An American Werewolf in London is the first horror movie I ever saw, when I was 12 or 13 years old. It had a huge impact on me, and ever since I have thought of country pubs in terms of how much they felt like The Slaughtered Lamb. There are many such pubs in Shropshire, where I live.
My friend Lara spent much of her childhood inside “The Slaughtered Lamb.” Her mother had bought the tiny cottage in Wales in about 1978, shortly before a film crew came knocking on the door, looking for a location to use for the exterior pub scenes. Nobody involved expected the film to become a cult classic.
Many years later, Lara offered me the cottage for a few days, to go and write some music. The more I considered this, the more I realised that I had to do it. Not only would I go there to write music, but this would be dark and scary music inspired by scenes from the movie and written inside The Slaughtered Lamb itself. This would be a Heart of Darkness kind of trip.
Lara had her own stories / myths about the cottage, which she passed on to me. The previous owner, Mrs Davis, was imagined to be a witch. She had four consecutive husbands, all of whom died in a bedroom upstairs and were now buried in the graveyard next to the cottage. I was advised to avoid this bedroom, as it was haunted.
But despite Lara’s warnings, I was not prepared for the actual experience of living on my own, in an old creepy cottage which had not been properly lived in since 2017, when her mother died. I certainly could not sleep for thinking about the four dead men in the next door bedroom. When I realised that the entire village was uninhabited, and that I was the only living person around, I got in to a strange kind of feedback loop of isolation and writing scary music. This album was created in two and half days of frantic recording.
Eventually the music got to Stockhausen levels of weirdness, and I decided to pack it in and go home before I lost my mind.