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And that`s what you need in folk music. These are songs that have been aroudn for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They existed for centuries before any kind of recording was possible, even before people could write, for god`s sake! So the only wah those songs lived and got passed on was by singers. The better singer you were, the more likely it was people were going to turn out to hear you and remember you — and remember the song — whether it was at a pub or wedding or ceilidh or just a knot of people seeking shelter under a tree during a storm. It`s a kind of a time machine, really, the way you can trace a song from whoever`s singing it now back through the years — Dylan or Johnny Cash, Joanna Newsom or Vashti Bunyan — on through all those nameless folk who kept it alive a thousand years ago. People talk about carrying the torch, but I always think of that man they found in the ice up in the Alps. He`s been under the snow for 1,200 years, and when they discovered him, he was still wearing his clothes, a cloak of woven grass and a bearskin cap, and in his pocket they found a little bag of grass and tinder and a bit of dead coal. That was the live spark he`d been carrying, the bright ember he kept in his pocket to start a fire whenever he stopped. You`d have to be so careful, more careful than we can even imagine, to keep that one spark alive. Because that`s what kept you alive, in the cold and the dark. Folk music is like that. And by folk I mean whatever music it is that you love, whatever music it is that sustains you. It`s the spark that keeps us alive in the cold and night, the fire we all gather in front of so we`re not alone in the dark.

We had a game we`d play sometimes at Wyldling Hall, after we`d have a good day and night of rehearsing and smoked a few spliffs — Julian got very good hash from a bloke in Notting Hill. We`d all hold our hands and shut our eyes. Then, without speaking, we`d drop our hands, and one at a time we`d open our eyes. All without talking. We thought that maybe, just maybe, if we did it at the right moment, in the right place, with the right people, we`d open our eyes and we`d be somewhere else. I don`t know where. Just someplace we`d never been. Some impossible place. It never worked. Not with me, anyway. I was never that stoned. Sometimes I wish I had been.

Thruth is, there was something in the air back then. There really was. Things just felt different in those days, and not just at Wylding Hall, but everywhere. You could sense it, like a smell, or a certain way the light came down through the trees. Everything looked golden. Everything felt golden. Like anything could happen. Wylding Hall intensified all that. It was like a lens: you focus the light through it, ordinary sunlight, but the lens intensifies it, makes it strong enough to start a fire.

It was a beautiful day, bright sunlight and very hot, everything smelling of sun and roses from the overgrown bushes in front of the house, gorgeous blood-red roses; they hadn`t been trimmed back in years. But I felt a sort of paralyzing cold. Not from the wind: it was as though my body had suddenly turned to cold metal. I couldn`t move, couldn`t talk; just stood there staring out the drive toward the trees. Yet the sun remained, and the butterflies hovering above the flowers, and Will and the rest all laughing and going through the basket to see what the farmer had brought them. Yet it was so cold, I literally could not move. I couldn`t even shiver, or unculr my fingers. You know the saying, "My blood froze"? Well, this was far worse than that — worse than anything I could imagine. It was as though my entire body had frozen solid. I coudln`t breathe. Couldn`t blink. Couldn`t hear a thing, not them talking or the wind or the truck driving off or bees. Couldn`t scream out to Will to help me or to anyone else, all of them talking and going on as though I wasn`t even ther.e And that was when I realized: This is what it`s like to be dead. No clouds or lights or bright tunnel, not even darkness: just hte world turning and going on without you and you`ll never be part of it again. I screamed then.

He had some ancient-looking volumes under his bed. Leather-bound. Some of them were quite small: the size of your hand. I remember feelign excited, thinking he was going to show me some weird esoteric thing he`d discovered, like an incunabulum or something like that. But it was just a paperback by Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and Profane. "Do you know this?" He held it in those big hands as though it were a butterfly he`d caught. "It`s brilliant. There`s two kinds of time, he says — sacred time and profane time. The outside, everyday world — you know, where you go to work, go to school, that sort of thing — that`s profane time. "But things like Christmas or holidays, any kind of religious, ritual or shared experience, like performing together, or a play — those take place in sacrd time. It`s like this—" He grabbed a pen and drew on the inside cover of the paperback. A little Venn diagram: two intersecting circles. "—a circle within a circle. Do you see? The big circle is profane time. This one`s sacred time. The two coexist, but we only step into sacred time when we intentionally make space for it — like at Christmas, or the Jewish High Holy Days — or if something extraordinary happens. You know that feeling you get, that time is passing faster or slower? Well, it really is moving differnetly. When you step into sacred time, you`re actually moving sideways into a different space that`s inside the normal world. It`s folded in. Do you see?"

It wasn`t like a dream. It was like being lost: not in the dark, but in the light. Blinding sun through the windows and that fug of smoke from cigs and spliffs, motes in the air like something alive, atoms or insects all silver in the smoke. You couldn`t see to find your way; we couldn`t even see each other`s faces, it was so bright and so much smoke. You could only hear the music, and so you followed that. Lesley`s deep voice and Julian`s sweet one, Jon grabbing the edge of his cymbal so you could only hear this thin, silvery sound. Ashton`s bass. Me and that mandoline I built from a kit; Les wailing until she nearly passed out. Julian`s guitar.