Anyway, I’m sure that’s why Tom decided to come down with the mobile unit — he didn’t want to chance someone else showing up with a tape recorder during one of our gigs.
Of course, I wasn’t dragging my drum kit down to the local, so whenever we played there, I’d have nothing but a little tambour and bells. It felt almost medieval, which was lovely, really — it felt like we truly were wandering bards. Troubadours.
Well, maybe not me so much. I was always a bit of the outlier. I never set out to play any kind of folk or trad — I was a rocker who went astray. Up there on Muswell Hill with the Davies brothers, that’s who I wanted to be, not a bloody little folkie. I saw myself more like John Bonham. Or Long John Baldry.
But me and Ashton were mates from school, and he’d been picking up work for a few years before we started the band. A good bass player is worth his weight in gold, and Ashton was brilliant. You know how they called John Entwistle the Ox? Ashton was the Oak, because of his name — the mighty Ash, the mighty Oak.
He was a tough nut, Ashton: always difficult to get along with. But the birds loved him — the young girls — and that meant he always had an audience. He’d played with Will at a few pickup gigs in London. They decided to put a band together and they were looking for a drummer, so that was me. Ashton met Arianna at some pub where he’d been playing. Will brought Julian. Arianna was gorgeous, and so was Julian. Both very photogenic — looked great onstage and when we did Old Grey Whistle Test.
But Arianna was out of her depth. Everyone saw that. We cut our first album, Windhollow Faire; Jack Bruce produced it, and he did a fine job of covering up her weaknesses in the studio. But in order to survive, the band needed to play almost constantly, and Arianna simply wasn’t up to it. She had a pretty voice, she could carry a tune — that was never a problem. But she had no depth. She couldn’t interpret a song, place her stamp on it. Unlike Lesley, who fairly stomped on it!
And that’s what you need in folk music. These are songs that have been around for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They existed for centuries before any kind of recording was possible, even before people could write, for god’s sake! So the only way those songs lived and got passed on was by singers. The better singer you were, the more likely it was people were going to turn out to hear you and remember you — and remember the song — whether it was at a pub or wedding or ceilidh or just a knot of people seeking shelter under a tree during a storm.
It’s a kind of time machine, really, the way you can trace a song from whoever’s singing it now back through the years — Dylan or Johnny Cash, Joanna Newsom or Vashti Bunyan — on through all those nameless folk who kept it alive a thousand years ago. People talk about carrying the torch, but I always think of that man they found in the ice up in the Alps. He’d been under the snow for 1,200 years, and when they discovered him, he was still wearing his clothes, a cloak of woven grass and a bearskin cap, and in his pocket they found a little bag of grass and tinder and a bit of dead coal. That was the live spark he’d been carrying, the bright ember he kept in his pocket to start a fire whenever he stopped.
You’d have to be so careful, more careful than we can even imagine, to keep that one spark alive. Because that’s what kept you alive, in the cold and the dark.
Folk music is like that. And by folk I mean whatever music it is that you love, whatever music it is that sustains you. It’s the spark that keeps us alive in the cold and night, the fire we all gather in front of so we know we’re not alone in the dark. And the longer I live, the colder and darker it gets. A song like “Windhover Morn” can keep your heart beating when the doctors can’t. You might laugh at that, but it’s true.
Chapter 5
Nancy O’Neill
I was Will’s girlfriend for two years, from before their first album to a year or so after Wylding Hall. I was an outsider — I wasn’t from the folk scene, or any music scene at all. I was in art school at the Slade and saw an early show that Windhollow did there. It was in the cafeteria, not a proper stage or anything, and only about thirty people in the audience. But I was impressed, mostly by Will’s looks. He was quite tasty: long curly red hair and a mustache. A big man. I made him get rid of the beard after we started dating.
Guys in the trad scene tended to wear flannel shirts and corduroys; I think the intent was that they should look like manly working men. Rock and rollers were more peacocks, all very Carnaby Street and Granny Takes A Trip. Will was an early adapter of that peacock finery — all of them in Windhollow were. When I first saw them at the Slade, he was wearing floppy suede boots and a pirate shirt. No gold earring — I think Bowie was the first to do that.
Anyhow, Will was very striking and a real catch. If you were an art student in those days, it was very cool to have a musician boyfriend. And I wasn’t so bad myself! I was jealous of Arianna, of course, but she was gone so quickly it scarcely mattered.
It’s sad now to think of it. We might have been friends, Arianna and I. But that was pre-women’s lib, at least for me — my consciousness had yet to expand. We could be very immature, fighting over a bloke: he’s mine, no, he’s mine. I didn’t do much of that, but I’m ashamed to say I thought it, even with Lesley.
But only at first. Les was always one of the lads. She could drink anyone under the table, and did. We became good friends, Les and I — lost touch over the years, but we never fell out or anything like that. I’d love to see her again.
Will and I hit it off from the start. He didn’t give me much cause to be jealous. There were groupies in the folk scene, but it wasn’t like rock and roll, with fourteen-year-old girls jumping all over you.
Still, I was put off when they all went down to Hampshire for the summer. Their manager, Tom Haring, made it clear that I would not be welcome, and neither would anyone else who wasn’t part of the band. Will and I talked every weekend, and he came up to London once, just for the night. I didn’t go down until they’d been there about a month. I think it was around the end of June.
Now I can’t say this without sounding all, you know, woo-woo. But there was a very, very weird vibe at Wylding Hall. I’m sensitive to that kind of thing; you can laugh all you want, but I’m a professional psychic, and I’ve managed to make a very good living from it for the last thirty years.
Wylding Hall was a bad scene. Or, no, scratch that. “Bad” isn’t the right word. We’re not talking good and evil, Christian morality, sort of thing. This went much deeper than that. There was a sense of wrongness, of things being out of balance — again, not something you would necessarily be aware of if you were just to walk into the house. No overturned furniture or broken glass, nothing like that. Just the normal amount of mess you’d expect in a group house where a bunch of teenagers and twenty-year-olds were living. That’s how old I was — twenty — lest you think I was some mad old woman skulking about.
But as soon as I walked into that old house, I could tell something was wrong. Even before I arrived, I knew. I’d caught a ride from London as far as Farnham, then hitchhiked the rest of the way. Got picked up by a lovely old man who was a farmer in the village there; he supplied them with food, driving a truck that seemed as old as he was.
“Going to Muck Manor, then?” he asked. “Hop in. I’m going there myself.”