Wylding Hall

Chapter 12

Will

About a week after we laid down those rough cuts in the garden, we all decided to go down to the pub and have another go at busking. Julian wasn’t crazy about the idea, but I reminded him we’d been practicing “Lost Tuesdays” all week and this would be a good place to debut it for an audience other than ourselves. We’d run out of booze, too.

It was Saturday, a rainy day; might have been the only time it rained that whole summer. I think it actually was. We’d been on our own all week: Tom was long gone, and we’d decided not to invite anyone else down. We just wanted to focus on the music.

You forget now, how strange and original those songs were for their time. When you got tagged as a folk band, especially a trad band like we were, supposedly — well, you were supposed to play traditional songs, weren’t you, acoustic guitar and all the rest, and traditional arrangements.

We weren’t having none of that. Especially me. I’d made an electric fiddle, hooking my own up to the innards of an old Hoover. Julian had written “Darkling Sea” for him and Ashton to play on acoustic guitar and upright bass, but I bulled my way into it, as is my wont. Les and Julian had worked out these gorgeous harmonies; you’d hear them singing first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

Something had happened between them, I never figured out what. I thought maybe Nancy and Julian had gone off together during the notorious non-orgy, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case. Hard to imagine the two of them in a passionate embrace, but stranger things have happened.

Whatever it was, there was still a bit of a chill between Lesley and Julian. Odd thing was, their singing was brilliant. You learn to do that if you’re in a band — put aside whatever it is comes between you the rest of the time. Sex, drink, politics, marriage, whatever it is. If you can’t do that, well, that’s when it all falls apart.

Jon

I drove the van that night. I wanted to keep a clear head, which is why I’m the one whose account you should trust. We’d all been boozing it up pretty steadily, Les and Will especially. Me and Julian mostly just smoked, though that week I finished an entire bottle of Jameson all by myself. Ashton kept to beer most of the time. I always wondered if he found some way to secretly pop down to the Wren. Probably he did.

Something changed after that weekend when Will’s girlfriend Nancy came to visit. I don’t think it had anything to do with her. It was like the dynamic within the group shifted into some stranger, higher gear. Emphasis on “higher.”

No, not really. But there was that one night when we all lay around in the dark and felt — something. I think it only happens when you’re young. This weird sense of possibility; a kind of knowledge. You know there’s a door, and even if you can’t see it, you can sense it opening, and if you’re quick enough, you can slip inside.

Will and Les and I used to talk about it. Ashton thought it was all bollocks, but me and Will and Les, we thought, you know, maybe it could happen. Maybe it did.

It didn’t take too much to convince Julian to come down to the pub. He was shy, but he wasn’t that shy about performing. He was self-conscious. Will or Ashton are good at banter, and Lesley, she’ll trip over her own feet and make a joke of it. The audience loved her.

Julian wasn’t like that, but he didn’t freeze up in front of a crowd. I know that’s the accepted wisdom, but it’s wrong. He was more like me. I get behind my kit and hide there. Unless you’re Keith Moon or John Bonham, no one’s looking at the drummer.

Once he got settled, Julian would just focus on his singing and his guitar. He had incredible powers of concentration — the whole time we were at Wylding Hall, if he wasn’t playing with the rest of us downstairs, he was up in his room, studying transcendental meditation or some mystic shite.

Only with him it wasn’t really shite — he really could go into kind of a trance when he played. We’ve all been there, catching a groove, but this was different. Uncanny. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how it’d go over at the pub.

Lesley

I have no clue what went on between Julian and Nancy, but something did. I know that. He was different after that weekend, not just different towards me but … changed, somehow. Back then you’d meet people who got involved with cults. Jesus freaks or swami so-and-so. Julian never joined a cult that I knew of, but he had that same glittery look in the eye, like he’d seen something amazing but was going to keep it secret because, you know, the rest of us weren’t worthy.

Nancy wasn’t exactly like that, but she was a self-professed witch. And she does have a gift. She sees things others can’t. I don’t think she’s making it up, either. She may be slightly deluded, but she’s not lying. That weekend she stayed with us, I think she inadvertently encouraged Julian in whatever fixation he’d developed.

Wylding Hall didn’t help, either. The whole time we were there, it was like being in a dream. Everything conspired to keep us from waking up. The weather and drugs and alcohol, the occult talk and crazy books and sexual tensions.

And that house — you could just get lost in it. Whenever I explored the old Tudor wing by myself, I’d find locked doors that wouldn’t open; then the next time, they would. No one had a key. One of the rooms had been a ballroom — shredded tapestries on the walls, floor covered with dust. Overlooking it was a minstrel gallery with an amazing oak screen, carved with all kinds of strange things. Birds with human faces. People with wings like dragonflies or wasps.

I used to stare up at the minstrel gallery, but no matter how hard I looked, I could never find the way in. No stairs, no ladder. There must’ve been a secret passage somewhere, but I never found it.

Jon

There were maybe forty people at the pub that night. Will said he counted thirty-seven, but I think he left out the barman. Call it forty. That pub was tiny, so it felt more crowded, but it wasn’t what you’d call standing room only. It was Saturday night and all the regulars were there — I guess they were regulars; I didn’t know them from Adam. The barman was a good bloke; he said we could set up and play in a corner.

We went acoustic — none of us wanted to lug amps and electric guitars and a PA. I just had my tambour and some shakers and an African drum a friend brought back from Tangiers. Very low-tech.

What did they think? Folks at the pub seemed more bemused than anything else when we walked in. They certainly weren’t hostile. The barman had a thing for Les, which made it easier — we knew we wouldn’t get tossed out. So, we set up, tuned up, and away we went. They loved it.

Ashton

To be honest, I was quite nervous for the first few songs. It wasn’t like when me and Les played on our own that time — there were a lot more people, for one. And it felt somehow like we were there to make a statement. Territorial, almost. We were interlopers, remember: long-haired hippie outsiders at a time when there was a lot of hostility toward that kind of person.

I could hear some muttering while we were tuning up — who the feck were we, gypsies squatting in the old manor and prancing about the forests, etcetera. Someone must have seen Julian stargazing in the woods. For some reason that got them especially worked up.

Still, once we started playing, everyone got quieter. We started with “John Barleycorn,” a traditional folk song; we thought that might lull them into a false sense of security. But after that, we did our own stuff. Lesley’s new songs — we kicked off with “Cloud Prince,” thought it would be good to put the girl singer out front.

Lesley — they loved her. A few of them tried taking the piss because of her accent. She might have been the first American some of them had seen since the war. But she only flung her long hair about and laughed and bantered with them. No mike, but she didn’t need one — her voice filled that place like nothing you ever heard. They just ate it up. Kept passing her pints while she was singing.

We did four or five songs, then took a break. Les passed the hat, the barman bought us a round, then we bought his. When we came back, it was Julian’s turn.

Jon

Second set, there were a few more people. No one had mobile phones back then, so you couldn’t text your friends and say, Rush down to the Wren to hear history in the making. But a few of the younger blokes left and came back with their wives or girlfriends.

We pulled up a chair for Julian. Lesley had stood, she always liked moving around. But Julian liked to sit, so I grabbed him a chair.

He cut quite a figure, he was so tall, and a bit of a dandy. Always the same old brown corduroy jacket, but it looked very sharp. The sleeves were a bit short, but I think he might have kept it on purpose, so people would focus on his hands when he played.

He had such big hands — big bony wrists, extraordinarily long fingers. That’s why he was such an incredible guitarist — his reach was terrific. He had very eccentric tunings, which meant you could never duplicate how he played — and believe me, people tried. Jimmy Page told me once that he listened to Wylding Hall a hundred times, trying to figure out Julian’s fingering on “Windhover Morn.” He couldn’t.

Still, the Wren wasn’t exactly the venue to impress people with your eccentric tunings. Only, of course, Julian did.

Tom Haring

Over the years, I can’t tell you how many people have told me they saw that gig. All total bullshit, of course. No one saw it, except for a few dozen people who lived in that village. I suspect a lot of them are dead now. Maybe the younger ones are telling their kids and grandkids, yeah, I was there when Windhollow Faire first played the songs from Wylding Hall. I guess that’s possible.

But if I had a pound for every person told me they were at the Wren that night, I wouldn’t be living here in Sheffield, I’ll tell you that.

Will

Now, you have to picture Julian, this tall figure sitting in a battered pub chair, hunched over his guitar, long brown hair falling over his face.

“That a girl?” some geezer called out, and the punters all laughed.

But Julian just kept tuning his guitar. A string broke, and for a moment I thought he’d lost it — that he’d just slink off somewhere and give it up.

He didn’t. I tell you, I can see it in my mind’s eye like it happened last night, those big hands and that wristwatch he loved so much. He looked at his watch, then glanced around the pub, like he was searching for someone. I remember thinking, Who the hell’s he looking for? He didn’t know anyone around there, as far as I knew.

People were getting impatient. We were getting impatient. Me and Les exchanged a look; she was wondering if maybe she should just take charge and start singing.

Then Julian began to play. “Windhover Morn.” “Cloud Prince.” For the third or fourth song, he did “Thrice Tosse These Oaken Ashes.” People know the song now because of Wylding Hall, but no one knew it then. It’s based on a seventeenth century air by Thomas Campion. I’d come across it at Cecil Sharp House earlier that year, but decided not to use it. Les called me on that much later, said I’d been superstitious. Perhaps I was.

The peculiar thing is that Julian had come across it as well, only he found it in the library at Wylding Hall. I didn’t even know there was a library there until he told me. He discovered it in some old book, and he said his version was far older than Campion’s, and with slightly different words. When we’d recorded it in the garden, Julian went with the original.

But that night at the Wren, he sang the older version. He’d composed new music for it, a very eerie melody. Unfortunately, we never recorded that version of the song. We all remember him singing it, but none of us has ever been able to recreate Julian’s music. Believe me, we tried.

As soon as he opened his mouth and began to sing, the room fell quiet. Not just quiet: dead silent. I’ve never seen anything like it. Like a freeze-frame in a movie. Nobody spoke, nobody moved. Nobody breathed. I know I didn’t, not for half a minute. It sounded as though he were whispering the song into your ear.

That night at the Wren, you could see that’s how every single person felt. Like he was singing to each one of them, alone, just his voice and those few chords over and over again. Once he finished his version, he went into the more familiar one.

Thrice toss these Oaken ashes in the air,

Thrice sit thou mute in this enchanted chair;

Then thrice three times tie up this true loves knot,

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

Lesley

It was the first time he performed the Campion song. I’d heard him practicing bits of it in his room, but he never sang it for us when we were rehearsing. I recognized the tune immediately. It was the same one I’d heard the night that Nancy was there. The song we’d all heard, only none of us could replicate it afterward, or even remember it.

It was like someone dragged a razor across my skin — not enough to draw blood, just a cold blade drawn down my neck, never enough to break the skin. I almost cried out — I would have, but my voice was gone. I know it sounds crazy, but I felt as though my own voice had been sucked into his, my breath. My heart beating at the same time as his. Nothing but that song and that voice and his guitar. None of us have ever been able to play that song since.

Jon

He’d just finished playing the bridge when I saw her. She was in the corner, watching him. I didn’t see her walk in.

At first I thought she was a young boy. Very slim and fine-boned, white-blonde hair. A real towhead. She was so pale, I mistook her for light reflecting on the mirror behind her. Took a minute for my eyes to focus and see it was a girl.

I’d put her at fifteen, sixteen. She looked younger because she was so thin, but when you got a better look, her face wasn’t young. Not old, just — she looked like she knew things. Her skin was the whitest skin I’ve ever seen — you could see where the veins were. It made her skin greenish, like a luna moth’s. She was wearing a long, floaty dress, white dress, ragged at the hem. Barefoot, leaves stuck to her feet like she’d been walking in the woods.

I didn’t think she was that unusual — you couldn’t throw a rock in the King’s Road and not hit some Pre-Raphaelite teenybopper. Pale and interesting. Still, I suspect it raised a few eyebrows with the punters in the Wren.

But with her, it wasn’t makeup. I saw that when she walked over, after the set. She was the palest creature I’d ever set eyes on. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, same way I felt about Julian. When the two of them stood beside each other, you didn’t know where to look.