Last week I programmed the time machine to take me back to the late sixties, specifically Ladbroke Grove, I not only met Jerry Cornelius and Mick Farren but also bumped into Princess Margaret on Camden market.
We made small talk and she happened to mention an album she’d heard at Marianne Faithfuls birthday party the previous evening, she said it had given Mick the inspiration to write an unrecorded as yet track he’s provisionally called 10,000 light years from home.
I didn’t know whether she was bullshitting me or just after my co ordinates for 2023.
Either way I was at a loss of what to do before checking out Quintessence later that evening at the Roundhouse, so I went to my favourite record shop the delightfully titled Spinning in my grave on Portobello road (aka trippy hippy) and picked up a copy together with a mint copy of the latest Traffic album.
So got back to 2023 last night and gave it a listen, it’s by a groovy cat from California calling himself R J McKendree. The album is called Wallflower, was released last year and is a musical homage to his temporary home in Devon, inspired by the surrounding geography and the local people who have made this close friend of Townes Van Zandt so welcome, foremost amongst them the novelist Tom Cox and fellow musician and time traveller Will Twynham.
It’s an album of laid back haunting tunes with sumptuous strumming and whispered echoing vocals which are absolutely sublime and I feel I will have to go back and thank Princess Margaret personally tomorrow.
Now where’s that sonic screwdriver?
By John Haylock
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