is generally considered to depict the tension between the speaker's desire for the simplicity of death and the tulip's encouragement towards life.
[22][29] This timeline was turned on its head in 2018, due to the original assumption made over the toll booth receipt found from the Severn Bridge.
The driver reported that the passenger had spoken in a Cockney accent, which occasionally slipped into a Welsh one, and that he had asked if he could lie down on the back seat.
The passenger got out at the Severn View service station near Aust, South Gloucestershire, and paid the £68 fare in cash.
[46] The magazine had received a number of letters from fans distressed at both the anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain and the disappearance of Edwards.
Then-editor Allan Jones placed the inspiration for the special nature of the issue firmly in the hands of the readers: "Every week the mailbag is just full of these letters.
"[47] On 21 April, Caitlin Moran, writing in The Times, commented that Edwards became "a cause celebre among depressives, alcoholics, anorexics, and self-mutilators, because he was the first person in the public eye to talk openly about these subjects, not with swaggering bravado and a subtext of 'look how tortured and cool I am', but with humility, sense and, often, bleak humour".
[46] Moran dismissed the mainstream media's narrative, which was geared towards the idea that Edwards inspired copycat actions in fans.
With regard to the 8 April edition of Melody Maker, Moran wrote of her distaste of the media treatment in general: "Arms were flung aloft and tongues tutted two weeks back, when the first anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide coincided with the two-month marking of ... Richey Edwards' disappearance, and Melody Maker instigated a debate on escalating teenage depression, self-mutilation and suicide.
Albert Camus,[48] Philip Larkin, Yukio Mishima, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Arthur Rimbaud are known to have been among his favorite authors.
In 2009, Rob Jovanovic's book A Version of Reason: The Search for Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers was published.
The book was written with the goal of providing an authoritative factual account, pieced together through testimonials from those close to Edwards before his disappearance.
[52] In 2019, Sara Hawys Roberts and Leon Noakes published Withdrawn Traces: Searching for the Truth About Richey Manic, a book that claimed to provide fresh evidence that Edwards staged the disappearance.