Villager, page 24
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
This book is not about me. There are enough examples of the rock biography where the ego of the author is permitted to take over, and he becomes as much the focus of events, if not more than, his intended subject, and I do not want to be another. But it is impossible not to tell the next chapter in my McKendree pilgrimage without detailing my own very personal role in it, since without that, and what I was going through at the time, the remarkable coincidence that took me deeper into the McKendree story would not have happened.
As I have briefly mentioned before, when I began to research McKendree I was going through a difficult period in my life. I would drink to excess, be quick with my fists in bar rooms and clubs and bus queues, spend mornings wallowing in regret about what I’d said or done, then look for a quick way to make it better, which, by mid-afternoon, I would have concluded could only involve a visit to the nearest pub. After a fruitful and exciting initial couple of months on McKendree’s trail, when I’d found out just how many bit players in his story were still alive and well in the south west, I’d hit a bit of a wall. I had used almost all of my savings, the moorland sky – as it can sometimes – had done nothing but empty itself on the boggy ground for two weeks without let-up, and I found myself in the corner of the Stags Bar in the Church House in Wychcombe, staring morosely into my stout and wondering how it had all come to this. The precise ins and outs of what happened next need not be detailed here. Let it suffice to say two angry men got into a petty quarrel over their position at the bar, then one of them – believing he was acting chivalrously towards a member of the opposite gender who had recently entered the premises – slightly misjudged the size of the other man and ended up coming off slightly worse in the resulting melee, and was taken into the care of the person he believed he’d been defending, back at her house, before slipping into a semi-comatose state.
The following morning, while I slept, my new guardian angel walked her dog, a lurcher called Sherlock, and bought eggs and coffee from the Co-op. As I stumbled around the top floor of her cottage, my bruised pride was not slow in coming back to me, but the events of the previous night were revealing themselves in a staggering, painful way, one by one: my tussle, the kind and patient face of my benefactor, the late night Indian takeaway I’d insisted on then left half-eaten, the laugh we’d had at the bit on the menu where it said ‘Thank you for your costume’ and the way the laughter had hurt my bruised face. It was several minutes before I descended the stairs and set my astonished eyes on the painting in her stairway, by which time Christine – for now I remembered that was her name – was opening the front door on her return.
‘This,’ I said. ‘It’s the painting from one of my favourite albums. I can’t believe it. It’s… it’s very… it’s, well, fucking hell it’s the reason I’m here, in Devon.’
‘Ah, you saw that?’ she said, elegantly easing off a boot. ‘It’s not an original. It’s not even an original copy. Just a copy of a copy. I have been thinking of taking it down, to be honest.’
‘Yes! The original is by Joyce Nicholas. It says on the LP sleeve. I looked it up online. It’s worth a fortune now. But do you know it, Wallflower? The record.’
Seeing her properly in the sunlight that was streaming through the window above the front door, I remembered her many kindnesses from the previous night. I noticed now that she was older than me, maybe by several years, older than I’d first thought. Her face made me think of a mosaic: a very beautiful thing made entirely from shattered things. The elegant way she held the lead attached to the dog and hung her hat on the coat rail seemed to accentuate an ambience of Frenchness about her.
‘Poor Sherlock, I think he has a gorse needle in his foot. I do know it, yes. I knew the man who made it, for a while. I also knew the person who helped to get it made. But that was a very long time ago.’
‘Dick McKnight, from Equinox? No, what I am I talking about, he just released it. Chickpea? You’re kidding. You knew Chickpea?’
‘No, her name was Maddie. She was my sister.’
The two of us, under the trees. Feet in the river. Her: calm, Zen. Me: screaming like a little girl. Dragonflies around our heads. Trees greened up to the max, furred branches. Burrows in the moss. Holes leading to the underplanet. Total Alice in Wonderland shit. ‘Just concentrate on breathing properly and it won’t hurt.’ All right for her to say. Doubt the water temperature would make much difference to her. Her feet are already like blocks of ice. Let her warm them on me every night, except nothing changes. ‘Bad circulation,’ she says. ‘Runs in the family. My dad had it. Sister too.’
Sister.
Trying not to cry or shout but sweet Mabel in heaven it’s cold. Find myself imagining him here, under the moss. The video he never made, the pop star he never was. ‘He used to come up here,’ she says, as if reading my thoughts. ‘He walked a lot. It was probably part of why there was never any meat on him, even in his forties and fifties. He never wore proper shoes for it, always just some old trainers. They always had holes in them and bits of moss sticking out of them. He didn’t have nice feet. He told me once about this house he used to go to, up over there, about a mile. Some rich Aussie bought it in the nineties and the barns are Airbnbs now. But it used to be abandoned. When they knocked some of the walls down there was a story in the local paper of someone finding a doll in one of them. It’s not uncommon, around here, dolls in walls. Shoes, too. They say they were put there to help ward off evil. Although I saw the picture of that doll in the paper and it didn’t look nice. Didn’t look like it wanted to help. Anyway, Richie said he went to the house and sometimes it felt like voices were speaking to him through the stone. A woman. He said she watched him sometimes. I was a bit mean about it at the time. Thought it was nonsense, acid casualty talk, even though I later realised he wasn’t one of those. He said a lot of weird stuff. It was before I’d really listened to the record, to be honest. I was twenty-nine, more dismissive, more beholden to irony. But now I think about him saying that and I’m not sure. Do you think music can be haunted?’
‘Definitely,’ I say. Got more to say on this subject, and I start, but then I stop. My role here is listener. Cold starting to get more bearable. Acclimatising. Zen feet of a Buddhist master. Give it a week and I will be able to walk on hot coals too.
‘I met him in 1993 at the old commune, sort of a commune I suppose, anyway, up at Runnaford Hollow. But I’d actually met him before. I didn’t remember that. Why would I? I was only a little kid, five. But when he started talking I knew, and he knew who I was straight away. It was a weird time, that summer, kind of like another little 1960s, and him being there probably made it more like that. He was older than everyone else but he still didn’t seem like other people I knew who were his age. There were some quite odd people up there too, people with quite a bit of darkness in their life. We all knew he’d made a record but he was very silent about a lot of stuff. Everyone always stopped everything they were doing and listened when he played, though. We started hanging out for a while. I’d been going out with this guy Mark, younger than me, nothing serious, and we’d been doing a lot of animal liberation stuff. But then we broke into this farm where there were loads of geese and opened the gates but some geese went straight onto the road and got hit by cars and I didn’t even know why we’d broken into the farm, which didn’t seem terrible for animals in any way; that made me withdraw from all that, and start to hang out more with Richie. We even recorded a few songs, in the same room where he’d recorded Wallflower. Very lo-fi, definitely not what was in vogue with UK bands at the time, more like American stuff. Eric’s Trip, Sebadoh. Chickpea still has the mastertapes. I’ve never asked him for them back. I decided they were a mess. Richie wasn’t fond of them, either.’
‘I went to his place, Chickpea’s, to find him. There was nobody there. Just all these dogs.’
‘I wouldn’t go within 500 yards of that place. It stinks to high heaven. That’s if he’s living in the same spot. He might have moved on. I heard that he is pretty ill. He’s been a very fucked-up guy for a long time. Did you know he robbed a post office and went to prison for a while? Someone told me they went into his caravan and it was just plastered wall-to-wall with eighties porn, with one great big poster of Princess Diana in the middle of it all. I don’t know if that’s actually true. Anyway, I have a cassette. So you can hear the songs if you like.’
‘You are kidding?’
‘No. The only catch is you’ll need to find a cassette player. I don’t have one.’
‘So you and Richie. Did you…’
‘Yes. No. Sort of. It didn’t work, at all. He seemed like quite an asexual person. And there was the fact of Maddie too. It made it odder still. Maybe me getting close to him was a way to try to bring her back, a bit. After that, we sort of drifted. I know he stayed in Devon for a while, though. I would pass him in the car sometimes, walking along a lane, and wave from the car, but that was about it.’
‘And him and Maddie…’
‘There’s no way of telling. I was ten when she died. She wouldn’t have said anything to me and maybe I wouldn’t have remembered if she had. My assumption is that maybe they didn’t. He wouldn’t have told me something like that, but I do know that when they met he’d been under the impression that she had a boyfriend. I don’t remember her having boyfriends, not since school. She was very much a law unto herself, different from me and Mum and Dad. You can even see that in the way she died. We had two tractors, a new one and an old one, and Dad had told her not to take the old one with the iffy brakes to the far field, which was really steep, but she didn’t listen. She was more arty than the rest of us, she read Russian novels and listened to what my dad called “drug music”. Everyone loved her. Everyone. I couldn’t have been more different, really. I was one of the boys, not many female friends. I ended up working at the golf club, drank pints, watched football. People found me a bit stroppy, I think. But then I changed, became a lot more like her. Started going up to Exeter and Bristol, hitting all the charity shops, where you could get some total bargains back then, and buying clothes like the ones she used to wear. Gabardine skirts. Felt hats. I became much quieter. This sounds really crazy but I even used her name as my own sometimes, answered the phone as her. It was this deferred way of processing grief, I think. And then after that, I kind of became me, whatever that is. That would have been not long after Richie died, I suppose. And that was when I repainted the painting.’
‘I really can’t wait to hear these songs.’
She doesn’t seem to hear me say it, just hears the other question in my mind, the one that I was too afraid to ask.
‘And you know what the most ridiculous thing was? It wasn’t even the brakes that did it. It was just the slope. We were all supposed to go to the May fair that day, at Riddlefoot Meadow. They always had it on the last day of the month. I remember that, because she was a Gemini, and so was he, actually. She had a migraine, and said she didn’t want to go. She must have felt better. She was always trying to move some stuff. It was some walkers who raised the alarm but it was too late by that point. It’s hard to say how much too late.’
Are my feet purple? Think they are. Fish nibbling at them. Wouldn’t even feel it if they were. Exfoliation. People pay good money for this. And bad money. Wondering about that house on the hill. Can just see an old woman down the valley, calling a horse, ringing a bell. Water is mellow, tinkly. River has a song but you have to get in really close to hear it.
Excerpt from rough draft of Wallflower Child: The Ballad of RJ McKendree
‘She said love don’t come for free and she pushed me into the trees.’ – RJ McKendree, ‘Marsh Pennywort’
McKendree might not have recorded during his thirties and early forties but in early middle-age he retained what many musicians of his generation did not, something he might not have maintained had he become rich and famous: a curiosity about new music. As a forty-something, his listening remained as diverse as ever, including Indian ragas, Zambian funk, fuzz-laden Polish psychedelia on the cusp of progressive rock, but also took in some of the most interesting low-budget American bands of the time: Pavement, Swell, The Amps, Guided By Voices, The Grifters. The sessions that McKendree recorded in 1993 with Christine Chagford yielded just four songs: ‘Sister Blue’, ‘Rent My Head’, ‘Gribblins’ and ‘The Twice River’. The recording sessions took place in the same room where the songs for Wallflower had been recorded two and a half decades earlier, with the same engineer, Chickpea. The songs – all duets between Chagford and McKendree, with the exception of ‘Sister Blue’, which features Chagford’s lone, gossamer vocal under a lagoon of tape hiss – are an unusual mixture of sunshine pop sweetness and Sonic Youth-like pre-grunge feedback and have a lo-fi quality that makes them sound like they’re coming from a stairwell three rooms distant. The two vocalists, meanwhile, sound connected and not connected, awkwardly spliced together somehow, yet all the more charming from that, and exempt from the ‘empty biscuit barrel’ sound that blighted so many of the bigger budget records of the nineties and makes them sound so horribly dated now. The sessions themselves were fragmented and chaotic, with Chickpea – who was suffering from what was later discovered to be the first of three bouts of bowel cancer – swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, leaving his post at the mixing desk every few minutes to use the nearest water closet, or just not turning up at all on the afternoon that had been arranged. The songs remain, to this day, unreleased.
‘Have you heard the term “impostor syndrome”?’ Chagford says to me. ‘I wonder if most people – apart from the really arrogant and privileged – have it. I think maybe I have it more than most. I have this recurring dream where somebody comes and tells me I’m not allowed to go on living the way I am because there’s a qualification missing from my past, and I have to go back and sort everything. I think it comes from this feeling in my life that I’ve never really stuck at something and completed it. I quit my bartending job and sort of ran away from it. I left school as soon as I possibly could. I chose not to stay on at the farm after it became too much for Mum and Dad to manage. Even the eco-terrorism stuff: I was never fully there with it. And those recordings were the same. It was another unfinished thing. But around that time I had another recurring dream, a proper nightmare, really. It was about Maddie. I didn’t dream actually doing it but in the dream I always knew that we’d been arguing and I’d pushed her off something high into some water and in the dream she kept coming back as this doll, I don’t know, maybe the really old doll Richie had told me about that he’d found in the wall, but maybe not, because I don’t really know what that doll looked like, but what would happen is that as the doll Maddie would sing and tell everyone about what I’d done to her. And then this ultra-weird thing happened which was that at the Newbury bypass protest march a few years later I met Maggie and Oliver Fox, you know, who’d done The Gribblins for TV, which I absolutely loved as a kid, with all that moss and everything, and the Water Bears always having a go at them, which I loved maybe even more. I was there with Mark, because we were still friends, although there was nothing else between us by this point, and he was really involved with the whole thing, getting arrested and chaining himself to trees, but I was really only a daytripper there, so it was just another example of how I am a bit half-arsed about everything, and at the end of the day I ended up getting a lift back down here to Devon with the Foxes, who were really lovely people, just as lovely as you’d imagine, and they invited me in to their house, which was this massive barn, which I remember had all these ladders and mannequins everywhere, and a swimming pool outside with frogs and leaves in it, and above the fireplace I noticed there was one of the actual Gribblins, just sitting there. And then after that, every time I had the dream where Maddie was the doll, she would be this Gribblin. So essentially the dream became about my sister, coming back as a seventies TV character, and singing a song to everyone about how I’d murdered her.’
Hot air balloon! Me! Who’d have thunk it? Up here. Me, who used to refuse to walk over the high bridge over the motorway and go a mile further along to the underpass instead. Is that turbulence? Do you get turbulence in balloons? No room for a black box recorder here. Not with four of us in the basket: me, Chris, Titus and Jen, who is down for the weekend. One of Titus’s toys, this. Seems to be in control. Took lessons years ago. His dad. Professional. Did it for Virgin. Flew with Branson. Hung out with him and Mike Oldfield and Oldfield’s kettle drums. Oldfield shy, still looking like a boy at thirty-two. Avoiding going over the field of cows now. You can’t do that, Titus says, because the cows think the sound of the burning propane is the aggressive roar of a giant skybeast and freak out. Going south, down the river. Cottages on their own. Mystery homes, invisible to the land eye. Secrets of the sky. How on earth do you get to these places by car? Chris’s hand in mine. Think Jen is cool about me and her. Seems it. Two of them talked about millinery. Jen is taking a course. Chris did one last year. Compared hats. Seemed to hit it off. Almost left them to get off with each other. Chris, eating a nobbly orange. Sailing the peel away on the wind. Likes the big ones. Not me. I’m more of a satsuma boy. I watch her. Lines blurring. What am I? Lover or biographer? Can I be both? Titus taking us lower, following the curve of the river. Don’t think he’s going to crash land. Got some champagne with him. Expensive stuff. If you end up on private land you have to give the bottle to the owners. Tradition. ‘Every landing is a crash landing if you’re in a balloon, really,’ he says. Reassuring. That confidence, rife, even up here. Nothing touching him. Bending with the wind, fragrant, easing through it all like he’s made of flowers. Could I make myself like that? Is being like that within my capability, with where I’m from, who I’m from? Anyway, doesn’t matter. Not much matters up here. Not the book, because who will read it. Not the rent, because it’s not due for another month, and besides Titus said I could earn some money by doing some picking if I like. Harvest soon. Reddening land below. Looks like a map: a map of what I’m writing. But who will ever see it? Who cares? And that doesn’t matter either right now, because I’ve got Chris. Hand back in mine now, sticky from the orange. Does this work, two broken people together? Are we jigsaw pieces, or just shards? Shut up, Martin. Stay out of the future. Stay here. It’s good up here. She’s good. Life’s good. Cucumber’s good. Look at it all below you. Is that the spooky barn we walked past? It is. Is that the building where ‘Sister Blue’ was recorded? It is. Is that the sheep you cuddled last week? It is. Is that your estranged father? No. It is a Jersey cow. Is that the pub where you decked the esteemed newspaper editor Richard Peck? No, it’s not. That’s a million miles away, in another universe. We can do this, Chris. We can do it here, I think. Look, it’s the mist. I can’t believe it. The one you said still looked for the river, even though the river was filled in years ago. It’s the actual, famous mist. Well, not famous, more like cult mist, really. Famous in a quiet way, underappreciated. That poor, sad mist. Never stops searching. And then it goes. But then there’s more mist, and I suppose even though it’s not the same mist, it is the same mist, and everything starts over again, and, even though it’s different mist, made of different particles, I suppose it never forgets. It will always be here, trying to find the answer to its question.
