Wylding Hall

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.

The place was immense. From outside, you just had no idea of the scale. It was originally a manor house, where a knight would have lived — you could see where the old part began, because the walls changed from wood and plaster to herringbone brick, with massive oaken joists and beams.

The hall grew narrower as I wandered along. Diamond-paned windows, that beautiful leaded glass that catches the light and throws it back in rainbows, like a prism. There were crooked wooden doors, oak planks banded with iron, so heavy and warped I couldn’t open most of them.

And of course I tried — who wouldn’t? The ones I could open seemed to be have been used as storerooms for the last few hundred years, dank and musty and dark. I wasn’t going to start poking around in them.

So, I kept going, until I found a stone stairway and climbed to the next floor. It was so dark, I kept my hand on the wall the whole time to make sure I didn’t lose my footing. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, and the passage was so narrow that my shoulders brushed the walls. It was like climbing into my own tomb.

I’d forgotten my watch, and so I lost all track of time. But finally I reached the top of the stairs and stepped out onto a landing. There, to one side, was an open door. Light poured into the hall, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust before I walked in.

It was a library — a very, very old library. You’re supposed to keep books out of the light, but this room must have been at least five hundred years old, built at a time when you’d want — need — natural light to read properly. Assuming you were literate and could read.

I’ve never been in such a beautiful room. Dark oak walls with carved linenfold paneling, hand-carved bookshelves. A row of diamond-paned windows, with leaves blown against them on the outside, so that the light that filtered down seemed to come from a forest canopy. One of the windows must have been broken — there were leaves scattered across the floor, green willow and birch.

And there was a fireplace big enough to walk into, filled knee-high with gray ash. The room smelled of woodsmoke: when I held my hands above the ashes, the air felt warm. Someone had been burning something.

Another odd thing was the walls. When I first walked into the library, I assumed the paneled walls were linenfold — what you usually find in posh houses of that vintage. But when I looked closer, I saw the paneling was carved like overlapping feathers — there must have been thousands of them. Not big peacock feathers, either: small feathers, about the size of your thumbnail. The detail was extraordinary; you could see every quill, and the wood was so smooth it felt like silk.

The bookshelves were carved, too: a repeating pattern of twigs and leaves with a little bird like a sparrow worked in here and there. You had to look carefully to find the birds, they were so small and carefully concealed within the larger pattern. The shelves weren’t filled, but there were still a lot of books — several hundred at least. Not very orderly. It looked like a library used often by the same person, someone who always knew where to find whatever book he wanted to put his hands on.

There were more books on a table by the window, in a language I couldn’t make out. Arabic, maybe? I can’t remember, it’s been so long. And another grimoire, not much bigger than my hand. It was in good nick, the leather cover very soft. The pages felt stiff and new. The ink looked new as well, not at all faded: black ink, not that dull brown you find in most very old books.

And this book was very old. I’m no expert, but even I could tell it must have been written around the time this wing was built. When I opened it, I swear I could smell fresh ink. I looked at the frontispiece for a date or name, but found nothing.

I did come across a bookmark — a birch leaf that had been picked within the last day or so, still green. Beneath it was a fragment of manuscript covered with writing, so old it crumbled when I touched it. I had my notebook with me — I’m a journalist, remember — and I quickly began to copy out the writing word for word. I thought it might make good copy.

“Burna thyn haer yn flamme

Tiss wrennas fedyr and thyn hatte blod.”

That’s all I got down when I heard someone behind me. I whirled around, but there was no one by the door. When I turned back, someone was at the other end of the room, watching me. A very old woman I thought at first, not as tall as me, slight and white-haired. But she wasn’t old — it was a trick of the sun in the window above her, bleaching the color from her hair.

Then I saw that her hair really was white — bright as silver, rather mussed-up hair that fell just above her shoulders. She didn’t look more than fourteen or fifteen, wearing a plain white dress that came just below her knees. A vintage petticoat, the kind of hippie frock that girls snapped up at Portobello Road. Strange tawny eyes. She took a step toward me and stopped. She looked surprised, as though she’d been expecting someone else.

“What are you doing here?”

I jumped: it was a man’s voice. And it didn’t come from her, but from the door, where Julian stood, staring at me. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or just confused.

I said, “Nothing,” and glanced back at the girl.

But she was gone.

Tom

It was a good article, what Patricia Kenyon wrote for NME—a very good piece. Unfortunately, by the time it appeared that fall, we were all focused on damage control. The album had to come out on schedule, and there was a tour all lined up — shows in London and Brighton. I was in the last stages of booking them in the United States around the holidays. The rumor mill had been running for a few months by then. Patricia’s article did a lot to calm that down, put things into perspective. I suspect she could have caused us a lot of trouble if she’d wanted to.

But that was never her intent, with us or anyone else. She’s a brilliant writer, one of the best. Deserves every bit of praise she’s ever received. In retrospect, it was extremely fortunate that I let her go down there, much as I was dead set against the idea at first. She became a sort of witness for the defense, long after the fact.

Patricia Kenyon

Afterward, I thought she must’ve been his girlfriend, the one he met in the pub. I never met her and there aren’t any photos, other than the cover for Wylding Hall. But from the description, that’s who it must have been. Right?