…as Shelagh’s career looked set to take off, her life began to falter. A relationship turned sour, she found herself living in a rough area of London and, most damaging of all, she began experimenting with drugs. Her fragile and sensitive personality could not cope with the psychedelic onslaught of the cannabis and LSD so readily available in the folk scene.

“Everybody was experimenting with drugs,” she recalls. “But in April 1972 I took a trip that turned my world upside down. I thought it would be out of my system within 12 hours, but three weeks later I was still hallucinating.

“It wasn’t the kind of colourful hallucination you normally got with LSD – this was horrific. I was walking around the shops and looking at people who had no eyes or features, their faces were just blank.

“It went on for so long, I just forgot to eat and was just skin and bone. I was all over the place and didn’t seem to know what I was doing or where to turn to.

“Suddenly, I had to get out. My disappearance wasn’t at all conscious. It was a coping mechanism – self-preservation.”