By Martin Robinson

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“I have my unicorn, my crystal, my underused guitar…” Chrystabell is noting all the reassuring totems she has gathered around her for what was always going to be an emotional conversation, but develops into a moving, dreamlike (the unicorn is fake, right?) trip into a world of darkness and light. In January, her great friend, collaborator, and spirit guide David Lynch left this planet for other realms, and Chrystabell is still feeling her way through a landscape of grief.

Of their soulmate relationship, she says, “The depth of the beauty can sometimes reflect the depth of the despair. I wouldn’t change it. It’s everything… But I’m learning to really extract the wonder, the awe, otherwise you can spiral down, because a massive presence has changed.

But David’s presence is indelibly infused. When there’s a person you love the most and miss the most, but is everywhere you look… I feel so blessed to have the surreal experience of the world mourning with you.”

While tears fall frequently, laughter is never far away either. And for this chat she’s having to battle through another more prosaic difficulty: “I recently had dental surgery, and I can’t speak properly, I’m swollen up. Don’t make me laugh. I look like the Lady In the Radiator.”

It lends a fittingly Lynchian moment of absurdity; which in his films was never surrealism for the sake of it, but often a detail at odds with the circumstances used to bring out a certain truth in the scene. Here, it sheds light on Chrystabell’s newfound openness and her determination to do this interview to support a celebration of Lynch in London this month called A Gathering of the Angels. At the event, she will perform songs she co-wrote with the great man in a special show called The Spirit Lamp.

“The fact that in the last several years I got to spend so much time with him, feels like a gift that I’ll never quite be able to express my gratitude for,” she says, “At the same time, I look at the trees and the moon and let the ineffable experience of loss wash over me. And that’s what grief does, you’re just so open. And vulnerable. I would never have done an interview like this at another point in my life, but now there’s this liberation. It’s like, ‘let’s see’. Because the worst has already happened.”

A Gathering of the Angels will be a chance for Lynch’s London fans to gather and mourn and celebrate along with his favourite actors and collaborators. Chrystabell’s performance is destined to be an emotional lightning rod.

“Not to be dramatic, but this show kind of saved my life,” she says, “I was very much going inward with grief. There is a moment where you have this awareness that if you don’t try and expand again rather than go within, you might just disappear.”

She talks with candour about a, “brutal and utter devastation from which I may never recover,” but says these pinpricks of consciousness in the darkness revealed, “synchronicities so undeniable that you have to proceed. You’re made aware on some level that if you don’t follow these breadcrumbs, you may be deep in the forest forever.”

The Spirit Lamp is her “devotional musical performance,” and she says with feeling, “It’s also my lifeline. My spark. Because I can also hear David’s voice being like, ‘Babe, get the fuck on with your life! Make art!’”

She takes a breath. “I’m here to live. I thought, ‘I can dig the hole deeper or I can start to reach for the light.’ And this show is me reaching for the light by singing the music that David and I made together, the music that happens to be perfect for joining melancholy with spiritual expansion.”

Chrystabell’s was introduced to David Lynch by a mutual friend in 1998 and it swiftly became a musical match made in heaven. By this time he was recognised as not simply one of the all-time great directors but one of the greatest artists, tapping into humanity’s nervous system like a combination of Francis Bacon, Jean Cocteau and Elvis Presley. While films brought him fame, he was a relentless artist across many mediums, with music particularly important.

Lynch and Chrystabell recorded some excellent records together, including the neon-noir epic This Train, and the erotically charged mystic pulp of Somewhere in the Nowhere. He was the romantic rock ‘n’ roller with a Scott Walker flair for musical/psychological deconstruction; she was the prodigiously talented siren singer with a range and a will that could take you to heaven and hell.

The final record they made, 2024’s Cellophane Memories, was his last major project, with the accompanying promo films his last cinematic works, which she described as, “hilarious… we were having fun.”

In the wake of Lynch’s death, Chrystabell moved away from Los Angeles back to where she grew up in Texas, where her and her mum own a natural burial cemetery. On the call, she gets up to reveal the beautiful expanse of countryside outside her door. “I have 82 acres, it’s incredible, such a gift to come back to. The perfect place to heal and figure out my life,” she says. Two dogs let themselves in – literally leaping up to turn the door handle – and she sighs, “I’ve never had a dog before, but these dogs have been such a comfort.”

Reflecting the shifting emotions familiar to anyone who has been in grief, she suddenly lights up the fire inside her, and says that the show will also be, “Magical and sexy and mystical. All of the things that I embody and that I can provide. I can hear David’s voice saying, ‘I don’t want it to be a downer!’”

She continues, “I want it to be delicious in that melancholy way that gets you but also awakens you. Where you get that portal to feelings. This is about lifting a veil and seeing where we can all go with this collective experience.”

This is not some tragic lost woman, this an artist who has suffered a great deal of pain but is also going through a renewal, helped by the very tools David left her with, particularly on the spiritual side: “He had an antenna for the transmissions.”

Lynch’s guru was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and he became a passionate advocate of Transcendental Meditation, establishing the David Lynch Foundation to spread the techniques towards reaching towards higher consciousness. In Lynch’s world this wasn’t some woo-woo affectation, but a method to help the mind access artistic ideas, follow intuitive paths, and rise over the hate and horror in the streets.

Chrystabell speaks of intuition as if tuning into it was an act of salvation to help her out of the woods.

“The first spark of this show was I had the invitation to perform at a David Lynch tribute at Cannes, and I knew I had to summon whatever it was to take to do it. I was going to do these shows by myself but with David’s music but I needed a collaborator who was still in this dimension.”

Chrystabell has written a piece about Twin Peaks and serendipity called The Blue Rose (a crucial bit of Peaks lore) on her website. In the wake of Lynch’s death, a man called David Gatten wrote an elegant message of condolence as a comment under the piece, and “something in its purity made all my intuition effervescent bubbles start to sparkle. He casually mentioned he was an experimental filmmaker. The licence that grief gives you is that you’re barely here anyway, so you might as well do something ridiculous. So I reached out to David Gatten without having seen anything and said do you want to make a show with me?”

It turned out Gatten was one of the most acclaimed and respected experimental filmmakers in the world, a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and lecturer of some renown. His films are cerebral, intense, abstract, poetic, liminal, somewhere in the nowhere. She describes their coming together for The Spirit Lamp as “directed by David Lynch.”

“What began to unfold were ways for me to be able to understand the cosmic levels that I was going in the right direction. It’s not like you always get what you want, but you always get what you need.”

She grows emotional again at how the show – in which she is cocooned in a film by Gatten – was perfect for A Gathering of the Angels, where she can come together with other people who cared about David: “To be in this essence together and to share that moment feels really powerful. To have this opportunity to perform this music for people who loved him so much.”

One of the remarkable things about David Lynch is how this serious artist managed to make such a mark across popular culture. While there’s much conversation about all the projects he was unable to make, look at everything he did make – an incredible set of films, a TV series, Twin Peaks, which changed the medium for ever, and a final major work Twin Peaks: The Return which is perhaps the ultimate mystery. The festival will be testament to how many he touched and forever will.

Speaking of Twin Peaks: The Return, Chrystabell made her first acting appearance in the series, as FBI agent Tammy Preston. Now, Tammy became something of a hate figure for fans bewildered by The Return, but with typical humour Chrystabell pictured herself wearing a ‘fuck Tammy’ t-shirt at the time and remains very self-deprecating about it: “I expected the offers to flood in…they did not.” but That initial sexist response to her (a woman suddenly mixing it with Gordon Cole and Albert Rosenfield, was seemingly too much to bear) has died down as time as gone on. She is actually perfect in the role, a crucial poised presence operating with restraint in a strange world. Lynh always had a knack of casting non actors he thought were just right for parts.

“Time heals…” she says, and lays it out, “Look if David Lynch asks you to be in Twin Peaks and you have no experience doing something like this, it’s in the hand of destiny. I gave my heart and soul, I couldn’t have given any more. And I did it for my friend, the person that I adore.”

She says even though the acting offers didn’t come in, it was extremely beneficial to her.

“I knew Twin Peaks: The Return would be phenomenally significant in my life, but I didn’t know that it would change my physiology. Nothing was the same after. I was terrified, and then I did it and I felt could do anything. What happened was tremendous self-trust and a willingness to be vulnerable in front of the world. Besides I had David holding my hand throughout it all… no one could feel sorry for me!”

Undervalued too, is Chrystabell’s musical work with Lynch. She was one of his most important collaborators, and you sense that in the years to come, as his work becomes ever more pored over, their work together will be analysed, deciphered and appreciated as it should be. The very fact Cellophane Memories was recorded and released in his last year is astonishing, and its experimental chanteuse blues rewards deep listening.

“It was transcendent because it was just the two of us. It was absolute creative bliss. And connection. I guess I’m still processing that it even happened. Because if the timeline had been any later, I don’t know that it would have. It was like the razor’s edge.”

She can hardly say the name of one song.

“The final track is called Sublime Eternal Love… so lovely.

And Angelo [Badalamenti, Lynch’s long-time film composer] is also on the record posthumously. And Dean Hurley [another close collaborator]. So we were all together. The rest was just me and David playing just being playful and experimenting and everything just came down. It was exactly what it was meant to be.”

She actually had to complete the engineering of the album herself, as time began to run out: “David was already in quarantine [due to emphysema], so he was like, ‘Hey you either do this, or it doesn’t get done.’

I grew up in a recording studio, I’ve dated engineers ad nauseum, I thought I could do it. And I ran the studio and I did it. He was so proud of me. It was a miracle that happened.”

She says they were in touch, “right up until the very end… but it was still unexpected.”

Then adds, “And we’re still in touch. I imagine how busy he is blessing everyone with ideas and whispering in their ear to go fucking meditate.”

Those at The Gathering of the Angels will perhaps be able to hear those whispers during Chrystabell’s performance. She sees herself as a kind of conduit providing an opportunity for communion

She says, “I have this music and it feeds my soul and it was a gift from David and I want to share it. If I can be this invitation of connection in this time of sadness but also of celebration, then I will take myself from Texas, leave my cocoon with my dogs and my unicorn, and I will venture out into the great unknown for this experience with everyone who is magnetised. I will give everything I’ve got to give, because that’s why we’re here.”

A healing moment for her and for everyone there?

“That’s my intention, and it’s the invitation.”

A Gathering of the Angels is taking place on 27 and 28 September at the Genesis Cinema.