Kevin Carter - Remastered Version

Kevin Carter was a South African photographer who took his own life months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for a haunting Sudan famine picture. After dropping out of school for bad grades he joined the South African Defense Force where he found upholding the apartheid regime loathsome - when he took sides with a black mess-hall waiter, some Afrikaans-speaking soldiers called he 'kaffir-boetie' (ni--er lover). After a few odd jobs, Carter worked in a camera shop and fell into journalism. Carter, whilst working for the Johannesburg Star, hooked up with three friends - Ken Oosterbroek of the Star and free-lancers Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva - and they began moving through Soweto and Tokoza at dawn. Capturing the chaotic hand-to-hand street fighting between Mandela's A.N.C. and the Zulu-supported Inkatha Freedom Party which involved AK-47s, spears and axes. The four became so well known for capturing the violence that Living, a Johannesburg magazine, dubbed them "the Bang-Bang Club." In 1993 Carter headed north of the border with Silva to photograph the rebel movement in famine-stricken Sudan. He wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. The picture immediately became an icon of Africa's anguish. on April 12, 1994, the New York Times phoned to tell him he had won the Pulitzer. Carter was always troubled by personal problems and two months after receiving his Pulitzer, Carter would be dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning in Johannesburg, a suicide at 33. His pickup truck was parked near a small river where he used to play as a child, in a note left on the passenger seat part of it read: "The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist."

Richey Edwards wrote the lyric to this song. The Manic Street Preachers guitarist vanished in February 1995, and the band continued on without him, including five songs on the Everything Must Go album (the first one released after his disappearance) that he co-wrote. The band was hoping that Edwards was in hiding, and that including some of his songs on the set would flush him out. In writing about Kevin Carter, Edwards opened a window to his own sense of nihilism and a depression that is exacerbated by success. His body was never found.