July 2, 2019
It has long been one of the great mysteries of music. The thing is, it is about to be solved. There have been a string of fairly popular hits in music over the past decade. Nothing to number one or anything, but nice solid charting songs. They all have one thing in common. A mystery songwriter. He is given credit for the songs, but no one has actually done any digging into who he is. Only his lawyer knows his true identity. The writer is someone who went missing two decades ago. He no longer wanted to be on the stage. He couldn't handle the pressure to perform and always come up with the group's lyrics. He was going to end up dead if he continued. So, he took a decade off, hidden away from the world. When he felt ready to make music, he had a decade's worth of lyrics and set out trying to sell them and music through an attorney. He loves being able to do what he wants to do with no one knowing who it is. I'm sure his family though, would love to know he is alive. He is foreign born and his group was probably A- at its peak.
Richey Edwards/Manic Street Preachers
It has long been one of the great mysteries of music. The thing is, it is about to be solved. There have been a string of fairly popular hits in music over the past decade. Nothing to number one or anything, but nice solid charting songs. They all have one thing in common. A mystery songwriter. He is given credit for the songs, but no one has actually done any digging into who he is. Only his lawyer knows his true identity. The writer is someone who went missing two decades ago. He no longer wanted to be on the stage. He couldn't handle the pressure to perform and always come up with the group's lyrics. He was going to end up dead if he continued. So, he took a decade off, hidden away from the world. When he felt ready to make music, he had a decade's worth of lyrics and set out trying to sell them and music through an attorney. He loves being able to do what he wants to do with no one knowing who it is. I'm sure his family though, would love to know he is alive. He is foreign born and his group was probably A- at its peak.
Richey Edwards/Manic Street Preachers
Still don’t know of him or his band... 🤷🏼♀️
ReplyDeleteBecause the Manics had so many hits before Edwards disappeared?
ReplyDeleteFreebird: he was a definite talent. But he's almost certainly dead.
ReplyDeleteHe's a talent, yes but the A- rating is pushing it.
ReplyDeleteThey were absolutely A-list in the Uk/Europe. I get that may not have translated into the States as the same rating.
ReplyDeleteThis must mean he is writing for others, not his old band. They would know.
ReplyDeleteId love to know which songs he's written anonymously! Really interesting blind. Congrats to the people who knew this one!
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ReplyDeleteMost of my British friends who were born in the mid-late 80s remember the Manics as one of THE defining, mainstream indie rock bands of the 90s (it was them, Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Suede and Stereophonics, if I remember correctly). A percentage of said friends all owned a big white mug with "Manic Street Preachers" printed in black on it.
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ReplyDeleteEh, I've heard of them, but A- is still pretty high.
ReplyDeleteThe band would have been A list in the 90s.
ReplyDeleteStarted off as a mix of Guns 'n Roses and the Clash.
Won a few Brit awards, headlined festivals, their appearance on Top of the Pops resulted in 25,000 complaints. One of the most popular bands in the UK, Europe, and Japan. They didn't hit the mainstream ti 1996's Everything Must Go.
Some material to check out on YouTube includes Motorcycle Emptiness, Little Baby Nothing, Faster, If You Tolerate This, Design for LifeYour Love Alone is Not Enough (which revitalized their career in 2007). Still tour, still do festivals. Thirteen albums - all worth listening to/purchasing. Bradfield is still underrated as a guitarist and really has/had one of the best voices to come out of Britain.
Wow, I guess his family now knows he's alive?!
ReplyDeleteA band doesn't have to be known in America to be A list, @Lisa.
ReplyDeleteIn the 90s, the Manic Street Preachers were huge in the UK, Europe and many other parts of the world. Their album 'This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours' sold millions internationally.
VikingSong
ReplyDeleteActually if the band is being described as A list to a predominantly American audience as a means of guessing said band, then yeah.....they would need to be A list in the US. Otherwise tell it like it is, they were A list in certain parts of the world, their home country but possibly lower here.
The Manics are absolutely A- I would even say A+ they just weren’t well known in the US
ReplyDeleteA- in their own country should be the line. Also, I really want to know what songs he has written
ReplyDeleteThey were always shit. I really cannot see what anyone thought highly of them. Seriously, not a good band.
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ReplyDeleteUtter horses***. As I said, I saw MSP at their early concerts and had all their early vinyl. NO WAY ON earth does a writer of such idiosyncratic lyrics end up writing MOR standards. Also no way on earth a man on such a downward spiral with serious mental health issues just magically 'fake' their death. The MSP were A list back in the late 90's in Europe, they sold millions and filled out arena's/stadiums.
ReplyDeleteI'm in a similar position to longtimereader. I was a serious Manics fan, following them from prior to their debut album in the early 1990s and losing interest a couple of albums after Edwards disappeared.
ReplyDeleteThe first relevant point, Edwards very rarely wrote music for the Manics. He admittedly didn't like playing the guitar and was a rudimentary player at best, and only then out of necessity. It was well known the frontman, James Bradfield, carried the musical weight of the band on-stage and in-studio.
Second point. Edwards was a lyricist, but not the band's sole writer. His lyrics were commonly rather bleak, intense or uncommercial, not the type of thing which outside of the context of the Manics would make for "solid charting" material. As longtimereader says, they were idiosyncratic. So I would argue that unless Edwards radically redeveloped his writing as to be virtually unrecognisable as his in style, content and tone, it's highly unlikely he'd have been able to fly beneath the radar in the charts for too long before attracting attention.
Thirdly, the pressure aspect. After his disappearance the band not only managed to continue functioning perfectly well, they almost immediately reached greater heights of success. Which doesn't fit with the scenario of them having felt any prior need to "pressure" Edwards into coming up with the goods for them. As already mentioned, he wasn't a contributing musician and wasn't the band's sole source of lyrics.
Which brings me to point four. The band grew up together in a tight and relatively remote community. They schooled together, holidayed together, discovered music together etc etc. So surely with bonds that tight, and with Edwards being musically inessential to the band, if he'd wished to step out of the limelight and simply concentrate on providing lyrics, it wouldn't have been that problematic?
And then there's the mental illness aspect. We're not talking a mild case of the blues or someone with diva tendencies. Edwards had a serious propensity for self-harm, in public and private, and was on medication due to the same. He was not a well balanced individual. Read contemporarty interviews, he was struggling with life.
I'll leave the reader to take all of that into consideration and decide the likelyhood of Edwards secretly reappearing to develop a successful career anonymously penning chart hits.
100% what Small Axe said.
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