He was going to end up dead if he continued. So, he took a decade off, hidden away from the world.

Source: http://www.crazydaysandnights.net

Pressure

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

Missing Manic Street Preachers rock star Richey Edwards still alive, new book proposes

A rock star who disappeared 25 years ago and was later presumed dead may in fact be alive and living in Israel, a new book claims.

Richey James Edwards was the guitarist and primary lyricist for Welsh band Manic Street Preachers until he vanished on the eve of a tour of the US on February 1, 1995.

For years his bandmates, family and friends held out hope he’d show up alive, but despite unconfirmed sightings of the troubled star, Edwards was declared officially dead in 2008.

But a new book, written with the cooperation of Edwards’ sister Rachel, access to his diaries and writings, and containing new interviews with those close to him, suggests he may have planned his disappearance.

“It was very interesting to uncover these things which add credence to the disappearance theory,” Withdrawn Traces: Searching for the Truth About Richey Manic author Sara Hawys told Wales Online.

They include evidence to suggest Edwards had Asperger’s, a form of autism which often leads to people shutting out the world.

“[We] started thinking about all the things the band had said about him being robotic, android-like, and we put two and two together,” said Hawys.

“We read books about Asperger’s and a lot of the traits clicked with Richey. It’s something that Rachel acknowledged that Richey might well have had – something that wouldn’t have been diagnosed back in the ’90s.”- Source

His disappearance

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. In the two weeks before his disappearance, Edwards withdrew £200 a day from his bank account, which totaled £2,800 by the day of the scheduled flight. Some speculated that he needed the money for the U.S. trip, and it was also mentioned he’d ordered a new desk for his flat from a shop in Cardiff. However, there was no record of the desk having been paid for, and this would have explained only half of the money withdrawn. 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. Among them was a copy of the play Equus. Edwards wrapped them carefully in a box with a note that said “I love you”, then decorated the box like a birthday present and decorated the outside of it with collages and literary quotations. These included a picture of a Germanic-looking house and Bugs Bunny. The package was addressed to a “Jo”.

The next morning, Edwards collected his wallet, car keys, some Prozac and his passport. He checked out of the hotel at 7:00 a.m., leaving his toiletries, packed suitcase, and some of his Prozac. He then drove to his apartment in Cardiff. In the two weeks that followed, Edwards was apparently spotted in the Newport passport office and at Newport bus station by a fan who was unaware that he was missing. The fan discussed a mutual friend, Lori Fidler, before Edwards departed. On 7 February, a taxi driver from Newport supposedly picked up Edwards from the King’s Hotel, and drove him around the valleys, including Edwards’ hometown of Blackwood. 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. Eventually they reached Blackwood and the bus station, but the passenger reportedly said “this is not the place”, and asked to be taken to Pontypool railway station. It was later ascertained, according to Jovanovic’s account, that Pontypool did not have a telephone. The passenger got out at the Severn View service station near Aust, South Gloucestershire and paid the £68 fare in cash.

On 14 February, Edwards’ Vauxhall Cavalier received a parking ticket at the Severn View service station, and on 17 February, the vehicle was reported as abandoned. Police discovered the battery to be dead, with evidence that the car had been lived in. Due to the service station’s proximity to the Severn Bridge, a known suicide site, it was widely believed that Edwards had taken his own life by jumping from the bridge. Many people who knew Edwards, however, have said that he was never the type to contemplate suicide and he himself was quoted in 1994 as saying, “In terms of the ‘S’ word, that does not enter my mind. And it never has done, in terms of an attempt. Because I am stronger than that. I might be a weak person, but I can take pain.”

Since then, Edwards has reportedly been spotted in a market in Goa, India, and on the islands of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote. There have been other alleged sightings of Edwards, especially in the years immediately following his disappearance. However, none of these has proved conclusive and none has been confirmed by investigators.

The investigation itself has received criticism. In his 1999 book Everything (A Book About Manic Street Preachers), Simon Price states that aspects of the investigation were “far from satisfactory”. He asserts the police may not have taken Edwards’ mental state into account when prioritising his disappearance, and also records Edwards’ sister Rachel as having “hit out at police handling” after CCTV footage was analysed two years after Edwards vanished. Price records a member of the investigation team as stating “that the idea that you could identify somebody from that is errant nonsense”. While his family had the option of declaring him legally dead from 2002 onwards, they chose not to for many years, and his status remained open as a missing person until 23 November 2008, when he became officially “presumed dead”. – Source