1995 turned into 1996, and Southampton continued along what I thought was to be a gloomy final few chapters... Happily I was wrong. The last eight weeks or so were bright and optimistic, and full of far more interesting events than the previous year and a half I had spent living in the city. I was sorry to leave, and didn't really have any idea of what I was to do in the future, aside from some vague notion of 'being an illustrator'.
I moved back in with my parents who lived in the small Worcestershire village of Bretforton. I would take Bracken the Yorkshire terrier for long meandering walks across the fields that surrounded the village. The village itself held a spectral atmosphere, picturesque and dream-like. Sinister inscriptions on the wall of the churchyard of how 'the paths of power lead but to the grave' (or something similar), dark houses hidden behind trees, The Fleece Inn daubed with witch marks... The village had a number of ghost stories attached to it; phantom funeral processions, decapitated women, the attic rooms of Bretforton Manor lighting up without cause in the night...
The summer was warm and pleasanr. Sunlight flickering through leaves, a certain dreaminess when walking over the fields, the village bell tolling in the distance, and being quite happy alone in the vast countryside with Bracken.
I imagine it was probably coincidence, or maybe I had read something somewhere about the origin of And Also The Trees and then forgotten, but over the early part of that summer, I began to be fascinated with the idea that the song 'Virus Meadow' somehow summed up the Worcestershire landscape. The way that the sunlight seemed to fall through small coppices, the way that the summer twilights seemed violet and vast and unreal... and something else too. Something less definable. The Worcestershire countryside is quintessential 'English country', but beneath that picturesque quality is something more sinister, a little spectral. A ghost story country.
Studying the words to Virus Meadow, of the tale of a haunted priest, followed by rooks 'flapping in the flat sky, shrieking in the spire, hanging in the lead sky, dangling from the sun...' The words of the song seem to take place at the end of a summer, a deep, rich and portentous summer, full of 'nightshade twine' and 'slow ringing echoes'. The last verse of the song starts off with a quite stunning evocation of the English landscape I would walk the dog in; 'Nodding thistle, English sun dew / swansneck woman, childbed meadow'. The narrative of the haunted priest falters into irresolution, as 'night brothers... struggle and crawl through the empty crack of morning'.
A ghost story summer, as English as M.R.James and black dogs.
Anyhow. A coincidence, for when perusing the sleeve of 'Virus Meadow' - or maybe the CD cover of 'The Klaxon', I noticed that the band did indeed seem to originate in Worcestershire, a small village called Inkberrow, not many miles away from where I was in Bretforton.
The summer continued, and I had managed to land myself a place studying for an English degree in the nearby city of Worcester. My interest in this mysterious band called And Also The Trees had grown. I still knew nothing about them though. I found no albums by them on a trip to London to Resurrection Records, but did discover a track 'The Woodcutter' on the Gewrman goth compilation 'Touched by the Hand of Goth volume 2'. I didn't know whether they still existed, had split up, even whether they had released any albums other than the two I had.
I moved to Worcester that autumn, and for the three years I spent there And Also The Trees would provide the soundtrack.
