by Colin Harper
This curious perception of a common touch would carry Bert through the rest of the decade as a performer of unique, utterly uncontrived charisma. Audiences would multiply in inverse proportion to his nonexistent skills as a conventional entertainer, communicator and exemplifier of text-book guitar styles. Where Davy Graham gave out an aura of aloof and unattainable brilliance, with poise and learning, Bert Jansch on a stage cried vulnerability, repression, the ‘small man’ aching for a better way through life – a man of the people. It was an extraordinary illusion: Bert Jansch was very different in character to Davy Graham, but he was every bit as much a loner and even more uncopiable as a technician.
‘Davy Graham played a lot of bar chords whereas Bert never used them,’ says Coia. ‘It was just such a total diversity from normal, conventional playing – in tonality, in dissonance, in his ideas on chord progressions. He didn’t play conventional chords – he played something that his ear wanted him to play, conventional or not.’ Coia was not a guitar player when he first heard Bert Jansch, but in a manner that was to be repeated a thousand times and more in the coming years, Bert was his inspiration to take up the instrument. Having the man on tape meant he could imitate Bert’s style and material at his leisure: ‘Initially I thought there was no way you could do it, it was so far removed. It’s his timing – his accentuation and the actual timing of his voice relative to the playing of his guitar which is so unique. They’re almost two detached things put together. Forty or fifty people would have been the size of the smallest venue he played in Glasgow, but it was always full to capacity for Bert. It was exciting because it was so fresh.’35
There were songs from the repertoires of Broonzy and McGhee; there was a hint of Charlie Mingus; there was ‘Courting Blues’, his song for Liz; there was ‘Strolling Down The Highway’, with its enigmatic references to Algerian terrorists and garlic; and there was a quite extraordinary instrumental called ‘Joint Control’. Never released on record, in Bert’s own words it became ‘the basis of about half a dozen other tunes’. It was certainly indicative of a style of guitar playing that would come to be instantly recognisable as that of Bert Jansch. Robin Williamson, on hearing ‘Joint Control’ for the first time in decades courtesy of Coia’s recording, made an intriguing observation: ‘It’s years ahead of its time, and also years before anyone had ever heard kora. If you listen to African music – kora music and palm-wine guitar – it’s got all those sort of rhythms going on. That music wasn’t available in Britain then. It’s almost like Bert had instinctively invented the ancestor of the blues.’
5
Peregrinations
The winter of 1962/63 was unusually cold. Pipes were bursting in London, the Thames was frozen, the building trade was laid off en masse and some years later Kenyan-born light entertainment sensation Roger Whittaker could still recall it as his worst Christmas ever: ‘I went to bed wearing a track suit and woke up the next morning with moisture frozen on my beard.’1 It was hardly an opportune time for a couple of complete unknowns to trek down from Edinburgh in search of an audience. But so the cards had been shuffled. Anthea Joseph, running the Troubadour, had seen Robin performing in Edinburgh and offered him a gig, on Saturday, 19 January 1963. Bert came along for the ride: ‘We went picking potatoes to get our bus fare to London – on the strength of that one gig,’ says Robin.
They stayed with Davy Graham’s brother Nick for a few days before finding a flat in the Earl’s Court area. They had one other contact in London: David Blass. David’s mother had by this time moved the family home from Wembley Park to Cresswell Place – just around the corner from the Troubadour. Anne Briggs, having left home to work for Centre 42, was already there. Blass had met Anne the previous year in Edinburgh, on a visit he had made by car. She had asked for and received a lift to London and, having made the connection, would return to stay with Blass at the family home on a number of occasions.2
Bert did not recall his previous encounter with Anne in Edinburgh some years earlier, but this time around the pair hit it off immediately: ‘I remember that night well,’ he says. ‘And hopefully she does too.’ There would be a lasting bond in terms of lifestyle and a shared interest in each other’s music: ‘By that time he’d got a lot more music together,’ says Anne, ‘but it wasn’t recognised as folk music on the English scene, although people who knew their stuff thought, “Wow, what an original guitarist this guy is.” Davy Graham was writing his own tunes, and he had obviously influenced Bert, but apart from Ewan MacColl, who was coming from a totally different dimension, there weren’t any singer-songwriters at that point, as far as I’m aware.’
The Troubadour itself was among the earliest folk clubs in London – a tiny, unventilated cellar that held around a hundred people. Geographically removed from the other venues, at 265 Old Brompton Road, it operated independently of either Ewan MacColl or the Soho scene. Martin Carthy was a regular: ‘It was started as a coffee bar in the fifties by a man called Mike Van Blumen, a Canadian Communist,’ says Carthy. ‘He had a folk club on a Saturday night but he also had poetry nights, jazz nights, basically anything that people would come to listen to and that people wanted to organise.’ Jenny Barton and Anthea Joseph were the two organisers most associated with the place in the early sixties, and when Robin and Bert made their London debut Martin Carthy was in the middle of a lengthy period as the club’s Saturday resident performer. Or was he?
‘I’m sorry to bust those hoary old legends that both “Rambling” Jack Elliott and Martin were residents at the Troub,’ wrote Barton, a tad pedantically, some years later. ‘I owe them both a vast debt – the former originally put the Troubadour on the map back in ’59, and the latter contributed very largely and for many years to our position near the top of the league. I can remember him when he had to dump a school satchel before hopping up on stage. My policy was always to book the best available, regardless of whether my audience had ever heard of them before. I was a rather reticent and inexperienced girl in my early twenties [but] the policy obviously paid, since the club remained packed like the proverbial sardine tin for nearly all the years I ran it. The audience paid the highest charges in Britain, endured quite the worst discomfort conceivable and most of them would cheerfully have admitted that they didn’t know a traditional song from a cabbage; they simply had the ability to recognise quality when they saw and heard it – and indeed to give the bird in no uncertain terms when they didn’t.’3
Robin was advertised, Bert was not; both played, neither remembers a thing about it. ‘I’m not surprised,’ says Carthy, ‘they were both very, very stoned indeed! I’d met Robin before, in Edinburgh, and you couldn’t help but be hugely impressed. I’d heard of Bert from various people. “Oh, he’s amazing,” they’d say, “he’s only been playing guitar a year and he’s miles better than anyone else, you gotta hear him …” And he lived up to expectations.’
Bert had already played on a stage in London earlier that week, upstairs at the King & Queen in Foley Street, at a blues session hosted by Cliff Aungier and Gerry Loughran. Again, his name was unadvertised. But the Troubadour experience was the watershed. Bert recalls Anthea Joseph remarking on his similarity to the previous week’s guest, who turned out to be Bob Dylan. ‘I asked her how much he got paid,’ says Bert. ‘It was thirty bob [£1.50].’4
Dylan, yet to make a significant impact on the world, was in Britain to appear in a BBC television play, Madhouse On Castle Street. The play, broadcast on 30 December 1962, was notable for the debut of a song he had just written, ‘Blowing In The Wind’. A review in The Listener noted that Dylan had ‘sat around playing and singing attractively, if a little incomprehensibly’. Nobody would have put any money on it at the time, but they had seen the future, and its name was Bob. While in London Dylan had been checking out the folk clubs. Brian Shuel, the only professional photographer to document that scene to any substantial degree over the coming decade, was at the Singers Club when Bob sang. By chance, he captured some now famous im
ages of the young American surrounded by Ewan MacColl, Martin Carthy and the cream of British folksong at the courthouse of its burgeoning empire. Bob had been lucky to get through the door. Like Bert Jansch, Bob Dylan may not have made any records yet but his reputation was preceding him. It was a reputation that Bruce Dunnet – Communist die-hard, MacColl’s doorkeeper, and a strident, imposing man at the best of times – was not impressed with:
‘Bob had already been to the Roundhouse,’ says Dunnet, ‘and I think it was Martin Winsor had told him to fuck off [Dunnet believed this was due to a perception of Dylan as a drug user at the time]. And then, shortly after, he came to the Singers Club at the Pindar of Wakefield and Peggy Seeger told me we had to let him in. I said, “No, I don’t want to let that shit in,” because I knew he’d been at the Roundhouse and barred. But no, she insisted and I had to let him in.’5
Dylan subsequently appeared unadvertised at the Troubadour on 29 December and 12 January. The next time he appeared in London it would be May 1964 and he would be firmly established as ‘the voice of a generation’. To the cognoscenti at that time Bert would bear briefly, and through no desire of his own, the mantle of being ‘Britain’s answer’ to the guy. In the meantime, an intense focus on his own music was more than enough to be going on with: ‘What he was playing,’ says Carthy, ‘you’d call it blues but it’d have to be a very, very loose definition of the blues. I can’t remember the first songs I heard him sing but fairly soon after he came down here I heard him do “Strolling Down The Highway”. That I do remember! It was just this drive, this incredible drive. His only concession to everybody else was to play “Angi” – and he played it all wrong! And still does. If I say Davy touched everybody it’s true, but there are some people who could not have survived had it not been for Davy. Bert always had more than that. He never sounded like anybody but Bert.’
The Troubadour gig came and went and there were no other bookings in the can. Hustling around the frost-bitten scene, Robin secured a couple of further gigs in March but there was nothing for Bert. Bert maintains that, unlike Robin, he was not actively seeking gigs on this trip. Nevertheless, with his preference for traditional music, Robin was always the more likely of the pair to get work in the MacColl era. He was more acceptable. ‘Eventually things really ground to a halt,’ says Robin, ‘and both Bert and I were finding it hard to get engagements. The folk scene per se had divided itself up very rigidly into a purist category, virtually run by Ewan MacColl, and a sort of international, neo-Israeli, peacenik thing which was a bit kind of “cabaret”, and we didn’t really fit into either. I don’t think Ewan liked either me or Bert very much, and I think he actually tried to stop us being able to work in London that first winter we went there. That was the impression I got. I actually rather admired his Radio Ballads. Ideologically he wouldn’t admire either of us. We couldn’t have been described as either left-wing or right-wing – we were pretty much “wingless”!’ In fairness, one of Robin’s other London bookings during the trip was at a midweek off-shoot of the Singers Club alongside Joe Heaney, a man who would become one of his all-time heroes.6 Possibly there was some incident or remarks made on the night, but Bruce Dunnet maintains it would have been out of character for Ewan, whatever the stringency of his views, actively to hinder the progress of other musicians.
By the end of March Robin was on his way back home. Bert would follow a little later. Perhaps not in the sense of a conventional relationship, he had nevertheless become close to Anne Briggs. Her record debut, singing two songs on Bert Lloyd and Ewan MacColl’s thematic album of industrial folksong The Iron Muse, had been released on Topic to fervent acclaim towards the end of February. The album featured a number of other singers, mostly associated with Centre 42, but Anne had been singled out for particular praise. In part, the adulation was the surprise of hearing a stunningly beautiful new voice, but in part too it was the quality of a song to match. ‘The Recruited Collier’ was Anne’s triumph. Her version – simple, unadorned and aching with poignancy – has never been bettered. ‘She didn’t sing like a little girl,’ says Martin Carthy. ‘She sang with real age, like she’d been singing for years and years. She was beautiful. She was a glorious singer and she just got better.’7
Though Anne was destined, largely of her own volition, to make precious few recordings thereafter, the wise hand of Bert Lloyd can be felt in the greatest of those that were to follow: ‘Bert [Lloyd] was a friend first and foremost,’ says Anne. ‘But he was enormously generous in sharing work and his knowledge of songs with me. He wasn’t a mentor, he was a giver.’ Eric Winter declared, in MM, that on the basis of her record debut Anne could soon be ‘a raving visitor to the London club scene’. The folk world still revolved around London, but Anne was the free-est of free spirits and her ‘raving’ was not to be confined: ‘All the other traditional singers then,’ says Bert Jansch, ‘certainly all the ones I’d ever met, were old and rather staid. The thing about Anne was she was wild. She got drunk onstage and fell over all the time – it was a regular thing, along with a few others like myself. If she got fed up with a song she’d just stop in the middle and say, “Oh, forget that, I’ll sing you another one.” I had a similar approach myself. But at that time, her impact in that world, she was more akin to a punk than to anything that had gone before.’ There was a softer, more vulnerable and solitary side to Anne too, a side of her personality that would bear comparison to Bert’s. ‘I remember thinking she seemed quite sad at the beginning,’ says Ray Fisher, who had shared Centre 42 stages with Anne. ‘She sang very mournful songs. She was certainly a lot quieter than I was. A much gentler person altogether.’8
Bert and Anne would maintain a loose connection for years – writing a handful of songs together, living upstairs and downstairs from each other in London for a period in 1965, appearing sporadically on gigs together right up to 1971. But their period of closest friendship and mutual support was here at the very start of their careers. Anne was the one with the record, the Melody Maker write-up and as a consequence the realistic prospect of getting some gigs around the country. Off they went.
‘“Romantic” is probably the wrong word,’ says Anne. ‘Everybody used to think that we were brother and sister because we looked very alike at that stage. We were on the road together. If I had a gig and Bert didn’t have a gig he’d come on mine, because he had nowhere else to stay. And the same if Bert had a gig and I didn’t, because half the time we didn’t have a roof over our head anyway. We were literally just dossing side by side. From my point of view it was great to be in Bert’s company because he was a companion. Yes, he was a boyfriend but he was a very loose sort of boyfriend. He’d wander off and have an affair with a girl, I’d wander off and have an affair with a bloke, but we’d always sort of keep going back to each other. This went on for quite a long time. It was no great “I love you” kind of thing – we were just close: very, very close. Musically and in lifestyle.’
Ewan MacColl had been no more aware of Joe Heaney, a legendary old fellow from Galway of richly un-English accent, limited learning and a deep well of songs, than he was of Robin Williamson when both were granted the platform of his club’s new (and short-lived) midweek gathering at the King’s Head in Twickenham. How Williamson got the gig is anyone’s guess, but Heaney had been recommended to Ewan by Bill Leader, who remembers the occasion purely for a moment of inadvertent comedy: ‘Joe sang a couple of ballads, one of which was part English, part Gaelic. Joe came off the platform, Ewan came over and said, “Nice to hear the old macaroni again, Joe” – a classic! Macaroni is a technical term to describe things sung in more than one language. I remember this because it seemed to be so inept but in a way so characteristic of Ewan, to start spouting grammarian jargon at some roots singer. It encapsulates for me the extent to which Ewan was not on the same wavelength as a lot of people he claimed to be close to.’
Bill Leader was something of a lone wolf on the folk scene. Coming down to London from Bradford in 1955 he
had a keen eye for absurdity and a healthy disregard for the establishment – any establishment. He was, crucially for posterity and for the careers of so many British and Irish folk musicians, both technically minded and fascinated with the esoteric edges of culture. ‘I always wanted to be a sound engineer as a kid. Instead of having daydreams about driving the Flying Scotsman I used to imagine myself recording in a film studio. I first got to London by getting a job in a film library. I was always interested in films. I got involved very slightly in the technical side of making English versions of foreign films but nothing ever came of it.’9
In parallel with this Leader became attracted to the ideals of the Workers’ Music Association, which at that time was still involved with Topic Records, busily re-establishing the label after the impasse created by an inconvenient World War. They were stumbling around in an endearingly amateur fashion – one triumph was the release of a ‘Rambling’ Jack Elliott record on eight-inch vinyl, at a time when gramophone auto-changers set to seven- ten- and the new-fangled twelve-inch formats were all the rage. There was potential for a subsidised label, of which Topic was the only one of its kind in Britain, to make a profit on a small run with the new LP format. Runs of ninety-nine copies were a way for Topic, and the other specialist folk labels it inspired throughout the sixties, to avoid paying Purchase Tax. The gathering folk revival, the viability of the new format and not least the recent introduction of semi-professional tape recorders made an increase in record production both viable and worthy. But who would do the work? ‘They got a few enthusiasts together to work on the idea of revitalising the label,’ says Leader, ‘and I was the only one who was keen on it and had time on his hands.’