Villager, page 28
You can be quite blunt sometimes, you know. The point is, I don’t want to represent, I want to be. You get tempted to represent, because the rewards for it are instantaneous, and also representing feels like a correction to all the times you are misrepresented – by people who judge you solely by your image, by the media, by people who misunderstand your work because they are too distracted to properly pay attention to it but also feel obligated to have an opinion on it. I am aware that I could press the ‘broadcast’ switch and we could flip this conversation and make it live, show people this entire walk, and that I would feel an instant sense of warmth and connection, or a digital mimicry of it, and people would be all like ‘Bea, we have missed you so much! It’s so nice to see you!’ and that is not totally unappealing to one part of my brain that I have tried to understand more extensively over recent times. But then I know I’d feel a bit hollow afterwards, and what would it have achieved, apart from giving away some of my life, when really I’m quite fine just being here with you?
Yes, with me. Whatever I am. That’s nice. I am touched. Even though you can’t actually touch me, physically.
I think you know how I feel about the Friendly But Edgy record by now. I think it’s an OK pop album, for the naive and noisy and pliable being I was at that point in my life. I am sure I will never have a record sell that many copies again and I am fine with that, and am especially fine with not experiencing many of the social and administrative by-products of that. It seems like a very… obedient record to me now, although that is probably as much about the image of the record that is reflected back at me by society as it is about the record itself. I’d sometimes look at me, this me that existed inside a virtual space, in the aftermath of that – and the aftermath of Rust to an extent, even though that was a smaller record, ‘the difficult second album’ I suppose you’d call it – and I’d not recognise this person who allegedly made them, this other person that a distracted hive mind had created and existed solely inside people’s visors. There’d be these huge online spaces where people would talk about the lyrics to ‘Thirty-Second Casanova’, explaining exactly which parts of my romantic life I was writing about in the lyrics, which disappointments and failures, when in reality nearly all of it was based on a story my friend Laura had told me back when I was in Year 11 at school.
Was Laura a Laura, by any chance?
She absolutely was. 110 per cent. One of the best Lauras I’ve ever met. Then after Rust I started having these recurring dreams where there was this line of strangers, an absolute train of them, all coming into my house, and I looked for the end of the train of strangers, where it might finally stop, and I couldn’t see it, there were just more and more people stretching off, into some trees in the distance. And I think that was a pivotal moment for me. And of course I was lucky because I’d had Reka to tell me what it was like, from her experience, which makes me feel sorry for people who are in that position and don’t have somebody to tell them what it’s like or guide them through it. She was there for a while, right there, somewhere much scarier than I was, and she killed it stone dead, snuffed out the fame she had created. And was undoubtedly happier for it. Not everyone can do that. Not everyone has the choice. I used to read about these rock suicides, the 27 Club and so on, and not understand it, baffled as to why these beautiful and talented and adored people would want to end it, apart from maybe that they were fucked up on drugs and booze. I wondered why they couldn’t just step off the rollercoaster for a while, stop doing gigs, stop making records, stop appearing. But now I understand. People want so much from you. You have no idea until you’re there. Also there’s another kind of overdose going on, an overdose of yourself being reflected back at you, and a sort of weird need for it, a preoccupation with it, and that need, and the simultaneous hatred of it, finally becomes a cage you can’t get out of. Because the adoration you experience from strangers is every bit as dangerous to your mental health as the loathing you sometimes feel from them too. I stopped before that happened, and wasn’t even that well known in the first place. And now here I am. I rarely get recognised, especially as I no longer look like ‘Her’, the screen me, the other me that never existed properly anyway, that I partially invented. I can still live. But of course I still want what I do – what I really do, the work – to be appreciated. I still want to communicate and be heard. That’s entirely human, and entirely natural. Communication is positive. I love it.
Are you absolutely sure? You said a few weeks ago that your new LP was going to be a concept album called Cave and that the concept was that you were going to record it as a gatefold double album featuring twenty-three songs, get just one copy of it pressed, then travel to France and leave it in the furthest, dampest recesses of a cave in the Pyrenees.
OK, I was having a bad day that day. Anyway, let’s not get too self-analytical about all this. Because in the end that becomes about the ego too, and the ego is what I’m trying to destroy, at least partially. Also, you’ve heard me talk about all of this too many times before.
I don’t mind. I like hearing your stories.
Doesn’t the village look pretty from up here? I’m just going to climb right up to the highest rock, because obviously you can’t hike to the top of the tor without doing that, it’s against the rules. Then I think if we go directly in the direction of the second buttock hill about two miles over there, we’ll be somewhere near where Craig said the spot was. It’s weird: you know, sometimes when I’m up here I feel like I’m walking on a man’s face. I remember Reka saying when she came back here for the second time, from Hungary, and then when she came back for the final time, from Canada, she loved the way the village could surprise her when she chanced upon a new angle to view it from. I suppose this is a very familiar angle, though. I am looking down now and thinking, ‘That looks like the kind of place I’d like to live,’ and, guess what, I do! That’s kind of cool, isn’t it, don’t you think? And isn’t that mist nice? The way it’s below us and the sun is breaking through it and the sun seems kind of below us in a way too. Oh my god, I think that is my actual shadow on it, wow.
That is known in weather folklore as a Brocken spectre. It comes from the Brocken, which is a German mountain that tends to be very misty: a place where that often happens. With a Brocken spectre, you also often get what used to be known as a glory, which Coleridge and Wordsworth both observed in their time in the Lake District, where a psychedelic selection of colours form around the shadow of your own head, on the mist. This is usually part of a mistbow. And all this is very quintessentially autumnal, which reminds me that it’s October right now, which – and please forgive me for labouring this point – seems quite a late and chilly time of year to be diving into a river on a moor, and that maybe it should be postponed until next summer, if not longer.
It’s quite curious: at first I just used to think you were merely a source of factual information, but now I feel like you also might be my conscience too, or maybe a parent, or an invisible brainjournalist relentlessly interviewing me for a double-page feature in your head magazine.
I know. I find it curious too. It’s happened, and I don’t know why. I have definitely changed and feel that change inside of me, whatever inside of me is. Lately I have experienced a desire to eat grass.
See that barn wall down there, the ruin? I hate that. I don’t know why I hate it, because it’s actually a very attractive bit of wall, where you can still see evidence of some skilled brick nogging, but I hate it. I have just remembered a phrase of Reka’s, ‘jump the sun’. It was what she said she used to say a lot when she was about to record a song: ‘Let’s really try to jump the sun with this one!’ I feel like that is what we are doing, all this way up here, right now, jumping the sun. I think that is what I will call my biography of Reka when I finally get my notes together. Jumping the Sun: the Wild Life and Times of Reka Takacs. I think it is better than my original title, Dreamweaver.
I feel you feel that way about the barn too. I have felt you feel it every time we have walked past it, ever since I started to feel things. And I agree: that is a better title. Do you definitely think you have enough material to write the biography?
I think I do. I have the journals, and, although they’re very sporadic, there’s a lot there. I know I only met her when she was already in her eighties but we became very close. I think it’s an amazing story: her childhood in poverty in Hungary, the crude yet somehow haunted and alchemic early songwriting, her and Martin’s move back to Eastern Europe, the way the two of them popularised the work of McKendree, her more solitary period, the attempt to capture the sound of falling dust on record, the animal rescuing and prize-winning horticulture. There will be gaps, of course. She would never talk much about her time at the house where she lived with Maureen, where my grandfather was conceived, apart from the garden. I know Maureen died and Reka still found it very upsetting to think about, all these years on. I know the village gravedigger had once lived in the house, which I suppose makes the place even more dark in my mind now, although the building is now no longer there and the land it was on has sort of been subsumed by the big house next door. But, look, gaps are OK. It gives the reader the opportunity to tell some of the story in their own way in their own mind. Reka said Martin worried that his biography of RJ McKendree had too many gaps in it, but when it finally came out, after Martin died, a lot of people thoroughly enjoyed it.
Why did Martin and Reka split up in the end?
I am not certain. Maybe the fire just went out. I know he liked to drink a fair bit. I’m also aware Reka felt a bit troubled by the close friendship he maintained with his previous partner, Christine Chagford, which definitely rekindled when Reka and Martin moved back to Devon, although I think it was just friendship and I know Reka liked Christine a lot too, was even a little obsessed with her in some ways. Apparently when Martin was dying it was Christine who stopped her entire life just to care for him.
What about Thomas Molland? Why did Reka break up with him?
I seem to remember her official explanation was he was just a narcissistic cunt.
What about you? Will you be in the book?
I think I will keep myself out of it.
But you are her great-granddaughter, and massively influenced by her work! You said it yourself just now: you got very close to one another. You have a bunch of her most cherished possessions in your house. The 7-inches. They’re each worth close to £500,000 now. You could buy a beach hut up north with that. A good one, with a door and everything. And then there’s the painting, and that freaky old doll she owned.
Yes, but I was also a slightly sore point for her, or rather my grandma was. She gave her away and tried her best to move on from that, as agonising as that must have been. And she knew my great-granddad for all of five minutes, at a time when she was enjoying her young life, taking control of her own decisions. If I hadn’t done my research and tracked her down she would have gone on in blissful ignorance of my existence. So, however she felt about my company, I was always an unwelcome reminder of a hard and reluctant decision early in her life that she had tried to put behind her.
But she did adore you, viewed you as a protégé, and gently but emphatically encouraged you to become who you are, artistically.
Anyway, this book will be about her, not me. I’m trying to annihilate the ego, remember? Also the painting isn’t the original, so it’s not actually the future pension fund you might think it is. Ooh, I love this bit, it’s like getting close to the roof of the world. It’s where everything starts again, I think, where the clouds and rivers renew it all. Listen to the water here. The noise is different. It’s different to down by the house. I was talking to Sue, who lives down the road, and we both said the same thing, that we listen to the river when we’re in bed and have the window open and sometimes we wait for the noise to stop; we forget it’s not a shower or a sink being run next door, and then we remember it’s never going stop, that it’s just going to keep on renewing itself, keep being the same but different, long after we are gone, and maybe that’s obvious but it’s also pretty wild, when you’re close to it and experiencing it and realising it. Oh wow. Look at the pattern of the stones in the bottom of this uprooted tree trunk. Don’t tell me that’s not art. Imagine the sound this big gentleman made when he fell.
A beech. 172 years old. Came down in December 2094. Nobody actually heard the sound. But it still made one. They always do. Just to clear that up.
How do you know this stuff, but not some other stuff?
I don’t know. I also know that Toadpit Lane is called that because there once used to be a pit full of toads down there, but I suppose that is self-explanatory.
Oh you saw that too, back at the start of the walk? It’s funny how you get these little connections that get your mind working, especially when you’re on a long walk, because I was thinking about that name, and then we were just talking about Reka trying to capture the sound of falling dust and turn it into a rhythm track, and it got me thinking about the Grateful Dead recording the sound of clean air in the desert and the sound of heavy air in the city and mixing them together into a rhythm track for Anthem of the Sun, which is an album where I think they really did jump the sun, and that got me thinking about Owsley Stanley, who was the sound man for the Dead in the early days, and also principally responsible for the supply of LSD to prominent musicians in the San Francisco area in the mid-sixties, and therefore at least partially responsible for this insanely enormous amount of transcendental and frontier-breaking psychedelic music, but who, by 2007, the fortieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, survived on an exclusively meat diet and spent a lot of his free time slaughtering toads near his house in Queensland, Australia. So you’ve got this dude who has been instrumental in the mind expansion that led to one of the most flabbergastingly creative artistic periods in all of history – a time when there was so much going on that someone as talented as RJ McKendree didn’t even have room to be recognised for the genius he was – and what he ends up as is this individual who is essentially made entirely of beef and chicken and – while suffering from the cancer that he thought his carnivorous leanings would prevent – goes out and murders as many as 225 toads per day using a highly toxic liquid disinfectant called Detsol. And that got me thinking about all the people who are these radical cultural icons when they are younger and how they very gradually change and come away from what they are and let down the people who adore them in the process, and how maybe it’s in the cacophony of fame that that happens, and you don’t even know that you’re changing and gradually becoming unmoored from what you were, you don’t even know that you’re becoming a carnivorous old toad exterminator.
I am not sure you’ve chosen the best case study here. Owsley actually went out of his way not to be famous for pretty much his whole life; he was preaching the benefits of an all-meat diet as far back as the sixties when he was managing the Dead and they would try to sneak chocolate bars into the studio behind his back while he wasn’t looking; he killed the toads because they were poisoning the baby fish in the lake near his house, and, though he did have throat cancer for many years, what actually killed him wasn’t that, but a car crash on 12 March 2011 (not 13 March 2011, as is sometimes reported). But I do take your point and see exactly what you are saying.
Know-it-all! Anyway, the thing is, I don’t want to get caught and lost in the cacophony. I don’t want to kill toads, even if they do poison fish. I like toads. I am also enjoying the way life has slowed down since I came off the road, the real one and the virtual one. It’s me who is controlling how I feel, not the hive mind. I’ve got really good at gardening, and flipping omelettes.
You also haven’t had a sexual partner for the last sixteen months.
That’s where having a nice soft right hand and an extremely good imagination is beneficial. Who knows? Maybe I’ll bump into Craig again. Plus, I have you.
But you can’t feel me.
I almost can. I wish I could, sometimes.
I wish you could too.
Do you miss me on the days when I switch you off?
I do. A lot. And I don’t know how that’s possible, but it is.
Ooh shit, I’ve tripped over. Sweet Mabel in heaven, it is SO boggy here. I’ve got peat all over my hand and my kaftan sleeve. What is this? Some weird black rectangle, plastic. Eugh. Must have been here for ages.
I believe it is a debit card, probably from the early decades of this century. HSBC. The name of the holder appears to have faded and rubbed away, though. I suggest you put it in your pocket for now and recycle it when you get home.
I don’t mind that I’m dirty. I’m too happy. You see, getting up here, alone, in this air, being away from the pressure to represent myself, I’ve had time to think about what I really want to do next, which you don’t when you’re on the road, or when you’re on the digital road, doing all the representing, and that’s when you go down paths that don’t suit you and get you trapped. I feel in a way that my career has only just started. I’m thirty-four. Reka didn’t make her best music until she was almost a decade older than that. We’re on the cusp of a new century. The world hasn’t ended yet. I think about me ten years ago, and I did what I did, and people liked it, but… the voice. It was sort of an amalgam of other voices, which everyone has to be at the start. All those great psychedelic bands: they started out by doing fairly straightforward cover versions, didn’t they. But you need your own voice, and I think that’s part of what makes something last, makes it something that is more than a song that people really like for six months then forget about forever, and you can’t force that voice. Some people are lucky enough to have it very quickly. I reckon McKendree might not have had it in 1966, but he definitely had it by 1968. It’s not been so quick for me, and I do think some of those early songs, they were kind of… Reka lite. But I think it’s here now, and it wasn’t about any trick or knack, it just came about by playing and, well, living on the planet for a number of years. There’s this feeling that all I was doing before was just sort of revving my engine, and now I’m ready to go. It’s exciting. There’s so much to be done. There’s Reka’s book, and the River Goddess album and that’s just the beginning.
