McKendree might not have recorded during his thirties and early forties but in early middle-age he retained what many musicians of his generation did not, something he might not have maintained had he become rich and famous: a curiosity about new music. As a forty-something, his listening remained as diverse as ever, including Indian ragas, Zambian funk, fuzz-laden Polish psychedelia on the cusp of progressive rock, but also took in some of the most interesting low-budget American bands of the time: Pavement, Swell, The Amps, Guided By Voices, The Grifters. The sessions that McKendree recorded in 1993 with Christine Chagford yielded just four songs: ‘Sister Blue’, ‘Rent My Head’, ‘Gribblins’ and ‘The Twice River’. The recording sessions took place in the same room where the songs for Wallflower had been recorded two and a half decades earlier, with the same engineer, Chickpea. The songs – all duets between Chagford and McKendree, with the exception of ‘Sister Blue’, which features Chagford’s lone, gossamer vocal under a lagoon of tape hiss – are an unusual mixture of sunshine pop sweetness and Sonic Youth-like pre-grunge feedback and have a lo-fi quality that makes them sound like they’re coming from a stairwell three rooms distant. The two vocalists, meanwhile, sound connected and not connected, awkwardly spliced together somehow, yet all the more charming from that, and exempt from the ‘empty biscuit barrel’ sound that blighted so many of the bigger budget records of the nineties and makes them sound so horribly dated now. The sessions themselves were fragmented and chaotic, with Chickpea – who was suffering from what was later discovered to be the first of three bouts of bowel cancer – swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, leaving his post at the mixing desk every few minutes to use the nearest water closet, or just not turning up at all on the afternoon that had been arranged. The songs remain, to this day, unreleased.