When we were investigating our feature on Tarkovsky A1 A1 we came across a very interesting story about one of the greatest lost albums of the 1970s. It was recorded on Warrengate Road, which is used numerous times in Veronica Swan’s Still Life. The house, built in the 1500’s when Thomas More and his family were keepers of the great forest, was the purpose built studio which also appears in the film, along with a brief cameo from it’s owner JOHN REGAN.
The Regan Tapes-Lost and Found
A SartRE + sARTre exclusive.
The day we stumbled across the psychedelic whirlpool world of the long forgotten band Wallpaper, It began, with a seemingly less innocuous pursuit, a quest for what were locally termed ‘swallow holes’, rumoured to swallow whole the misdemeanours of gangsters fleeing north from London.
We followed the notes, which took us in circles, before we found the Warrengate Road sign, hidden in the tangled undergrowth, where nature’s creep reclaimed the street. Two swallows, crudely tattooed onto the bark of a sycamore, accompanied by a scatter of dots and a rather unsettling depiction of a disembodied hand, its forefinger aiming resolutely south, pointed the way. Local lore, whispered in the hushed corners of ancient pubs, spoke of artists, amongst the itinerant chalk drawers, leaving such cryptic trails towards welcoming establishments, oases in the otherwise parched landscape, others said it was obviously a coded message, indicating the most favourable location to bury the body parts, so to speak. One gangster fleeing the city was Bill Sykes, he came through here after the murder of Nancy in the serialised story of Oliver Twist, it was one of the local ponds which swallowed poor Bullseye, the loyal companion who had seen too much. It felt like the landscape, kept a locker of such uneasy secrets firmly shut, waiting for a folk singer’s enchanting refrain to free the spirits trapped in the branches above these sink hole streets.
Our pilgrimage led us to another location that had once served as a backdrop for Swan and Tarkovsky’s cinematic Still Life, a small coaching inn clinging to the faded grandeur of Warrengate Road, a wrong turn off a wrong turn., the last turn past the sink holes. The relentless surge of modern traffic now bypassed it entirely, roaring along the new A1 Motorway, a concrete artery just beyond the skeletal reach of the winter trees. Curiously, the quiet lanes nearby had once provided the stark, unsettling backdrop for the vehicular mayhem in that other cinematic vision, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. We were greeted with a warmth that belied the chill in the air, a pint of ale a comforting balm before the afternoon bell tolled its somber note, signalling closing time. From there, we were directed a short distance south, towards the Regan House. Above the weathered lintel, the numerals ‘1515’ echoed the numbers station code written in the notebook at the start of the Still Life film. It was first spotted by eagle eyed pause button enthusiasts, when the crimson car exits the Cold War edifice of the nearby transmission station on the old Great North Road, there it is, 1515. In the doorway of Regan House, a cursory glance at the watch confirmed the uncanny synchronicity: three fifteen. The air itself seemed to hum with a latent energy from the pylons, a premonition of oddities lurking beneath the surface, as if bewitching season had taken up residence under the eaves of that forgotten dwelling. Later we discovered, the year 1515 was when the house was built, a period during which, the family of Saint Thomas More, (the local church still bears his name) held guardianship over this secluded stretch of what was once, before the clearings, before the enclosures, known as the Great Wood, a detail that now seemed to resonate with a peculiar, almost spectral significance. We better stay focused lest we lose our heads like Thomas More.
The heavy iron knocker, a severed hand reaching down to grasp a golden sphere, (similar to those seen in the streets near the port of Bordeaux, the backdrop to two of Swan and Tarkovsky’s 1980s collaborations) yielded no response to our insistent summons. The atmosphere hung thick and still, carrying a faint, almost metallic tang, as if some long-past transgression had seeped into the very fabric of the place from the swallow holes. A palpable sense of something… untoward… lingered, a silent testament to a history we were only beginning to glimpse. This, we knew, warranted further delving. The call of the whirlpool. The suck of the swallow hole. The severed hand holding the golden orb might one day open the portal to Regan House.
Later, ensconced in the anonymity of a motel room beside the A1, we watched the scenes from Still Life that had been filmed within the walls of Regan House. Swan, we discovered through diligent research into the film’s arcane notes, possessed a meticulous identikit eye for detail, a tendency towards repetition that bordered on the obsessive. She would return to the same image, the same narrative thread, exploring its nuances from myriad perspectives, or find uncanny echoes between seemingly disparate tales.
John Regan, the visionary force behind the 1960s band Wallpaper, emerged as a figure of peculiar fascination. He was the unwavering anchor, the vessel around which a shifting constellation of session musicians would briefly orbit. His artistic sensibilities were steeped in the decadent allure of the French Symbolists and the hermetic worlds of J.K. Huysmans. France, and Paris in particular, embraced his singular vision with an ardour that stood in stark contrast to the indifference he encountered in his native England. It was on a Parisian stage, amidst the smoke licking the swirling psychedelic lightshow, that one chapter of the Wallpaper saga abruptly concluded, only to give rise to another, even more bizarre. Regan, in a moment of theatrical abandon, fled the stage mid-performance, supposedly because he remembered he had promised to return with a van laden with rolls of exquisitely patterned French wallpaper, destined for the silent walls of Regan House on Warrengate Road. Local legends, too numerous and too outlandish to recount in full, chronicled the subsequent episode, in which Regan, in a fit of creative mania, papered the entire house, including the doors, transforming it into a cave, his hermetically sealed cocoon. At one point even the front door was covered in a blue Japanese wallpaper pattern similar to the cover of the AromaTape 001 scented cassette. The windows were either boarded up, bricked in, or, most curiously, stuffed with egg boxes. “You’ve never seen a man buy so many eggs,” an ancient voice at the inn had rasped, a hint of bewildered amusement in his tone. “We even bought him an egg timer for Christmas, and he looked at us as if we were the ones touched in the head. We didn’t know Regan was vegan!”
For those attuned to the esoteric realms of film soundtrack recordings and the synaesthetic interplay of sound and vision, a certain pattern might already be emerging “through smoke” (the Latin for perfume translates as per-fumum, through smoke, fragrant fragments burned as scented offerings to the gods to ward of evil spirits). The arrival at the Regan House, under the cloak of darkness, of the analogue reel-to-reel tape recorder and the warm glow of vintage tube amplifiers hinted at a sonic alchemy at play. Rumours, as they often do in such intriguing narratives, swirled around the figure of Stanley Kubrick himself, a clandestine visit from his nearby mansion to listen to a unique synthesiser fashioned by Regan from scavenged parts of a local radio mast, hooked up to a broken Mellotron via the remnants bequeathed by his late producer Joe Meek. It was Meek, the eccentric sonic architect, who had apparently imparted the unconventional wisdom of using egg boxes for soundproofing.
Other oddities became part of his sonic tapestry, objects weaving between the dotted stitches sucked under the car on his Texas Road Trip, (chasing the AM Radio attention afforded to the Wallpaper classic, Tell Your Troubles, top selling cassette and eight track cartridge in two states, time slowed down until Regan began to hear the song in a different dimension, a film clip is included at the bottom of this page) and the wooden hammer of judge who could still smell the mescaline sweating from the sleeve where he wore his heart as proud as these Texans wore their Lone Star flag. The only reason he got bail was because of that toy Lone Star badge his dad made in the factory for his eighth birthday, yes his dad lost his job because of it but that meant the world too, his daddy the outlaw riding out of town, chased by voices on the wind calling Shane, or was it shame? Shane “Shame” Regan once said, the sins of the father always visit the son, one day you’ll find out what you’re daddy done. The songs rooted in that trailer park in Marfa, as if received from the distant stars, kicked up from the dusty earth by that trusty right boot, that boot could spin some yarns of its own, dispatching the nose attached to the thieving hand that dared trespass the stage, the biggest headline he ever saw, the moment etched in fleeting flashbulbs like a lightning strike through the gathering storm clouds. Marfa, dear Marfa, the mysterious lights in the the sky above the desert, the howl of the coyote, the rattle of the iron horse as it cleaved the town, a stark reminder of the right and wrong side of the tracks, disappearing into the horizon, far out there in the middle of elsewhere there was a strange comfort in the vastness of the sky, it mattered as much as it didn’t matter, the parity in the blaze of light where people remember you and the black hole shadows where time slows down and people forget you. He welcomed those shadows, he’d build a house there, a day coming for the knowing, when he’d decorate it and move right on in.
Tarkovsky’s own notes, while rich in enigmatic symbolism, made no direct mention of Regan, only of a hybrid synthesising machine receiving signals from the pylons, an updated version of the Eckartshausen glass clavichord. Despite no trace of Regan, there was, however, within a section devoted to the eerie world of numbers stations, a coded symbol that had previously eluded our grasp: a series of dots forming the motif of two swallows, violently torn asunder and no doubt submerged amongst other body parts in the local sink holes. Our initial interpretation had linked the swallow image to the ill-fated DH108 plane, the Swallow, which had famously broken the sound barrier only to disintegrate in the process.
Was Regan, then, the other, unseen Swallow? The event dubbed the ‘swallow dive scene’ in the film Still Life, had reportedly taken place at Regan’s in 1994. The extra outtake footage we unearthed depicted Regan hunched over a mixing desk, gesturing through a strange, distorting glass globe (like the orb on his front door) towards a solitary singer, his features obscured by oversized spectacles. Swan, her characteristic fascination with mirrored surfaces, was clearly manipulating reflections, creating layers of visual distortion until Tarkovsky’s lens, with its almost mystical quality, transported us through the glass, right into the singer’s eye as he half-spoke the haunting opening line which would introduce AromaTape 001: “and when you look do you still see?” Regan, meanwhile, was feeding the vocal signal through a Joe Meek processor, imbuing it with an ethereal, disembodied quality, making it seem as if the voice emanated from the towering radio mast visible from the rooftop, the very point from which Tarkovsky’s spectral eye retreated back towards the burnt-out car. The exploding planet around which the entire film revolves.
The story took a strange twist at this point, travelling around the planet itself, rewinding that Wallpaper cassette, to reveal something which would blow the door of Regan House wide open!
Now, a crucial detail, a subtle nuance, had slipped through our investigative net. A detail, we would soon discover, well-known to aficionados of Wallpaper in France, Italy, and North America. A Breton journalist, who had briefly joined our collective, quoted our initial article in his own publication. Subsequently, an Italian collective in Florence stumbled upon the first part of our feature, meticulously translating it into their native tongue. From there, it was translated yet again, and, to their credit, with full attribution, by a Canadian zine. We invite you to revisit the narrative, to rewind the tape, to allow the echoes of these disparate voices to resonate, and to see if you can now discern the one significant detail that, in our initial exploration of this psychedelic whirlpool, had somehow eluded our grasp. The truth, as always, lies not just in the grand pronouncements, but in the subtle whispers carried on the wind from distant shores.
As you will vouchsafe, our original article carried a somewhat different voice when it appeared in the Canadian cult psyche zine, aptly named The Canadian Cult Psyche Zone.
Have Wallpaper Won’t Travel, the discovery of the long lost Regan Tapes.
Alright, cats and kittens, strap yourselves in, because we just tumbled down the goddamn rabbit hole, headfirst into some seriously wigged-out wallpaper wonderland. See, we were chasing ghosts, or rather, swallows. Not the feathered kind, dig? We’re talking cryptic markings on a goddamn tree – two little birdies inked with a constellation of dots and a pointy finger. Led us on a wild goose chase, or should I say, a wild swallow chase, all the way to one of those forgotten corners of England, where Swan and Tarkovsky, those cinematic shamans, conjured their Still Life.
We’re talking a dusty little coaching inn on Warrengate Road, a place the roaring present, in the form of some soulless new motorway, had just flat-out forgotten. Shutters down, afternoon closing, the whole nine yards of desolate charm. But a tip-off, a whisper in the dying light, sent us a few doors down to this hulking relic called Regan House. Right there, above the door, plain as day: 1515. I checked my beat-up Timex – three goddamn fifteen. You could practically smell the spooky vibes clinging to the eaves like cobwebs.
The door knocker? A goddamn iron fist. We pounded, we waited. Silence. But there was this palpable moistness in the air, a certain… thickness. You know that feeling, right? Like you’re on the verge of something seriously weird. Something worth sticking your nose into, even if it meant risking a splinter or two.
Cut to some generic motel room off the A1, the flickering screen showing us the Still Life ghosts of scenes filmed at that very Regan House. Took some serious digging, man, wading through the celluloid swamp and the scribbled notes. But Swan, bless her obsessive little heart, she was a detail freak. Loved to loop back, see the same damn thing from a million different angles, or find these eerie echoes between stories.
And then there’s John Regan. The tripped-out visionary behind this sixties band called Wallpaper. The main dude, the anchor, hands in the harbour, with this revolving door of session cats orbiting his strange little planet. This dandy was obsessed with the French Symbolists, digging on those decadent vibes, and lost himself in the twisted worlds of J.K. Huysmans. France, especially Paris, they got him, man. They embraced his weirdness with a passion the stiff-necked Brits couldn’t even fathom. So, naturally, one Wallpaper freak-out ended on a Parisian stage, only to birth an even weirder one back on Warrengate Road, where they shot the car scene in A Clockwork Orange. Legend has it – and there were more local tall tales than you could shake a stick at – that Regan, in some kind of wallpaper-fueled frenzy, plastered the entire house. Doors, walls, the whole damn shebang. Windows? Boarded up, bricked in, or stuffed with goddamn egg cartons. “You ain’t never seen a man buy so many eggs,” one old timer supposedly croaked.
Now, for you soundtrack freaks out there, you can probably smell the sonic stew brewing, right? The analogue tape machines, the warm glow of vintage tubes, all smuggled in under the cloak of night. And the rumors? Wild, man. Whispers that even Kubrick, the ultimate control freak, swung by to listen to this Frankenstein synth Regan cooked up from parts of the local radio masts, hooked up to spare Mellotron guts and scraps he somehow inherited from the dearly departed, tragically brilliant Joe Meek. It was Meek, the sonic wizard himself, who apparently gave Regan the lowdown on soundproofing with… you guessed it… egg cartons.
If Regan drove past your local planetarium you gotta picture him letting off a stolen 45 into the globe to make it spin the wrong way. Scorching the planet, half Phaeton, half Hunter S Thompson, reverse ricochets sucking in the sound as it cruises Mach 1. That’s right… he viewed the world differently to everyone else in this one horse town. One horse town, one saloon stage, one trusty boot, one small town cell, one small town judge, one newspaper hack, one strap line hitting the wires.
Yeah, well, the weirdness just kept piling on, man. Part of this whole sonic freakshow from that Texas trip, right? And this judge, this judge, he caught the mescaline stink clinging to his sleeve like some kinda goddamn badge of honor, wearing his bleeding heart on it like those Lone Star flag-wavers. And the only reason he walks? A toy badge. Lone Star. His old man whipped it up in some factory, lost his gig for it, but hey, it meant everything. Daddy the outlaw, riding off into the Zane Grey sunset, people yelling “Shane!” or was it “Shame!”? Shane ‘Shame’ Regan, dropping truth bombs: ‘The sins of the father always visit the son, one day you’ll find out what you’re daddy done.’ Harsh, man, but you know, maybe true. Then there were those Marfa songs, straight from the trailer park, beamed down from the cosmos, kicked up from the dirt by some righteous boot. That boot. It could tell some tales, man, like the time it rearranged some dude’s face for trying to steal his soul. Biggest headline ever, flashback flashbulb freeze frame. And he’s out there, summoning those goddamn lights in the sky, above the desert. Coyote howls, train tracks slicing the town in two, way out in the middle of nowhere. And there’s this cross-wired comfort in that vastness, you know? It matters, it doesn’t matter. The whole fame and oblivion thing, the bright lights and the black holes where you just fade away. But he digs the shadows, man. Welcomes ’em. Would build a place there, slap it together in a day, move right on in. Because that’s where the real heart is, right? In the darkness, in the forgotten places, where the noise of the world finally shuts the hell up.
Tarkovsky’s cryptic notes? Nada on Regan by name. But there was this one symbol, this nagging little puzzle piece – the two swallow motif, ripped in half. We initially thought it was about that doomed DH108 plane, the Swallow, the one that broke the sound barrier and then just… broke.
Was Regan the other swallow? Two birds with one stone. The notes hinted at something called the “swallow dive scene,” happening at Regan’s in ’94. Picture this: Regan hunched over the mixing desk, gesturing through some freaky glass globe at a lone singer swallowed by these massive, dark-rimmed glasses. Swan’s playing with reflections, all mirrors and smoke, until Tarkovsky’s cinematic voodoo pulls us right through the glass, into the singer’s goddamn eye as he half-speaks this haunting opening line: “and when you look do you still see?” Regan’s twisting the knobs on a Joe Meek processor, making the voice sound like it’s booming from this massive radio mast looming over the rooftop, the same place where Tarkovsky ghosts out, back to that burnt-out car, leaving us stranded in this sonic and visual head trip.
Tarkovsky of course was the manager of Wallpaper, which may shoot an arrow straight through the glass target when it comes to certain strange career choices, as well as Regan’s obsession with film soundtracks.
Yeah, man. Wallpaper. Not just some pretty pattern on the wall. This was a whole goddamn world. And we just scratched the surface. Stay tuned, freaks. This ain’t over. Not by a long shot.
Did you notice it? Tarkovsky was Regan’s manager!
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