Rock
Manic Street Preachers' James Dean Bradfield doesn't believe in 'closure'
James Dean Bradfield has reflected on the heartbreaks he's experienced in life.
Manic Street Preachers' James Dean Bradfield doesn't believe in the "American notion of closure".
The 57-year-old musician admits that time hasn't fully healed the pain he suffered after losing his mother, and bandmate Richey Edwards, who disappeared in February 1995 and was legally presumed deceased in 2008.
James told The i Paper: "That American notion of closure and all that stuff is just b*******.
"I never got closure of my mum dying. You’ll always have that pain. And unloading yourself into your writing doesn’t always solve things. Talking to people doesn’t always solve things. I find it hard when people say they’ve got closure on something like that. I’m just like, really? How does that happen?"
In 2014, the band played a run of 20th-anniversary concerts performing their third album, The Holy Bible. The Manics have also released a live version of the album and James feels proud of how they've dealt with Richey's passing.
He said: "If you’re not showing emotion, then you’ve got to question yourself. And now and again, I’ve had to question myself because we’ve been around for so long. But those nights, I felt as if we all connected. I do feel we did it justice physically, kinetically.
"We know the absence of Richey hangs over everything. But then you still try to connect with what he did on that record, and we still could. As simple as that – we could still do it."
Meanwhile, Nicky Wire, the band's bassist and lyricist, previously admitted that he'd "blanked" out the pain.
The 57-year-old star told BBC Radio 4’s Mastertapes programme: "I probably blanked it out. We told ourselves he was writing about these dark things in a journalistic kind of way, writing from the point of view of an anorexic, and so much of our stuff was loaded in that way."
Nicky also recalled having mixed emotions when he realised that Richey was missing.
He shared: "I prefer to block it out to be honest with you. Once I knew he was missing there was a mixture of extreme panic and a nagging feeling that there was something wrong."
