Besides me, the others in the house, which was rented by our record company, were the fiddler, Dave Swarbrick, bass player Dave Pegg, drummer Dave Mattacks, guitarist Simon Nicol, their wives, two young children and innumerable roadies.
The point of us all living together was to have a quiet, pleasant place in the sticks to make music, but the Angel was nothing of the sort. It was on a sharp corner on the A120, so there was constant din from heavy lorries, and living conditions were appalling. The owner was an antiques dealer who had furnished the place with oddments of junk he couldn’t sell. The hot-water system didn’t work, the furniture had fleas, and it was so unsavoury that some of the children got ringworm.
The layout was still that of a pub. Downstairs, there were two bars that we used as bedrooms, and a huge pub kitchen, which became our communal living space. There was also a function room, about 30ftx15ft, which we used for rehearsals, and next to it was a kind of hovel, where our roadies lived.
These were a constantly changing crew of acid casualties and social dropouts who seemed to appear from nowhere — none of the band could ever remember employing them. But 1969-71 were the hippie days, when social boundaries were blurred, so they lived with us, we bought them beer for hauling our equipment to gigs, and everybody was happy. There were another three bedrooms and a television room upstairs, and just one bathroom between all of us. Outside there was a big garden where we’d play football.
You’d have thought a group of scruffy, long-haired young people like us would have been treated with suspicion by the rest of the village, particularly the police, but nothing could be further from the truth. We got on fine with the locals, especially after we did a concert for the local St Cecilia’s church organ fund, raising £450. This set up our friendly relationship with the police. We were sitting around rolling joints one morning, when suddenly we saw policemen coming up the garden path. Everyone panicked, as we thought it was a bust. Not a bit of it. The chief constable simply wanted us to play another free gig, this time for the police orphans’ fund. We agreed, obviously, and this concert, held in a meadow, went even better. It got publicised on Radio 1, a massive crowd turned up and we raised thousands for their fund.
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From that day on, we could do no wrong. If anyone from the Angel got a parking ticket, we just took it down the police station and we heard no more about it. The police even bought us a dishwasher as a token of their appreciation.
Then there was the night of our fireworks party. We had a road manager who was a worryingly keen pyrotechnics fan, and he had a friend who worked in Gamages department store who got us display-standard fireworks at a knock-down price. We bought about £400 worth, a huge sum at the time, and the outcome was the craziest fireworks party you’ve ever seen. Dave Pegg’s friends from Birmingham, like Cozy Powell, later of Black Sabbath, and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin were there; other friends came up from London; music was blaring, the explosions from the fireworks went well off the Richter scale. Yet there wasn’t a word of complaint until about 3am, when I saw two policemen coming out of the smoke, like figures from a Charley Chan film. “Sorry, lads,” one of them said, apologetically. “We’ve had about 300 phone calls. We’ll have to ask you to turn the music down a bit.”
Our days at the Angel ended in a mix of comedy and tragedy. Dave Swarbrick was offered big money to play on a Paul Simon album and Swarb, being an irresponsible spendthrift, put the money he expected to be paid into antiques, which he kept in his room. Then, one Sunday morning in February 1971, a Dutch lorry driver lost control of his vehicle and drove straight into Swarb’s downstairs room, killing himself instantly. Swarb, miraculously, survived, although his antiques were smashed to smithereens. Later the same week, he heard from Paul Simon, who had decided to cancel the recording. So Swarb was out of pocket again.
The crash brought about the end of our experiment with communal living. I moved in with friends for a few months, then later in 1971 I rented a place of my own, a pretty good two-bedroom flat in Hampstead. It cost £12 a week.
That was the end of the Angel, too, of course. The last I heard, bottled spring water is now produced on the site, which is ironic really, when you think of all the dubious stuff we put into the ground there 35 years ago.
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A five-CD set, The Life and Music of Richard Thompson (Free Reed, £44.99), is out now
Interview by Fred Redwood