“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.