by Colin Harper
32. As note 13.
33. The anti-Polaris demonstrations began in 1961. In 1963 a record entitled Ding Dong Dollar, encompassing many of Blythman’s satirical songs set to the tunes of Glasgow street songs, came out on the US label Folkways. Purportedly, no UK company would touch it. Hamish Imlach’s recordings for the project, with JFK as the target of his ire, were scrapped as the President had just attained sainthood in Dallas.
34. Gordon McCulloch, Folk News, 12/79. Although not contemporary with the events of this chapter, the extract used encapsulates what I have found to be a widely held view of MacColl’s performance style regardless of era.
35. Aside from those already mentioned, 1961 folk clubs in Greater London included the following: on Mondays, a new blues night with Gerry Loughran and Cliff Aungier at the King & Queen in Soho; on Wednesdays, Derek Serjeant’s new and destined to be long-enduring enterprise at the Oak Hotel in Surbiton; on Thursdays, the Star & Garter in Bromley; on Fridays, the King’s Arms in Putney, the Rose & Crown in Wimbledon or the White Hart in Southall; on Saturdays the old faithfuls, the Ballads & Blues (now at Carlisle Street, Soho) with Steve Benbow as resident, Martin Carthy at the Troubadour, and a regular club at the Cellar in Cecil Sharp House; on Sundays, should one not fancy an evening in the company of Ewan MacColl, there was always the Robin Hood in Potters Bar, Les Faux Hiboux (the Mad Owls) in Streatham or a club boasting the residency of Alex Campbell at the Community Centre in Richmond.
36. Seeger at the Albert Hall was a triumph, but not everyone was jumping with self-congratulatory joy. Andy Irvine for one: ‘He came out with an axe and sang a wood-chopping song at the beginning. I thought, “Fuck this”. It was bad.’ That very theatricality was what had delighted others. ‘Andy would have seen Pete chopping a log onstage,’ says Martin Carthy, ‘with this huge chip of wood flying about forty feet up in the air, and singing a song at the same time. I didn’t know Andy in those days, but to me it was amazingly impressive.’
37. Spinners member Tony, interviewed in Folk News, 9/77, recalled their club thus: ‘We set a policy at the beginning, with three aims. The first was to get people singing songs, folk songs if possible; the second was to learn all we could about traditional music; and the third was to tell the people in our club what we learned. That was the credo of our club and we’ve fairly well stuck to that.’ At the height of their light entertainment popularity, the group were still running their Liverpool club with great success. Deferential to the EFDSS and Ewan MacColl, when the Singers Club began the group also sought advice on club organising from Bruce Dunnet.
38. Fife is a populous corner of Scotland to the immediate north of Edinburgh. Including the Fife clubs at St Andrews, Dunfermline and Kirkaldy, the Edinburgh venues, the clubs in Dundee and Perth (just beyond Fife to the north) and in Bo’ness (in the West Lothian region that surrounds Edinburgh on its landward side to the south), this represented quite a circuit. No club was more than fifty miles’ drive from any of the others.
39. ‘High Street Howff’, Jeremy Bruce-Watt, unidentified Edinburgh newspaper, circa 1990s.
40. As note 17.
41. At least some of Martha Schlamme’s incredible coverage, and consequently the lure of profit that led to the demise of the Howff, must lie at the door of Magnus Magnusson. Yes, that one. Magnus was part of the Howff circle at the time, worked in journalism and had something of a crush on Martha Schlamme. Outrageously prolonged coverage ensued. Evidently, he started and couldn’t quite finish.
42. Waverley Records may not have been quite the ‘house label’ Roy was suggesting, but Bryce Lane was certainly tapping into the Howff’s reservoir of talent. A record of Archie Fisher was issued on the label before March 1963, while three Edinburgh-centric compilations appeared during 1964 and ’65: Hoot’nanny Show Vols 1 & 2 – including Ray Fisher and others featured in the BBC TV show of that name, broadcast as one series during 1964 live from Edinburgh. Roy Guest was the presenter and possibly also appears on the records. The other release was Folk Festival: Festival Folk in 1965. Catalogue numbers suggest over thirty records were released on the label up to this point. Len believes both Craighall Studios and Waverley Records were eventually subsumed by EMI, although the studio and all trace of Bryce Lane had disappeared by the late seventies.
43. As note 3.
44. As note 1.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. ‘Three Dreamers’, first released on the Danish version of A Rare Conundrum (1977), later re-recorded for The Ornament Tree (1991). A Rare Conundrum contained a number of songs concerning Bert’s youth: ‘One To A Hundred’ is about the death of a childhood friend; ‘Three Chord Trick’ contains oblique references to Jill Doyle and the Howff; ‘Daybreak’ is about the all-nighters at Les Cousins in the mid-sixties. ‘Three Dreamers’ is, of course, a reflection on himself, Clive and Robin living together in Edinburgh at the beginning of all their careers. The archway and courtyard, at 9-15 West Nicolson Street, are still there.
2. Dirty Linen, 10/90.
3. Ptolomaic Terrascope 7/97 and Beat Instrumental 8/77 (quotes combined). Describing this fusion, the phrase ‘folk baroque’ is attributed to Karl Dallas’s invention.
4. ‘Folk Routines’, Ken Hunt, Folk Roots 5/97.
5. As note 4.
6. As note 4.
7. Outtakes to Acoustic Routes, BBC Scotland 25/1/93.
8. Davy’s invention of DADGAD can only be dated by reference to the date of his first recording with the tuning. Recorded with a live audience in a Decca studio on July 3 1963, Davy’s arrangement of the Irish tune ‘She Moved Thro’ The Fair’ was a ground-breaking moment. It was released on From A London Hootenanny, an EP shared with the Thameside Four, on 27 September 1963. Davy performed it on ABC TV’s Hullaballoo, tele-recorded around June/July 1963. Martin Carthy recalls Davy introducing the tune at the Troubadour two weeks before the EP recording. He had visited Tangier in 1961 and had developed the tuning in response to the demands of re-creating Moroccan music on guitar.
9. As note 4.
10. As note 7.
11. Midnight Man: The Davy Graham Fanzine, No.1, July 1999.
12. Cod Liver Oil and The Orange Juice, Hamish Imlach & Ewan McVicar (Mainstream Publishing, 1992).
13. MM, 17/1/76. Traditional songs from Clive’s repertoire in this era continue to slip into Bert’s, e.g. ‘Rosemary Lane’ (Rosemary Lane, 1971), ‘The Lily Of The West’ (One More Road, 1993).
14. Zigzag, 9/74.
15. ‘The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Folk Singer’, Ken Hunt, Swing 51, No. 13, 1989.
16. Robin’s early performing career is difficult to reconstruct. ‘I worked vaguely with Archie, off and on, playing whistle, around the clubs in Fife and Glasgow and Southern Scotland,’ he says. Robin and Clive worked the same clubs as a duo and also around the North of England for what Robin recalls as ‘a year or two’. Robin also toured, as a fiddler, with bluegrass man Tom Paley around the working men’s clubs of Northern England and appeared on fiddle with Hamish Imlach and Josh MacRae, standing in for Bobby Campbell, on the Emmetones’ one and only live performance, in Glasgow. Somebody had offered Hamish £50 for the pleasure and it was unrefusable. There are live recordings of Robin and Clive in Edinburgh, August 1963, and in St Andrews, November 1964. Robin was also recorded in splendid partnership with Owen Hand at the St Andrews club in October 1963. Joe Boyd, responsible for the Incredible String Band’s recording career, believes he first heard them play in an Edinburgh pub (most likely the Crown Bar) circa March 1965. However, as Dolina MacLennan recalls: ‘Bill Leader and Eric Winter sent him up to stay with me and my husband in Edinburgh and we took him to hear the boys. I remember the day he came because it was his birthday and we made a cake!’ Joe Boyd’s birthday is 5 August. In November 1965, Joe Boyd opened the London office of US record label Elektra. Around February 1966 he visited Clive’s new club, the celebrated Clive’s Incredible Folk Club, in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow – stopping to take directions from Hamish Imlach.
The ISB’s first album was recorded that summer.
17. Edinburgh Nights, BBC2 19/8/92.
18. Thirty songs from Bert Jansch performances recorded in Glasgow during the early sixties are available as Young Man Blues: Live In Glasgow 1962-64 (Ace, 1998). Since that package was assembled, at the very beginning of the process of writing this book and with a tight deadline for sleeve notes, it has been possible to re-examine the chronological jigsaw and the hazy recollections of relevant parties and to conclude that the fifty-six remaining tracks represent the vestiges of, almost certainly, four separate gigs. From sonic evidence, only four tracks – ‘Come Back Baby’, ‘I Am Lonely’, ‘Tic-Tocative’ and ‘Blues Run The Game’ (all featured on the CD) – survive from one of these four gigs. Other evidence suggests that this gig remnant must date from late 1965: Bert strongly believes that ‘I Am Lonely’ and ‘Tic-Tocative’ were written during the latter half of 1965 while Jackson Frank, author of ‘Blues Run The Game’ (not available on record until December 1965), was not in Britain until April 1965. Bert would most likely have learned the song from its author. Unfortunately, reasons of space preclude a more rigorous examination of the Glasgow tapes.
19. As note 14.
20. ‘McClelland’s own hang out was a club in Glasgow called the Cell,’ says Challis. ‘I went to Glasgow that time myself because we’d discovered all the people supplying dope in Edinburgh were getting it from Glasgow so we thought, “Well, cut out the middle man” – although that also cut out the fun of it. These were the days when nobody did it for profit, you did it because it was a whole new world that was opening up.’ During his Edinburgh days Bert and his friend ‘Wee Jimmy’ would often visit the Cell for late-night jazz sessions.
21. Blass remembers Bert’s companion on this occasion as a girl.
22. As note 14.
23. ‘Cynic’s Progress’, Maggie Holland, Folk Roots, 10/90.
24. As note 14.
25. Foreword by Peggy Seeger to The Peggy Seeger Songbook, ed. Irene Scott (Oak Publications, 1998).
26. Folk News, 6/78. All further Alex Campbell quotes are from this source.
27. Folk News, 10/78.
28. Folk News, 12/78. As Sutton also noted: ‘If a fair history of the folk revival ever gets written, no doubt the author will draw gratefully upon Behan’s testimony, but I hope that he will consult other sources as well.’ Indeed.
29. Bert first recorded ‘Been On The Road So Long’ on It Don’t Bother Me (1965). It later appeared on Leather Launderette (1988), issued a year after Alex Campbell had died. A third performance was used as commentary on Bert’s own career in the BBC documentary Acoustic Routes (1993).
30. Back in London around 1959, Alex also began busking with blues shouter Redd Sullivan. Another singer called Marion Grey became involved and then Long John Baldry, still at school at the time, asked to tag along. ‘When I went back to Paris,’ said Alex, ‘John left school and joined the group. Then, I think, Wally Whyton joined, Martin Carthy joined, Davy Graham, the lot. But that group started off with Redd and me, that was the original Thamesiders.’ Aside from his own testimony, Alex Campbell’s role in starting off the embryonic folk revival’s quintessential equivalent to the Yardbirds – every guitarist a legend of tomorrow – is obscure. He was at best the Anthony Topham of the group (the bloke before Eric Clapton, whom nobody much remembers). Later standardising the name to the Thameside Four, the group’s ‘classic’ line-up was centred around Marion Grey, Pete Maynard and Redd Sullivan. Long John, Wally Whyton and possibly Martin Winsor (manager of the Gyre & Gimble coffee bar and later an inseparable sidekick to Sullivan) passed through the ranks before Martin Carthy was recommended in 1961 by Jenny Barton, manager of the Troubadour where Carthy was now enjoying what was to become a lengthy residency. Never a major influence on anything much, they were nevertheless one of the earliest folk groups and a popular act at the time: ‘What we did was a mixture,’ says Carthy, ‘a lot of blues, a few simple jazz standards, gospel, English stuff, sea shanties, the occasional bit of music hall. It was an enormously wide repertoire.’ Forty years on, the group’s claim to fame is occupying the other side of From A London Hootenanny, the 1963 EP shared with Davy Graham.
31. As note 12.
32. As note 15.
33. ‘Two Festivals – Part 1’, Folk Review, 5/77. The precise role of co-credited BBC producer Charles Parker in MacColl’s Radio Ballads series is controversial. MacColl believed that from being initially sceptical, Parker later basked in an inferred ownership of the project’s concept and execution. All subsequent Ian Campbell quotes are from this source.
34. Robin also recalls, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, his own first professional engagement being at the Rotherham club.
35. From Frank Coia’s perspective Dick Gaughan later did with traditional music what Bert had done with the blues. Gaughan, today recognised as a flag bearer for Scottish traditional song, exquisite guitar playing and stalwart champion of the socialist values espoused by many of the early Scottish revivalists, was brought up in Edinburgh like Bert: ‘By the time I started going round the clubs he was gone,’ says Dick. ‘It would have been 1966 and he was in London by then. The influences that I had then were people like Bert and Archie Fisher and Hamish Imlach, but I suppose it was secondhand by the time it got to me. I first ran into him in Sussex in 1972, but I’d already heard everything he’d ever done. He’s always had this status of being a legend – I’m sure Bert was born a legend! He’s always had this kind of “aura” about him. He’s never exploited it or been particularly conscious of it himself, I think, but it’s always been there. He revolutionised the guitar. He influenced everybody – his playing, directly or indirectly, influenced everybody. I don’t think anybody has ever been revered as much as he is.’
CHAPTER FIVE
1. Disc & Music Echo, 19/12/70.
2. It would be wonderfully convenient to believe that Bert, Robin and Anne met up at the home of their mutual friend David Blass. Almost certainly Blass was the connection, although Bert is adamant that he and Robin found their own place to stay in the Earl’s Court area. Blass’s recollection of meeting Anne in Edinburgh is intriguing: it has to be subsequent to the Centre 42 events in August and September 1962, but why, having been offered a job in London by Centre 42, was she in Edinburgh at all? Anne had met Gill Cook, an assistant at Collet’s record shop, on the Centre 42 tour and Anne would often thereafter stay with Gill at her flat off Gray’s Inn Road. Conceivably, Blass met Anne in Edinburgh not in 1962 but in 1963, when she was living in the city with one Gary Field, whom Blass also remembers. The problems then are these: (a) who introduced Anne and Bert to each other in the Earl’s Court area during the early weeks of 1963? (b) why did Gill Cook not meet Bert, by whom she later had a child, until much later in the year?
3. Acoustic Music, 9/80.
4. Acoustic Routes pilot film, 1990. Jenny’s policy was to pay everyone the same, with the unassailable argument that ‘they all did the same amount of work’.
5. Current Dylanology has it that Bob played the following dates while in Britain for the TV play: Dec 21 1962, King & Queen; Dec 22, Singers Club; Dec 29, Troubadour; Jan 12 1963, Troubadour. Dunnet’s recollection, which must apply to this visit by virtue of his venue identification (the Pindar of Wakefield hosted the Singer’s Club from October 1962 to September 1963), adds a Roundhouse visit to the list. The Singers Club met, at this time, on Saturdays and Sundays: 22 December was a Thursday, but Christmas may have been a factor. Brian Shuel was also at the King & Queen the previous night, where he took some shots of Martin Carthy. His project at the time was to capture the atmosphere of the clubs themselves – it was purely incidental that Dylan or anyone else of note happened to be there.
6. ‘I loved the way he sang,’ says Robin, of Joe Heaney. ‘It was a particularly lyrical and embroidered style. A mixture of him and Indian music was the main inspiration in my approach to my own style of singing.’ Swing 51, No. 13, 1989.
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7. ‘Anne Briggs’, Ken Hunt, Swing 51, No. 13, 1989.
8. ‘The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Folk Singer’, Ken Hunt, Swing 51, No. 13, 1989. ‘Most of the blokes who ran into Anne fell madly in love with her,’ says John Challis, ‘a stunningly beautiful woman with a stunningly beautiful voice. Even her feet were beautiful – she never wore shoes unless she had to.’
9. ‘The Bill Leader Tapes’, Karl Dallas, Folk News, March 1979.
10. Stan Kelly was a gifted mathematician, author of such latterly well-known vignettes as ‘Oh, You Are A Mucky Kid’, ‘I Wish I Was Back in Liverpool’ and populariser of ‘The Leaving Of Liverpool’ and also a working-class Scouser with four kids: a bit of a character round Cambridge. Wherever he went on the early folk scene his humour was a welcome relief from the dogma.
11. Part of this quote as note 9, part from an interview with the author.
12. Nathan Joseph: Foreword to The Transatlantic Story, 4CD set, Castle Communications, 1998.
13. George Martin made three Parlophone singles with Benbow. With the advent of the Beatles’ success, his priorities were elsewhere and Benbow was passed on to a less sympathetic producer, engendering a transfer to Decca. Decca: the people who had turned down the Beatles and the people who would, by way of small compensation, enjoy modest success with Val Doonican. But not with Benbow. As regards Malcolm Nixon, he had virtually run Alex Campbell into the ground the previous year, with no strategic benefit to Campbell’s career. Nixon would eventually declare himself bankrupt and, according to Gill Cook, get taken under the wing of Bruce Dunnet – a much cannier operator.
14. Courtesy of Ken Hunt, from an interview conducted in April 1992.
15. Zigzag, 9/74.
16. ‘Two Festivals’ Part 2, Ian Campbell, Folk Review, 6/77. All further Campbell quotes are from this source unless otherwise credited.
17. As note 15. A certain Eric, one of Bert’s guitar students from the Glasgow Folk Centre, met up with Bert and Lynda in Morocco. Robin Williamson later travelled there himself, around 1966.