by Colin Harper
Coming from Bournemouth, where he had played lead guitar in beat groups, Al Stewart was one of the first wave of blow-ins to the Soho singer-songwriter scene. Arriving in London in February 1965, one of Al’s first gigs was at Bunjies, where he proceeded to play, in correct order, the entirety of The Times They Are A-Changing. ‘I wasn’t a folk singer at the time,’ says Al, ‘I just happened to own a couple of Bob Dylan albums. But all these singer- songwriters I met in London seemed to be doing something very fresh, very exciting. And the folk scene seemed a little more intellectual than the rock’n’roll scene, and that was appealing. Wearing a corduroy jacket and living in a coffee bar when you’re nineteen and discussing Sartre with like-minded people was a long way from being in Bournemouth talking about how the Surfaris got that great guitar sound!’44
Bumping into Paul Simon, who was rooming with Judith Piepe – a social worker with a charitable weakness for folk singers – Al moved in too for a period. When ‘The Sounds Of Silence’ became a US hit in April Simon moved temporarily back to the States, leaving what Al observed to be a fortuitous hole in the scene: ‘People booked me who’d previously booked Paul Simon. They could have me a lot cheaper and I knew all his songs, plus Dylan songs and the odd Bert Jansch like “Needle Of Death”. Like everyone else, I’d had to learn “Angi”, because they didn’t take you seriously unless you did at least one guitar instrumental. [But] I was a compendium of contemporary folk songs.’45
Also staying with Piepe by the dawn of the Cousins era was a strange young American called Jackson C. Frank. One of the most tragic but revered figures in the story of British folk, Jackson’s mythic status is secured by the brevity of his rise and fall – delivering one monumental song, ‘Blues Run The Game’, recording only one album and never really outliving as an artist the scene within which he thrived. ‘He was an absolute genius,’ says Bert. ‘A lot of the music that came out of that period was most certainly due to him. “Blues Run The Game” influenced just about everyone who heard it. You could say that it changed the face of the contemporary songwriting world. He was the ultimate.’46 Characterised by a certain pathos and sense of doom, Jackson’s work was no bedsitter affectation, it was the real thing.
Born in Buffalo, New York, 1943, Jackson (the ‘C’ was for Carey) had suffered serious burns in a fire at school when he was eleven. Eighteen of his classmates had died, and for Jackson the physical and psychological injuries would stay with him for the rest of his life. During a period of several months recuperating in hospital he learned to play guitar and in 1957, on a trip with his family to Memphis, he met Elvis. It was another pivotal event. By the time he was sixteen, Jackson was performing rock’n’roll, but developed an interest in older songs and became involved in the local coffee-house folk scene. Inspired by the success of Buffalo contemporary Eric Andersen, Jackson and future Steppenwolf star John Kay decided they too could make it big as folk singers. Jackson also applied to college as a failsafe but turning twenty-one in 1964 there was suddenly a whole new side to the equation: an insurance payout of $110,500 (minus legal fees) for the fire. ‘Living for today’ became the new ethos.
‘I left my job on the Buffalo Evening News and went to England,’ he recalled.47 The motivation was not music but, now ‘able to indulge the propensity’, car-buying: ‘At one time in England I had a 1950 one-off Bentley, a new Land Rover and an even newer Aston Martin DB-5.’ But he had also brought his guitar, and on the boat trip over, around March/April ’65, Jackson wrote what is believed to have been his first song, ‘Blues Run The Game’. Tinged, as much of his work would be, with melancholy and not a little strength in adversity, it encapsulated the lifestyle, dreams and fears of those who had chosen the uncertain path of singing songs for a living. In England, he would find many of his new peers more than willing to perform or record it. Expecting nothing but welcomed with open arms, as Dorris Henderson had been before him, these were exciting days: ‘Bert Jansch, Donovan, Sandy Denny, Al Stewart and many others became associates and dear friends.’ Courtesy of Paul Simon, Jackson Frank joined the crowd at Judith Piepe’s.
‘I led a very charmed life at that time,’ says Bert. ‘After the first album I was never down and out. I was lucky I had the outlet to put down all these experiences at the right time, at a time when most young people don’t have the opportunity.’48 In this crucial period in Bert’s ascendancy, during the summer of 1965, he had the field almost totally to himself. On the acoustic scene, there was simply no one else in town to touch him instrumentally or to rival his drawing power: Alex Campbell would be touring America from July to December; Davy Graham would be off around the Middle East in search of exotica; John Renbourn, inexplicably, would be absent from London from the beginning of June until the end of August (Dorris Henderson left for America at the same time, not returning till September); while Jackson Frank, perhaps the only man to equal Bert in terms of songwriting promise and singular charisma, would disappear from July to October. All this was coincidental – it was the free-and-easy nature of the scene, nobody was thinking of ‘building careers’ – but with two weekly residencies in the most happening quarter of the most swinging city in the world, during its peak period of tourist activity, the legend of Bert Jansch was set to explode. By this time, again with Les Bridger and John Renbourn in tow, he had moved to yet another flat: 30 Somali Road.
Situated, to the great amusement of all concerned, near Shoot Up Hill in the West Hampstead/Kilburn area, Bert, John and Les occupied the upstairs, while the Young Tradition – a new harmony trio comprising Peter Bellamy, Royston Wood and Heather Wood – were downstairs. The Young Tradition had formed under the wing of Bruce Dunnet at the Scot’s Hoose earlier in the year. ‘Revival singing’, in the hands of people liable to appeal to both the Soho set and the more conservative traditional music clubs around the country, now had its duo, trio and quartet: Dave & Toni Arthur, the Young Tradition and the Watersons. Anne Briggs, an honorary ‘fifth Waterson’, would often stay with the downstairs crowd at Somali Road. All in all, it was quite a scene. ‘They got all the gigs, we got all the visitors,’ says Anne, of the guitar heroes upstairs. ‘They were earning a great deal of money by then. In fact, I suspect they paid our rent quite a lot of the time.’
Having shared a bill with the Dubliners in a concert at Cecil Sharp House in May, Anne had been encouraged to visit Dublin and meet a friend of theirs called Johnny Moynihan – a traditional musician of similarly free-spirited outlook to herself. Having done so, and begun what was to be a long-term relationship with Moynihan, Anne’s life for the next few years would revolve around the desire to spend time in Ireland, where the revival of folk music on a widespread commercial level had yet to happen, and the need to return periodically to England and earn some money gigging to finance the next trip. There would always be a place for her at Somali Road: ‘Downstairs was a folk haven for anyone who had nowhere else to stay,’ she says. ‘It was packed with bodies like sardines, it really was.’
The following year Moynihan would form a band in Galway called Sweeney’s Men. Including Andy Irvine in its fluctuating line-up, it would provide a blueprint for the future direction of Irish music and its eventual revival in the seventies as a young-person’s music on a scale comparable with Britain’s ‘folk boom’ in the sixties. Andy, disillusioned with his life as an actor in Dublin, had been making occasional trips back to England before settling in London again in 1965, and thereby getting sucked into the life of the full-time troubadour.49
Friendly with both Anne Briggs and the Young Tradition, Andy would soon be one of the regulars at Somali Road: ‘I always thought of it as the harder drugs upstairs and the softer drugs downstairs,’ he says, never more than a drinking man himself. ‘But I’m sure that wasn’t true. The fact that Bert had had that early record, when most people didn’t have a record out, boosted his status enormously. There was a certain awesome, semi-legendary quality about him, even as he sat there and played. I would put him in the same bag as Davy G
raham on that, although Davy had a mystery about him that was kind of scary, that you didn’t want to get into. With Bert, it was a little different. You could say, “Hi, Bert” – “Yeah …”, but you wouldn’t go any further. You could go into a place and he would be there and so would Peter Bellamy and his crowd, talking loudly and showing off – but Bert was a little bit distant from them as well. Because he was silent and they were loud there was a kind of awe.’
Another resident of the upper floors at Somali Road, during the spring/summer of ’65, was Bert’s friend from Ealing Art College, John Challis: ‘This time it was me who was sleeping in the kitchen,’ says Challis. ‘Having left Ealing I’d tried to get work as an illustrator and failed miserably, ending up working at the income tax office at Lisson Grove.’ Necessarily a little detached from the scene at Somali Road, Challis was in a position to observe Bert’s changing fortunes:
‘He never looked ahead, but he was very focused on what he was doing. If you saw him without a guitar it looked like there was something missing! The romantic idea of the tortured artist is a bit superficial. But there is a sense in which actual possession of a creative ability of that order is as much of a penalty as a benefit because you can’t switch it off – it’s with you all the time. I think at the time what really bothered him was that what seemed so obvious to him was completely obscured to most other people. There are two things about Bert: one is that he was at times very fragile and vulnerable but there was also steel inside him. There were these two sides and they coexisted. Bear in mind I was the same age as him – I was very young, very bewildered by life myself and he was the first seriously creative person I’d ever encountered. I found it quite hard to understand, but I did try to understand and I think that was part of the basis of our friendship: I wasn’t laying stuff on him and expecting him to respond in a certain way.
‘Renbourn was much more the “professional musician”. He was much more together than anybody else. Whatever conflicts there were between him and Bert weren’t played out in public. There was obviously a huge amount of mutual respect. Renbourn was more of a technician: more theoretical knowledge and faster fingers. But Bert had this blinding originality, and Renbourn was good enough to be able to keep up with that.’
To Challis’s recollection, downstairs did not have all the visitors. People like Alex Campbell, ‘Rambling’ Jack Elliott and Derroll Adams would drop in on Bert and John. There was also someone rather more familiar to the teenage population: ‘It must have been the early part of 1965 that Donovan was hanging around,’ says Challis. ‘He aroused a good deal of suspicion amongst John and Bert and their friends. He seemed far too friendly. It subsequently transpired that his management were trying desperately hard to get Bert to sign up with them. I remember Bert saying to me once, “I’ve just spent a day with Donovan and been chased all over the place by teenage chicks – what’s that all about? I can’t live like that!”’
‘I was an overnight success,’ says Donovan, ‘and if I entered a folk club afterwards half of the room would be mumbling about how I’d done the dirty on them, sold out, gone over to the other side – all this ridiculous stuff! When I met Derroll Adams he took a shine to me, and he saw that I was being hammered like crazy by the Dylan/Donovan thing in the press and everybody taking the piss out of me because I’d gone on television – “Don’t sing any popular songs, don’t make any money out of it, don’t buy any good clothes” – all this bullshit. Now the only reason I wore rough clothes, and I suppose Bert too, was because we were cold, we were poor and we actually might have to sleep rough or on somebody’s sofa without any heating, and you didn’t want to freeze. So Derroll took me and he introduced me to people like Bert Jansch.’
Donovan had almost certainly first seen Bert performing at Pete Frame’s club in Luton, on 28 April 1965, where Bert, to Frame’s delight, had brought along Dorris Henderson and John Renbourn for the ride. Donovan was fascinated by Bert’s playing, his songs, his strange charisma and his apparent lack of ego: ‘Nobody would teach how to play the guitar in my group,’ says Don. ‘But when I went to Bert I saw things that I wanted to learn – this descending pattern of “Angi”, this seminal song that opened up “Stairway to Heaven” for Jimmy Page, “Sunny Goodge Street” for me, probably thousands of songs. The descending pattern can be taken back to Johann Sebastian Bach, but when it finally arrives at Bert Jansch he’s doing things with it and he becomes a kind of doorway for lots of people, and what I found when I would go to Bert’s place was that he didn’t mind showing you. And that is the great magnanimity of the artist: Bert Jansch shared.
‘I tried to play exactly like him to begin with, until you realised that Bert didn’t play exactly the same thing every night. It was a “genre” of picking that you could improvise on. He was doing something extremely sensual, and yet you got this impression from Bert that he didn’t really care whether you liked it or not, and if he didn’t want to sing it too loud you wouldn’t hear the words. But it was magic. He had the power – the power of the bardic voice. He was actually writing a new tradition and that was exciting. I followed him around when I wasn’t working myself. He was a hero. When you go to see a figure like Bert you’re going in the hope of hearing a new song which is going to explain some obscure emotion. That was the fascinating thing – you might hear something that he might never play again, because he’d forget it or something. So there was this anticipation. And the girls in the room would fall in love with him.’
Bert liked Donovan as an individual and enjoyed his early recordings. Two singles had now been issued and by May there was an album, What’s Bin Did And What’s Bin Hid: ‘He was already world famous,’ says Bert, ‘but he would come down to Cousins and mix with the crowd. In those days you felt rather awe-inspired by this “television character”, as I used to call him. My friendship with him was a Cousins job – we used to meet there, drink there and play there.’ What Bert was less inclined towards was the nature of the pop game of which Don was a part, and particularly his management, Stephens and Eden, ‘a couple of mad, pushy geezers who put a hat on his head, stuck him on the telly and made a million pounds out of him. They did a “sign your name here, lad” scene on me and, being a kid, I put my name to some publishing thing involving a couple of songs Donovan wanted to record. The album subsequently got into the charts, but I wasn’t exactly showered with royalty cheques.’50
‘Donovan’s management used to come round to get songs from Bert,’ says Renbourn. ‘They’d make a field trip to darkest West Hampstead! The thing was, they didn’t know who Bert was, and there’d always be loads of people asleep on the floor. So the guys would come in saying, “Bert! Bert!” and someone would say, “Yes, that’s me” and foist these songs on them. Les Bridger claimed to be him most of the time. Bert was quite happy for it to go on.’
‘Oh, Deed I Do’ was a genuine Jansch song recorded by Donovan for his second album, Fairytale, released later that year, but never recorded by its author. Donovan was also championing Bert to the press at every opportunity and featuring a number of Bert’s songs in his live repertoire: ‘Needle Of Death’, ‘Running From Home’ and ‘Do You Hear Me Now?’ Around that time Bert was involved with Beverley Kutner, a singer who later married and recorded with John Martyn, a singer-songwriter from the later Cousins era. But during 1965, Bert’s only competition for Beverley’s affections was Donovan: ‘We had a triangle at one point,’ says Don, ‘and my recollection is that it may have cut us all up at the time. “The House Of Jansch”51 was written about that triangle, and I wrote another one called “Sweet Beverley” because Beverley was about to become famous and get a record deal and I was trying to give her some advice. How could I give her any advice? I was getting ripped off right, left and centre!’
‘I think Beverley might have been putting herself about a bit,’ says Challis. ‘At one point she asked me to go on the road with her, but because I knew she was involved with Bert I kind of backed away from it. But she sang with
me a couple of times at the Scot’s Hoose – an excellent blues singer.’ By the end of the year, Bert was involved with a young woman called Jan Cole, but Beverley was around long enough to appear in the background on the sleeve photo for Bert’s next album. It would also be Transatlantic’s first-ever colour cover. Nat Joseph had quickly realised Bert’s potential and had signed him to a long-term recording deal before the first album had even been released. He was also keen for Bert to start touring internationally.
‘Having done the album for Nat,’ says Bert, ‘I remember him wanting me to go to Denmark. But I didn’t have my passport, having not paid back the fare from Morocco [after being repatriated by the Embassy in 1963], so the record company paid it for me. I was king over there. I only had to arrive in the country and I’d be plastered all over the place, all the front pages. Why, I don’t know. They had their own folk singers who sang in Danish – they tended to put music to poetry by famous national poets. It was all very straight. How I got involved I’ve no idea because when I first went there everyone spoke and sang in Danish. There were very few English singers. The Danish style of folk clubs – it was more of a booze-up really.’
After that first trip to Denmark Bert would tour the whole of Scandinavia roughly twice a year. In the seventies and eighties, when Bert’s star was on the wane in Britain, the regularity of work in Northern Europe would serve him well. Both Alex Campbell and Les Bridger would end up living in Denmark. But for Bert, explaining his popularity there remains elusive: ‘For some reason I used to know all the generals – all of them – in Denmark. It was a very exciting time to be living in, the sixties. Not stopping to think about things – that was what was more exciting about it than anything else. Even to this day I still know some of the Danish generals. But the scene’s changed: for me worse, for them probably better.’