The Domestic Terrorist - The Pathetic Cult Of Richey

Fans or Fanatics?

The problem with The Manic Street Preachers is their fans. There's a huge difference between someone who's a fan and someone who's a fanatic. "Success is such an ugly word, especially in your tiny world." Tiny little people, who see James, Sean and Nicky as the Three Apostles of the Rock Apocalypse, gagging hopelessly on the teat of an age they never know except through the history books.

Like Jesus, never have the 'fans' so wholly missed the point whilst knowing the scriptures. They know the words, yet not the meaning of them. Language can assign meaning and definition. It can also destroy and pervert. But what we're dealing with is people who know not what the words mean. They are illiterate.

For them, the past is beautiful. The future is a corpse in the snow. And so, all the fans have is a glorified past, and a fear of the future. Because in their eyes - even though they're here now - the Manic Street Preachers ceased to exist when Richey left. What they're watching now is merely the movement of the maggots under the skin of the corpse. And yet still they come to worship at the dead church.

The people who forget that even in 1992, if they were even there, the Manics only had around 50 fans in the country who looked like a mess of eyeliner and spraypaint. The rest of the people who came to see them were the curious and the bored. And there weren't very many of them either. At the start of 1992, the Manics were playing to 300 people a night and tickets cost �3.

The people who glorify the past, because they fear the fact that right now, we might be living in a time that will be as good as it gets. That we might look upon today, with its attendant worries, as a golden time of opportunity and adventure, at some point in the future. Things always look better when you're no longer there. Glorify the past because...

...�all you slut heroes offer is a fear of the future�. - Motown Junk.

The people who didn't even know about Richey when he was alive. The people who never saw the Manics when he was in the band. The people who now pay �70 for a copy of "You Love Us" on CD because at the time they were off listening to their Take That records, and now desperately want to pretend they've always been cool. But you don't become cool looking like the sad clone of a band that ceased to exist a decade ago. It's like the sad punks who still wear mohawks and have their photos taken by tourists. Soon, I promise, Manics fans will be on postcards saying "Welcome To London!" that you can send home. Relics from a dinosaur age.

"People are always talking about Richey as if they knew him. He was my best friend.
These people, most of them didn't even like the band before he went missing." - Nicky Wire

They're the fans who, through streaks of black-foundation tears, scream along to "This Is Yesterday" yet boo and hiss and sit around on the floor in the middle of a heaving mosh pit smoking when the Manics play "Everything Must Go." Even though the people who wrote and recorded those songs are exactly the same. And just a year separates the recording of the two songs.

Just a hint, it�s the Standing section for a reason. If you want to sit down, go the seats.

People stumble over these sad little excuses for fans and yet somehow, these glitterati feel superior to the 'proles'. Even though the reason they think they're superior may very well be the reasons they are not.

"It's not rock'n'roll, but the geometry of contempt"

These are the 'fans' who run to the front whenever the Manics play anything released before 30th January 1995, yet wander back lost and sad to sit down whenever anything after that date is played. The people who - in their ignorance - fail to realise that "Kevin Carter" and "No Surface All Feeling" were recorded before Richey's disappearance. They're the fans who wear black panda eyeliner, fake fur, angel wings, tiaras, and home made t-shirts with slogans from records they don't own painted on.

I even once saw a guy at a Manics concert who'd shaved his head and was wearing the exact same type of pyjamas and shoes that Richey was wearing in his last ever photo shoot.

Just so you know, Richey NEVER played on a Manics record apart from inaudibly on a couple of live b-sides and that fuzzy guitar at the end of "No Surface, All Feeling" (which was recorded in January 1995). And he only wrote half the lyrics to the songs whilst he was in the band. These people, these 'fans' are deifying a man who isn't here. Just go back to 1992 and live in the past with memories you never had.

They're suffering Nostalgia for an age that NEVER existed. Trying to live in a past they NEVER had. Celebrating the image of the Manics, yet forgetting the substance. Don�t follow others : make your own mythology.

�Mute Icons Are The Only Acceptable Form Of Beauty� - Mark Rothko

Because as far as I'm concerned, people who understand the Manics, who grasp the importance of their cultural legacy, who read the books they quote on their sleeves before they were even on the sleeves sometimes, don't go to gigs in make up, fake fur, angel wings, tiara's and other toys to try and add glamour to their empty lives. Don't sit around acting like immature teenagers, sulking, when the band tries to play something written after 1994. They try to make the world a better place, live life with intelligence, awareness, and beauty.

To them, Richey is an icon. Just like Sid Vicious. Ian Curtis. Kurt Cobain. Someone who was never really alive. Someone who only ever existed in newsprint and in history books. He might as well be Jesus. Yet all he was was a man.

This isn't about age. It's about understanding. If you were 6 when "Motown Junk" came out, don't pretend that you were there at the time. You weren't. Don't lie. Don't waste your money chasing a memory you never had, a life you never lived, a world there never was. Don't just follow the image. That's as shallow as liking Westlife or Blue because they're pretty.

Don't be afraid of the fact that the Manics write some great songs now that there are only three of them. They know what the words to the songs are - they're stencilled all over their crap home-made shirts. now they've just got to Understand. It isn't about glitter, or make up, or tiaras. The Manics were about survival. About making the world a better place. About going from despair to ... somewhere else. Otherwise all you are is oppressed. Not thinking of yourself. A silent, coke-swilling, unthinking member of the herd. Loving your masks, and adoring your failures.

Flaubert - "Be regular and ordinary in your life so you can be violent and original in your work."

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