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Fact #98619

When:

Short story:

Traffic move into Sheepcott Farm, Aston Tirrold, Berkshire, England, UK, Europe, and set to work creating music for their next album, Mr. Fantasy.

Full article:

Rosie Roper (villager): I was 15 when Traffic arrived in the village. Everybody was very worried about it at first. I worked in the village shop where they came every day to collect their letters. They were very strange-looking. Chris Wood had these high-heeled boots painted purple. We'd never seen anything like it. My dad reckoned they were a sweaty, smelly lot, but I got such a crush on Chris. Whenever I saw them coming, I'd take off my glasses and hide them under the counter. My dad warned me to keep away from them because of the sex and drugs and that.


Chris Welch (journalist): It was the first 'getting our heads together in the country' cottage. It was on Sheepcott Farm, which belonged to a wealthy landowner and socialite, William Piggott-Brown, who part-owned Island Records with Chris Blackwell. He rented them this cottage with roses rounf the door for 5 pounds a week.


Linda Eastman (photographer, now Linda McCartney): I came to England in 1967 to do a book of rock photographs and I was a huge Winwood fan so I wanted to do him. He had left The Spencer Davis Group and moved to the cottage, but Traffic hadn't been publicly announced yet, so I got the opportunity of doing their first pictures. It was a cold but beautiful day, and all the trees were blooming, so I did the pictures outside, starting with them running towards me down the slope behind the cottage.

Timothy White (journalist): Mr Fantasy was the first album they worked on there, and the song 'House for Everyone' is about the cottage. You came upon a deeply-rutted chalk track, and hidden in the centre of a copse of hazelnut and pine trees was a two-storey wisteria-draped, white brick dwelling with a slate roof and a squat red chimney.

David Dalton (journalist): There were beehives, and the ground in front of the cottage was strewn with boxes, bags of cement, a brass bedstead, newspapers, an old cartwheel, cans of paint and a big psychotic-looking dog leashed to the fence.

Chris Welch: Including the kitchen, there were three rooms downstairs and four bedrooms upstairs. They had oriental rugs on the floor but otherwise it was quite bare, almost spartan, like a camp rather than a home. A typical all-male scene.

Linda Eastman: They seemed very happy there. In the evening, after we'd done the pictures, they played in the front room, jamming on the Tim Rose song 'Morning Dew'. I had taken The Beatles' Sgt Pepper down there, because it had just come out, and it stunned them a bit, because a lot of what they were planning to do, The Beatles had done first. I also took The Doors' first album with me, and I know Jim Capaldi got very turned on to Jim Morrison because of that.

Muff Winwood (member of The Spencer Davis Group and Steve Winwood's brother): The whole idea was to be very low profile and inconspicuous but one Sunday Steve invited me up because he'd got into riding. He had this big yellow horse, exactly like Trigger, with no saddle, just a bridle. I watched him leap up on to its back, full of confidence, but it took off like a rocket, with Steve hanging on for dear life. Next thing, it does a flick and throws Steve off. So he's on the ground moaning in agony, and it runs out into the main road, causing a car to skid and a lorry to run into the back of the car. Me and Capaldi went running into the road trying to stop this mad horse. It was pandemonium. That's how inconspicuous it was.

Rosie Roper: It was creepy. My dad had lived in the cottage years before and the story was that a young man had hanged himself by the well and you could still hear the ghost of his dog howling for him. The band said there was a spirit that moved things around. It never hurt anybody, it was just mischievous. One day, Chris Wood and I sat there all afternoon waiting for it to do something, but it never did.

David Dalton: I went to write about them for Rolling Stone, and I was struck right away by how wonderfully na