Licorice McKechnie, lost myths, collapsing foma, and the strange afterlife of the 1960s

In every generation, there are artists who feel less like people and more like thresholds — brief windows into a more porous, mystical world.
For me as a young teenager in London, the Incredible String Band were exactly that: a shimmering footnote in the psychedelic dream of the late 60s. Their music wasn’t quite songs. It was weather. Mood. Myth. A signal from some parallel emotional landscape.

And at the centre of that atmosphere was Licorice McKechnie — flowers in her hair, a drifting voice that felt half here, half elsewhere, a presence that didn’t seem bound by gravity.

So when she vanished in the 1980s, it felt almost correct.
Some people fade.
Licorice evaporated.

Her disappearance became one of those beautiful cultural absences — a small, persistent mystery that kept the entire era alive in the collective imagination. Every generation has one or two of these: the artist who steps out of the frame and refuses re-entry, allowing everyone else to project what they need onto the silence.

Then the Daily Mail found her

Not dead in the desert.
Not living off-grid.
Not transformed into some desert mystic.
Just an 80-year-old woman in Sacramento, worn down, smoking outside a subsidised high-rise, wanting to be left alone.

This is where the foma meets the world.
And the world wins.

When a long-standing mystery resolves, it always collapses into something smaller, human, and faintly sad. The myth dissolves. The person appears. And the grand foma that sustained decades of speculation deflates instantly.

Yet the impact is powerful, because it reveals a deeper truth:

People claim they want mysteries resolved —
but what they really want is to keep them suspended.

They want the story open-ended.
They want the unresolved edges.
They want the myth more than the fact.

Because mystery is a stabilising fiction —
a foma we keep around to soften reality.

Interlude: ISB, Scientology, and the Collapse of a Foma

Most people under 60 have only the faintest idea what the Incredible String Band were. They were not a “band” in the modern sense. They were a drifting psychedelic commune of ideas, instruments, mysticism, and improvisation. They wrote songs about amoebas, minotaurs, reincarnation, cosmic riddles — a kind of musical surrealism powered equally by innocence and LSD.

By the early 1970s, three of the members — Robin Williamson, Mike Heron, and Licorice — took what felt like a logical next step:
they embraced Scientology.

To understand this moment:

  • LSD had blown open perception
  • Spiritual experimentation was the cultural oxygen
  • Eastern mysticism, occultism, communes, and fringe religions blurred together
  • Everyone was trying to decode reality in some form

Scientology arrived not as the Tom Cruise spectacle of later decades, but as an underground mental operating system. For seekers — especially artists — it offered structure, vocabulary, and certainty.

For the ISB, already living inside a self-created mythos, it felt like an extension of the same story.

But as happens with foma:

  • The belief hardened
  • The system calcified
  • The music changed
  • The magic dimmed
  • The creative organism began to ossify

Scientology took a band that lived on fluidity and turned it toward rigidity.

And Licorice — perhaps more sensitive to that shift than anyone realised — quietly stepped off the stage.

Not just from the band.
From the era.
From the idea of herself.

The Impact of Resolution: When Myth Becomes Mortal

What happens when the Daily Mail solves a 40-year cultural mystery?

Exactly what always happens when a foma collapses:

  • The poetic dissolves into the mundane
  • The symbol becomes an elderly woman with a cigarette
  • The myth becomes a neighbour in a high-rise
  • The unresolved becomes a headline
  • And the human story replaces the imagined one

There is disappointment in that, but also something strangely beautiful.

Because Licorice didn’t disappear because she was fragile.
She disappeared because she was done.

Done with the music scene.
Done with ideology.
Done with the mythology surrounding her.
Done with being a character in someone else’s story.

She walked offstage — not into tragedy, but into ordinariness.
And she stayed there, unobserved, uncommodified, uninterpreted.
A clean break from every foma she had ever inhabited.

And that act — quiet, stubborn, unglamorous — is oddly radical.

The Foma Insight

Here is the essence of her story:

“A mystery is a foma suspended in mid-air.
Once it resolves, it becomes a fact.
Once it persists, it becomes a myth.
Humans say they want facts —
but they live on myths.”

Licorice McKechnie did something very few people ever manage:
she refused both.

She left the foma behind and chose to live in the one place myths cannot follow —
the ordinary, unobserved life of a private person.

She didn’t vanish.
She simply walked out of the narrative.