STREET PREACHER SIGHTING

With the Manic Street Preachers having won two trophies at the recent Brit Awards, the British press is full of reports from an apparently credible source that the Welsh band’s missing guitarist-lyricist Richey Edwards was spotted in the popular hippie resort of Goa in India.

The band hasn’t heard from Richey, who had suffered from alcoholism and depression, since Feb. 1, 1995, when he left a London hotel on the day the band was scheduled to fly to America for press sessions. He left his passport, credit cards and supply of Prozac in his Cardiff flat. Two weeks later he was presumed a suicide after his car was found abandoned near the Severn Bridge on the Engand-Wales border, a notorious suicide site, though no body was ever found.

Now, though, Viv Morris, a 48-year-old writing lecturer at Neath College in West Glamorgan, claims he saw Edwards in Goa last November. Morris had seen Richey close up once before, in August 1993, when a promoter friend of his gave him a backstage pass for a Manics concert. The person he saw in Goa, he says, was very sunburned and had matted, long hair, but he says he is all but certain it was the missing rocker. He learned from another traveler that his name was Rick and that he’d been on the road with this group of hippies for about 18 months.

“The importance of it only struck me when I saw the band on the Brit Awards,” says Morris. “I’m not some wound-up fan or a dreamer--just someone who thinks they can help.”

Police have interviewed Morris and are taking the sighting seriously. If Edwards is alive, he’s also--perhaps unwittingly--wealthy. His recording and songwriting royalties have been held in a trust fund, estimated currently to be at about $1.5 million.