Gallows, my childhood home, and David Bowie sleepovers

07 Jan, 2025

A tale.

In idle moments, I like to read old-fashioned messageboards on all sorts of topics, mostly around music and bands I liked ten twenty-five years ago.

During a casual browse today, I stumbled upon a link to the Wikipedia page of Finlay Quaye after reading this:

The page has been... not defaced so much as edited by someone who needed a space to rant. It's a little upsetting so I'll not embed the full text, but I've saved a screenshot here for posterity.

Something curious struck me as I was reading through - a reference to a band which included Finley's father called Hookfoot, and specifically a song listed as "Coombs Gallow's":

Huh, I thought. Weird coincidence. I grew up in a small village on the Berkshire/Hampshire border which was overlooked by a high chalk hill, Coombe Hill, where a gibbet stands to this day.

(In retrospect it's kind of weird to have grown up being able to see a medieval hanging pole looking on a hill from the end of your garden.)

It turns out that the song is about the same place - the scenic view from the top of the hill near where I grew up:

Come with us to where the gallows stand
Outta here in green Hampshire land
That's where the witches paid their dues

I sent a message to my dad, who promptly replied that though he didn't know the song, he did know the writer:

Amazing.¹

Within about twenty minutes:

• I learned what's happening with Finlay Quaye;
• Discovered that his father was in another band;
• A band that wrote a song about somewhere a mile down the road from my childhood home;
• That another member of the band was the brother of a family friend;
• Some nice rock-and-roll trivia about said friend.

Sometimes the internet is still full of six degrees of Kevin Bacon fun.

#family #main #music