Elizabeth Hand: Wylding Hall

But then I heard Nancy move very, very slightly — she must have turned her head towards his — and I heard her whisper, “ I know .”

That was all. I kept holding my breath in case they went on, but there was nothing else. I never asked Julian about it. Like I said, the next day, whatever was between us was over.

I was heartbroken, but I didn’t show it — didn’t want anyone to think it mattered. We all had mayfly relationships in those days. Girls did, anyway. You’d be with someone for a one-night stand and it was like you were engaged to be married, you’d be so excited.

But it was over. I didn’t know much back then, but I knew that whatever had happened between Julian and me was done. I have no idea what they were talking about, him and Nancy. I have no idea what they saw.

Nancy

Suddenly, I heard this uncanny singing. To this day, I can’t explain what it was. Less like singing than birdsong: quite high-pitched, almost piercing, then a series of trills, and that high keening again. Then a fluttering sound right above me, like something was trapped in the rafters.

I knew we weren’t supposed to open our eyes, but I couldn’t help it. When I heard that rustling noise, my eyes popped right open. I almost bolted. I thought it was rats scurrying around, which wouldn’t have surprised me a bit. There were all sorts of things living in the walls there. Rats and mice and god knows what.

So there I am, staring at the ceiling — and that’s when I realize it can’t possibly be rats. Whatever it is, it’s above me. The rehearsal room had very high ceilings, which should have made for a bad acoustic, but didn’t. It sounded like a bird had got in and was bashing itself against the beams up there, trying to get out.

I started to sit up, but I felt Julian’s hand on my arm, holding me back. He didn’t say anything, not out loud, but I knew he was telling me to stay beside him and look at the ceiling. Like he was a transmitter and I was picking up the frequency he was on.

I looked up, but I couldn’t see anything. It was pitch dark, darker even than it had seemed when my eyes were shut. The bird kept flying back and forth; I could hear it strike the beams and the ceiling. A hollow thump, over and over again.

There was something horrible about it. The fact that it just kept bashing itself against the beams and wouldn’t stop: it was killing itself, trying to get out. And if it did fall, it would fall on me, and that would be even more horrible.

Even with Julian trying to hold me back, I knew I had to get away. I tried to sit up, but it was like when I’d first arrived. I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. And all the while that bird is thrashing about, and Julian beside me is breathing faster and faster — it was almost like he was getting off on it.

At some point, the bird stopped flying. It must have found its way out, because I didn’t hear it fall. That was when the singing began again, the same eerie song I’d heard before.

Only now Julian sang along with it, so softly that I couldn’t hear any words. I have no idea if he was just chanting, or if he was trying to make contact with something — if he’d entered some sort of liminal state. You know, in-between: here and not-here. It’s what I do for a living, but I’ve trained myself over the decades. And I’m always very careful, because it can be extremely dangerous.

With Julian, I think he was like a kid playing with electricity. Fiddling with the wireless, touching the electric fence to get a little shock. Without knowing it, he grabbed a live wire, and— pffft . Maybe that’s how the bird found its way out. It wasn’t until long after that it struck me: maybe it wasn’t trying to find a way out at all. Maybe it was trying to find a way in.

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.