Have you ever seen a bird without its beak? Horrible, just tiny dead eyes and a hole in its face.
I whirled around to get into back into the hall and something stabbed my foot — I thought I’d stepped on a nail, it hurt like hell but I didn’t stop, slammed the door behind me and hobbled fast as I could to the main hall. Will had finally gotten out of the loo by then, so I went inside and locked the door. Last thing I wanted was for Will to see how worked up I was. I never told him or anyone else.
My foot was bleeding hard, but when I pulled off my sock, it wasn’t a nail stuck there but a bird’s beak, black and no bigger than a thorn. It must’ve taken me five minutes to work it out of my foot. How the hell it could have gotten in so deep, I have no idea — it slid right through my sock. I stanched the cut best I could, tore up a wash towel and washed it, and still it bled. I still have a scar there. See?
Lesley
My room was next to Julian’s. It was a lovely room. I had a beautiful four-poster bed, and Tom had bought some very nice bed linens for me at Portabello Road: beautiful old French linen sheets and a pillowcase. There was also a big wardrobe and a very large mirror. Because I was the girl, I suppose.
I loved it — it was by far the best room I’d ever lived in. Still is, probably. I’d sit in that big bed and write songs all day long. When we weren’t playing together, I mean. I was reading a lot of poetry — John Clare, Rimbaud, and Verlaine. Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. There weren’t a lot of women songwriters then.
I was determined to change that.
The boys were down the halclass="underline" Will and Ashton and Jonno — Jonno, I remember, had the most ridiculous throne in his bedroom; he’d just lounge in it and listen to the same King Crimson record over and over again on his stereo. For, like, three hours at a stretch. Then he’d come down and grab something to eat, and we’d all play together in the big room.
Jon
It’s true. I think I was stoned twenty out of twenty four hours back then. Me and Will. Ashton was more of a boozer; him and Les would go off to the pub some days. They were the only ones got to know the locals.
Will
No, I don’t drink anymore. I’ve been sober for thirty-seven years now, longer than you’ve been alive. Back then, I could pack it away. Occupational hazard of the folksinger in those days. Rock and rollers, too. Les, she still does — you can see that on her face. Don’t print that. She has her reasons.
A typical day? Hmm, hard to say. I’m not sure if a typical day would start with the day or with the night. Night, probably.
All right: for the purposes of the documentary, I’ll say day. Julian would be up at daybreak no matter how little sleep he’d got, but the rest of us rose a bit later, say nine or ten. That sounds early to you? Well, youngster, it felt that way to me, too!
But there was a feeling we all had that we were in a magic place, and we wanted to make the most of it. And we were young, so our powers of recovery were remarkable. We could drink all night, smoke till the house was spinning, do the odd bit of windowpane or blotter, busk at the pub if we needed a bit of ready cash for groceries, and still pop up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and hop down to the living room, strap on our mighty axes, and get to work.
Still—“typical day”?
I don’t think those were typical days. Truly. They were halcyon days.
What does that mean? It’s from a myth told by Ovid. Alcyone is the original name — the daughter of the wind god. Her lover Ceyx was a king and the son of the morning star. Against Alcyone’s wishes, he set sail on a long journey across the sea. A terrible storm rose up, and he was drowned, along with everyone on board his ship. Weeks later, Alcyone discovered his body washed up on shore, and her grief was so great, she drowned herself.
But the gods took pity on her — on both of them — and turned them into birds. Kingfishers. So every summer there’s six or seven days of perfect calm, perfect sun. They call those halcyon days, in memory of Alcyone.
That’s how we lived at Wylding Halclass="underline" kingfisher days and golden nights. There was an enchantment on us; you can hear it in the music on the record. But the magic on that record is only a shadow of what we experienced then, playing together.
Yeah, okay, “shadow” doesn’t really work, does it? Mixing metaphors.
An echo — that’s what you hear on the album. An echo of what we created when we were all in that room together, Julian and Les and Ashton and me, mad Jon bashing away at his drum kit and the sun in those great windows like they were gold, not glass. We’d play for hours, until Julian broke a string or Tom rang on the phone. We’d all take a break for a slash or a smoke, and then back to it.
You don’t know what it’s like, making music like that—I didn’t, I couldn’t have imagined it, until Wylding Hall. Julian was writing these songs: every morning he’d come up with something new or a new version of one he’d just written. He’d grab his guitar and start picking out the melody and begin to sing in that whispery voice. After a minute, Les would pick it up and join in. I’d follow them, and Ashton, and Jonno would suddenly erupt on the drums. And we’d just … play.
I’ve never known anything like it. Music, it’s always hard to describe, isn’t it? You can describe what it’s like to hear a song, how it makes you feel, what you were doing when you first heard it. And you can describe what it’s like to write it, technically, and how to play it — the chord changes, slow down here, pick it up here. A Minor 7, C Major.
But this — this was different. It’s a cliché to say something’s like a shared dream, like a movie or a concert — you know, “We got wasted and stayed till the lights went up and then we stumbled home and it was all like a dream.”
This wasn’t like a dream. It was like being lost: not in the dark, but in the light. Blinding sun through the windows and that fug of smoke from cigs and spliffs, motes in the air like something alive, atoms or insects all silver in the smoke. You couldn’t see to find your way; we couldn’t even see each other’s faces, it was so bright and so much smoke. You could only hear the music, and so you followed that. Lesley’s deep voice and Julian’s sweet one, Jon grabbing the edge of his cymbal so you could only hear this thin, silvery sound. Ashton’s bass. Me and that mandolin I built from a kit; Les wailing until she nearly passed out.
Julian’s guitar. You couldn’t see him at all — he stood at the very back where it was dark, farthest from the window. I swear, I can still hear him. There was a song by Davey Graham, “Anji,” very famous guitar tune, very difficult to play. Every kid who picked up a guitar would try to master it, and let me tell you, it was hell to play. No YouTube videos or guitar school to teach you, no Jimmy Page master class. But Julian figured it out back when we were still at school. I remember I was amazed, but also so jealous, I was just about sick.
I swear to god, he played it better than Graham did. Better than anyone. He tuned that Gibson to some scale only he could hear; you couldn’t mistake it for anything else. The rest of us just followed it, like a thread through the maze.
I always thought the rehearsal room was the one space that didn’t feel like it had a history attached to it. There wasn’t the bizarre sense that we were intruding there, like I got in other parts of Wylding Hall. Whatever history that room had, it was our history. We laid it down, made our mark upon the place. Sometimes, I feel like we might still be there, all of us playing together, if it hadn’t been for what happened.