Shepard, his wife, and their young son lived in London for three years from 1971 to 1974, returning across the Atlantic only to spend summer vacations in Nova Scotia. England was chosen on the grounds that it was not America but that its inhabitants spoke English, and also because Shepard thought vaguely that he might be able to start a more serious rock career in London, home of the Who and the Rolling Stones. He quickly abandoned this latter idea, however. After the chaos of his last years in New York, he and O-Lan attempted to create a quieter, more domesticated life for themselves, settling in the London suburb of Hampstead. Director Nancy Meckler, who knew him well at this time, notes that the legends of Shepard as a drug-addled wild man of rock always seemed bizarre to her: she recalls him as a man who liked to cook, read, and look after his son. During this period, Shepard took the opportunity to sit back and take stock of where he was going, and wrote a variety of very different plays in the process of this reassessment. First among these was The Tooth of Crime, written in 1972 and still regarded by many as his most remarkable achievement.