Hop on
Starting into this album, I have three major handicaps. I am not a long-time admirer of KLF’s “Chill Out”, I have never been on a road trip through rural England and/or Wales, and I don’t have a chance to visit one of the screenings of the film the album belongs to.
Instead, we have parked our imaginary cars up in rural Yorkshire, before the break of dawn. It’s a bunch of survivors entering a bus, those who made it through the night before, the ones that survived the 90s, a few who have made their way through the first annoyances of a midlife crisis, and the ones who somehow got over beans for breakfast at five.
The guys who created “Still Out” equipped the album with an insert, explaining the route and the main stops. Great. This guide and the sounds are inspiration enough to get on that imaginary bus and take the trip ourselves.
Stage 1: Swaledale
Long before Yorkshire was Yorkshire, it was the land of the Vikings. About a thousand years ago. Looking at the hills and valleys of Swaledale you can imagine how they must have felt right at home. Pastures, moors and ridges, and everything seems to have been built with roughly hewn stones. Walls, cottages, churches, villages, everything.
There’s a town called Keld, the name having been given by the Vikings, for a spring that invited them to settle there. Once it was called Appletre Kelde, Apple Tree Springs, a combination of old English and Viking words, something that seems to be rather common, one of the ruins we’re passing carrying the odd name Crackpot Hall, and it’s not referring to someone that had lost touch with reality, pot is Viking for a very deep hole, and crack is old English for a crow.
The shepherds up there have a peculiar way of counting sheep too. The words for numbers only go up to twenty. When they had more than twenty sheep, they picked up a stone to represent the first twenty, and then started at once again. 46 sheep are two stones and six sheep. And while we listen to rural tranquility and gentle synth pads, we hear Jake Thackray counting sheep. Twenty of them.
Stage 2: Jodrell Bank
Back in our seats. We’re heading south. Cars passing, honking, someone plays “Dark Side Of The Moon”, strange voices from old movies come to mind as we’re passing through the moorland, along with old chants and vaguely aboriginal sounds. From the Dales to the forests, along rivers, lakes and reservoirs, ignoring both Manchester and Liverpool, this is not a hop-on-hop-off city tour. Which doesn’t mean that it’s nature only. In the middle of Cheshire, we stop at Jodrell Bank, a giant telescope, ranking third on the list of largest radio telescopes in the world. It sits there, with two little brothers, right in the middle of the countryside. The sheep are having lunch while we treat ourselves to a cup of hot coffee. So many sheep. Too many to count them the Swaledale way.
More road. Trains rumbling by at a railway crossing, “Blue Moon” emerging from the static on the radio, the day passes while we keep dozing off. Is that the same station playing those Steve Miller interludes or did someone change it while I was asleep? Time stretching, the sounds with it, the mind wandering, the road rolling on, nature getting denser again.
Stage 3: Forest of Dean
None of us are particularly interested in Harry Potter stories, but of course we know that this is where they filmed part of those movies. Forest of Dean. No one needs magicians here, really, nature doing a very fine job enchanting everyone. The sun has long passed the horizon, a campfire is keeping us warm and encourages us to tell a few tales while someone is playing old melodies on a flute, and maybe one or two of those stories include demons, but not from fantasy movies, more of a personal nature.
Stage 4: Laugharne
Wales. To most of the people I know this is a place that they know to exist, but I don’t know anyone who has been there. Something that needs to be corrected if you listen to what Dylan Thomas said about Laugharne – the next stop of the “Still Out” road trip. He called it timeless, beautiful and barmy, and “the strangest town in Wales”. He spent the last years of his life there, came for a day and simply stayed. And isn’t that Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas? Yes, of course. “Under Milk Wood”.
It’s a radio drama commissioned by the BBC, and it’s the last piece of work Thomas worked on. So much that it killed him. Touring all over the American east coast, constantly adding lines, rewriting sections, rehearsing every day he didn’t spend traveling, and all the while literally coughing his way to death. His agent didn’t stop him, the actors were shocked, and all the doctors gave him was cortisone. After half a year of this, Thomas died, in November 1953.
You can visit Dylan Thomas’ Boathouse in Laugharne. It’s a beautiful place, and most of “Under Milk Wood” was written there. He was only 39 when he died.
Stage 5: Wistman’s Wood
Granite boulders covered with moss, stunted and twisted oak trees adorned with epiphytes, the wide and empty moorland around it – I don’t have to have visited Wistman’s Wood to grasp its charm. Our bus has reached southern Devon and it feels like any minute a druid might appear among the trees. The peace and quiet is almost overwhelming, and only one piece of music may be allowed at such a place: “Peace Piece”. Bill Evans.
Stage 6: Welcombe Mouth
What is the perfect end to a trip like this? A beautiful, serene, secluded beach. Wecombe Mouth is just perfect. You have to earn your way, navigating a small and challenging road and hiking down to the shore, but then it’s not just a beach, there’s a waterfall too, big stepping stones across the water below it, and a sunset that silences just about everything.
Not everything. The seagulls. The waves. The wind. But that’s it. We’re there. All there. Still out. On our way. We may have reached the end of the road, the end of the land, but the path continues, who knows for how log. We’ll see.
Release for review:
KiF – STILL OUT – SOUND RECORDS – SNDREC005
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