Lisson Grove

The Seashell on Lisson Grove does the best fish and chips in London and i will fight anybody on this, and if you come out of there and walk north with the parcel going soft in your hands you pass the social security offices in Tresco House, and Paddington Green police station is round the corner, and set back off the road there is a row of low cottages.

Before they were a charity they were a place where old ladies had been dumped to die. And before that, for a while, i lived in them.

So when we opened the CORE Trust in those buildings i was not a man arriving to help. i was, and said so at the time to anybody who would listen, actually part of the source of psychic infection in that address, and a brass plate on the door does nothing whatever about that.

So one midwinter my friend Jason Wright, who ran the place, and i decided to exorcise it. Not with a priest - with the only tools two men like us had, which were the longest night of the year and the refusal to sleep through it. We sat in that building from dark to dark reading aloud to each other so that neither of us would go under. He found it easier than i did. Part of me wanted to sleep and continue the distress. We got a long way into the old stories somewhere around four in the morning, and neither of us went under, and the light came up over Lisson Grove at eight o'clock the colour of dishwater, and we went out and had breakfast.

The Trust worked. It won prizes, and had proper premises in central London and a waiting list, and the approach was holistic, which in 1986 was a word that made men in suits laugh out loud, and by 1996 was a word that made men in suits give you money.

My job title, for some years, was head counsellor.

i had no qualification whatsoever. None. i had been an addict, i had come off, and i had a way of sitting in a room with a man at four in the morning that had been trained into me by nothing except having been that man. When the Trust finally had enough money to hire properly trained therapists, the properly trained therapists looked at my file and said, quite reasonably: you can't work here, you're not qualified.

And here i reached for something an old neighbour of mine had given me years before in a squat in Formosa Street. Max Rynish - the airship man, the man who knew everything about lighter-than-air flight and had been destroyed for it - used to say that every genuinely new idea goes through three stages. First it is the joke. Then it is the threat. Then it is the obvious. i said that in the meeting. i have no idea whether it convinced anybody or whether they simply did not want an argument with a large Scotsman, but i kept the job, and the phrase has since been used by me in defence of positions far less defensible.

Still, they had a point, and i went off and got myself educated sideways. i sat in on everything Kathleen Raine's Temenos Academy would let me sit in on. i attended the London Convivium For Archetypal Studies, run by Noel Cobb and by Eva Loewe, who was the only person at a Hampstead dinner party who laughed at my Schubert joke in a Glasgow accent, and who thereby became my friend for the rest of her life. i qualified - actually qualified, with a certificate, i have it somewhere - in Applied Kinesiology with Brian Butler. i worked, at the invitation of Doctor Ruth West, at the Koestler Foundation, on a project about the roots of coincidence and on the logistics of famine relief in Africa, which are two subjects that sound unrelated until you have sat in the room.

And then there was Robert.

i had been reading Robert Bly since 1964, since a school library in Glenrothes and a poem called Poem Against The British, which as a title alone was enough to make a boy in Fife feel seen. Thirty years later he gave a talk in London and i went, and afterwards - because i was living in a large house in Ladbroke Grove with too many rooms and no particular reason not to - i asked him whether he wanted somewhere quiet to stay. He stayed five weeks.

What followed was about a year in which i was, God help us all, a press officer. Robert's men's events were not public and were not to be written about, and journalists kept ringing, and i became the man who said no in a Fife accent, which turns out to be a transferable skill.

The events themselves: a hundred men, sometimes for a day, sometimes for a week, in a hall or a house in the middle of nowhere. Stories - the old ones, the Grimm ones, the ones with the wild man at the bottom of the pond. Poetry sung, not read. Me on a bouzouki at the back. And grief coming up out of grown men in a way that i have never seen before or since in this country, because in this country we have arranged things so that it cannot.

It was, and i have written this elsewhere and mean it, a fabulous time of soul plenty, with a harvest of the hardest tears i had ever shed.

People ask whether i believed all of it. No. i am absolutely no Jungian - the idea of wholeness makes me shudder, it sounds like a diet. i sat for years in a dream group where everything meant your mother, and eventually i could not take any more of it, and it was Hillman who gave me the way out: don't say that the black snake in your dream is really your mother. Let the snake be a snake.

But belief was not the point. The point was that for the first time since a farmhouse in Dorset i was in rooms where something serious was being attempted, and where nobody wanted anything from me except that i show up.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, without noticing, i started writing songs again.