Wylding Hall (6 page)

Chapter 8

Will

Things got much more intense after the weekend Nance came down. It was like all the sexual tension and creative energy somehow got focused, and what it got focused on was the songs. I was definitely in a better state, because I’d spent the weekend with my girlfriend, so I knew where
my
sexual energy had gone.

Les and Julian broke up then. I’m not sure what happened, but I never had the impression that sex was as important to Julian as it was to some of us. That changed when the girl showed up, but that was later.

After that weekend, Les seemed pretty upset. She was trying to act like nothing had happened between her and Julian, that it didn’t matter. But you could just tell, she was very hurt.

Les always comes off as one of the lads—that’s her defense mechanism. Swaggering about like she owns the room she’s in. You know, tough little bird, swears like a sailor, drinks us all under the table—well, that part’s true.

But the rest of it, that’s just a defense. No one could go through what we did and come out the other side without being affected by it. I eventually had to stop drinking if I was to survive. Ashton has always been a hard contrary bastard, and Wylding Hall just made him harder. But everyone deals with it differently.

Patricia Kenyon, journalist

I first heard about the scene at Wylding Hall from Nancy O’Neill. We were friends, not especially close, but we hung out in the same circles. I had recently started writing for
NME
—I was one of the first women rock journalists; it was a real boys’ club in those days, Nick Kent and all the rest, and I had to spend way too much time boozing and drugging with the boys to prove myself.

So I was always happy to have a girl’s night out. There was a party at the Marquee, very bisexual chic—boys with boys, girls with girls, everyone with everyone. I wasn’t out of the closet then—I was twenty and still living at home—and I felt a bit intimidated by how open some of those people were. Nancy was straight, so she was my beard—I could be with her and everyone would think we were a couple, and I wouldn’t have to worry about the fact that I was, you know,
actually gay
.

So, we go off into a corner with a bottle of champers and get to talking, and I ask her how things were with Will Fogerty: Were they still going out? The truth is I kind of fancied Nancy—sounds like a song, right? And I thought, Well, maybe if she’s broken up with Will …

But she hadn’t. Not yet, anyway. Instead she starts telling me about this bizarre weekend she’d just had down in Hampshire at a ruined country house called Wylding Hall. Tom Haring had locked up everyone in the band Windhollow Faire, and he wouldn’t let them out till they’d finished an album. I laughed.

“What, like locking a bunch of monkeys in a room with typewriters until one of them writes Shakespeare?”

“I’m serious, Tricia. It was seriously … strange.”

Of course, that was all it took for me to immediately want to see for myself exactly what was going on. I knew Windhollow’s first album—it had come out late the previous year, featured on
John Peel
and BBC Radio 1, half-page advert in
Rolling Stone
, blah blah blah. Everything you could expect from an electric folk album. There weren’t many venues for music reviews then, so there wasn’t the sort of coverage they might have gotten today.

It wasn’t a groundbreaking album, not like
Wylding Hall
was when it was released. Still, people were talking about Windhollow Faire. Today, we’d call it buzz. I’d seen them perform once at UFO. Not the ideal hall for them, I thought. Too big, and everyone was totally out of their mind on acid. I was so square: I found all the noise and whirling around in ponchos kind of distracting. Going down to Hampshire and sitting in on rehearsals in a stately home seemed like a good angle for me to pitch an article to
NME
. Easier said than done.

“Put that right out of your pointy little head,” Nancy told me when I brought it up. “Tom Haring’s got his knickers in a twist over me going there. He rang me up and said if I told anyone where they were that he’d slap a cease and desist order on me.”

I was incredulous. “That’s absurd. He can’t do that and you know it.”

Nancy was silent. Finally, she said, “Maybe. But I don’t think you should go, either. It gave me a bad feeling.”

“All the more reason for me to go! Things fall apart, the center of the folk scene cannot hold, sort of thing. That would make a great piece.”

She was adamant. Wouldn’t give me the phone number at the house, wouldn’t even tell me the name of the village. Nowadays you could just google it, but I had nothing to go on. I asked around, but no one seemed to know. There were a lot of rumors, but I couldn’t afford to be driving around the English countryside looking for musicians laying low somewhere in Hampshire. Everyone and his dog was living in a commune by then—hippies, anarchists, Luddites, aristos. I finally called Tom Haring.

“Absolutely not,” he shouted, and hung up on me. I called back and he hung up again. It took me five tries before we even had a civil conversation. After that, it was days of me hectoring him before he gave in and agreed to let me go down there.

“We can time the piece so it comes out right when the album does,” I told him. “It will be great publicity.”

“Will you give me right of refusal if I don’t agree with what you say?”

Now it was my turn to dig in my heels. “Absolutely not. Have you run this by the band?”

“In fact, I have. They’re gun-shy about journalists after all the bad press about Arianna. And they’re at a very delicate place in their creative process.”

Their creative process.
What a load of bollocks! I just kept at him, and eventually I wore him down.

“Look, Tom, you know that even bad publicity’s better than none. Not that this will be bad,” I assured him. “I’m genuinely fascinated by their creative process and by the entire band, especially Julian Blake.”

“You and everyone else.”

Eventually, Tom relented. I could go, but only for the day, and only if he accompanied me. No overnight stays at the house or in the village. Which was a moot point—there was no place to stay within twenty miles. Wylding Hall was at the end of the fucking earth.

“Picking Up the Pieces: Windhollow Faire’s Remarkable Rural Revival,” by Patricia Kenyon

New Musical Express, January 17, 1972

You enter Wylding Hall as into a dream, or perhaps a time machine.

First there’s the anteroom, filled with coats and wellies, muddy trainers and the odd Faire Isle jumper or velvet cape. Oh, and a cricket bat. Then a whitewashed corridor, walls hung with ancient photographs of prize pigs and family members long deceased, slate floor strewn with rushes as it might have been a thousand years ago. From here, one finds the kitchen, where the twentieth century finally begins to hold sway—running water, a gas range and refrigerator—but only briefly.

“The beating heart of Wylding Hall is this way.”

Will Fogerty, the band’s fiddle player and resident musicologist, beckons me down a few stone steps worn from centuries of human traffic.

“Watch yourself,” he adds, a bit too late, as I’ve already banged my head on a wooden beam.

As we now know, an encounter with the beating heart of Wylding Hall leaves no one unscathed, even—or especially—the members of Windhollow Faire. But on this idyllic midsummer morning, one can hardly imagine a lovelier place than this sixteenth century manor house, with its late Victorian additions and all mod cons in the rehearsal hall where Windhollow has parked its instruments and sound equipment, along with Indian-print tapestries, Turkish carpets, brass hookah, and hi-fi system with an advance pressing of Todd Rundgren’s
Something/Anything
on the turntable.

“We’ve been playing that one nonstop,” Will says, running a hand through a thatch of auburn hair. “Brilliant production.”

Sun slants through the high windows. The sweet smell of beeswax polish mingles with that of ganja and the black Sobranie cigarettes favored by one of the band members.

Will steps over a heap of Navajo blankets that turns out to be Julian Blake. Julian rubs the sleep from his eyes and blinks at us, more Alice’s Dormouse than the eighteen-year-old guitar prodigy responsible for writing most of the songs for their album-in-progress.

“Oh, hello,” Julian greets us with a yawn. “Is it morning? Or still yesterday?”

It’s all rather as if a hippie caravan has taken over the maze at Hampton Court. …

Patricia Kenyon

To me, it was very apparent that there was something off about Julian. I’d seen him once before, performing with Windhollow at the Marquee, and he made a real impression on me. Very tall, very good-looking, sort of a delicately handsome face. The young Jeremy Irons might have played him. He was a finger picker, which was unusual for a guitarist, at least in rock music.

And he had eccentric tunings. He’d taught himself, and while he read music, I always had the impression he was someone who played more by ear.

That morning at Wylding Hall, he seemed to be in a different place, mentally. He was the one chain-smoked those horrible Russian cigarettes. The smell was everywhere. His fingers were stained yellow—a real, jaundiced yellow—and they were so long, they looked like great spider’s legs clutching at that Indian blanket.

He didn’t look like someone who’d just woken up. He looked … manic. Eyes a little too wide. He laughed when he saw me and shook his head, then just kept staring at me, as though waiting for me to recognize that he’d made a joke.

But he hadn’t said anything. It was unnerving. He reminded me of Syd Barrett.
Oh god
, I thought,
another fucking acid casualty
. I said hello and he laughed again and wandered off, draped in his blanket like Lear on the heath. Will toddled after him, to make us some tea.

That left me alone in the room. Down on the floor, Julian had left this nest of blankets. When I bent to examine it, I found a copy of
Alice in Wonderland
opened to the Mad Tea Party:

Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. “What a funny watch!” she remarked. “It tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what o’clock it is!”

“Why should it?” muttered the Hatter. “Does your watch tell you what year it is?”

“Of course not,” said Alice very readily: “but that’s because it stays the same year for such a long time together.”

“Which is just the case with
mine
,” said the Hatter.

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. “I don’t quite understand you,” she said, as politely as she could.

“The Dormouse is asleep again,” said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose.

Tucked in among the blankets were several more books, not much bigger than a Moleskine notebook, which is what I thought they were at first. I looked around to make sure the others were gone, then knelt and looked through them.

They weren’t notebooks at all, but very old books in leather covers. One was done up in vellum and written in very archaic English. Another was in Latin.

I felt excited, but also uneasy. I’d done classics at uni and I knew what these were—books of magic. The one in Old English was a grimoire. A scrap of notebook paper fell out of it, covered with writing in Biro. Julian’s writing, I knew that without being told. A spidery hand to suit those spidery fingers.

I thought he’d copied out a spell. Later, when I heard the
Wylding Hall
album, I realized it was an old ballad by Thomas Campion—a song in the form of a spell, dating to the fifteenth century.

Thrice tosse these Oaken ashes in the ayre,

Thrice sit thou mute in this inchanted chayre;

Then thrice three times tye up this true loves knot,

And murmur soft, shee will, or shee will not.

Goe burn these poys’nous weedes in yon blew fire,

These Screech-owles fethers, and this prickling bryer,

This Cypresse gathered at a dead mans grave:

That all thy feares and cares an end may have.

I thought I heard voices, so I dropped everything and scrambled back to my feet. But no one came, and when I listened, I could tell they were in the kitchen with Tom. I knew he wanted to go over some of the details about studio time.

I figured they might be a while, and this might be a good time to do a bit of exploring on my own, without someone at my shoulder steering me past whatever it was I wasn’t supposed to be looking at. This is why you have to be very careful when you invite a journalist into your midst.

The big room where they rehearsed was in one of the newer sections of the farmhouse, eighteenth century, tacked onto the Victorian addition. Tom had told me that the original manor was Tudor, and parts of it were older than that, fourteenth century.

So, I did a bit of exploring. Their bedrooms were all in the newer wing, and I knew these would be off-limits to me. But one of the doors from the rehearsal room opened onto a hallway, and I followed that.