Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  Few people actively involved in folk music in the early sixties owned a TV, but the medium still lent a sheen of success to those who appeared on it. Relatively few managed such a feat and fewer still got the opportunity to make a record. It was understandable that people believed there to be a hierarchy. Josh MacRae had enjoyed some notoriety as a recording and TV artist, under his own name and with the Reivers and the Emmetones. Ray & Archie Fisher were starting to appear regularly on Here & Now, STV’s regional magazine show, and by the end of the year would have their debut EP Far Over The Forth available on Topic. Roy Guest was, of course, a veteran of Tonight and Saturday Club and was quite happy to make people aware of this. Robin Hall & Jimmie Macgregor – who are also known to have appeared at the Howff – were well on the way with their own TV career. By the end of 1961, even Dolina MacLennan & Robin Gray had their first EP, By Morland Braes, out on Topic and were lined up as guests on STV’s new folk show Alex Awhile, fronted by Alex McEwan. Rory & Alex were both veterans of Tonight, and on Alex Awhile backing would be provided by Steve Benbow. Benbow himself was all over the nation’s airwaves: on 22 December 1961 he appeared at the Howff in a performance broadcast by the Scottish Home Service. Within a year or two he was fronting his own series for STV, Plectrum: ‘I was a bigger name in Scotland for a while than I was in England,’ he notes. Maybe so, but his records were still not selling.

  With such a wealth of talent in the city, it was inevitable that the beginnings of an industry would evolve. Bryce Lane ran the Leith branch of an Edinburgh soft-furnishings business called Jeffries. In some ways comparable to the beginnings of Brian Epstein’s Liverpool empire, Lane first established a small hi-fi department at the store, then opened a dedicated branch of the business, named Audio House, in Home Street. The new store had the facilities to record people directly on to acetate. It was the beginnings of Waverley Records. Bryce left Jeffries and opened Craig Hall Studios – where in August 1963 Bert Jansch would make his first professional recordings, now believed lost. One of Lane’s early acquisitions, with acumen redolent of Roy Guest at his best, was a Studer portable desk bought specifically to make annual recordings of the Military Tattoo at Edinburgh Castle: a perenially popular event, eminently saleable to the tourists.

  Curiously, few of those involved in the Edinburgh scene remember Waverley Records, though a fair amount of product was released. Featuring his party piece ‘Everybody Loves Saturday Night’, one of the first was Introducing Roy Guest, an EP purportedly recorded live at the Howff with a West Indian Steel Band. Representing more obvious commercial nous was an LP, available in mono and stereo versions, of The Edinburgh Military Tattoo Of 1961. Catalogue numbers in the local press ads for these desirable items suggest at least one, perhaps two other records had already been released. The label had been flagged as ‘imminent’ in Eric Winter’s brief MM piece on the Howff in February 1961, which also gave the distinct impression that the whole thing was Roy’s idea. Perhaps if Roy had had the foresight to recommend Bert Jansch as someone for Lane to record, his name may have been secured as the Sam Phillips of British folk history. At the very least, the largely forgotten Waverley Records may have proved more memorable. One could not, however, suggest with any conviction that it would have guaranteed the venture a level of success more widespread than any it enjoyed at the time.42

  ‘This time last year a great deal of folk was going on in Edinburgh,’ wrote Eric Winter, in April 1962. ‘A year later, by all accounts, the folk capital of Scotland has shifted dramatically to Dunfermline.’ John Watt’s Dunfermline Howff, situated in a disused cellar next to an optician’s, had opened its doors on October 5 1961. Inaugurated by Hamish Henderson, with Roy Guest and Dolina MacLennan & Robin Gray its opening acts, the club was a success from the word go. Running on Thursdays and initially hosted, on alternating weeks, by Roy Guest and Robin Gray, by the time Winter came to his sweeping conclusion (not unreasonably used on club advertising for some time thereafter) Len Partridge and future MOR star Barbara Dickson were among the regulars and the membership stood at six hundred.

  Two issues later, Winter let slip that the Howff in Edinburgh had closed. The St Andrews Society, ‘regarded by some as the top people’s cultural organisation’, he wrote, had made an informal offer to reopen the club in new premises. More than that, in the pages of the Melody Maker, was never revealed. ‘Roy went off quite suddenly,’ says Maggie. ‘He’d just done the Howff up, we’d all paid our membership fees and then he disappeared. The membership was like a pound each, so not a lot of money – he certainly wouldn’t have been able to pay for a ticket to America on the proceeds!’

  There is no concrete explanation as to why Roy Guest left Edinburgh when he did. His reputation secured, he could surely have gone on to still greater things as an organiser and promoter within the city’s flourishing arts scene. One rumour had it that he signed up for a degree in sociology at Edinburgh University, pocketed the grant money and left for America. But any suggestion of money trouble is difficult to support: if Martha Schlamme had really compromised his financial position in August, he would surely have done a bunk nearer the time. The Howff was certainly still functioning by Christmas, when Steve Benbow broadcast from the place, and into the new year, when John Challis, a future flatmate of Bert’s, happened by on a trip up from London. ‘It didn’t last terribly long after it was done up,’ says Len, ‘and part of the problem there was that Roy in many ways mistreated the regular clientele when he discovered, “Wow, there’s money to be made here.” A lot of people drifted away because of that. But he’s a guy who I have actually quite fond memories of because anybody who is that much of a rogue is quite likeable. Provided you knew he was a rogue.’

  By July 1962 Roy was running a Howff Mk2 in New York with none other than Martha Schlamme. Roy later accounted for his time after Edinburgh as ‘the wanderlust returning’, initially travelling all over Europe. During the winter of 1962 – 63 he drove from New York to Los Angeles to appear at the LA Troubadour with the Clancy Brothers. By the middle of 1963 he was back in London, promoting folk concerts on a grand scale for the Harold Davidson Agency. From January 1964 he was moonlighting as the host of The Hoot’nanny Show, a national BBC folk TV show broadcast live from Edinburgh – a strange move for a man supposedly ‘on the run’ from something in the same town. Bar the ‘wanderlust’, there are no obvious answers. But then Roy always was an enigma.

  ‘A lot of people thought he was a little bit of a joke,’ says Norma Waterson. ‘I never did. He was one of the most far-reaching ideas men I’ve ever met. In the early sixties he was the one who put on all the old traditional singers with the young performers at all these big concerts at the Albert Hall and elsewhere. He went to the Arts Council and tried to persuade them to do what they do now in backing traditional music. That was Roy Guest.’ Roy spent the rest of the sixties as the most ambitious, hard-working and successful folk music concert promoter and festival organiser in Britain, first with Harold Davidson, then the EFDSS, then his own Folk Directions agency. During the Folk Directions era he pioneered the promoter’s now standard gambit of block-booking major venues on choice dates months in advance. Beatles manager and partner in the NEMS agency Brian Epstein, it is said, became so frustrated by Guest’s ingenuity that he had no choice but to buy the company.

  So it was that Guest worked two years, without a holiday, running the newly installed folk department of one the biggest promotions operations in the land. Burned out, he disappeared, to return once again in 1972 with a Howff Mk 3 in London’s Chalk Farm area. He wanted to recapture a way of doing things, and run it on the model of what he declared to be ‘the happiest times of my life’ at the original.43 It had taken a few years for him to realise what he had lost. ‘The growing artistry of Ray and Archie Fisher, Bert Jansch and other serious performers was exciting to see,’ he recalled at the end of 1964. ‘But it was not a club that I ran responsibly enough. I didn’t have the knowledge and experience necessary, although we had
some good moments.’44

  ‘The Howff was such a wonderful time,’ says Maggie, ‘but I’d say it was the beginning of something not the end. The Waverley had started by then, the White Horse was starting, and we soon found the Crown.’ The premises at 369 High Street became, to Hamish Imlach’s recollection, ‘an upmarket tea-room’, but Roy’s venture had made a colossal difference to the perception and popularity of folk music in Edinburgh: ‘After the Howff people stopped asking, “What’s a folk song?”’ says Dolina. ‘You could put on a folksong concert and people would come to it, whereas before they wouldn’t have known what it was. People in their twenties who would go to the dancing on Saturday nights, they would come to the Howff or the Waverley first. It opened up a whole new world to people.’

  4

  Three Dreamers

  Under the archway, across the cold courtyard,

  Up the stone stairway all pitted and worn

  To a room in a shambles with orange boxes for chairs

  Our lives all lay scattered, still yet to be born

  Daylight would show you the cracks in the ceiling

  Wallpaper hanging all tattered and torn

  It looked like a junkyard of paraphernalia

  Where three dreamers dreamed dreams still yet to be born1

  Towards the end of the sixties Roy Guest would be established as the most successful folk music promoter in Britain. He would take an act like the Watersons, essentially unaccompanied traditional singers, and graft them seamlessly on to that most intangible and lucrative of things, the ‘Swinging Sixties’. Two of his most successful clients would nevertheless be the two most innovative bands of the day to have emerged from the broad church of folk music: the Pentangle and the Incredible String Band. The key protagonists in both could trace their origins back to the Howff. One, of course, was Bert Jansch; the other was Robin Williamson who, by the time he had achieved national status, was the archetype of hippiedom. The same age as Bert, Robin had stayed on at school a little longer, missing out on the early days of the Howff but slipping in before the end.

  ‘Robin wasn’t bohemian at all when we met him,’ says Maggie Cruickshank. ‘He was very innocent in those days – quite ordinary, middle-class. The first time we heard him was at this concert during the 1961 Festival at a place called the Camera Obscura near the castle. He got up and sang this murder ballad, really into the whole act of it. That was the first time he’d sung in public, he told us.’

  Robin would describe his own background as lower middle-class. But like Bert, whom he first met at the Howff, he was escaping from the drudgery of life: ‘I left home with a fairly major thrust to get out of everything that I’d ever known and do something else. I could already play guitar – not very well, though. I took it up at school and played with two jazz bands, one of them an old-timey kind of band and the other a mainstream swing band in which I played electric guitar. And then I got interested in traditional music when I was sixteen-ish and got an acoustic guitar. I used to play the Waverley Bar when I was still at school, for ten shillings [50p] a night, doing traditional material. Archie and his sister were on the television weekly, during the last year I was at school. It was an evening news programme [Here & Now, STV] but they would do a song at the end of it. Jimmie Macgregor I remember being on there as well.’

  Bert and Robin ended up sharing various dilapidated rooms in the less desirable districts of Edinburgh. ‘Traditional Edinburgh tenement buildings in their last states of disrepair,’ says Robin. ‘Four flights down to the toilet sort of thing.’ Robin recalls Bert both owning a guitar, though not a good one, and still gardening when they first met. One may concede that Bert and Robin could have met when both characteristics were in place, a year earlier, but their relationship in terms of sharing flats did not begin before the latter part of 1961. The dates may be gone, but Robin’s recollection of Bert is still vivid: ‘I seem to remember him as this sort of shambolic figure with a guitar permanently attached to one arm,’ he says. ‘He did own a guitar although he spent a lot of time playing on mine, which I’d been given by a man called Barney who was going off to become a Trappist monk. He had a very nice Levin which was better than anything that we had ever had a go at before.’

  Accurate chronology is not possible for the period between the closure of the Howff in the early days of 1962 and the time that Bert would finally remove himself permanently to London, after a number of previous forays, in the autumn of 1964. Certain events can be pin-pointed with confidence, but as a whole the period is very much defined by the euphemism ‘if you remember the sixties, you weren’t there’. Bert and Robin certainly were, and shared accommodation for what both describe as ‘two or three years’ – certainly 1962, with perhaps a few months on either side and during which time Bert would enjoy various trips abroad. ‘I am basically itinerant in all ways,’ he has said. ‘In life and in music, I must keep moving.’

  Foreign travel would become integral to Bert’s lifestyle, and a rich resource for his lyrical and musical inventions. Dope from North Africa was now becoming easily obtainable in Edinburgh. It was an exotic alternative to the heavy drinking that was favoured by some and was another aid to escaping the misery of life for those who chose it. In terms of Bert’s increasingly accomplished if singular guitar playing there was also, at last, a benchmark by which it could be judged: that benchmark, for an entire generation of would-be folk guitar heroes, was a deceptively simple little tune called ‘Angi’. And its maker was Davy Graham.

  ‘Angi’ first appeared on a Topic EP entitled 3/4 A.D., released around April 1962. The record’s other pieces, ‘3/4 A.D.’ and ‘Davy’s Train Blues’, were instrumental collaborations between Davy Graham and Alexis Korner. Alexis could always spot talent, and had arranged for the session to take place. Somehow, he had also managed to side-step Bert Lloyd and his veto. Perhaps Lloyd had even approved the venture. But this was strange, innovative music with the dark muscle of Delta blues, something of the structural rigour of European baroque and the time signatures of modern jazz. ‘Angi’, a solo guitar piece written and performed by Graham, was short but effective. For those who could learn to play it, it would be their passport to folk club bookings nationwide for the rest of the decade. Bert Jansch took the piece, turned it inside out and made it his own. And he had never even bought the record.

  Davy Graham was never a performing guest at the Howff but with Jill Doyle/Guest his half-sister he had a tangible connection to that scene, and some time prior to its release Davy sent Jill a tape of his new recording. Everyone would hear it and be dumbfounded. Bert unlocked the puzzle of ‘Angi’ and consequently introduced the new technique it held to all those around him: ‘From the tapes, no one could work out how to do it, until I hit on the secret of it all, which was very simple. Our techniques are very different but I did learn a lot from him.’2

  As had been the case with Broonzy, Bert figured it out and applied the new knowledge to his own work. After Big Bill, Brownie, Archie, Hamish and Len, Davy Graham was the final piece of the jigsaw. For the rest of the decade Bert would work on assimilating Davy’s ideas into something uniquely his own, but the process of his musical education was now all but complete: ‘The only three people that I’ve ever copied were Big Bill Broonzy, Davy Graham and Archie Fisher,’ says Bert. ‘After hearing Davy play, it was just all there.’3

  Bert believes he first met Davy in Edinburgh, but only in passing. On one occasion he brought his girlfriend Angi, who had inspired the tune, to the Howff. ‘We knew the song, so we were tickled pink to meet her,’ says Maggie Cruickshank. Her immortaliser was a different prospect entirely: ‘Extraordinarily intense,’ is Dolina MacLennan’s recollection. ‘I wouldn’t have spoken to him.’ Davy Graham was indeed an eccentric and singular individual and right down to the present day one can sense from Davy, however subdued it may be, a feeling of antipathy or, at least, ambivalence towards Bert. Bert has always held Davy, as a musician, in the highest regard.

  ‘At
that time, my playing was influenced more by folk stuff like Pete Seeger and Archie Fisher,’ says Bert. ‘But certainly my playing now is taken straight from Davy. I first met him at the Waverley Bar but I got to know him really only later, in London. I already knew his brother Nick and his sister Jill – in fact, I seemed to know all his family except him. He was much more enigmatic than anyone else, and still is exactly the same. You still can’t have a conversation with him.’

  So where had this extraordinary man with his extraordinary music come from? Born in Leicester on 22 November 1940, his father Hamish from the Isle of Skye, his mother Winifrid from Guyana, Davy was brought up in the racially volatile Notting Hill area of London. The ages of ten and twelve have been given variously as the starting point of his guitar playing but either way he was, like Bert, sixteen before he owned one. And as with Bert, the individual and the instrument became inseparable: ‘I started not doing homework and playing “My Baby Left Me”, “Mystery Train” and Lonnie Donegan hits. I couldn’t concentrate at school thinking of Lonnie Donegan.’4 Davy left school in 1958 and became one of the first to follow in the footsteps of Alex Campbell and go busking on the streets of Paris. Wizz Jones would follow the same path: ‘When I hit Paris [in 1959] it was late at night and he suddenly came round the corner. I remember seeing this vision of this tall, blond-haired, statuesque, deep-tanned, god type of person as he was walking towards me. I thought, “That’s what I wanna be!” And he said, “I’ve just come up from Greece, man.” He was so cool.’5