Leaving London, in search of a dream 1971/74 and 1975 /79

1976 saw quite a few changes for me and even bigger changes for some of my friends. I was spending time away from the shop, playing drums occasionally with  Giles' band “Chaos” but was most engaged with the venture with John. His house was now pretty habitable, he had friends living in the barns, he was as busy as ever but he had gone back to one of his passions, which was song writing, He’d been inspired by the new wave of punks and new music and was writing songs about social issues and psychology, we would give the songs titles like “be your own hero” “sex and money” “behind your smile” and try not to draw on anything in particular. ‘thinking punks’ music’ It was very much John's thing, with me helping out, passing bass players and more ideas than we could manage. We had a few local venues that a mixture of local hippies, art students and travellers would come together at, I played with Chaos  and eventually borrowed a guitar player ( January) from Jester , met Dave Bass ...

The shop was a huge venture. Upstairs we simply moved our stuff from the cottage into the flat, knocked a wall down (well almost, we exposed the studwork and painted it). There was an old working tv in one of the rooms, but there was no signal in Carmarthen then, just a cable service that ran across the rooftops, managed by a firm called ‘Radio Rentals’. If you paid a weekly rent, they would connect you to the physical network. I just bought a connector and tapped in for free. I’d never had a TV before, since leaving home. There were three channels to choose from and twice a week there was a music program almost worth watching. It was hardly ever on. Hillary did all the sign writing and to fit out the shop I used the same skills as I had for the cottage, second hand timber from the dump for a frame and the discarded boards that were used in the local cheese factory for the shelving. On a trip to the farmers auction in Llanybydder I spotted that the old Pharmacy and Chemist shop was e...

  When I got back from India, I weighed 7 stone, the jaundice and occasional Delhi Belly had taken their toll. Because of the jaundice I was referred to the hospital for tropical diseases in Paddington and they did blood tests and gave me a prescription for vitamin supplements.   However, I felt great, I’d had 'hepatitis A' which is the least problematic, no major damage to my liver (slight scaring). I hadn’t ever felt so alive, coming back to the UK, I felt quite enlightened, could appreciate the fabulous privilege of the West, universal health service, the cleanliness of the environment, the comparative wealth and apparent lack of extreme poverty, the ease of communication that a common language brought. I had a clarity of thinking I probably haven’t experienced as vividly since. I was acutely aware of the natural word and my place within it, I could see clearly the way that governments and hierarchies worked and realised that the open corruption and black markets operating ...

  Blaencwm, bookshelves, bric-a-brac and some homemade elderflower wine ( picture courtesy of Miriam Mills) Coincidentally, we had developed new friends from within the medical profession locally. I went once to the local dentists for a check-up and when I walked in to the surgery the locum threw his arms around me and said “at last, some proper Welsh hippies” . His name was Roger and he had bought a place not far away and was settling in, in the hope of finding a mythical Alternative. We went for dinner a few times and he would always bring his visiting friends to visit us. He built his house with no internal walls, bath, shower and toilet in the corner of the sitting room, just clear glass screens between the bedrooms, he wanted to challenge everything he perceived as normal. We had a locum lady GP too, briefly, who spent hours talking to me about remote locations for living a quiet and reclusive life. Loads of fascinating people came and went. I grew a little Marijuana in a sp...

  Meigan fayre was very special. They held more of them, bigger crowds, more music, better stages, but this first one was really a fabulous achievement, not a rock festival but an arts event, driven by the best of motives, offering hope and brotherhood at a time of immense change in the world. It brought together free spirits, thinkers, dancers and activists.  Not so much a microcosm of that first free Glastonbury festival which inspired so much, but more like the Beckenham arts festivals that Bowie helped put on, where I first met him, pre superstardom. You don’t find these events often nowadays, especially not free, every little festival thinks it needs big name headliners and are   basically business enterprises. Many of those who came to visit me ended up staying in the area, others came for some respite, short stays and some for recuperation from the rigours of city life. Miriam would visit off and on as would others of my closest old friends. Two of my sisters v...

 We had a lot of new friends now, John and Ase eventually bought a huge derelict shell of a place with some outbuildings and moved onto the site nearby to make it habitable, nice picture of them showing the scale of the venture. We visited a lot once they had one end of the house habitable. Janet and Gosh David moved into a little place they rented in the middle of a forest, with no real access apart from a long walk through the woods and my new soul brother, Andrew, would stay with us and help me with building and plumbing, depping on the market stall and taking over where Janet had left off as regular guest. People I can only vaguely remember, like Christoph, who taught me to weld copper pipe fittings and a lovely couple of guys who didn’t fit the Hippie mould but had a retreat where they rested and made props for film sets. Russ and Jan, who I’ve mentioned, used to invite us over and we’d eat, listen to music and talk. Russ gave me some addresses of people who imported essential...

  The cottage was very basic, 4ft thick stone walls, a bare timber beam ceiling between the ground floor and bedrooms, which were just about 18 inches of stone wall and the remaining low headroom in the roof space. We filled the place with book cases full of  our favourite books, artefacts and bric a brac. We furnished the place with stuff that was thrown out by local people, the majority of rural Welsh folk were getting rid of all their old classic furniture, dressers and well made, post war stuff and replacing it with modern G plan and more mass produced furniture, in the same way they were abandoning their old stone cottages and farm houses and building sterile bungalows. The local dump, an open landfill site, was about 2 miles away and was a rich source of building materials, timber, furniture, glassware, cooking utensils and much more. I would generally do a weekly or fortnightly trip in the car and come back with all manner of treasures. Our other main source of...