Villager, page 23
One afternoon about a week after I’ve been to see Angus, my phone rings, and it’s him, although I don’t know at first because I haven’t saved his number because rock stars you’ve interviewed aren’t going to be your friend.
‘I had one more thought, laddie, regarding your wee book,’ he says. ‘The boy who produced the album, Chickpea. The great big slab of beef. He might be able to tell you a bit more about your man McKendree. If ye can get any sense out of him. He still lives down here, up in the hills behind Dawlish. Shite thing is I don’t have his number…’
‘Damn.’
‘I can tell you where his caravan is, though.’
*
Nobody talked about ‘acid folk’ in the seventies so nobody called the Wallflower LP that when it was released. ‘Acid folk’ is what it has been described as more recently by record collectors but I am not sure if that is truly accurate. Genres are just restrictive boxes that were made to contain something naturally slippery, and, often, the more slippery something is, the better it is. To me Wallflower is as bucolic as it is acid, as eastern as it is western, as jazz as it is folk, as elemental as it is mystic, as spectral as it is real. It sounds possessed to me, by a landscape, possibly by a woman, or maybe two. All of this is very hard to get a grip on for the listener, and it’s perhaps in this slipperiness where another part of the mystique lies.
Songs such as ‘Penny Marshwort’, ‘Marsh Pennywort’ (a more hazy, whispery reprise of the earlier song but also something more than that), ‘Mrs Nicholas’ and the reworking of the little-known traditional Devonshire folk ballad ‘Little Meg’ all give the impression of a state of hypnosis induced by female characters, potentially even the same female characters. Once the listener learns of the close friendship McKendree struck up with Maddie Chagford, the daughter of a farmer living on the edge of the moor, it’s tempting to speculate to just what extent she was his muse. Chagford died in 1974, aged just twenty-five, in a heart-breaking tractor crash on the farm, so by the time McKendree returned to the West Country for the deferred attempt to promote his album, he was too late to consolidate anything that might have sparked between them, and perhaps it is this, rather than the manner of his death, that is the biggest tragedy of all. Maddie was not his last romance, if a romance was what it was, but he never married and for the remainder of his life certainly never had a live-in girlfriend or sustained a relationship for longer than seven months.
‘There is one other thing I just remembered,’ says Maggie. ‘I can’t believe I forgot. I do worry about myself sometimes. Well, so the thing is, we did see McKendree one more time. Or at least I thought it could have been him, and Oliver was sure it was. It was at the march to protest the bypass. 1996, or 1995, was that? You’d probably know as well as I do. He was a few rows behind us but then we lost sight of him. I remember he was with this very beautiful black boy wearing a silk scarf. It can’t have been all that long before he died.’
What is this hair on me? Tiny hairs, all over my t-shirt. Get off me, hairs. These things are ferocious. I think it’s the sofa. Whose sofa is it? Seems familiar, but it’s not mine, not Titus’s. That’s where the hairs are coming from, the sofa. But where did they come from before that? God, there are SO MANY of them. I just can’t put it together. My brain is too dried out, too big for my skull. It’s a wonder it’s still inside there. If you took it out and tried to fit it back in you’d never manage it. Why do I continue to be this stupid when my brain is this big? Fuck this fucktangular life. OK, kitchen. Water. Tastes good. I need salt. Who decided to make taps so loud and why do they hate me? What did I ever do to deserve this? Who lives here and why am I alone here? Painting of a cow on the wall. Seedlings. Why won’t my left eye open? I think an enemy might have Copydexed it shut. Scent of lily and coffee. Pot is warm. Guitar. Spider plant. Oxygen Steve who did the listings page at Melody Maker had one. Used to go to his house with Adam from Engine Room PR before gigs. Hated that plant, Adam did. Don’t know why. Used to piss in the soil when Oxygen Steve was out of the room. Johnny Slazenger came over one time and joined in. PRs. Can’t trust any of them. Nice table, this. I notice tables more nowadays, me. Coins on it. £1.56. Enough to buy some eggs from an honesty box outside a farm. RSPCA newsletter next to the coins. Dark bottle of hair product. Miss Delicious Sea Spray, ‘for that “just out of the waves” look’. But does it also contain fish piss, mystery and the souls of the dead? If not, I’m not into it. Open laptop. Some bread! Is there anything to spread on it, I wonder. Ooh yeah. Watch out technology ’cause I’m using honey. Why is nobody else here? Not a man’s house. 91 per cent sure of that. Sex? No. Didn’t happen. Can feel my loins telling me that. Neglected of late. Must do something about it. Clean the pipes. ‘A freelancer’s lie down’, the journos used to call it in London. But not here. Of course not here. Anyone could walk in. Well, not anyone, but the owner. Ah, I think it’s coming back. A woman, her dog, limitless source of tiny hair. Cold flannel on my face. Such big sad eyes, looking down at me, eyes that seemed to stretch in their corners and reach out to try to tell their tale. French dress sense, a bit, sort of. Mid-forties? OK, that is enough of standing up. Tactical vomit might be in order. Finger down the throat. Puke’s sweet release. Steps outside, an excited canine whimper, key unlocking a door. Does that paper bag have poppadoms in? Ooh, one left. Nice and rubbery, just like I like them. Which kind person did this for me? Ah, I think I remember: it was me. Top bloke, my past self. Like him a lot. Sometimes.
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
When I arrive at Chickpea’s, it’s the smell that hits me, before anything else, before I get around the corner and see the rotting half Ford Escorts and three-quarter Mitsubishis, the motorbike wheels, the strange rusting gurney, the chimney pots, the tiny pink child’s bike sinking into the weeds on the high bank, the pile of defeated smoking something behind the corrugated iron shed, the lone disconsolate horse with the fluffy feet tied to a stake, the caravan with the pen of barking dogs outside and the other caravan that looks like it’s been subject to its own internal hurricane and the other caravan behind that with more penned and caged dogs outside. It’s the smell of the last day of every music festival I’ve ever attended but as if that smell has then had oil poured on it and been grilled for a year. Dogs yell at me from all sides from behind fences and awful walls and wire mesh, and two more tousled black ones trot down the lane to meet me. I knock on the door of the red caravan, the one I have been told about, the one with the car engine on its roof, but there is no answer. An old unconnected sink looks up at me from the dirt, asking for help. The two black dogs follow me around the back, eager-tailed. ‘And this is the place where we keep our old tyres and cookers,’ the dogs seem to say, proudly. Half a Renault van offers ‘OODLE GROOMING SERVICES, OTHER CANINES CONSIDERED’. I see nobody. I want to leave, just as I have since I first smelled the smell. The relief upon doing so is so immense, the relief makes having been there almost worthwhile. I proceed down the lane, out of this rust and asbestos apocalypse, out of this inexplicable steel village run by dogs. The smell departs and butterflies cartwheel alongside me, into the sun.
*
Devon retained its mysterious hold on McKendree and perhaps it was all about that first journey he made there, from California, and some kind of attempt to recreate it, and the inspiration that flowed through him as a songwriter for that one summer, which led to the recording of the songs on Wallflower. He returned in 1978, for his gig with Dick McKnight, and then again in the late eighties, and twice in the mid and late nineties, sleeping in tents and on friends’ sofas, and at a travellers’ commune in the foothills of the moor. Ever since his early twenties, McKendree had suffered from upper back problems and blackouts, and it seemed that his one-in-a-million death, on the morning of 31 December 1999, was a final sort of culmination of these. A haemorrhage during treatment for spine issues is not a rock-and-roll death but McKendree’s was not a rock-and-roll life in much of an archetypal sense. It is perhaps fitting that it ended in Devon, the place where he’d made the defining artistic statement of his life. There is also a certain poetry to the fact that he never got to see the twenty-first century: a lost artist who was not made for an era where art didn’t get lost any more, when music became so much more accessible, cheapened by choice, when archive footage was there for free, to be picked over, shared, and shared and shared, then shared again.
It is a little difficult to remember just how hard it was to access music itself in the seventies, eighties and the first part of the nineties, let alone to access a publicity-shy, commercially moribund creator of that music. No Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, Discogs, eBay. Prior to the arrival of the Internet, it was hard enough to track down your own estranged father, let alone a psychedelic primitivist’s folk music from California whose last recorded output had come out three years before your birth, and even then only in Hungary. This book could not have been written then, I suspect. This dearth of digital network, of all the invisible wires that now loop and cobweb together and connect everything and make the world seem so small yet so much more intimidatingly massive and complex, was no doubt another reason why McKendree continued to go largely unrecognised as the paisley acid genius he was, but what it gave him was the luxury of living a life under the radar, the ability to stay modest and quiet and unexpected. The more I learned about McKendree from the few people I talked to who met him and were still alive, the more I suspect that living some other way would have been deeply uncomfortable for him.
Eye cleaned up now. Sat very patient while she did it, didn’t even whimper. Still won’t open but feeling better for a woman’s touch. Walking now, me and her and the dog. Couldn’t believe it when she told me her full name. But by that time I’d seen the painting – not the cow, the other one – and something in me knew, even though I hadn’t even known she existed. All too convenient, really. Thought I was in my own fantasy. Film of my life. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m dead. If I am, being dead is OK. Some great ladies here in the afterlife. She takes me up the back of the tor, round past the house that looks like it has ghosts inside, the one where you watch and wait for the terrible face that will press itself against the depraved smudgy glass. Water is rushing down the lanes and beside them. A river, and then another dry something that used to be a river. ‘They reclaimed the land in the fifties,’ she says. ‘Filled it in. But you still get the mist down there, looking for the river like it should still be there.’ Poor mist. Like a lost soul looking for a dead lover. Like a singer looking for an old muse. Shut up. Don’t think about that. Sheep carcass. Meat almost gone off the bones. Dog won’t leave it alone. ‘Come here, Sherlock, stop frolicking in former animals!’ Viaduct. The hill and its stepladder of rocks. ‘Used to be a volcano, once,’ she says. ‘1976, I think it was.’ Funny, she is. Effortlessly. Some of the lads at the paper used to say women couldn’t do humour well. Fucking bullshit. She’s not wearing make-up but her eyes seem smudged, somehow. Entrancing. Wish I’d properly decked that guy last night; caught me unawares before I’d got a chance. Didn’t even know I’d cut in on him at the bar. Tracksuit bastard. ‘What’s your problem? Go over there and sit with Sad Susan while you wait your turn.’ Well, here I am with Sad Susan. That’s the main thing. Cows in this field. Coming towards us. Lary buggers. ‘Nothing to be scared of,’ she says. ‘They’re all lovely. Just stand your ground.’ Ah, we’re going past that bit of barn. Always freaks me out, that place. ‘There’s a rumour that someone photographed it and when the photo was developed the whole building was there, just as it would have been when it was built in the 1700s,’ she says. ‘Nobody has ever seen the photograph, though, conveniently.’ Muddy. Her legs don’t half motor, for a little person. Big puddles. I help her over; her hand is clammy and small. And then she lands, kind of in my sleeve, and stays there and holds on to me. There’s so much I want to ask her. But all I say is ‘Are you cold?’ and we don’t move for what feels like the next fortnight.
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
By 1989, RJ McKendree was a middle-aged man, albeit an oddly youthful-looking one, with few of the trappings of middle-aged life. He lived in his mother’s house in the suburbs of Tulsa, which he’d inherited upon her death four years earlier. He socialised with few people besides his sister, who lived just two streets away. For income, he continued to work in a camera shop in the centre of town. His music had reached the pinnacle of its obscurity. Dick McKnight had died of heart failure a year earlier, Selkie Records had long since folded and Wallflower was remembered only by – at the very most – those still alive who were involved in its release or had bought one of the small number of copies of it that had been pressed. McKendree was sometimes known to busk in downtown Tulsa (note to self: FIND SOURCE/TULSA RESIDENT AND VERIFY THIS) but had largely abandoned playing music in any committed sense, yet it was at this point that he decided to buy a plane ticket, pack a few clothes and his guitar, and visit Devon for a third time. What was his impetus? We will possibly never know. Was he still searching for the ghost of Maddie? Had he finally realised, after all these years, that the UK’s deep south west was the place where he most fitted in, or at least the place where he felt least like an outsider?
Not bad, this cucumber. Eating them all the time now. Bite into the fuckers like a Twix, just while idly doing my stuff. Had a word with Titus and he’s agreed to defer rent payments for a couple of months. He’s a good guy, the cucumber baron. Course he is. Related to Jen. Badge of quality. Teach me to write posh people off, that will. Veg paradise, this. Am allowed as much as I like. Sometimes find a box outside my door. Tasty rejects. Carrots the world wrote off as ugly without stopping to look into their pure soul. Soil-caked muscular dystrophy broccoli. Outsider sweetcorn. Rebel cabbage. Nobbled geek courgettes. Could almost stop going to the shop altogether if I cut out carbs and personal hygiene and accepted extreme dust as a part of domestic life. Got the stuff Chris asked for today. That bread she likes, with the olives in it. Why do they put a little plastic window in the packaging? Food doesn’t look out and see what’s going on in the street. It’s not your nan. Newspaper. Don’t know why. Thought Chris might like one. Good stories today. An aromatherapist in Paignton has been sentenced for terrorising her neighbour by repeatedly banging bin lids. ‘The jury heard that Karen Birchall, who practises aromatherapy under the name “Mitzy Moon”, started banging the bin at 3 a.m., asking her retired neighbour Denise Sutcliffe, “How are your nerves now?”’ Bastard in front of me didn’t put the divider down on the checkout. Sure sign of a wanker. Shit. Forgot candles, the scented ones. Will she hate me? Is this married life, suddenly? We only met two Fridays ago. Used her card to pay today. Waiting for a new one of my own. Lost mine in a peat bog, Sunday afternoon. Walked up by the cemetery, the burned-out church. Good names on the tombs. Meredith Bunce. Elsie Welsey. John Peter Trumbletits. OK, made that last one up. Stuck for a name for your novel? Go to a cemetery. Grave of a small child. First World War. Scary statue, head missing. Forget-me-nots. Wildflowers love dead people. Me? I’m coming back as a primrose in the next world. Walked up, up, up the hill that goes to the clouds. Past two old cottages. Thick stone walls built to withstand Satan’s bronchitis. Sign above a door: ‘DUCK’. The duck who lives there must be fucking massive. Sign above another door: ‘REBUILDED 1847’. Great but more importantly can you tell me when was it builded? Higher, the old mine with the stone eye windows. Place where it looks like it all ends. Buttock hills. Wire grass. Ground like a mouth, sucking at you, not happy with just your feet, wants your knees too. Lose your whole leg around here if you don’t watch it, or at least a good part of it. Why do you only have one foot, shin and ankle? Ah, I left the others up on Trembling Hill. It seemed easier in the long run than bringing them back. The earth owns them now. Moss everywhere. Trees all in their sartorial stoner-rock phase. Vincent Price’s voice in my head, narrating my journey. What a mid-Atlantic accent would be if the mid-Atlantic contained a pagan island with its own thriving population of wolves. Thought I might meet one of Oliver Fox’s Gribblins, go on an adventure, join the tribe, biggest member, only redhead, the new leader, a simpler life. Another hangover vanquished by the moor. Passed my Stepping Stone Proficiency Test, all the levels, breezed the Beginner and the Intermediary but then almost came unstuck at Holy Shit These Slippy Bastards Aren’t Even Above The Water. Fucking bench up here at the top carved out of stone. What pre-industrial maverick did that? Garden furniture essentials. All the rage in the 1680s. Sat down on the granite, looked in my wallet to check how many stamps I had on my loyalty card for Toploaded Burrito in Camden. Don’t know why. Not going back there any time soon. Just wanted to check. See what I was missing out on. Saw my debit card was missing. Panic! Remembered I’d stored it in my phone case pocket instead. Relief! Looked in my phone case pocket. Wasn’t there either. Panic! Had my phone out to take a photo of some bog asphodel half a mile back. Must have dropped it. Walked back. Got on my hands and knees and ferreted around, trying not to sink. Wasn’t there. Couple of hikers passed, binoculars, matching red anoraks. Twitcher types. Them: ‘Oh dear, what have you lost?’ Me: ‘My bank card.’ Everyday occurrence here on the moor, sort codes seeping into the peat. Gave up after twenty minutes. Three youths coming the other way. Duke of Edinburgh award types. Wholesome. ‘Can you do us a favour? Can you call my number if you happen to spot a black HSBC card down there in the bog?’ ‘Sure. I’ll just save it on my phone. What’s your name? Don’t worry. I’ll just put it down as Bank Card Guy on the Moor.’ No call. Trudged back to Chris’s. Creaky hips. Blister bigger than the toe it was attached to. No money for beer. Can’t take myself anywhere. Hope you know what you’re getting yourself into, Chris.
