I need a slash. I think I’ll do it here. Gap in the tree curtain. Well-trodden. Ah sweet Mabel in heaven it stinks. Should have chosen a country lane instead. How many people have wazzed in this layby? Must be millions. Billions. Ye olde travellers on the trunk road into the west, unable to wait until the next rest facility. Services: twenty-one miles and twelve miles. Always try to get your horse to last out until the furthest one. Invariably a mistake. God, what’s this ground made of. Weeds growing from pure urine. Don’t think I’ll kick off my new foraging career here. Let’s leave that a while, shall we. Plastic bag caught in a tree. Nothing beautiful about that, whatever that emo kid in the film reckons. I was a big emo fan as a kid too. Rod Hull. Brilliant. Convinced it was a real bird until I was at least eleven. OK, here will do. Crisp wrappers. Plus-size drinks cartons. Do you want to get large for an extra 20p? Sorry, I mean go large. Litter bastards, slurping their McDiabetes after their day out to a renowned World Heritage Site. Tiffany, look here, isn’t this remarkable, these larger blue stones were somehow transported all the way from the mountains in west Wales 4,000 years before cars or trucks or trains had been invented, although there is a conflicting theory that they are erratics which drifted in on Ice Age glaciers from their original resting place. No, Tiffany, leave it where you threw it. There isn’t time. We have to be at Aunt Jackie’s at six, and what’s the point when there’s loads of other crap there already and I’m sure there’ll be a little man to come and pick it up before long.
That’s better. Give it a shake for luck. Why is it they never do that in the films? Always goes back in the pants so quickly. Barely even a movement. No thespian concession to zipping up. Zero evidence of stains or droplets. Always a plot device piss, too, never just a piss. Is this a plot device piss too? ‘If he hadn’t have stopped, he would never have met that druid, and his life would never have turned around.’ Doubt it. Who needs turning around anyway? It just means it’s going to be that much more exhausting the next time, when you get turned back around the other way again. Could do with a drink. Just one. Three hours until the pubs open. The pubs where I’m going anyway. The Coach & Horses on Greek Street will be open by now. Johnny Slazenger and Steve Rizlas two pints of Fosters down, boasting about how they crushed another innocent with their knowledge of New York Dolls trivia. Pete Shapiro with another indie girlfriend, flicking peanuts into her cleavage ravine at last orders. Had a quiet word with the twat last time. Wanted to take her home myself and treat her good in good ways and bad in good ways but didn’t; just walked her to the Tube station, asked her if she was OK, told her not to date music journalists and find a nice lad instead, a scientist or botanist or oil rig worker. Sign on a lamppost: ‘LOVE CONQUERS ALL’. Arrow added between the ‘CONQUER’ and the ‘ALL’, leading to a ‘FUCK’. Walked back into the pub and it looked like a battlefield, smelled like a yeast illness, oozed the spotty defeat of an old armpit. I put the Pogues on the jukebox and leapt around a bit while everyone else died in corners. Won’t be doing that again. Not after last night. All gone now. You’ll never work in this town again. Or mosh boisterously again in this town to snaggle-toothed Gaelic punk rock.
Going 60 now. Feels like 80 in this. Pleasant Jesus, are those poppies over there? Is that even real, or some fake carpet someone put down for a laugh to wind me up? There’s a rattle that’s bothering me. Hope this thing is going to make it the last ninety miles. Bought it from a granny in Enfield. 1989 vintage. One lady owner. Lady owner made me a cup of tea. Strong like I like it. Never seen a builder drink it stronger. Six digestive biscuits. Forced me to take the three I didn’t eat home with me. Think the shady old crone might have turned the clock back, popped in a 1980 Lada engine. If it doesn’t get me past Yeovil I’ll sell it for parts and hitch the rest of the way. Better than the Renault 4 I used to have. Got nicked. Thieves changed their mind and abandoned it after 200 yards. Feck, I need MUSIC, but I’ve got no cassettes – who has, now, apart from hipsters and the dead? – so I’ll carry on amusing myself by watching the place names zip by. Tintinhull? What sodding kind of name is that? I’m picturing North Sea poverty meets intrepid French reporting but sensing that’s not what I’d find. Maybe that’s it, that’s why I became a journalist: reading all those Tintin books when I was ten. Never got the dog, though, did I, and it’s all over now, isn’t it, probably. Too late. Sorry, Snowy. Try an owner with a longer temper. You don’t go decking Richard Peck in the most popular pub for north London journalists at 7 p.m. on a Friday and expect to walk out of it as an employable metropolitan freelancer. Don’t regret it, though. Twat lied then tried to screw me out of a month’s pay then when I sold his feature – my feature – to The Times he said he’d make sure I never got work from anyone he knew ever again. Too much silence about this shit, too much fear about what not being silent about it might cost you. Too many people in that world not from money being pushed around by people from money and not paid by people from money because the people from money don’t understand the importance of being paid and the terror of not being paid. Too many people not from money complying and not sending the people from money sprawling across a lager-stained parquet floor, scrabbling for their glasses which they probably only wear as an affectation.
OK. Motorway now. Getting closer. Traffic slowing down. REPORT OF DEBRIS in orange computer letters. It’s OK. Twenty-five miles left. This will be better. New start. Can feel the country air clearing up my eczema already just from those three minutes in it. Give me a week and I’ll be a fully qualified country squire. Lazy afternoons of picnics and croquet and mild alcoholism. Looking forward to the pubs too. Saddlers and farriers and wheelwrights, sitting about, telling you about how they made their girth straps and shoe nails and spokes. You get the hippies down here, too, lots of them. Nothing hectic about anything. Very little aggro. A more meditative life. Finally get down to writing my bestselling memoir Mindful Fighting in which I explain how to stay totally in the present while lamping somebody at closing time.
Shouldn’t get too excited. Room above a garage. Not exactly going to be Daphne du Maurier, am I. Saw her on an old documentary, saying her house wasn’t too big just for her. Only 938 rooms. Quite modest, really, darling. Not as if it’s the kind of place one rattles around in. Different bit of the wild west but the same in some ways. More trees, less coast, fewer ghosts of children who died in arsenic mines. I’ll go down there too soon, though, Kernow. Loved both counties as a kid. Climbing trees. Any I could get into. As high as I could go. OK, off the main road now. Thank god. Left in such a rush forgot to do my road tax and was freaking out every time I saw the police. Always pulling me over, they are, perhaps sensing insurrection, despite my responsible adherence to the speed limit.
Giant rocks in the woods. Hobbitland. Came to a party near here in ’99 with Jen. Big farmhouse where capitalist hippies sold their homebrew. Tiny men everywhere. Me towering over them. Tiny men and willowy women. ‘You get taller when you’re drunk,’ said Jen. Correct, probably, as she is about everything. Best break-up ever. Still love her to bits, even though her family are poshos. Still looking after me even now, getting me out of tight spots. What are these things beside the road? Sheds? Look more like portals, bit charred-looking. Step in and everything spins and smokes and you fear incineration but actually just end up in 1968. Fine by me. It’s where I’m planning on going soon anyway. Is this a road? I think it is, just about. Ah! Polytunnels. This’ll be it. Jen said to come in the back way. So as not to embarrass him in front of his customers? I asked. No, because the main gate will be locked by that point, you prat, she said. Ooooh look at this, not what I had in mind when she said garage. I was thinking of the ones in Hackney. Don’t get this there. Stone, pretty big, little old wonky steps going up to the living quarters. Daisies, multicoloured ones, growing out of them. I can deal with this. The place is just an afterthought for her cousin Titus, one of many annexes. Done pretty well for himself. Two years younger than me, Jen says. Not as if he started with nothing, though. Wonder what the main house is like. I’m fucking well early. Two hours. Saw a pub a couple of miles back up the lane. Sounds like a plan.
*
Wednesday. Titus has been over, brought three cucumbers. I tried to be polite about them, thanked him, even though if you ask me they taste of all the most disappointing parts of British life. He walked over to the window, turned this big Indian jug around, possessive like, stamping his authority on the space. I don’t care which way around the Indian jug goes. It’s not my Indian jug. Asked me how I was settling in. Great, I said, not totally fibbing. Refrained from complaining to him about the way if you’re cooking a pizza in the oven you need to shove it right to the back then turn it around halfway through and even then it will probably burn on the edges and be frozen solid in the middle. He told me to put a rod down the septic tank if it gave me any problems. ‘We are a tad feral around here, I’m afraid,’ he said. He’s all right, Titus is. Voice oozes everything he’s from. Not super posh, laid-back Devon posh, as if the act of talking itself is a little tiring, as if words are a chair he’s constantly pushing the reclining lever on. Heard that sound a lot here already. Reminders of my ingrained peasanthood everywhere. Bit alone but made some friends at the pub already. Maurice, a thatcher. Almost broke my fingers with his handshake. Saw Bob yesterday. First time in six years. Good to be close to him again. Grumpier than he used to be. Looks even more like a terrier. ‘Mind out for newts,’ he said, as I walked in. ‘What?’ I said. ‘They’re breeding out the back,’ he said. ‘They seem to still think there’s a pond here.’ Some people really own a room when they walk into it; Bob used to really rent a corner of that same room. Different now. Sense a new unwillingness in him to please. Listened to some records, a blast of stoner rock, proto-metal, some of our old touchstones. Didn’t smoke. Drank tea. First time I’ve known him to be single. A good thing, too. Loved himself a loud, bossy lady, Bob did. Don’t know if he still does. Always going straight from relationship to relationship with no time to take his clutter to the charity shop in between. Never the healthiest state of affairs. Big barrier to meeting someone on equal terms for him. Wouldn’t have told him, though. Say something like that to Bob and he wouldn’t express offence; he’d just go a bit silent then you wouldn’t see him for an epoch. Hard to believe he ever lived in or near a city. Kind of bloke who whispers to sick trees and makes them well again. Told him I was trying to learn the names of the flowers. ‘You?’ he said, disbelieving. ‘Have this,’ he said, handing me a book. ‘I’ve got two.’ ‘What’s this one on the cover?’ I said. ‘Snake’s head fritillary,’ he said. ‘The ones next to it are marsh marigold.’ Took the book and wandered around a bit afterwards in the sun, steep steps, a water spout two inches above the pavement, ‘NOT DRINKING WATER’. Good job they told me that because I was just about to get down on my back and clamp my lips around it. Ginnels and jitties behind cottages, covered in daisies. Not daisies. Fleabane. Just learned it. Ugly name for a nice plant. Pictured this place, 1968. Thought about its ghosts. RJ. Was this one a street he walked along? And did the Countenance Divine shine forth upon these clouded hills?
‘I see your car’s got Devon rash already,’ Titus asked later, when I saw him by the polytunnel, stirring an organic nettle and comfrey-based fertiliser.
‘You what?’ I said.
‘Devon rash. It’s when the left side of your car gets scratched up from all the time you spend pulling over into hedges and banks to let other people pass.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Yeah. It’s a good job people don’t drive here like they drive in Manchester or London. I’d be dead by now.’
‘Did you know?’ he added, as if we’d been talking about it for a while. ‘Apple used to just mean “fruit”. It didn’t mean “apple” until relatively recently – a few hundred years ago or so.’
Every day’s a school day here.
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
You don’t realise you’re part of history when you’re in it. If you live in a time in history where you walk down from your village to defecate alongside your compatriots in a communal mire, you are not squatting there wishing 1596 would hurry up and arrive and Sir John Harington would outline an idea for the first flush toilet. By a similar measure, if you live in 1967, and are renting a house for an affordable price in a beautiful part of the world, near dozens of other artists who you rub up against every week and spark off, you probably do not think ‘Hey, I am in the sixties when everything was better!’ There is no awareness in you that everything will not always be this way, that you are part of a blessed generation, sprinkled with stardust, and in a few decades’ time artists will auction several of their internal organs for the freedom you have.
But that stardust is only part of the story: the story of the Woodstock Generation that has been told a thousand times. We know magic filled the air. We know that it was a rare time when artistic bravery intersected with popular appeal and – frequently – vast ensuing wealth. But there are different stories still to be told of the same era. In a way, there were quite simply too many great records made in the sixties and seventies. The foyer got too crowded, and not everyone had room to move around and do their thing. Some less assertive souls, perhaps feeling that they could not breathe, decided to leave. What it means is that many records made during that era are only now getting the respect and love that they are due. Some of them are yet to receive it. This is a book about one of those records and about the man who made it. But it is a little more than that too. It is also an adventure in itself, a road trip, after which nothing in my own life was ever quite the same again.
‘What it’s probably hard to get your head around for people now is that we were not worried about money back then. We were just a little British folk band really yet we were playing huge venues, touring Australia and Germany, we all had big detached houses, and most of us had paid off the mortgage before very long. Of course, a lot of what we earned got squandered on beer. You’d go to Dick and Sheila’s house and wait while they got ready to go to the pub – Dick and Mick always had to live within a mile’s walk of a pub, it was part of their rules – and, as we were leaving, Dick would grab a wad of pound notes from a gap in one of the walls or a cranny behind one of the beams, which was also later where he kept his weed because after some of the other folk bands got busted, he started getting paranoid. Of course, Oliver and I had money coming in from The Gribblins and Mingle the Tingle by then. But we hadn’t, a few years earlier. When Oliver had first started making them in his shed. It all happened very quickly, the change. Four years, something like that. But everything changed quickly back then.’
I’m sitting in a farmhouse kitchen. The room is full of ceramics and they’re great ceramics – full of abstract slashes and curves and runes in bold primary colours – and I’m trying to stay calm but it’s not because of the greatness of the ceramics that I’m trying to stay calm. It’s because the kitchen belongs to Maggie Fox, the Maggie Fox, who is sitting right there in front of me on an Ercol chair talking to me. Maggie Fox, whom I watched present Blackbird when I was a kid. Talking to me about Equinox, my favourite folk-jazz band of all time, and about the costumes she made for The Gribblins and Mingle the Tingle and – later, slightly less successfully – Brock of the Wood, and about her ex-husband Oliver. And I’m also trying to stay calm because all of this interests me, all of this is a book in itself, and every story leads to another story, and every one is enthralling, but it’s not even the real reason I’m here, and I want to talk to Maggie about the real reason I’m here, but I also don’t want her to stop talking about the other stuff, but I also don’t want to keep her all day.
Maggie is one of the all-time unsung, or certainly only partly sung, heroes of the children’s-television acid-folk music crossover and a Renaissance woman of the first order. In the late sixties, with her husband Oliver, in a stone shed at the bottom of the garden of the old weaver’s cottage they shared, she co-created the Gribblins: the tiny enchanting green creatures who disorientated humans – invariably rich, affluent ones – with their eerie flute music and dancing then stole their possessions and carried them back to their mossy lair to examine and hypothesise about them. While Oliver made the sets, using moss he had gathered from nearby woodland, and storyboarded the episodes, Maggie designed and made costumes for them of a mindboggling intricacy, tiny felt hats and gloves and the phosphorescent chainmail armour that covered their bodies – all of which, in the shadow of her better-known husband, she has never in my opinion received enough credit for. Not satisfied with the success of that, and her brief turn as co-presenter of Blackbird, singing slightly-too-eerie songs for children, she later took up an invitation to join the folk supergroup Equinox as singer and flautist for the final two of their five albums, replacing their original vocalist Bonnie Gosling.
Having emailed the address on her out-of-date-looking website and received nothing back, I had thought the easiest way to track Maggie down would be via the publishers of her now-hard-to-source children’s book Josephine Bigfish or the company responsible for the 2003 DVD reissues of The Gribblins and Brock of the Wood (Mingle the Tingle is still to be rereleased due to contractual issues). Nothing came of either so I opted for the more direct route, driving down to the Cornish estuary village of Trewars, hanging out in a craft shop which sold some of her pottery, then skilfully and subtly managing to get the owner of the shop to let slip where the creator of the ceramics I was admiring lived. An hour later, here we were, in her kitchen, and I got no sense that my presence was unwelcome.
‘You’re on the moor, you say, or close to it?’ she continues, handing me the second cup of tea of the afternoon. ‘I miss being up there. Of course, I have little to complain about here, in terms of surroundings. But looking back I think the moor was a kind of seventh member of Equinox. Equinox, it was really me, Dick, Mick, Julian, Norman, Gill and the moor. All but two of us lived on or very near it. It’s where a lot of the secret something we had came from, even though by that time the band were breaking up. Norman had already recorded his Let Norman Steal Your Thyme solo LP and Dick and Mick were thinking about new ventures. So it was very exciting and very fraught at the same time. And it was the same with Oliver and me with the moor. When he first had the idea for the Gribblins – which of course comes partly from some real robbers who lived on the moor in the sixteenth century – we’d be doing all these walks up there and he’d be fizzing with inspiration, asking me, “What type of monster do you think would live in this tree?” or running off to climb into an abandoned shed and root around. Then he read about tardigrades, these microscopic creatures who live in moss and can withstand boiling and freezing temperatures and sleep through an apocalypse, and that was where the idea for the Water Bears came from, who as you’ll probably remember were the nemeses of the Gribblins in the show. We’d walk through the woodland, over the moss, “the Goddess Carpet” they call it, and Oliver would collect the moss for the sets. Probably not a very ecologically correct thing to do, actually. It was like being married to a big kid. Later he got a bit too involved in the world he was creating at times. He once told me he was convinced that one of them was alive and spoke to him. Meg, the smallest one. Not that there was much difference in size in any of them. They were all different, though, if you looked closely. I hesitate to say a girl because the Gribblins ultimately had no gender. They were before their time in that way, I suppose. I should hasten to add, however, that Oliver was high a lot at this point, as so many of us were.’
She got up and swept an intrepid ginger cat off the kitchen work surface.
‘Dad, get down from there. We call her Dad because as soon as I got her, she went straight to get settled on my dad’s old favourite armchair and Hannah, that’s my daughter, started saying she looked like him and always seems to watch Question Time very intently, like my dad used to. But I digress. You wanted to ask about Wallflower. I think I have the copy that Dick gave me somewhere in the loft. Isn’t it amazing the way the value of these things change, and it comes round again and people get interested? If I am being honest I haven’t played it for several years now. I know I thought it was very special at the time. I am sure I still would. This is all – what? – forty years ago now, so you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t get all of this right. A lot of it was about Dick and Mick and their friendship which was sort of bowing and creaking under the strain of various internal dynamics. As I said, the band was already disintegrating by the time I joined, halfway through the recording of “Mountebank”. Then before we started the last record Dick came in and said he had this song, “Mrs Nicholas”, by this American guy, which was strange, because Dick could be very anti-American back then, and he wanted us to cover it, but even though we did and it went well, Mick was always very resistant to the idea, just, I think, because it was very specifically Dick’s thing.
‘The background to this, which I think you can’t ignore, is that not long before that, Mick had slept with Sheila, and Sheila hadn’t really enjoyed it, and had gone running straight back into Dick’s arms. Of course, Dick hadn’t precisely been any kind of saint before that, and viewed her infidelity as licence to be even less of one, which was not hard for him, what with the amount of time he was spending hanging around the art college at Chidleigh Babbots after he’d been doing some guest lecturing in the music department there. I don’t know if it was there, maybe not, but he ended up cheating on Sheila with this girl called Sue Piduck, who, as soon as we found out about her, we all started calling “Superduck” in an attempt to cheer Sheila up. It didn’t last long between Dick and Superduck but afterwards she wouldn’t leave him alone and kept saying she had this tape with this incredible music on it and nobody knew who made it, and that Dick needed to hear it, that it would be an actual crime if he didn’t, and she just would not shut up about it and finally, after about two months, Dick – realising it was genuinely about this tape, and not about the fact that Superduck wanted anything more from him – goes around to her house and listens to it, and it turns out she’s not lying: it’s an amazing record. The next day she brings it over to Dick’s house, and we’re all there, including Sheila, which meant there was a tension in the room, and nobody really seemed that mellow, but all of us – except Mick – totally got it that this record was not anything ordinary: utterly haunted, with this slight eastern edge to it, and with this amazing tuning that was even more advanced than the people of the time we thought were really advanced, musician’s musicians; Davy Graham and Suni McGrath and Nic Jones and the like. I felt like I was listening to something that had been made centuries ago, not four years ago. “Mrs Nicholas” was the one Dick had earmarked and wanted us to cover and we did play it at a few live shows but we never recorded it, mostly due to Mick’s resistance. I don’t even remember it being the best song. But I’m skipping ahead. The thing was, there was this big chap from the college there at Mick’s house, a biker type bloke, a sound recordist from the college who Dick was knocking around with and who everyone called Chickpea, and about two minutes into the first track, he says, “Fuck me backwards. I recorded this album!” And then he tells us that it was by this American guy called Richie McKendree but that he didn’t have a clue what had happened to him since but he knew this girl called Maddie who might, but it turned out she didn’t either, only that he’d gone back to California years ago and nobody had heard from him since.
‘Of course, things being things, and Dick being Dick, it took absolutely ages for it all to get sorted. The friend of Superduck’s who’d had the tapes was in some kind of debt at the time and wanted a lot of money for them, even though she’d just found them in a beach hut belonging to her dad. Then Chickpea wades in and says they’re as much his as anyone else’s. Meantime Equinox are breaking up and Dick’s trying to get Selkie started as a label and also trying to track down this McKendree guy to clear it all up. By the time Dick finally finds him, McKendree’s working in a camera shop somewhere in Oklahoma and living above his mum’s garage and has given up music altogether, and when Dick manages to get the record out it’s December 1976 and a different kind of music is in vogue. Even Dick himself had lost a bit of interest in the more… mystical and bucolic aesthetic by then. He’d started writing those very raw and political songs about trade unions and whatnot, which – don’t get me wrong – I always liked a lot, but they’re not quite sprinkled with the same magic, are they? Selkie only lasted about three years in total as a label. Hardly any copies of Wallflower were pressed and even fewer were sold. I hear it’s going for – what – £400 on the Internet now? Astonishing. Did you know Dick also managed to get McKendree over here, a couple of years later, here in Devon?’
I know it’s a cliché, but I actually choke on a throatful of tea as she says it. ‘Haggli fzz!’ I say.
‘Pardon?’ says Maggie.
‘Holy fuck!’ I say. ‘I didn’t. Pardon my French. That’s… I had no idea.’
‘Yep. The Empire in Exeter. Long since shut down. It was a small disaster, really. Dick, who was piling the pounds on by this point, headlining, wearing these jeans that were far too tight, and with this really harsh crew cut Sheila had just given him. The venue had booked a totally inappropriate third support, this skiffle band from Budleigh Salterton called Cliffy Coggles and His Donkeys, who were all well into their forties. And then in the middle there’s McKendree, playing the whole gig sitting on a stool with his back to the audience, and not saying a word, not even a thanks, between songs. He only played about four, I think. I was introduced to him afterwards, but he didn’t say much, seemed like someone who’d recently had some bad news, but also like this lost little boy. I reckon there were no more than thirty people in the crowd, and three of those were me and Oliver and Angus Boon from Nannie Slagg, who now I come to think of it had a go at a McKendree song too. And then there was this really embarrassing moment backstage when this German couple turn up with a pen and an autograph book and Dick’s getting poised to sign it for them and McKendree just looks like he wants to find the nearest manhole and hide under it and it turns out that it’s actually Oliver’s and my autographs the couple want. Dick was not pleased, I don’t think. A complicated man with a very tangible ego. So many good points, though. He had put up all the money himself to fly McKendree over, at a time when money was less easy for him. Say what you like about him, he was always generous to a fault. Hard to believe he had only a decade left on the planet at that point.’
‘Wait. Hold on. Did you say Nannie Slagg? The metal band who turned into Blacksmith?’
‘Yes, although they were far less metal at first. More progressive. A filthy band, both in looks and sound. I believe they covered “Bog Asphodel” at their live shows, circa 1972. That would have been because of Dick. An almost unrecognisable version of the song, though. When Nannie Slagg became Blacksmith and got properly famous – a totally different kind of fame to Equinox’s – Angus envied the freedom Dick had as a lone wolf, envied his new… anonymity, and he’d often hide from it all at Dick and Sheila’s place. You’d walk in and he and Dick would be eating jam butties, sometimes ten of them in one go, all on doorslab bread and layered with Sheila’s homemade butter. Both being Scottish, they didn’t call them jam butties, though; they called them “jeely pieces”.’
Aye, get me, the walker. Walking. Bloody miles. Even got the jacket. Right country squire, I am. Map and mint cake and everything. And boots. The Converse All Stars weren’t really working out up here. Bit bleak today. Think I can see November coming over the hill, December behind it, carrying its bad news in a sack. Not bleak like home but bleak. What’s home? Where you lived until you were eighteen, I suppose. Doesn’t seem like home in my mind any more, though, and then other times it does. Our house, tiny, end of the row, no garden but you went up the ginnel at the end and then past the tyre stack and the back of the garage and these old barns, all this crumpled corrugated iron, and then you were right there, at the bottom of the hill, and the strips of rusty metal and Coke cans would peter out and you climbed the top and up there you felt safe from everything and you looked down and all the shit wasn’t visible any more; everything seemed much greener. And then the woodland, behind that: a little forest in the sky where there was a pond and the tadpoles made the water look black in April and I found a lost ginger cat then carried it back down to town in my coat and then just as I got to Gallagher Street I saw a picture on a lamppost of the exact same lost ginger cat that was in my coat with ‘LOST CAT’ written next to it and I took the cat straight to the address on the poster. Everyone hates the advertising industry until they lose a cat. Except the woman in the house didn’t seem that massively over the moon about getting the cat back and the cat didn’t seem that massively over the moon about being back and kind of gave me this look as I left, like it was much sadder than when I found it or when it was in my coat. But maybe the woman was glad and was just being the way people were around there, which was not that happy about anything. Which is different to the way people are around here, which sometimes seems a bit too happy about everything. And that’s sort of the way the countryside in this place doesn’t quite look like the countryside near this place: it’s still all big but here it seems a bit happier. I remember the last time my dad came back, about three months before he left for the last time and about a year after he’d left the first time. He had this big plywood board, which he started attaching papier mâché to and making all these humps and bumps, and then when the papier mâché was dry he started painting it green, and brown, and grey, and then you realised that the green bits were hills, and the grey bits were roads and the brown bits were mud, and I got home one day and he’d put a load of plastic farm animals on it, plus a couple of dinosaurs, and left my toy cars there – the ones I had already and a couple of new ones he’d secretly got me in Stockport the weekend before – for me to brum all over it, which I did, for weeks afterwards, until after he’d gone for the last time, and it was all the fun I needed, even more fun than when my mum took the rugs up to clean and I scrunched them up and brummed my car through the folds. He never talked much about what he was making, my dad, he just went ahead and made it, mostly in secret. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had a secret shed somewhere, like Oliver Fox, where he was making his own Gribblins or something like that. And that was a lot of the problem, and why my mum didn’t trust him, because he was so quiet and secretive about everything, but maybe it was her lack of trust that pushed him towards what he did, and that made him go off with Sandra Tunnard, and then go off with her again, after he’d changed his mind about it for a bit and tried to live with my mum again. And maybe my mum was right when she told me he was a bastard, and maybe he still is one if he is still around, but the point is I have never really had the chance to find out firsthand. Ah shut up, Martin. Tell it to your therapist. Not that you’ll ever have one. Admission of defeat, isn’t it, therapy? Not down here: they’ve all got one, even the trust fund techno hippies with the smooth life and no demons. Might as well be California, what with that and the coastline. Another sign of the north in me: that stubbornness. I’ll sort myself out, thanks. Keep your couch. But anyway that was all about five years before I found the lost cat, and about two years before I found my dad’s records in a box in the loft, and got on the road to wasting my life writing about rock bands instead of doing a worthwhile job that might help somebody. And what I remember now about that model village my dad made me, as well as the new impact of the realisation that he took the time to make something like that, just for me, is that the hills looked more like the hills down here than the hills up there: they had less space between them, like someone had really enjoyed squeezing them together and making all the angles between them and thinking about how they related to each other and making little secret places in all the folds where nobody could see you getting up to your secretive business.
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
I was one of the lucky ones: I found my copy of Wallflower in a box marked ‘Country/Folk/Misc’ in the Heart Foundation shop in Sheffield in 1998, a time before the Internet had turned record pricing into a less exciting democracy. It cost me £5.49. I suppose you could say that I, on that day, was another person who didn’t realise he was part of history. I was just a person taking a chance on a record that looked interesting. I might not have even picked it up if I had not been intrigued by the cover, which featured an abstract painting: a swirly heliocentric sort of hillscape, with dotted suggestions of houses, and with, I later realised, what could be argued to be just a suggestion of a face in it. On the inner sleeve the painting was credited to ‘RJ McKendree, based on an original work by Joyce Nicholas’.
I loved Wallflower instantly, but it wasn’t until much later that I developed my deeper relationship with it. I was recovering from a bad time in my life at that point. I had lost my job, been drinking far too much. I picked fights with men who deserved it and men who didn’t. Stood in to defend the honour of women in trouble and women not in trouble, gradually lost my power to perceive which was one and which was the other. Went home with cauliflower ears and a carrot nose. Woke up with a crying liver and a clicking hip. I took off deep into the West Country, an outsider there, just as McKendree had been when he’d first arrived there, more than forty years earlier. I lived above a garage, just as McKendree had. I had no certainty of my future, drifted, just as McKendree had. I learned wildflower names, just as he had. Opened my eyes to their magic and the poetry of the dead, who had dreamt the names of the plants into existence. Greater spearwort. Reedmace. Purple loosestrife. Creeping bugle. Toadflax. Agrimony. Lady’s bedstraw. All the while the record seemed to be growing each time I listened to it, as if someone had snuck in and, in fact, changed it while I had been partially neglecting it. I decided its grooves had actual ghosts within them yet they were not ghosts I wanted to run away from. I played McKendree’s version of the traditional Devon folk ballad ‘Little Meg’ and his choral, semi-chanted ‘Sad Painting of a Dog’ sixteen, seventeen times a day. Then, later, as I explored my new terrain, met people connected – however tangentially – with the McKendree myth, the record stayed with me and waltzed me through the landscape. I found it extremely difficult to find out what happened in McKendree’s life between late 1968 and the late seventies when he made the first of what turned out to be several return trips to Devon. It seemed like the most mysterious of many mysterious periods of his life. I knew his father passed away in 1969, and by 1975 he, his sister and his mum had moved from California to Oklahoma, where he was living in his mum’s annexe and working part time in a used camera store. It appeared to be a time when he had abandoned music altogether. But then my research led me to an unexpected discovery that thrilled me to my marrow: in 1972, McKendree had reconnected with his old co-songwriter from Stoneman’s Cavalry, Frank Bull, and recorded a one-off single, an almost unrecognisable electric version of ‘Little Meg’. But even this turned out to be another rotten rung on the ladder separating McKendree from fame. Bull disowned the result, the pair clashed during its recording, and, following its conclusion, never spoke again. Meanwhile the label who were set to release it, Hemlock Jukebox, folded, yet in a surreal twist, owing to the determination and Eastern European background of one of the label’s evacuees, the single was still pressed, but only for a Hungarian market. After many fruitless eBay searches I managed to track down a copy in Klagenfurt, Austria, for which I was pleased to only pay £35. It’s a truly mind-bending work, three minutes of echoey, raw-as-you-like fuzz where psychedelic furry FX pedal funk meets something frightening and primal, apparently roaring out of the mouth of a cave beyond the edge of time. Yet it is also… a duet. Bull’s vocals have to me never sounded like this on any other recording, resembling, as the defunct Hungarian music magazine Bounce! so accurately put it in one of the single’s few reviews, ‘the voice of a man unsuccessfully attempting to dislodge a locust he’s found stuck between his teeth’.
The more I learned about McKendree, the more I learned he was not merely an eerily, almost celestially gifted musician. He painted, he took uniquely atmospheric photographs. In his later years, he was an ahead-of-the-curve campaigner against climate change and ecological ruination. In some ways, perhaps part of the problem for McKendree, and part of the reason he has still not been reappraised in the way a Nick Drake or even a Judee Sill has, is that his story doesn’t follow a traditional rock tragedy narrative. He did not die in his twenties and was not a suicide. He failed at all points to be a major abuser of drugs. He part-vanished rather than totally vanished, only part gave up making music. There was nothing emphatic about his path. But his story is as laden with tragedy as any other in popular music that I can think of. His music was lost, found, lost again. The one true love he’d ever found, the only woman he’d ever wanted to truly be with, rather than just float noncommittally around, had her life cruelly snatched from her in a freak agricultural accident, just as it seemed feasible the two of them might finally be united. He himself died in a manner that was no less freakish, suffering a fatal stroke while on a bed in his chiropractor’s clinic, on the final morning of the twentieth century.
Full track listing for Wallflower (recorded 1968, released 1976):
Penny Marshwort
Mrs Nicholas
Little Meg
Bog Asphodel
Cow of the Road
Sea Cabbage
Villager
Clapper Bridge
Gods of Mist, and Stone
Sad Portrait of a Dog
Marsh Pennywort
Notes, from 2,300th listen:
Whose is the laughter you can just faintly hear at the end of ‘Marsh Pennywort’?
How much better would this have sounded if it was pressed on heavy late sixties vinyl, rather than this flimsy Ted Heath-era frisbee I hold in my hand?
Let’s say this record actually came out just after it was made, in 1968 and 1969. Let’s say it found an audience, lots of cool people were whispering about it. Let’s say I was my age, or younger, at that time. Would I have listened to this record? Or would I have been suspicious of it for being too popular with cool people, and possibly denied myself the chance to enjoy it until a few years later, when it had become less cool? Ergo: been the same kind of stubborn cultural edgeperson I am now. But, even if it had been given the right of birth in the era it was made, would Wallflower have found any kind of large audience of cool people? Is it not a little bit frail, too much of an elusive whisper, too much of a record – even in its actual sound – that you have to search for, and eventually find?
Question: What are they, the layers that you can put into a piece of music, that makes it improve with age? Are they things you can see and feel? Where do you find them? Are they in the grooves? Grooves of vinyl. The transference of sound to them. People tell me how it works but I still don’t get it. It’s the ultimate modern witchcraft.
Usable transcript from interview with Angus Boon:
‘Equinox were round tae bend, away wi’ tae fairies. Something mental always happened when we played wae them. Which we did a bit, in our very early days, and which might sound tae you like a weird pairing, if ye didn’t properly ken us, but wasn’t, in that stage of Nannie Slagg’s musical evolution. And there’s this one gig in Todmorden, ye listenin’, and we’ve played our last song and we get backstage and Equinox are there, all ready to go on and then Mick says tae the rest of the band, “Hold on, where’s the rug?” They had this Moroccan rug which they all had to sit on while they played and they couldnae play without it and Julian, the wee milksop who played the lute and yae could knock over with a feather, he’d been entrusted with its safety on this occasion, and he’d left it in their hotel room in Halifax. By the time he’d driven there and back they were an hour late going on and a rumour was going round that it was because the band were baked, but it wasn’t; it was because they needed their RUG. There was a second rug, too, after the first one wore out. And there’s a story about Mick getting pished and nailing the first rug down on top of Dick so he was totally trapped underneath, but I don’t know if that’s apocryphal now, laddie.
‘The Exeter solo gig? Aye, I mind it well. Fecking class performance by Dick. As always. He was so obsessive about his craft, the laddie had made himself immune from ever being anything less than brilliant. Not many people there, though. People paint it like it was all about the punks, like outside the venue streets were thronged with laddies and lassies wearing safety pins and gobbing on pedestrians. That’s a load of pish and twaddle. It was just a little lean time, a general lack of interest for what Dick – and I – was doing. I remember McKendree was wandering around, looking like a lost lamb; ye can guarantee nae member of the audience who saw him would have kenned the long streak of piss was one of the star acts of the night. When Dick had finally persuaded him to come over he’d asked specifically if he could stay somewhere on the moor, which meant Dick couldnae get more than a couple of drinks, and had tae drive him to and from the venue, and Dick was ragin’ about that, because if he couldnae get drunk it always ripped his knitting. McKendree looked like he was about tae start bawling and I asked him what was wrong, kenning that maybe the two of them had fallen out. He told me he’d been walking up near Underhill Tor that afternoon and been trying to photograph a pair of these merganser ducks, which were pretty rare, even then, and in trying too hard to get a close-up he’d managed to scare the female, which like all the females looked very fragile and had a right braw shagged crest on the back of her head – kind of like some of the lassies Dick picked up at gigs, come tae think of it, heh – and by doing that he’d sent her flying off 300 yards up the river, and sent the male the same distance in the other direction, and now he couldnae stop thinking about it and said he was feeling like a terrible person. I told him to stop being such a wee nancy.
‘Before Dick moved down here, after when we first decided to leave Glasgow, the two of us were staying in a house in Kensal Green for a while, only a mile or so from all the bohemian stuff going on in Notting Hill Gate. You wouldnae have called it a fashionable place, but we did some of the fashionable stuff of the time. A wee lassie Dick knew back in Kilsyth hitchhiked all the way down after him and turned up on our doorstep one day wae some sugar cubes. Lassies would do crazy stuff like that, where Dick was concerned. I didn’t even ken the stuff was acid. That was how fecking naive I was. Anyway we took it and I ended up in the bath just bawling, “When’s this fecking shite gonnae start working?” Neither of us were really intae it but I do reckon it broke down some walls for Dick; he started getting a bit further taeward the peripheries after that, exploring death more in his songs. And then he bought his first rug, from the market on Portobello. So we were intae it all and weren’t. A lot of the minted hippie laddies didn’t really see eye-to-eye wi’ me. I talked too much, whereas for them it was all about not saying much and just saying stuff like “cool” and “far out” and making yersen look mysterious. But that was another world; we didn’t live there. We were often up late at night and a bunch of car thieves lived next door, and you’d see them in an alley in the back spray-painting a Rover P5 at three in the morning. But anyway, Dick was never much of a lover of yer pop music, but I do remember at the time he would just nae stop listening to this tune “Thirteenth Snake Woman” by Stoneman’s Cavalry, which was just a B-side to this tune called “Right On” that had been a wee hit in the States. So after he got the tapes from Superduck and found out that McKendree actually had been in the band and had a co-writing credit on that song, he flipped right out. I’m sure the laddie would have got the record out anyway but that was the icing on the cake.
‘Aye, Morag! That was the name of the lassie who brought us the acid. I’ve remembered it now. Have yae seen the photo on the back sleeve of the Doubling Cube LP that Mick and Dick did just before they got Equinox together? The one where they’re playing backgammon? You can just see this bored-looking lassie sitting on the couch behind them, staring out the window, looking like death. That’s her. She was aff her fecking heid. Followed Terry Reid everywhere on tour, after she’d had her business with Mick. Wouldn’t leave the poor lad Terry alone. Cut off a big chunk of his hair one time when he was asleep and kept it in a box.’
Sodding hell, is that my problem? Is that what I’ve been doing all these years, interviewing all these fading emperors of sixties and seventies rock, convincing me they’re just my uncle for an hour when actually I’m looking for a full-time father figure? Thank you for the chat, Carlos Santana, and just as an extra could you come back to the flat and do me some overcooked chips in the deep fat fryer and tuck me up under my Spiderman duvet? Also, how are you with papier mâché? Why do I ask? Oh no reason. Just wondered. Actually did once pencil in a casual drink with Rick Wakeman after our Q and A but he never called. Christian. Into his cars. Probably wouldn’t have worked out for the two of us anyway. Another one today, Angus Boon, but nobody’s paying me for that. Nobody does now. Listened to his stuff on the way over. The early work, Nannie Slagg; a folk band, really, once you remove the layers of noise sludge. Actually did some half-decent tunes right at the start. All burrs and incense and runny battery-farm eggs on pappy white bread. Then the well-known stuff. Blacksmith. Three albums, gradually getting more shit and famous with each one. Stadium rock for the hygiene-deficient. A band who looked more like their own roadies than their own roadies did. Not my thing at all. Solo LP after that: weird record, not quite right. Got to give him kudos for the title though: Unmetalled Road. Him standing next to a footpath sign on the cover, in a tight vest, looking sullen. Not quite carrying it off: the vest, or the shift in genre. Traditional Scottish folk songs and synthesisers. An uneasy mix. Still got his mullet now from not long after that. 1984: year of delusional concepts of hair progress in middle-age rock. Imagine he’ll stay committed to it until the end now. Younger wife, Carol. His fifth. One more for the full Henry VIII. Carol kept coming in to the living room and asking if we had enough fudge brownies. We said we were OK. At least thirteen of them on the table at all times. Clues to the epic recent narrative of Angus’s stomach. Buzzing a bit from the stories he told. Liked him a lot. Showed me a photo of him and Dick McKnight of Equinox walking through the docks in Greenock. Double denim. Possible absence of underwear. Couple of useful lads to have on your side in a brawl. Talked on with him. Gave me more leads in my detective story. Kills me that it might never get read. Tried to sell a book a while ago. Nobody was arsed. ‘Thank you for sending us this. We thought it was excellent and really has something special and a unique voice and I particularly like the bit where you wrote your name on the title page in capital letters but we think what would really improve the structure is if you could kindly fuck the fuck off and never contact us again.’ Why would this one be any different? ‘We would actually love to publish this biography of a dead person very few people care about, written by someone who can no longer get work in the national media.’ Not happening. £118.73 left in the bank now. Rent due with Titus in a week. Trying not to worry. Bob will help me out, I reckon. Clearing my head. Walking along the coast. Atlantic. Different to the south. Right big growling bastard. Sharper teeth, more root canals. Almost fell down a hole in the cliff. Salty spume blowing up at me through it. You’d think they’d tell you, put a sign saying ‘HOLE’ in front of it or something. Hut on the cliff edge. ‘I LOVE ANNIE’ scratched into the wood. We all want to be Annie. Wind spun me down some steps. Helicopter above, coast guard, following for a while, probably thinking ‘What’s this cunt doing out here?’ Hair getting a bit long, a bit Angus, at the back. Wind blew it all the way round and it blinded me and I fell over a tough wiry wee shite cunt of shrub. Talking like a Scottish person too now. Happens, if you spend enough time with them. Shrubs have to be hard bastards up here, to survive all the blowing. Looked like one myself. Redhead cliffweed, also known by its Latin name Gingerus Twaticus. Everyone used to rub it when I was young, scruff it up. Always rough enough for it to hurt a bit but you weren’t allowed to complain. What passed for affection, round our way. Last thing the old man did before he left. Rubbed his knuckles into it. Nobody does that round here. They give you a hug, even if you don’t know them, make to shake your hand like they’re about to do origami with it. Do what the hell you want with your fingers, pal, but I’m not game; I’m keeping my palm right here, in the archetypal loading position, like a human man.
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
It’s hard to imagine what impact Devon must have made on McKendree as a baby, if any, but one might assume that his decision to head there in 1968 was sparked by some seed of a memory, some kind of peeling back of the layers and searching for the child inside himself. His father was in the US air force, which meant he moved the family around a lot during McKendree’s early childhood, until they settled in the town of Watsonville in California. From that point until the dissolution of Stoneman’s Cavalry in 1967, Richard John McKendree’s story was not markedly different to that of a lot of music-crazed kids growing up in sixties America: he gets into the Beatles, he grows his hair to the disapproval of his parents, he and Frank, his friend from school, begin to write songs in Frank’s mum and dad’s garage. Out with his bandmates, he smokes weed and drinks whiskey, but remains in fear of his father at home, shakes his mother’s and sister’s hands every night before going to bed. Stoneman’s Cavalry get a record deal, have a minor hit, implode. He makes it known that he would henceforth prefer to be known not as Richard or Richie but RJ and drifts around the steep dusty edges of LA, almost gets convinced to become a born-again Christian by Bryan MacLean from Love, is rumoured to be briefly considered as a replacement when David Crosby leaves the Byrds, always seems trapped on the edge of everything, unable to quite reach the centre of any scene and become part of it, as if behind some kind of force field, possibly self-made. He doesn’t appear in any memoir or biography or review of the time, besides very briefly in the cobbled-together, long out of print and somewhat trashy-looking 1970 paperback LA and the Happening Scene. Here, the young full-time dental hygienist and sometime singer Linda Perhacs, whose own lone solo album Parallelograms would also take decades to be recognised for its true mystical brilliance, remembers McKendree attending a gig at the Whiskey a Go Go in the company of his mother, presumably some time in 1969, not long after his return from Devon, and recalls noticing that they ‘have each other’s looming awkwardness and small ears’. It took a long time for me to track down Frank Bull, who never gigged or recorded again after his ill-fated reunion with McKendree to record what became the Hungarian-only ‘Little Meg’ single, and now is an abstract artist living – going on the evidence of his website – in an extremely long one-storey wooden house in Colorado. He told me he was reluctant to talk about that time, having been advised by his guru to place it in a locked box in the past, but after numerous requests from me did reply to a couple of questions in a fashion not a lot less abstract than his art, calling McKendree ‘my original old lady’ and ‘the source of my river’. He claimed to have never heard the Wallflower album and to have no interest in doing so but was sure that ‘my other self, on a parallel plane to this one, really digs it’.
One afternoon about a week after I’ve been to see Angus, my phone rings, and it’s him, although I don’t know at first because I haven’t saved his number because rock stars you’ve interviewed aren’t going to be your friend.
‘I had one more thought, laddie, regarding your wee book,’ he says. ‘The boy who produced the album, Chickpea. The great big slab of beef. He might be able to tell you a bit more about your man McKendree. If ye can get any sense out of him. He still lives down here, up in the hills behind Dawlish. Shite thing is I don’t have his number…’
‘Damn.’
‘I can tell you where his caravan is, though.’
*
Nobody talked about ‘acid folk’ in the seventies so nobody called the Wallflower LP that when it was released. ‘Acid folk’ is what it has been described as more recently by record collectors but I am not sure if that is truly accurate. Genres are just restrictive boxes that were made to contain something naturally slippery, and, often, the more slippery something is, the better it is. To me Wallflower is as bucolic as it is acid, as eastern as it is western, as jazz as it is folk, as elemental as it is mystic, as spectral as it is real. It sounds possessed to me, by a landscape, possibly by a woman, or maybe two. All of this is very hard to get a grip on for the listener, and it’s perhaps in this slipperiness where another part of the mystique lies.
Songs such as ‘Penny Marshwort’, ‘Marsh Pennywort’ (a more hazy, whispery reprise of the earlier song but also something more than that), ‘Mrs Nicholas’ and the reworking of the little-known traditional Devonshire folk ballad ‘Little Meg’ all give the impression of a state of hypnosis induced by female characters, potentially even the same female characters. Once the listener learns of the close friendship McKendree struck up with Maddie Chagford, the daughter of a farmer living on the edge of the moor, it’s tempting to speculate to just what extent she was his muse. Chagford died in 1974, aged just twenty-five, in a heart-breaking tractor crash on the farm, so by the time McKendree returned to the West Country for the deferred attempt to promote his album, he was too late to consolidate anything that might have sparked between them, and perhaps it is this, rather than the manner of his death, that is the biggest tragedy of all. Maddie was not his last romance, if a romance was what it was, but he never married and for the remainder of his life certainly never had a live-in girlfriend or sustained a relationship for longer than seven months.
‘There is one other thing I just remembered,’ says Maggie. ‘I can’t believe I forgot. I do worry about myself sometimes. Well, so the thing is, we did see McKendree one more time. Or at least I thought it could have been him, and Oliver was sure it was. It was at the march to protest the bypass. 1996, or 1995, was that? You’d probably know as well as I do. He was a few rows behind us but then we lost sight of him. I remember he was with this very beautiful black boy wearing a silk scarf. It can’t have been all that long before he died.’
What is this hair on me? Tiny hairs, all over my t-shirt. Get off me, hairs. These things are ferocious. I think it’s the sofa. Whose sofa is it? Seems familiar, but it’s not mine, not Titus’s. That’s where the hairs are coming from, the sofa. But where did they come from before that? God, there are SO MANY of them. I just can’t put it together. My brain is too dried out, too big for my skull. It’s a wonder it’s still inside there. If you took it out and tried to fit it back in you’d never manage it. Why do I continue to be this stupid when my brain is this big? Fuck this fucktangular life. OK, kitchen. Water. Tastes good. I need salt. Who decided to make taps so loud and why do they hate me? What did I ever do to deserve this? Who lives here and why am I alone here? Painting of a cow on the wall. Seedlings. Why won’t my left eye open? I think an enemy might have Copydexed it shut. Scent of lily and coffee. Pot is warm. Guitar. Spider plant. Oxygen Steve who did the listings page at Melody Maker had one. Used to go to his house with Adam from Engine Room PR before gigs. Hated that plant, Adam did. Don’t know why. Used to piss in the soil when Oxygen Steve was out of the room. Johnny Slazenger came over one time and joined in. PRs. Can’t trust any of them. Nice table, this. I notice tables more nowadays, me. Coins on it. £1.56. Enough to buy some eggs from an honesty box outside a farm. RSPCA newsletter next to the coins. Dark bottle of hair product. Miss Delicious Sea Spray, ‘for that “just out of the waves” look’. But does it also contain fish piss, mystery and the souls of the dead? If not, I’m not into it. Open laptop. Some bread! Is there anything to spread on it, I wonder. Ooh yeah. Watch out technology ’cause I’m using honey. Why is nobody else here? Not a man’s house. 91 per cent sure of that. Sex? No. Didn’t happen. Can feel my loins telling me that. Neglected of late. Must do something about it. Clean the pipes. ‘A freelancer’s lie down’, the journos used to call it in London. But not here. Of course not here. Anyone could walk in. Well, not anyone, but the owner. Ah, I think it’s coming back. A woman, her dog, limitless source of tiny hair. Cold flannel on my face. Such big sad eyes, looking down at me, eyes that seemed to stretch in their corners and reach out to try to tell their tale. French dress sense, a bit, sort of. Mid-forties? OK, that is enough of standing up. Tactical vomit might be in order. Finger down the throat. Puke’s sweet release. Steps outside, an excited canine whimper, key unlocking a door. Does that paper bag have poppadoms in? Ooh, one left. Nice and rubbery, just like I like them. Which kind person did this for me? Ah, I think I remember: it was me. Top bloke, my past self. Like him a lot. Sometimes.
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
When I arrive at Chickpea’s, it’s the smell that hits me, before anything else, before I get around the corner and see the rotting half Ford Escorts and three-quarter Mitsubishis, the motorbike wheels, the strange rusting gurney, the chimney pots, the tiny pink child’s bike sinking into the weeds on the high bank, the pile of defeated smoking something behind the corrugated iron shed, the lone disconsolate horse with the fluffy feet tied to a stake, the caravan with the pen of barking dogs outside and the other caravan that looks like it’s been subject to its own internal hurricane and the other caravan behind that with more penned and caged dogs outside. It’s the smell of the last day of every music festival I’ve ever attended but as if that smell has then had oil poured on it and been grilled for a year. Dogs yell at me from all sides from behind fences and awful walls and wire mesh, and two more tousled black ones trot down the lane to meet me. I knock on the door of the red caravan, the one I have been told about, the one with the car engine on its roof, but there is no answer. An old unconnected sink looks up at me from the dirt, asking for help. The two black dogs follow me around the back, eager-tailed. ‘And this is the place where we keep our old tyres and cookers,’ the dogs seem to say, proudly. Half a Renault van offers ‘OODLE GROOMING SERVICES, OTHER CANINES CONSIDERED’. I see nobody. I want to leave, just as I have since I first smelled the smell. The relief upon doing so is so immense, the relief makes having been there almost worthwhile. I proceed down the lane, out of this rust and asbestos apocalypse, out of this inexplicable steel village run by dogs. The smell departs and butterflies cartwheel alongside me, into the sun.
*
Devon retained its mysterious hold on McKendree and perhaps it was all about that first journey he made there, from California, and some kind of attempt to recreate it, and the inspiration that flowed through him as a songwriter for that one summer, which led to the recording of the songs on Wallflower. He returned in 1978, for his gig with Dick McKnight, and then again in the late eighties, and twice in the mid and late nineties, sleeping in tents and on friends’ sofas, and at a travellers’ commune in the foothills of the moor. Ever since his early twenties, McKendree had suffered from upper back problems and blackouts, and it seemed that his one-in-a-million death, on the morning of 31 December 1999, was a final sort of culmination of these. A haemorrhage during treatment for spine issues is not a rock-and-roll death but McKendree’s was not a rock-and-roll life in much of an archetypal sense. It is perhaps fitting that it ended in Devon, the place where he’d made the defining artistic statement of his life. There is also a certain poetry to the fact that he never got to see the twenty-first century: a lost artist who was not made for an era where art didn’t get lost any more, when music became so much more accessible, cheapened by choice, when archive footage was there for free, to be picked over, shared, and shared and shared, then shared again.
It is a little difficult to remember just how hard it was to access music itself in the seventies, eighties and the first part of the nineties, let alone to access a publicity-shy, commercially moribund creator of that music. No Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, Discogs, eBay. Prior to the arrival of the Internet, it was hard enough to track down your own estranged father, let alone a psychedelic primitivist’s folk music from California whose last recorded output had come out three years before your birth, and even then only in Hungary. This book could not have been written then, I suspect. This dearth of digital network, of all the invisible wires that now loop and cobweb together and connect everything and make the world seem so small yet so much more intimidatingly massive and complex, was no doubt another reason why McKendree continued to go largely unrecognised as the paisley acid genius he was, but what it gave him was the luxury of living a life under the radar, the ability to stay modest and quiet and unexpected. The more I learned about McKendree from the few people I talked to who met him and were still alive, the more I suspect that living some other way would have been deeply uncomfortable for him.
Eye cleaned up now. Sat very patient while she did it, didn’t even whimper. Still won’t open but feeling better for a woman’s touch. Walking now, me and her and the dog. Couldn’t believe it when she told me her full name. But by that time I’d seen the painting – not the cow, the other one – and something in me knew, even though I hadn’t even known she existed. All too convenient, really. Thought I was in my own fantasy. Film of my life. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m dead. If I am, being dead is OK. Some great ladies here in the afterlife. She takes me up the back of the tor, round past the house that looks like it has ghosts inside, the one where you watch and wait for the terrible face that will press itself against the depraved smudgy glass. Water is rushing down the lanes and beside them. A river, and then another dry something that used to be a river. ‘They reclaimed the land in the fifties,’ she says. ‘Filled it in. But you still get the mist down there, looking for the river like it should still be there.’ Poor mist. Like a lost soul looking for a dead lover. Like a singer looking for an old muse. Shut up. Don’t think about that. Sheep carcass. Meat almost gone off the bones. Dog won’t leave it alone. ‘Come here, Sherlock, stop frolicking in former animals!’ Viaduct. The hill and its stepladder of rocks. ‘Used to be a volcano, once,’ she says. ‘1976, I think it was.’ Funny, she is. Effortlessly. Some of the lads at the paper used to say women couldn’t do humour well. Fucking bullshit. She’s not wearing make-up but her eyes seem smudged, somehow. Entrancing. Wish I’d properly decked that guy last night; caught me unawares before I’d got a chance. Didn’t even know I’d cut in on him at the bar. Tracksuit bastard. ‘What’s your problem? Go over there and sit with Sad Susan while you wait your turn.’ Well, here I am with Sad Susan. That’s the main thing. Cows in this field. Coming towards us. Lary buggers. ‘Nothing to be scared of,’ she says. ‘They’re all lovely. Just stand your ground.’ Ah, we’re going past that bit of barn. Always freaks me out, that place. ‘There’s a rumour that someone photographed it and when the photo was developed the whole building was there, just as it would have been when it was built in the 1700s,’ she says. ‘Nobody has ever seen the photograph, though, conveniently.’ Muddy. Her legs don’t half motor, for a little person. Big puddles. I help her over; her hand is clammy and small. And then she lands, kind of in my sleeve, and stays there and holds on to me. There’s so much I want to ask her. But all I say is ‘Are you cold?’ and we don’t move for what feels like the next fortnight.
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
By 1989, RJ McKendree was a middle-aged man, albeit an oddly youthful-looking one, with few of the trappings of middle-aged life. He lived in his mother’s house in the suburbs of Tulsa, which he’d inherited upon her death four years earlier. He socialised with few people besides his sister, who lived just two streets away. For income, he continued to work in a camera shop in the centre of town. His music had reached the pinnacle of its obscurity. Dick McKnight had died of heart failure a year earlier, Selkie Records had long since folded and Wallflower was remembered only by – at the very most – those still alive who were involved in its release or had bought one of the small number of copies of it that had been pressed. McKendree was sometimes known to busk in downtown Tulsa (note to self: FIND SOURCE/TULSA RESIDENT AND VERIFY THIS) but had largely abandoned playing music in any committed sense, yet it was at this point that he decided to buy a plane ticket, pack a few clothes and his guitar, and visit Devon for a third time. What was his impetus? We will possibly never know. Was he still searching for the ghost of Maddie? Had he finally realised, after all these years, that the UK’s deep south west was the place where he most fitted in, or at least the place where he felt least like an outsider?
Not bad, this cucumber. Eating them all the time now. Bite into the fuckers like a Twix, just while idly doing my stuff. Had a word with Titus and he’s agreed to defer rent payments for a couple of months. He’s a good guy, the cucumber baron. Course he is. Related to Jen. Badge of quality. Teach me to write posh people off, that will. Veg paradise, this. Am allowed as much as I like. Sometimes find a box outside my door. Tasty rejects. Carrots the world wrote off as ugly without stopping to look into their pure soul. Soil-caked muscular dystrophy broccoli. Outsider sweetcorn. Rebel cabbage. Nobbled geek courgettes. Could almost stop going to the shop altogether if I cut out carbs and personal hygiene and accepted extreme dust as a part of domestic life. Got the stuff Chris asked for today. That bread she likes, with the olives in it. Why do they put a little plastic window in the packaging? Food doesn’t look out and see what’s going on in the street. It’s not your nan. Newspaper. Don’t know why. Thought Chris might like one. Good stories today. An aromatherapist in Paignton has been sentenced for terrorising her neighbour by repeatedly banging bin lids. ‘The jury heard that Karen Birchall, who practises aromatherapy under the name “Mitzy Moon”, started banging the bin at 3 a.m., asking her retired neighbour Denise Sutcliffe, “How are your nerves now?”’ Bastard in front of me didn’t put the divider down on the checkout. Sure sign of a wanker. Shit. Forgot candles, the scented ones. Will she hate me? Is this married life, suddenly? We only met two Fridays ago. Used her card to pay today. Waiting for a new one of my own. Lost mine in a peat bog, Sunday afternoon. Walked up by the cemetery, the burned-out church. Good names on the tombs. Meredith Bunce. Elsie Welsey. John Peter Trumbletits. OK, made that last one up. Stuck for a name for your novel? Go to a cemetery. Grave of a small child. First World War. Scary statue, head missing. Forget-me-nots. Wildflowers love dead people. Me? I’m coming back as a primrose in the next world. Walked up, up, up the hill that goes to the clouds. Past two old cottages. Thick stone walls built to withstand Satan’s bronchitis. Sign above a door: ‘DUCK’. The duck who lives there must be fucking massive. Sign above another door: ‘REBUILDED 1847’. Great but more importantly can you tell me when was it builded? Higher, the old mine with the stone eye windows. Place where it looks like it all ends. Buttock hills. Wire grass. Ground like a mouth, sucking at you, not happy with just your feet, wants your knees too. Lose your whole leg around here if you don’t watch it, or at least a good part of it. Why do you only have one foot, shin and ankle? Ah, I left the others up on Trembling Hill. It seemed easier in the long run than bringing them back. The earth owns them now. Moss everywhere. Trees all in their sartorial stoner-rock phase. Vincent Price’s voice in my head, narrating my journey. What a mid-Atlantic accent would be if the mid-Atlantic contained a pagan island with its own thriving population of wolves. Thought I might meet one of Oliver Fox’s Gribblins, go on an adventure, join the tribe, biggest member, only redhead, the new leader, a simpler life. Another hangover vanquished by the moor. Passed my Stepping Stone Proficiency Test, all the levels, breezed the Beginner and the Intermediary but then almost came unstuck at Holy Shit These Slippy Bastards Aren’t Even Above The Water. Fucking bench up here at the top carved out of stone. What pre-industrial maverick did that? Garden furniture essentials. All the rage in the 1680s. Sat down on the granite, looked in my wallet to check how many stamps I had on my loyalty card for Toploaded Burrito in Camden. Don’t know why. Not going back there any time soon. Just wanted to check. See what I was missing out on. Saw my debit card was missing. Panic! Remembered I’d stored it in my phone case pocket instead. Relief! Looked in my phone case pocket. Wasn’t there either. Panic! Had my phone out to take a photo of some bog asphodel half a mile back. Must have dropped it. Walked back. Got on my hands and knees and ferreted around, trying not to sink. Wasn’t there. Couple of hikers passed, binoculars, matching red anoraks. Twitcher types. Them: ‘Oh dear, what have you lost?’ Me: ‘My bank card.’ Everyday occurrence here on the moor, sort codes seeping into the peat. Gave up after twenty minutes. Three youths coming the other way. Duke of Edinburgh award types. Wholesome. ‘Can you do us a favour? Can you call my number if you happen to spot a black HSBC card down there in the bog?’ ‘Sure. I’ll just save it on my phone. What’s your name? Don’t worry. I’ll just put it down as Bank Card Guy on the Moor.’ No call. Trudged back to Chris’s. Creaky hips. Blister bigger than the toe it was attached to. No money for beer. Can’t take myself anywhere. Hope you know what you’re getting yourself into, Chris.
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
This book is not about me. There are enough examples of the rock biography where the ego of the author is permitted to take over, and he becomes as much the focus of events, if not more than, his intended subject, and I do not want to be another. But it is impossible not to tell the next chapter in my McKendree pilgrimage without detailing my own very personal role in it, since without that, and what I was going through at the time, the remarkable coincidence that took me deeper into the McKendree story would not have happened.
As I have briefly mentioned before, when I began to research McKendree I was going through a difficult period in my life. I would drink to excess, be quick with my fists in bar rooms and clubs and bus queues, spend mornings wallowing in regret about what I’d said or done, then look for a quick way to make it better, which, by mid-afternoon, I would have concluded could only involve a visit to the nearest pub. After a fruitful and exciting initial couple of months on McKendree’s trail, when I’d found out just how many bit players in his story were still alive and well in the south west, I’d hit a bit of a wall. I had used almost all of my savings, the moorland sky – as it can sometimes – had done nothing but empty itself on the boggy ground for two weeks without let-up, and I found myself in the corner of the Stags Bar in the Church House in Wychcombe, staring morosely into my stout and wondering how it had all come to this. The precise ins and outs of what happened next need not be detailed here. Let it suffice to say two angry men got into a petty quarrel over their position at the bar, then one of them – believing he was acting chivalrously towards a member of the opposite gender who had recently entered the premises – slightly misjudged the size of the other man and ended up coming off slightly worse in the resulting melee, and was taken into the care of the person he believed he’d been defending, back at her house, before slipping into a semi-comatose state.
The following morning, while I slept, my new guardian angel walked her dog, a lurcher called Sherlock, and bought eggs and coffee from the Co-op. As I stumbled around the top floor of her cottage, my bruised pride was not slow in coming back to me, but the events of the previous night were revealing themselves in a staggering, painful way, one by one: my tussle, the kind and patient face of my benefactor, the late night Indian takeaway I’d insisted on then left half-eaten, the laugh we’d had at the bit on the menu where it said ‘Thank you for your costume’ and the way the laughter had hurt my bruised face. It was several minutes before I descended the stairs and set my astonished eyes on the painting in her stairway, by which time Christine – for now I remembered that was her name – was opening the front door on her return.
‘This,’ I said. ‘It’s the painting from one of my favourite albums. I can’t believe it. It’s… it’s very… it’s, well, fucking hell it’s the reason I’m here, in Devon.’
‘Ah, you saw that?’ she said, elegantly easing off a boot. ‘It’s not an original. It’s not even an original copy. Just a copy of a copy. I have been thinking of taking it down, to be honest.’
‘Yes! The original is by Joyce Nicholas. It says on the LP sleeve. I looked it up online. It’s worth a fortune now. But do you know it, Wallflower? The record.’
Seeing her properly in the sunlight that was streaming through the window above the front door, I remembered her many kindnesses from the previous night. I noticed now that she was older than me, maybe by several years, older than I’d first thought. Her face made me think of a mosaic: a very beautiful thing made entirely from shattered things. The elegant way she held the lead attached to the dog and hung her hat on the coat rail seemed to accentuate an ambience of Frenchness about her.
‘Poor Sherlock, I think he has a gorse needle in his foot. I do know it, yes. I knew the man who made it, for a while. I also knew the person who helped to get it made. But that was a very long time ago.’
‘Dick McKnight, from Equinox? No, what I am I talking about, he just released it. Chickpea? You’re kidding. You knew Chickpea?’
‘No, her name was Maddie. She was my sister.’
The two of us, under the trees. Feet in the river. Her: calm, Zen. Me: screaming like a little girl. Dragonflies around our heads. Trees greened up to the max, furred branches. Burrows in the moss. Holes leading to the underplanet. Total Alice in Wonderland shit. ‘Just concentrate on breathing properly and it won’t hurt.’ All right for her to say. Doubt the water temperature would make much difference to her. Her feet are already like blocks of ice. Let her warm them on me every night, except nothing changes. ‘Bad circulation,’ she says. ‘Runs in the family. My dad had it. Sister too.’
Sister.
Trying not to cry or shout but sweet Mabel in heaven it’s cold. Find myself imagining him here, under the moss. The video he never made, the pop star he never was. ‘He used to come up here,’ she says, as if reading my thoughts. ‘He walked a lot. It was probably part of why there was never any meat on him, even in his forties and fifties. He never wore proper shoes for it, always just some old trainers. They always had holes in them and bits of moss sticking out of them. He didn’t have nice feet. He told me once about this house he used to go to, up over there, about a mile. Some rich Aussie bought it in the nineties and the barns are Airbnbs now. But it used to be abandoned. When they knocked some of the walls down there was a story in the local paper of someone finding a doll in one of them. It’s not uncommon, around here, dolls in walls. Shoes, too. They say they were put there to help ward off evil. Although I saw the picture of that doll in the paper and it didn’t look nice. Didn’t look like it wanted to help. Anyway, Richie said he went to the house and sometimes it felt like voices were speaking to him through the stone. A woman. He said she watched him sometimes. I was a bit mean about it at the time. Thought it was nonsense, acid casualty talk, even though I later realised he wasn’t one of those. He said a lot of weird stuff. It was before I’d really listened to the record, to be honest. I was twenty-nine, more dismissive, more beholden to irony. But now I think about him saying that and I’m not sure. Do you think music can be haunted?’
‘Definitely,’ I say. Got more to say on this subject, and I start, but then I stop. My role here is listener. Cold starting to get more bearable. Acclimatising. Zen feet of a Buddhist master. Give it a week and I will be able to walk on hot coals too.
‘I met him in 1993 at the old commune, sort of a commune I suppose, anyway, up at Runnaford Hollow. But I’d actually met him before. I didn’t remember that. Why would I? I was only a little kid, five. But when he started talking I knew, and he knew who I was straight away. It was a weird time, that summer, kind of like another little 1960s, and him being there probably made it more like that. He was older than everyone else but he still didn’t seem like other people I knew who were his age. There were some quite odd people up there too, people with quite a bit of darkness in their life. We all knew he’d made a record but he was very silent about a lot of stuff. Everyone always stopped everything they were doing and listened when he played, though. We started hanging out for a while. I’d been going out with this guy Mark, younger than me, nothing serious, and we’d been doing a lot of animal liberation stuff. But then we broke into this farm where there were loads of geese and opened the gates but some geese went straight onto the road and got hit by cars and I didn’t even know why we’d broken into the farm, which didn’t seem terrible for animals in any way; that made me withdraw from all that, and start to hang out more with Richie. We even recorded a few songs, in the same room where he’d recorded Wallflower. Very lo-fi, definitely not what was in vogue with UK bands at the time, more like American stuff. Eric’s Trip, Sebadoh. Chickpea still has the mastertapes. I’ve never asked him for them back. I decided they were a mess. Richie wasn’t fond of them, either.’
‘I went to his place, Chickpea’s, to find him. There was nobody there. Just all these dogs.’
‘I wouldn’t go within 500 yards of that place. It stinks to high heaven. That’s if he’s living in the same spot. He might have moved on. I heard that he is pretty ill. He’s been a very fucked-up guy for a long time. Did you know he robbed a post office and went to prison for a while? Someone told me they went into his caravan and it was just plastered wall-to-wall with eighties porn, with one great big poster of Princess Diana in the middle of it all. I don’t know if that’s actually true. Anyway, I have a cassette. So you can hear the songs if you like.’
‘You are kidding?’
‘No. The only catch is you’ll need to find a cassette player. I don’t have one.’
‘So you and Richie. Did you…’
‘Yes. No. Sort of. It didn’t work, at all. He seemed like quite an asexual person. And there was the fact of Maddie too. It made it odder still. Maybe me getting close to him was a way to try to bring her back, a bit. After that, we sort of drifted. I know he stayed in Devon for a while, though. I would pass him in the car sometimes, walking along a lane, and wave from the car, but that was about it.’
‘And him and Maddie…’
‘There’s no way of telling. I was ten when she died. She wouldn’t have said anything to me and maybe I wouldn’t have remembered if she had. My assumption is that maybe they didn’t. He wouldn’t have told me something like that, but I do know that when they met he’d been under the impression that she had a boyfriend. I don’t remember her having boyfriends, not since school. She was very much a law unto herself, different from me and Mum and Dad. You can even see that in the way she died. We had two tractors, a new one and an old one, and Dad had told her not to take the old one with the iffy brakes to the far field, which was really steep, but she didn’t listen. She was more arty than the rest of us, she read Russian novels and listened to what my dad called “drug music”. Everyone loved her. Everyone. I couldn’t have been more different, really. I was one of the boys, not many female friends. I ended up working at the golf club, drank pints, watched football. People found me a bit stroppy, I think. But then I changed, became a lot more like her. Started going up to Exeter and Bristol, hitting all the charity shops, where you could get some total bargains back then, and buying clothes like the ones she used to wear. Gabardine skirts. Felt hats. I became much quieter. This sounds really crazy but I even used her name as my own sometimes, answered the phone as her. It was this deferred way of processing grief, I think. And then after that, I kind of became me, whatever that is. That would have been not long after Richie died, I suppose. And that was when I repainted the painting.’
‘I really can’t wait to hear these songs.’
She doesn’t seem to hear me say it, just hears the other question in my mind, the one that I was too afraid to ask.
‘And you know what the most ridiculous thing was? It wasn’t even the brakes that did it. It was just the slope. We were all supposed to go to the May fair that day, at Riddlefoot Meadow. They always had it on the last day of the month. I remember that, because she was a Gemini, and so was he, actually. She had a migraine, and said she didn’t want to go. She must have felt better. She was always trying to move some stuff. It was some walkers who raised the alarm but it was too late by that point. It’s hard to say how much too late.’
Are my feet purple? Think they are. Fish nibbling at them. Wouldn’t even feel it if they were. Exfoliation. People pay good money for this. And bad money. Wondering about that house on the hill. Can just see an old woman down the valley, calling a horse, ringing a bell. Water is mellow, tinkly. River has a song but you have to get in really close to hear it.
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
‘She said love don’t come for free and she pushed me into the trees.’ – RJ McKendree, ‘Marsh Pennywort’
McKendree might not have recorded during his thirties and early forties but in early middle-age he retained what many musicians of his generation did not, something he might not have maintained had he become rich and famous: a curiosity about new music. As a forty-something, his listening remained as diverse as ever, including Indian ragas, Zambian funk, fuzz-laden Polish psychedelia on the cusp of progressive rock, but also took in some of the most interesting low-budget American bands of the time: Pavement, Swell, The Amps, Guided By Voices, The Grifters. The sessions that McKendree recorded in 1993 with Christine Chagford yielded just four songs: ‘Sister Blue’, ‘Rent My Head’, ‘Gribblins’ and ‘The Twice River’. The recording sessions took place in the same room where the songs for Wallflower had been recorded two and a half decades earlier, with the same engineer, Chickpea. The songs – all duets between Chagford and McKendree, with the exception of ‘Sister Blue’, which features Chagford’s lone, gossamer vocal under a lagoon of tape hiss – are an unusual mixture of sunshine pop sweetness and Sonic Youth-like pre-grunge feedback and have a lo-fi quality that makes them sound like they’re coming from a stairwell three rooms distant. The two vocalists, meanwhile, sound connected and not connected, awkwardly spliced together somehow, yet all the more charming from that, and exempt from the ‘empty biscuit barrel’ sound that blighted so many of the bigger budget records of the nineties and makes them sound so horribly dated now. The sessions themselves were fragmented and chaotic, with Chickpea – who was suffering from what was later discovered to be the first of three bouts of bowel cancer – swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, leaving his post at the mixing desk every few minutes to use the nearest water closet, or just not turning up at all on the afternoon that had been arranged. The songs remain, to this day, unreleased.
‘Have you heard the term “impostor syndrome”?’ Chagford says to me. ‘I wonder if most people – apart from the really arrogant and privileged – have it. I think maybe I have it more than most. I have this recurring dream where somebody comes and tells me I’m not allowed to go on living the way I am because there’s a qualification missing from my past, and I have to go back and sort everything. I think it comes from this feeling in my life that I’ve never really stuck at something and completed it. I quit my bartending job and sort of ran away from it. I left school as soon as I possibly could. I chose not to stay on at the farm after it became too much for Mum and Dad to manage. Even the eco-terrorism stuff: I was never fully there with it. And those recordings were the same. It was another unfinished thing. But around that time I had another recurring dream, a proper nightmare, really. It was about Maddie. I didn’t dream actually doing it but in the dream I always knew that we’d been arguing and I’d pushed her off something high into some water and in the dream she kept coming back as this doll, I don’t know, maybe the really old doll Richie had told me about that he’d found in the wall, but maybe not, because I don’t really know what that doll looked like, but what would happen is that as the doll Maddie would sing and tell everyone about what I’d done to her. And then this ultra-weird thing happened which was that at the Newbury bypass protest march a few years later I met Maggie and Oliver Fox, you know, who’d done The Gribblins for TV, which I absolutely loved as a kid, with all that moss and everything, and the Water Bears always having a go at them, which I loved maybe even more. I was there with Mark, because we were still friends, although there was nothing else between us by this point, and he was really involved with the whole thing, getting arrested and chaining himself to trees, but I was really only a daytripper there, so it was just another example of how I am a bit half-arsed about everything, and at the end of the day I ended up getting a lift back down here to Devon with the Foxes, who were really lovely people, just as lovely as you’d imagine, and they invited me in to their house, which was this massive barn, which I remember had all these ladders and mannequins everywhere, and a swimming pool outside with frogs and leaves in it, and above the fireplace I noticed there was one of the actual Gribblins, just sitting there. And then after that, every time I had the dream where Maddie was the doll, she would be this Gribblin. So essentially the dream became about my sister, coming back as a seventies TV character, and singing a song to everyone about how I’d murdered her.’
Hot air balloon! Me! Who’d have thunk it? Up here. Me, who used to refuse to walk over the high bridge over the motorway and go a mile further along to the underpass instead. Is that turbulence? Do you get turbulence in balloons? No room for a black box recorder here. Not with four of us in the basket: me, Chris, Titus and Jen, who is down for the weekend. One of Titus’s toys, this. Seems to be in control. Took lessons years ago. His dad. Professional. Did it for Virgin. Flew with Branson. Hung out with him and Mike Oldfield and Oldfield’s kettle drums. Oldfield shy, still looking like a boy at thirty-two. Avoiding going over the field of cows now. You can’t do that, Titus says, because the cows think the sound of the burning propane is the aggressive roar of a giant skybeast and freak out. Going south, down the river. Cottages on their own. Mystery homes, invisible to the land eye. Secrets of the sky. How on earth do you get to these places by car? Chris’s hand in mine. Think Jen is cool about me and her. Seems it. Two of them talked about millinery. Jen is taking a course. Chris did one last year. Compared hats. Seemed to hit it off. Almost left them to get off with each other. Chris, eating a nobbly orange. Sailing the peel away on the wind. Likes the big ones. Not me. I’m more of a satsuma boy. I watch her. Lines blurring. What am I? Lover or biographer? Can I be both? Titus taking us lower, following the curve of the river. Don’t think he’s going to crash land. Got some champagne with him. Expensive stuff. If you end up on private land you have to give the bottle to the owners. Tradition. ‘Every landing is a crash landing if you’re in a balloon, really,’ he says. Reassuring. That confidence, rife, even up here. Nothing touching him. Bending with the wind, fragrant, easing through it all like he’s made of flowers. Could I make myself like that? Is being like that within my capability, with where I’m from, who I’m from? Anyway, doesn’t matter. Not much matters up here. Not the book, because who will read it. Not the rent, because it’s not due for another month, and besides Titus said I could earn some money by doing some picking if I like. Harvest soon. Reddening land below. Looks like a map: a map of what I’m writing. But who will ever see it? Who cares? And that doesn’t matter either right now, because I’ve got Chris. Hand back in mine now, sticky from the orange. Does this work, two broken people together? Are we jigsaw pieces, or just shards? Shut up, Martin. Stay out of the future. Stay here. It’s good up here. She’s good. Life’s good. Cucumber’s good. Look at it all below you. Is that the spooky barn we walked past? It is. Is that the building where ‘Sister Blue’ was recorded? It is. Is that the sheep you cuddled last week? It is. Is that your estranged father? No. It is a Jersey cow. Is that the pub where you decked the esteemed newspaper editor Richard Peck? No, it’s not. That’s a million miles away, in another universe. We can do this, Chris. We can do it here, I think. Look, it’s the mist. I can’t believe it. The one you said still looked for the river, even though the river was filled in years ago. It’s the actual, famous mist. Well, not famous, more like cult mist, really. Famous in a quiet way, underappreciated. That poor, sad mist. Never stops searching. And then it goes. But then there’s more mist, and I suppose even though it’s not the same mist, it is the same mist, and everything starts over again, and, even though it’s different mist, made of different particles, I suppose it never forgets. It will always be here, trying to find the answer to its question.