Natalie Leonard: The morning after the Japan concert I woke up with about a hundred messages on my phone, and twice as many texts.
Davina Thewsley: I ran to my parents, sobbing. (laugh) I don't think they knew what to do with themselves. I never showed any emotion to them before that I don't think, not since I was a baby.
Alice Hughes: I saw the pictures. It was unmistakeable even from blurry photos taken from someone's mobile phone.
Theresa Hawk: I'd thought it was impossible. I'd thought she'd died.
Davina Thewsley: But it was definitely Evelyn. She'd straightened and bleached her hair, but the face could belong to no other. Her family had been notified, and they were just shocked. What was their little girl doing in Japan? The Porters weren't exactly jet-setters! These were people who only had passports because a relative in Canada passed away once and they flew out for the funeral.
Eileen Richardson: So what happened was, someone had seen Evelyn Porter at the Japanese Knave concert and taken a photo of her to send to all the fans, and Evelyn's family. Her father flew out to Tokyo with a police officer, which was the furthest he'd ever been from home apparently, and within a week she was back in custody. Her passport was suspended and she was no longer allowed in Japan, but she was home safe and that was what mattered to her family and friends.
Naoko Izumi (translated from Japanese): What you have to understand is, we didn't know anything about her. She lied about her name from the day she first contacted us. She said that she was a university student living out a life someone else had planned for her, and that she wanted to escape. As far as we knew, she had gotten into Japan by legitimate methods, and so all we had to do was meet her at the border. When we heard about the girl who disappeared, she expressed sorrow and fear for the girl, but never hinted at the truth.
Risa and I had needed a roommate after ours moved out, and it worked out perfectly for us. Vicky—that's what we knew her as—was a wonderful roommate. She was very clean, and she found a job as a waitress in the city center, so she was able to pay us the rent for the month that she stayed with us.
We were very happy, the three of us. We shared the excitement that Knave of Hearts were coming to Tokyo, and we spent that month being the most creative we ever had been. All three of us are interested in fashion design. Risa and I are in school for it, and Vicky worked independently.
We decorated the apartment with fairy lights and colored paper. We cooked our own meals and arranged them artfully. We threw themed parties for our friends. All the time, Risa and I were in school and Vicky was working. I still can't figure out how we managed to do so many things in such a short time, but I think we had an excited energy that maybe we'll never capture again. Perhaps for Vicky it was the energy of someone who fears the end every minute of her life.
I'm sure it was difficult for Vicky. She knew that if she went to the Knave of Hearts concert, people there might recognize her. But at the same time, she couldn't pretend she didn't want to go with us, because it would make us suspicious. And she didn't have to pretend she wanted so badly to see the band she loved again.
When Risa and I checked the fanzine sites in the morning we didn't want to believe it. I remember pacing around the room and around Risa's chair, coming up with all these excuses, all these complicated ways that Vicky might not be Evelyn Porter. But eventually we had to admit we knew the truth.
Risa Takagawa (translated from Japanese): We talked to Vicky—she was very distraught, but we gradually found out that she had used her passport and her life savings to get as far as South Korea, and then she had sneaked into Japan on a fishing boat to cover her trail, which was why no one had been able to find her until someone saw her at the concert. In one sense she was very brave to attempt all of that just so she could escape her ordinary life, but I think it's inexcusable to do that to her family. In a sense I felt betrayed, myself, to know that my beautiful, creative friend had done something so selfish, and had lied to me and Naoko the whole time she knew us.
We phoned the Porters' home and spoke softly, in probably broken English. We told Vicky's mother that she was safe and with us, and that we hadn't known who she really was, and that because we loved our friend we knew that we wanted her to be back at home with her family.
Davina Thewsley: I wish the story had ended there, with Evelyn returning safely home and everyone being happy after that. But the problem with having so many people who know about your life is that you can't escape it, sometimes. Immediately, the fans reacted again. And everyone wanted to get a reaction in. It became a bit of a mob mentality thing. Many of them were just happy to hear Evelyn was safe, and had been feeling all along that her attempt at disappearing was really immature. But some of them were angry—they said she had claimed to be so free, but what she had really done was just to find a replacement for an ordinary life far away. They said you can't just get a 'get out of jail free' card in life, you can't just decide you don't want the consequences of your decisions, or that you don't want the people who care for you.
Oh, it got stranger than that. After those there was the group of people who felt like she was a hero to them, even though she had been caught. And they were the ones who really caused a problem. They would bother her—send her strange, scarily devoted letters; come to her house... Once, a girl came to my house and demanded I take her to see Evelyn. That was the scary part.
There was also Rivka. But she was quickly becoming the outlier among all Knave fans. She always had something completely off the wall and senseless to say. Her article was also scolding Evelyn—for coming back. She thought the whole 'disappearance' was wonderful and subversive and liberating, and that the true logical conclusion of the idea would be to stay disappeared. To run away from those Japanese girls' flat as soon as she was discovered. Rivka's article was filled with snippets of stories of travelers: mendicants and hitchhikers and hobos. Every day that girl had new heroes.
Lane Kennedy: We were hesitant to start writing again, at first. Alan and Emma had worked on prototypes of new songs, but we were in a very precarious position. We had to somehow best an album that had gone gold, had to maintain the stance that people recognized us for.
And there was a weird sort of postpartum depression, almost, when the tour was over. Even though the end of the tour had been nasty and full of arguing. We just didn't know what to do with our lives. Alan and Emma had coursework to do, but my class schedule had thinned out on account of it being my last year of university. I was mostly working at home and on tour anyway, designing at my laptop.
What I did was started running. It was summer, then, and the plants were in full bloom. When I was running the world passed by too fast to be noticed, and I could be alone in my thoughts.
Alan Léonin: I was really stressed, all of a sudden. I felt pressure like I had never quite done before, since ordinarily having deadlines was good for me, and the only time I'd felt really upset while making an album was when I felt like my own role was already done and I just had to watch while everyone else put together the pieces. But now I felt like I had to try and write more, write better. The manuscripts from the tour needed touching up, needed to be made into serviceable lyrics. But at first I couldn't do it.
I went to Emily's flat one day, when it was too hot to stay in mine—no air conditioning, I'm sure you can imagine. The joys of student housing. And I thought maybe Emily could offer some counsel, being not only our manager but a songwriter herself.
It was very strange. She was not her former self. She was worried and twitchy, pacing round the room the whole time, going on about how she didn't know what to do about 'the Evelyn Porter situation'. I didn't think it really was a 'situation' per se, until she managed to pull herself together and explain to me exactly what had happened.
You see, there was this young girl called Rivka who had found Evelyn's address, and had shown up at her doorstep with propositions to take her away, to go running off into the great European wilderness. Evelyn didn't know what to do; I think she just told Rivka off, and then Rivka got almost violent, saying some odd, semi-threatening things to Evelyn's parents and her brother. Evelyn's parents had phoned the police and then phoned Marque, figuring perhaps it was best put in the hands of those who handled publicity.
I guess it was a question of, what has to happen for you to consider changing your ideals? And for me, that whole situation was not what had to happen. I felt, as soon as Emily finished her story, like I was back to my old self, back to being inspired. I knew I still had a job to do. And I told Emily that. She perked up almost instantly, like perhaps—oddly, with her being the manager and me just being, you know, a voiceless tool of the industry—perhaps she was looking to me for that drive to keep going. Life's funny that way.
Emma Marx-Hall: We definitely got our work ethic back after about a month of being back in London. To record the new album, we more or less locked ourselves up and just worked as hard as we could push ourselves to. The tour truly had made a better musician out of each of us.
Tom Thorogood: I'll admit it was almost...claustrophobic, maybe, to come back from the tour and write the third album. We went from having the whole wide world all around us to it being just the four of us, and sometimes Emily. We didn't even start working with an engineer yet, because we really wanted to get back to the organic writing process we were familiar with.
Emily Alexander: After I talked to Alan, I felt really confident about the new album. I felt like all the drama of the tour had died down, and it was time to get back to work. We'd made a significant profit from the tour, and we could have more or less had whatever we wanted on the new album—symphony orchestras, modular synths, elephants, explosions, you name it. I talked to the band and they all agreed that they didn't want any bells and whistles. They just wanted to make some bare-bones rock music. All the demos they played for me sounded much more raw, more organic than the stuff on In the Court of the King. It seemed like a good step to me, since so much of Knave was about the words, and this sound was their way of stripping away everything surrounding the words and the message.
I was taking care of publicity for the band then, which meant I was also doing their blog posts and updating their Myspace. Every time I posted something, sure as sunshine there'd be a dense two-paragraph comment underneath by the next day, criticizing everything I had to say and criticizing me for 'taking over the band's rightful position' and 'putting my face on the band and making them faceless'. Signed, Rivka Starlett. It bothered me, but I didn't see her as a threat or anything, I just thought she was starving for attention and I refused to give her that attention.
Davina Thewsley: But what no one knew was, Rivka was still sending hateful things in the mail to Evelyn's family. And then magazines and newspapers kept bothering the Porters at their house. It got to the point where they were all just so frustrated and upset that they filed for witness protection, and the government relocated them and gave them new names to live under so they could finally be at peace.
Seeing Evelyn for that last time was so weird to me. She didn't want to speak to me, and I had nothing to say to her. It didn't seem right to tell her how much I'd missed her, would miss her.... I just told her I was glad she was safe and I hoped everything would go well for her in hew new life. And that was when I myself finally turned away from Knave of Hearts and the world of Knave fandom, because everything had traces of Evelyn on it and I just looked at it and felt numb.
Yeah, I'd say the experience changed me. I'd say it taught me how to relate to people and make friends. It taught me that there's more worth living for than just the fear of dying, because that's more or less how I was going about my days before I met Evelyn.
And I learned that journalism is my first love in this world. That's what I do now, music journalism, right. I just enjoyed writing ANTI EVERYTHING, and I needed somewhere to put all that energy, so that's what I did. I traded in rants from homeless people in Edinburgh for conversations with club DJ's and reviews of venues around the United Kingdom.
I still listen to the band, you know. I still look up when I hear the first line of "South East" on the radio. When it's that much of your life...well...one doesn't exactly forget.
ºKnave of Hearts (singing "South East"): If you hear this song, are you looking up? There's a message written high above...
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