Villager, page 21
Maggie is one of the all-time unsung, or certainly only partly sung, heroes of the children’s-television acid-folk music crossover and a Renaissance woman of the first order. In the late sixties, with her husband Oliver, in a stone shed at the bottom of the garden of the old weaver’s cottage they shared, she co-created the Gribblins: the tiny enchanting green creatures who disorientated humans – invariably rich, affluent ones – with their eerie flute music and dancing then stole their possessions and carried them back to their mossy lair to examine and hypothesise about them. While Oliver made the sets, using moss he had gathered from nearby woodland, and storyboarded the episodes, Maggie designed and made costumes for them of a mindboggling intricacy, tiny felt hats and gloves and the phosphorescent chainmail armour that covered their bodies – all of which, in the shadow of her better-known husband, she has never in my opinion received enough credit for. Not satisfied with the success of that, and her brief turn as co-presenter of Blackbird, singing slightly-too-eerie songs for children, she later took up an invitation to join the folk supergroup Equinox as singer and flautist for the final two of their five albums, replacing their original vocalist Bonnie Gosling.
Having emailed the address on her out-of-date-looking website and received nothing back, I had thought the easiest way to track Maggie down would be via the publishers of her now-hard-to-source children’s book Josephine Bigfish or the company responsible for the 2003 DVD reissues of The Gribblins and Brock of the Wood (Mingle the Tingle is still to be rereleased due to contractual issues). Nothing came of either so I opted for the more direct route, driving down to the Cornish estuary village of Trewars, hanging out in a craft shop which sold some of her pottery, then skilfully and subtly managing to get the owner of the shop to let slip where the creator of the ceramics I was admiring lived. An hour later, here we were, in her kitchen, and I got no sense that my presence was unwelcome.
‘You’re on the moor, you say, or close to it?’ she continues, handing me the second cup of tea of the afternoon. ‘I miss being up there. Of course, I have little to complain about here, in terms of surroundings. But looking back I think the moor was a kind of seventh member of Equinox. Equinox, it was really me, Dick, Mick, Julian, Norman, Gill and the moor. All but two of us lived on or very near it. It’s where a lot of the secret something we had came from, even though by that time the band were breaking up. Norman had already recorded his Let Norman Steal Your Thyme solo LP and Dick and Mick were thinking about new ventures. So it was very exciting and very fraught at the same time. And it was the same with Oliver and me with the moor. When he first had the idea for the Gribblins – which of course comes partly from some real robbers who lived on the moor in the sixteenth century – we’d be doing all these walks up there and he’d be fizzing with inspiration, asking me, “What type of monster do you think would live in this tree?” or running off to climb into an abandoned shed and root around. Then he read about tardigrades, these microscopic creatures who live in moss and can withstand boiling and freezing temperatures and sleep through an apocalypse, and that was where the idea for the Water Bears came from, who as you’ll probably remember were the nemeses of the Gribblins in the show. We’d walk through the woodland, over the moss, “the Goddess Carpet” they call it, and Oliver would collect the moss for the sets. Probably not a very ecologically correct thing to do, actually. It was like being married to a big kid. Later he got a bit too involved in the world he was creating at times. He once told me he was convinced that one of them was alive and spoke to him. Meg, the smallest one. Not that there was much difference in size in any of them. They were all different, though, if you looked closely. I hesitate to say a girl because the Gribblins ultimately had no gender. They were before their time in that way, I suppose. I should hasten to add, however, that Oliver was high a lot at this point, as so many of us were.’
She got up and swept an intrepid ginger cat off the kitchen work surface.
‘Dad, get down from there. We call her Dad because as soon as I got her, she went straight to get settled on my dad’s old favourite armchair and Hannah, that’s my daughter, started saying she looked like him and always seems to watch Question Time very intently, like my dad used to. But I digress. You wanted to ask about Wallflower. I think I have the copy that Dick gave me somewhere in the loft. Isn’t it amazing the way the value of these things change, and it comes round again and people get interested? If I am being honest I haven’t played it for several years now. I know I thought it was very special at the time. I am sure I still would. This is all – what? – forty years ago now, so you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t get all of this right. A lot of it was about Dick and Mick and their friendship which was sort of bowing and creaking under the strain of various internal dynamics. As I said, the band was already disintegrating by the time I joined, halfway through the recording of “Mountebank”. Then before we started the last record Dick came in and said he had this song, “Mrs Nicholas”, by this American guy, which was strange, because Dick could be very anti-American back then, and he wanted us to cover it, but even though we did and it went well, Mick was always very resistant to the idea, just, I think, because it was very specifically Dick’s thing.
‘The background to this, which I think you can’t ignore, is that not long before that, Mick had slept with Sheila, and Sheila hadn’t really enjoyed it, and had gone running straight back into Dick’s arms. Of course, Dick hadn’t precisely been any kind of saint before that, and viewed her infidelity as licence to be even less of one, which was not hard for him, what with the amount of time he was spending hanging around the art college at Chidleigh Babbots after he’d been doing some guest lecturing in the music department there. I don’t know if it was there, maybe not, but he ended up cheating on Sheila with this girl called Sue Piduck, who, as soon as we found out about her, we all started calling “Superduck” in an attempt to cheer Sheila up. It didn’t last long between Dick and Superduck but afterwards she wouldn’t leave him alone and kept saying she had this tape with this incredible music on it and nobody knew who made it, and that Dick needed to hear it, that it would be an actual crime if he didn’t, and she just would not shut up about it and finally, after about two months, Dick – realising it was genuinely about this tape, and not about the fact that Superduck wanted anything more from him – goes around to her house and listens to it, and it turns out she’s not lying: it’s an amazing record. The next day she brings it over to Dick’s house, and we’re all there, including Sheila, which meant there was a tension in the room, and nobody really seemed that mellow, but all of us – except Mick – totally got it that this record was not anything ordinary: utterly haunted, with this slight eastern edge to it, and with this amazing tuning that was even more advanced than the people of the time we thought were really advanced, musician’s musicians; Davy Graham and Suni McGrath and Nic Jones and the like. I felt like I was listening to something that had been made centuries ago, not four years ago. “Mrs Nicholas” was the one Dick had earmarked and wanted us to cover and we did play it at a few live shows but we never recorded it, mostly due to Mick’s resistance. I don’t even remember it being the best song. But I’m skipping ahead. The thing was, there was this big chap from the college there at Mick’s house, a biker type bloke, a sound recordist from the college who Dick was knocking around with and who everyone called Chickpea, and about two minutes into the first track, he says, “Fuck me backwards. I recorded this album!” And then he tells us that it was by this American guy called Richie McKendree but that he didn’t have a clue what had happened to him since but he knew this girl called Maddie who might, but it turned out she didn’t either, only that he’d gone back to California years ago and nobody had heard from him since.
‘Of course, things being things, and Dick being Dick, it took absolutely ages for it all to get sorted. The friend of Superduck’s who’d had the tapes was in some kind of debt at the time and wanted a lot of money for them, even though she’d just found them in a beach hut belonging to her dad. Then Chickpea wades in and says they’re as much his as anyone else’s. Meantime Equinox are breaking up and Dick’s trying to get Selkie started as a label and also trying to track down this McKendree guy to clear it all up. By the time Dick finally finds him, McKendree’s working in a camera shop somewhere in Oklahoma and living above his mum’s garage and has given up music altogether, and when Dick manages to get the record out it’s December 1976 and a different kind of music is in vogue. Even Dick himself had lost a bit of interest in the more… mystical and bucolic aesthetic by then. He’d started writing those very raw and political songs about trade unions and whatnot, which – don’t get me wrong – I always liked a lot, but they’re not quite sprinkled with the same magic, are they? Selkie only lasted about three years in total as a label. Hardly any copies of Wallflower were pressed and even fewer were sold. I hear it’s going for – what – £400 on the Internet now? Astonishing. Did you know Dick also managed to get McKendree over here, a couple of years later, here in Devon?’
I know it’s a cliché, but I actually choke on a throatful of tea as she says it. ‘Haggli fzz!’ I say.
‘Pardon?’ says Maggie.
‘Holy fuck!’ I say. ‘I didn’t. Pardon my French. That’s… I had no idea.’
‘Yep. The Empire in Exeter. Long since shut down. It was a small disaster, really. Dick, who was piling the pounds on by this point, headlining, wearing these jeans that were far too tight, and with this really harsh crew cut Sheila had just given him. The venue had booked a totally inappropriate third support, this skiffle band from Budleigh Salterton called Cliffy Coggles and His Donkeys, who were all well into their forties. And then in the middle there’s McKendree, playing the whole gig sitting on a stool with his back to the audience, and not saying a word, not even a thanks, between songs. He only played about four, I think. I was introduced to him afterwards, but he didn’t say much, seemed like someone who’d recently had some bad news, but also like this lost little boy. I reckon there were no more than thirty people in the crowd, and three of those were me and Oliver and Angus Boon from Nannie Slagg, who now I come to think of it had a go at a McKendree song too. And then there was this really embarrassing moment backstage when this German couple turn up with a pen and an autograph book and Dick’s getting poised to sign it for them and McKendree just looks like he wants to find the nearest manhole and hide under it and it turns out that it’s actually Oliver’s and my autographs the couple want. Dick was not pleased, I don’t think. A complicated man with a very tangible ego. So many good points, though. He had put up all the money himself to fly McKendree over, at a time when money was less easy for him. Say what you like about him, he was always generous to a fault. Hard to believe he had only a decade left on the planet at that point.’
‘Wait. Hold on. Did you say Nannie Slagg? The metal band who turned into Blacksmith?’
‘Yes, although they were far less metal at first. More progressive. A filthy band, both in looks and sound. I believe they covered “Bog Asphodel” at their live shows, circa 1972. That would have been because of Dick. An almost unrecognisable version of the song, though. When Nannie Slagg became Blacksmith and got properly famous – a totally different kind of fame to Equinox’s – Angus envied the freedom Dick had as a lone wolf, envied his new… anonymity, and he’d often hide from it all at Dick and Sheila’s place. You’d walk in and he and Dick would be eating jam butties, sometimes ten of them in one go, all on doorslab bread and layered with Sheila’s homemade butter. Both being Scottish, they didn’t call them jam butties, though; they called them “jeely pieces”.’
Aye, get me, the walker. Walking. Bloody miles. Even got the jacket. Right country squire, I am. Map and mint cake and everything. And boots. The Converse All Stars weren’t really working out up here. Bit bleak today. Think I can see November coming over the hill, December behind it, carrying its bad news in a sack. Not bleak like home but bleak. What’s home? Where you lived until you were eighteen, I suppose. Doesn’t seem like home in my mind any more, though, and then other times it does. Our house, tiny, end of the row, no garden but you went up the ginnel at the end and then past the tyre stack and the back of the garage and these old barns, all this crumpled corrugated iron, and then you were right there, at the bottom of the hill, and the strips of rusty metal and Coke cans would peter out and you climbed the top and up there you felt safe from everything and you looked down and all the shit wasn’t visible any more; everything seemed much greener. And then the woodland, behind that: a little forest in the sky where there was a pond and the tadpoles made the water look black in April and I found a lost ginger cat then carried it back down to town in my coat and then just as I got to Gallagher Street I saw a picture on a lamppost of the exact same lost ginger cat that was in my coat with ‘LOST CAT’ written next to it and I took the cat straight to the address on the poster. Everyone hates the advertising industry until they lose a cat. Except the woman in the house didn’t seem that massively over the moon about getting the cat back and the cat didn’t seem that massively over the moon about being back and kind of gave me this look as I left, like it was much sadder than when I found it or when it was in my coat. But maybe the woman was glad and was just being the way people were around there, which was not that happy about anything. Which is different to the way people are around here, which sometimes seems a bit too happy about everything. And that’s sort of the way the countryside in this place doesn’t quite look like the countryside near this place: it’s still all big but here it seems a bit happier. I remember the last time my dad came back, about three months before he left for the last time and about a year after he’d left the first time. He had this big plywood board, which he started attaching papier mâché to and making all these humps and bumps, and then when the papier mâché was dry he started painting it green, and brown, and grey, and then you realised that the green bits were hills, and the grey bits were roads and the brown bits were mud, and I got home one day and he’d put a load of plastic farm animals on it, plus a couple of dinosaurs, and left my toy cars there – the ones I had already and a couple of new ones he’d secretly got me in Stockport the weekend before – for me to brum all over it, which I did, for weeks afterwards, until after he’d gone for the last time, and it was all the fun I needed, even more fun than when my mum took the rugs up to clean and I scrunched them up and brummed my car through the folds. He never talked much about what he was making, my dad, he just went ahead and made it, mostly in secret. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had a secret shed somewhere, like Oliver Fox, where he was making his own Gribblins or something like that. And that was a lot of the problem, and why my mum didn’t trust him, because he was so quiet and secretive about everything, but maybe it was her lack of trust that pushed him towards what he did, and that made him go off with Sandra Tunnard, and then go off with her again, after he’d changed his mind about it for a bit and tried to live with my mum again. And maybe my mum was right when she told me he was a bastard, and maybe he still is one if he is still around, but the point is I have never really had the chance to find out firsthand. Ah shut up, Martin. Tell it to your therapist. Not that you’ll ever have one. Admission of defeat, isn’t it, therapy? Not down here: they’ve all got one, even the trust fund techno hippies with the smooth life and no demons. Might as well be California, what with that and the coastline. Another sign of the north in me: that stubbornness. I’ll sort myself out, thanks. Keep your couch. But anyway that was all about five years before I found the lost cat, and about two years before I found my dad’s records in a box in the loft, and got on the road to wasting my life writing about rock bands instead of doing a worthwhile job that might help somebody. And what I remember now about that model village my dad made me, as well as the new impact of the realisation that he took the time to make something like that, just for me, is that the hills looked more like the hills down here than the hills up there: they had less space between them, like someone had really enjoyed squeezing them together and making all the angles between them and thinking about how they related to each other and making little secret places in all the folds where nobody could see you getting up to your secretive business.
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
I was one of the lucky ones: I found my copy of Wallflower in a box marked ‘Country/Folk/Misc’ in the Heart Foundation shop in Sheffield in 1998, a time before the Internet had turned record pricing into a less exciting democracy. It cost me £5.49. I suppose you could say that I, on that day, was another person who didn’t realise he was part of history. I was just a person taking a chance on a record that looked interesting. I might not have even picked it up if I had not been intrigued by the cover, which featured an abstract painting: a swirly heliocentric sort of hillscape, with dotted suggestions of houses, and with, I later realised, what could be argued to be just a suggestion of a face in it. On the inner sleeve the painting was credited to ‘RJ McKendree, based on an original work by Joyce Nicholas’.
