Rushcombe Ale

Cycling back from a pub along a Dorset lane in the dark, hedges going past, some quantity of cider in me, i came off the bike and landed on my back in the road with my ears ringing. Full moon over a sleeping village. And instead of the usual internal weather i had one very clear thought, which was that it's nearly good to be almost alive.

That is the Yeats thing, isn't it - and i shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow. i used the line as an album title twenty-five years later and people took it for literature.

The farmhouse was a small one near Sturminster Marshall, and i had come down out of the maelstrom of living dangerously in the north without knowing that quiet was what i had been going towards. Badbury Rings. Wimborne Minster. The Vine at Pamphill, which is a pub the size of a front room and had been a front room. i learned the names of things.

Before that there was Poole, and Poole means Morts.

Morts had a furniture van, a kitchen, and no hurry whatsoever, and he let me sit in that kitchen for what i can only describe as an eternity, trying to work out how you write a song - not how you write words, any fool can write words, but how you get the thing to stand up on its own legs and walk out of the room. He never once asked me how it was going. His daughter Mikki Rain became the wise woman of our tribe in Dorset and has been for thirty-odd years, and in the wilder times she lived on an ocean-going barge called the Queen Phillipa on the south bank of the Thames by Battersea power station, and after London shows she would take me back there, away from the scene, because she could see the state of me when nobody else was bothering to look.

Ed came down and stayed with me in Poole when he was still in his late teens, and i took my little brother to the Bricklayers, which was a Hell's Angels pub with meat hooks in the ceiling, actual meat hooks, which nobody ever explained. Ed sat there with his pint looking round at all of it, and i have rarely seen a boy so pleased with his own life.

Nick Whiffen took me to the speedway. We stood at the fence at the Poole Pirates with hot dogs, pulling cinders out of our eyebrows, going cor - did you see that! - while four men went round a track on bikes with no brakes.

Exeter for a while, where a whole lot of us lived at the same time, and where i played the Double Locks by the canal and first knew Steve Knightley and Phil Beer, who went on to be Show Of Hands and to fill halls i will never fill, and who have never once made me feel it.

Then Rushcombe Farm, with Joe Shaw.

Joe brewed. What Joe brewed was called Rushcombe Ale, which was ordinary bitter with a very large quantity of extremely strong grass in it, and the way you found out about it was that you would be standing in a kitchen saying something perfectly reasonable about the weather and then the sentence would go off in a direction that nobody, including you, had authorised. Wait till the Rushcombes, people would say, ominously, and about forty minutes later the Rushcombes would arrive. We had a summer of it. Psychic festivities, i have called that summer elsewhere, and elsewhere is where it is staying.

It ended the way my summers end, which is that i was suddenly required to go to Spain and support the Electric Light Orchestra. i shall say nothing further about that tour, partly out of respect for those involved and partly because the internet is forever.

And in that farmhouse, in that lane-and-cider world, with Joe in the next room being better on the guitar than anybody in London, the thing started which became Doll By Doll. It did not feel like the beginning of a band. It felt like several men getting quietly ready to be furious about something and waiting to find out what.

People assume the wild years come first and the peace after, that it runs upwards - drugs, chaos, redemption, gardening. Mine came the other way round. The peace arrived in 1971, in a wet county, on a bicycle, and after it came fifteen years in which i did a great deal of damage, and i have never worked out whether that was a warning i failed to read or simply the way the cards came out of the packet….