ALTADENA – the tiny Californian town that Natalie Mering now calls home – is one of those places that time forgot. Pushed back against the towering San Gabriel mountains, it’s isolated on three sides by jagged foothills and dark primeval woods. Eldridge Cleaver is buried here; so are Alice Walker and George Reeves, the first TV Superman, who died under mysterious circumstances. Johnny Otis spent his final years here without anyone the wiser.
Largely ignored by Pasadena, its haughty neighbour to the south, Altadena was where rich millionaires from the east and well-heeled Angelenos used to come to beat the heat, before moving on to more exotic and cooler playgrounds to the north and south. It has few restaurants or shops. The single art store is called McGinty’s Gallery At The End Of The World. It’s the kind of place where you could elude the law, exes or creditors, wait out the apocalypse… or maybe just be left alone to make an album.
As Mering did over the last two years, plotting and writing And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow – the follow-up to Uncut’s 2019 Album Of The Year, the prophetic Titanic Rising.
Wild flocks of peacocks and peahens dart from rooftop to Altadena rooftop – including Mering’s, where a stately male is unfurling his plumage on the low slope of her slate roof. “It’s no big deal,” she says, waving her hand dismissively as she unlocks the door to her rambling white ranch house, set far back from the street. “They’re everywhere. They have the run of the town.”
If no-one looks askance at a majestic blue peacock on a rooftop, what are the chances that Altadenans will recognise an artist of Mering’s calibre living in their midst? That must be part of the appeal, to move here two years ago.
“Well, that, and I’m certainly a lone wolf! But I got this house cheap because it doesn’t have air-conditioning,” she laughs. “Which wasn’t that big of a deal
