For decades, William Jellett danced at gigs and festivals, and told people he was the Son of God. Then, it seemed, he disappeared.

Jellett at the Reading Festival, 1974 (Source: Vin Miles, UK Rock Festivals)

It was a Saturday evening, St Valentine’s Day 1970, when William Jellett first thought he might be Jesus. He was on the London Underground, travelling back from work, and noticed the headline of the newspaper unfurled opposite him: “Cambridge riots — two policemen beaten up”. There had been student protests the night before, on Friday the 13th.

Feeling “hurt for my brothers,” he later told 19 magazine, he put his head in his hands. He had the sense that everyone was his brother or sister, and that the music and freedom he had found over the last few years were slipping away, with this rising violence. The lights flickered between stations, catching the dull livery.

He was only 21, but violence had always bothered him; back in the children’s home, back at school, back with the mods and rockers on the beaches. It seemed to be all around him now. The music press talked about Manson and Altamont and Kent State, and sometimes there were photographs of crowds at gigs too, in which he could see himself dancing, conspicuously. Music was getting heavier too, at the gigs he went to nearly every night: Black Sabbath had released their first album the day before, The Who recorded “Live at Leeds” that night.

As the train rumbled forward, Jellett looked into his hands. They were less smooth than they had been, he saw. He had not been able to hold down regular work for a while, leaving the job he had found when he first moved to London, at the tea importer, then the job in the storeroom at the BBC, where he had spent much of his time scrawling designs in biro on cardboard. He now sometimes told people he “worked in an office”, if they asked, between songs, or in queues. He did, really. Travelling around the city, he cleaned flats and houses, and offices. His hands were hardening with the work. He had never noticed the lines in his palms before.

Jellett at Bath Blues Festival, 1969 (Source: Lawrence Impey, UK Rock Festivals)

For the first time, Jellett saw that the lines crossed in the centre of each hand. The cross, he would say, in the “idle of my palm”. He was well-attuned to religious symbolism, and divine calling. His parents had been in the Salvation Army, and he had felt something of this significance over the last couple of years, in the music he listened to.

Now, the logic overcame him. He thought about reincarnation, and about universality and interconnectedness. If we are all one, he thought, he could be anyone. People had been calling him “Jesus” for a while, and he had adopted the nickname, but now it made sense. If he had been reincarnated, he thought, “there would be no permissive society, no underground, just people wanting to be themselves and live their lives the way they wanted to before”.

The crosses were stigmata, he thought.