Elizabeth Hand: Wylding Hall

Jon Redheim, drums and percussion

I saw it coming with Arianna. She was drop-dead gorgeous, but she was, you know, high maintenance. A cross between Nico and what’s-her-name, that French singer. Juliette Greco. Always wearing black, back before everyone and his grandmother was wearing black. She was a big mope, Arianna, and we were well rid of her. There, I said it.

Ashton Moorehouse, bass

We slept together once after a gig. She cried afterward, said she’d betrayed Julian. I told her Julian wouldn’t give a fuck. Which was true, but probably I shouldn’t have said it. She was beautiful, but too skinny for my taste. I like a girl with meat on her bones. Julian, he always went for the ones a good wind would blow away.

Lesley

I can still remember when Tom told us he’d booked Wylding Hall for the summer. Ashton and Jon weren’t happy about it. Ashton especially; he was royally pissed off. They were afraid of what they’d miss here in London. Girls, mostly, for Ashton. Boys for Jon, though no one was supposed to know that. And there’s Tom with his high-minded idea that all anyone needed was a month in the country to recover from Arianna’s death.

Yeah, I know: I’m being a snark, ’cause I wasn’t with Windhollow Faire from the very beginning and didn’t really know her. So sue me. And it’s true: with or without Arianna, they were getting a lot of gigs. Windhollow Faire had just come out that Christmas — their first album — and sales were good. There was no music press like there is now; you didn’t have Pitchfork or YouTube and all that stuff. Rolling Stone had only been around for a few years, and you had Melody Maker and NME . There was no way to really publicize your band except by playing, like, constantly. Which they did.

But to be brutally honest, even before Arianna died, they were getting tapped out. I’d heard Windhollow play a few times, and while they were good — I believe that “promising” is the overused adjective — they were never going to be much more than that if they didn’t do something drastic.

And I know Tom could see that they were starting to flag, inspiration-wise. Which is why he suggested that Julian and Will come hear me at the Troubadour one night. I was doing a couple of Dylan covers, some Velvet Underground — hardly anyone here had heard of them — along with the usual stuff from the Child Ballads songbook. I saved my own songs for last. I knew I had them as soon I did “Fallen Sky.”

Will

My god, that girl could sing! Les opened her mouth, and Julian and me looked at each other and just started laughing. By the time she got to “Fallen Sky,” we were practically climbing over the tables to ask her to join Windhollow.

Tom

In retrospect, we should have told Arianna immediately that we’d found a new female singer. I should have told her. It was my responsibility as manager. The fact that Lesley was American must have been a real slap in the face for Arianna. I’ve taken the blame from the outset. Still, Julian never forgave himself.

That was the real reason I signed that summer’s lease on Wylding Hall: to get Julian away from his bedsit in Gospel Oak. Which, let me tell you, was the most god-awful, depressing flat that you can imagine. I would have flung myself out the window, too, if I’d spent more than a week there.

Never mind, strike that. I don’t need any more crazed fans blaming me for what happened. All I can say is that, at the time, spending three months at a beautiful old wreck of a stately home in the English countryside seemed like a good idea.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty. Isn’t that what you say in America? But I didn’t have hindsight. When it came to Windhollow Faire, I was utterly blind.

Lesley

I rode down there with Julian. He had a rickety Morris Minor: there was barely room for me once he’d got his guitar and other gear into it. Everyone else went down in the van.

I’d heard Julian sing before, and of course I had the first Windhollow album. But we’d never properly met. Word on the street was, Julian Blake was the most beautiful guy anyone had ever set eyes on. Typically, I was going to be contrarian: I was determined to be unimpressed.

The truth is, I was very, very shy. I was only seventeen, remember. My mum and stepdad were American. They both died when I was fifteen, in a car accident. My biological father was from Yorkshire; he’d been married before he met my mother and already had a family. I was born here in London when he and my mum were still together, so I had dual citizenship. We used to come over for summer vacations. I got to be close with my older sister, so after the accident I came here to live with her in Rotherhithe.

I was a bad student, but I was a good singer. My dad was brilliant — he used to sing along with whatever was on the radio, but he also knew all these old English folk songs. I learned by listening to him, harmonizing. I just memorized whatever I could.

It was tough, coming to live here with my sister. People thought I was stuck-up because I was American. It was hard to make friends — I got pushed around a few times, but when I’d take a swing at them, I’d be the one got into trouble.

Eventually, I just stopped going to school, and I guess because of the whole American thing, no one followed up on me. Plus, it was the early nineteen seventies — there were kids squatting everywhere in London. I went out to Eel Pie Island and joined the commune there for a while. That’s when I started performing.

Julian was only a year older than me — fourteen months, to be exact — and he was cripplingly, almost pathologically shy. Much worse than I was.

Which of course I didn’t realize when I drove down with him to Wylding Hall. I thought he was stuck-up! He was from Hampstead. I was this blond hippie from Connecticut, even though I’d been in London for a year. I looked older than seventeen, so at first he thought I was putting him off for being younger than me.

I didn’t know that till Will told me. The two of them had grown up together. Will was almost like Julian’s interpreter — sometimes Julian was so shy, he’d just stand there right next to you and stare straight up into the sky for a quarter of an hour without saying a word. “Cloud Prince”: I wrote that about Julian. The boy with the sky in his eyes.

Jon

It’s true. When he was young, Julian was almost unearthly; he was so handsome, it was difficult for me at first to keep my eyes from him. Spooky beautiful. People thought he was gay, but he wasn’t. I was the one who was gay, though I only came out after that summer at Wylding Hall.

Believe me, I would have known if I’d had a snowflake’s chance in hell with Julian, and there was just no way. I know, darling — you’re looking at me now thinking, No shit, Sherlock! But you wouldn’t have said that back then. I was a bit of a looker myself in those days.

Oh, right, you’ve seen the documentaries and all that on YouTube. Yes, I was wasted back there behind the drum kit. But kinda cute, right?

Julian was beautiful: those high cheekbones and all that dark hair flopping around his face. His skin was so pale you wanted to write on it like paper. And he had those amazing hands, big, big hands with long, long fingers. I used to watch him play guitar and just be hypnotized. He’d open his mouth and sing “Lost Tuesdays” or “Windhover Morn,” and I’d just be a puddle — really! Me! The drummer! I used to watch him and just dream— pray —not that he’d kiss me, but that he’d write a song about me.