Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  Donegan’s hit parade swansong ‘Pick A Bale Of Cotton’ peaked just two months prior to The Beatles’ first. Appropriately enough, it was another Leadbelly song. The worlds of pantomime and cabaret were beckoning: ‘I was bitter,’ he says. ‘I was the king! All of a sudden The Beatles were king. I spat, fought and cursed, but a new generation had come along. At the same time, the variety theatres were in decline, so we had to learn to play the cabaret clubs which were taking off. In fact, cabaret paid much better – £1000 a night. You wouldn’t get that for a week in theatre.’16

  Indeed not. And you would certainly not have got it for a month’s work at even the swishest of the coffee bars in Soho. For the Jansch generation of singer-songwriter guitar heroes that would come to prominence in the mid-sixties, the compact bohemia of Soho would be the epicentre of their world as it had been a decade earlier for the skifflers. By 1965 it would be buzzing with pub and cellar folk clubs, some of them all-nighters; by the end of that year Bert Jansch would be the king of the castle and a tiny little club called ‘Les Cousins’, in an airless cellar beneath a restaurant at 49 Greek Street, the castle of his kingdom. It was, by all accounts, a crazy scene.

  Why, for two generations of post-war British music pioneers who worshipped at the same shrines of two recently deceased black Americans, and their dutiful re-creations of pre-war hokum, did Soho become the playground of tomorrow’s stars? John Platt, fascinated with the literary and musical heritage of the area, wrote a definitive magazine sketch on the subject in the late seventies, surveying its pubs, coffee bars and other music venues in the context of the area’s rich history. He defined Soho as being geographically ‘a square mile dropped into London’s West End, bordered by Oxford Street in the north, Regent Street in the west, Coventry Street in the south and Charing Cross Road in the east’ although certain outlying areas could be said to have honorary inclusion. ‘Modern Soho,’ he argued, ‘came into being towards the end of the nineteenth century when it began to be settled by various immigrant groups, especially Italians. The immigrants, simply by bringing some of the flavour of their native countries to London – particularly as so many opened restaurants and bars – gave Soho a reputation amongst those who cared for such things for the exotic and the unusual. Soho was that oddity – a village in the city, where you could feel part of a genuinely urban life but live on an essentially human scale. This fact, coupled with its cosmopolitan quality, is what has given it its continuing appeal.’

  In the 1920s and particularly the 1930s, Soho and the adjoining Fitzrovia quarter were becoming popular with artists and writers, most famously perhaps with Dylan Thomas. Those on leave in London during the war were attracted to the area as a refuge from nine-to-five drudgery. Platt goes on to explain that ‘after the war a new bohemian type was emerging, especially from the art schools of the area. Whereas previously the bohemian types had been fairly respectable – at least outwardly – the new generation opted for a good deal less conformity and were altogether more outrageous in their behaviour. There was a split from a literary based community to a musically based one. The new denizens of Soho were jazz fanatics for whom literature, though important, took second place to music. There had been coffee bars (or at least cafés) before the war, but after the first new-style place with an Espresso opened in 1953 (the Moka in Frith Street) the whole area became overrun with them. Most of the coffee bars were just that – a place to go and drink coffee – but many acquired a mystique of their own. Often open practically all night, they became a quasi-secret network of meeting places for young people, generally run by like-minded individuals, where for the price of a coffee one could indulge in apocalyptic conversation till dawn. Many provided music too – jazz initially, then skiffle and later folk.’17

  Acts like the Vipers Skiffle Group and the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group, featuring the implausibly named Nancy Whiskey, jumped very successfully aboard Donegan’s bandwagon during the brief heyday of the new sound in 1957, even charting with some of the same material. The whole thing was quite clearly outrageous and at the very height of the craze one national newspaper had this to say:

  ‘Soho is no longer London’s naughty square mile. It has become Espresso Land, bright with the coloured neon lights of oddly-named coffee bars – Heaven & Hell, Prego, the Macabre and the 2 i’s – and noisy with the yowling screams of skifflers. Now, instead of razor-armed mobsters and cosh boys, you meet bearded young men in duffle coats carrying double basses and washboards, and pimply faced rock’n’roll fans in their tapered pants. And in the cellars where the spielers once ran their all-night dice and poker games, the skiffle bands have taken over and the youngsters are jiving.’18

  Most of these exotic new venues, including others in the area like the Nucleus, the Partisan, the Gyre & Gimble and Bunjies, were catering for the beatnik crowd, those bearded fellows with the duffle coats that the Sunday papers were so concerned about. Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and other such products of the American ‘beat’ school of writing became the manuals of this tried and tested alternative lifestyle, and as much so in the Edinburgh that Bert Jansch was on the cusp of discovering as in the London that Lonnie Donegan’s success had served to shine a spotlight on. The 2 i’s itself, so closely identified with the vagaries of a certain era as the birthplace of British rock’n’roll, was an anachronism by the end of the fifties although the majority of the coffee bars survived well into the sixties.19 Alongside the platforms provided by Ewan MacColl and by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, in the upper rooms of various public houses, they were the earliest stomping grounds for many of that decade’s key figures in British folk: Robin Hall and Jimmie Macgregor, Davy Graham, Steve Benbow, Martin Carthy, Wizz Jones and Clive Palmer among them.

  Situated beneath a restaurant at 49 Greek Street, though not a coffee bar as such, was a club called the Skiffle Cellar. It did not not take long to abandon the S-word, and from May 1958 to the close of 1960 it would be known as the Cellar, running two folk sessions on a Saturday and featuring the Steve Benbow Folk Four in a Tuesday night residency. After a short period as a strip club it would reopen in 1965 as ‘Les Cousins’, the most legendary of the ‘Swinging London’ folk joints. But in its original mid-fifties incarnation it was owned by one Russell Quaye, whose City Ramblers were thus effectively the house band.20 A staggering amount of people would seem not only to have dropped by of an evening but to have passed through the ranks of Quaye’s band. One individual of greatly underestimated importance who did not do so but who had established early on his own Sunday night residency there as a soloist, performing not skiffle but bona fide British folk music with arrangements for guitar, was Steve Benbow.

  In the same way that Davy Graham has long been viewed as the more shadowy precedent to the revolutionary guitar of Bert Jansch – however much Bert’s initial development was in truth very largely independent of Graham’s influence – there will always be someone or something lurking in the pre-dawn of every great happening in music just waiting for the analysts of history to stumble in. For the very concept of British folk songs played to the accompaniment of a guitar, Steve Benbow is where it all begins.21

  Born in London in 1931, Benbow recalls his mother singing a lot of folk songs when he was a kid, but his own involvement in music began relatively late in life, at twenty-three. Exceptionally good at languages, learning French and German at school and Arabic from his father, Benbow joined the army in 1950. He was posted to Egypt and within six months was working out his tour of duty as an interpreter. Within a couple of years he had taken up guitar and was singing material from the repertoires of Jimmie Rodgers, Frank Crummit and Burl Ives. After national service he got a job touring in a concert party, singing songs like ‘The Foggy Dew’, ‘The Fox’ and ‘Unchained Melody’.’ That microcosm of repertoire illustrates fairly well the benchmarks of Benbow’s subsequent career – simple traditional ballads and easy-listening standards with a hint of jazz. Steve was a pragmatist. Life was not easy in those days and yo
u did what you could: he happened to like music, he was a good player and in 1957, with a little serendipity, he lucked into the unadvertised vacancy of Britain’s First Folk Guitarist.

  Steve had been playing trad jazz in a band led by trombonist Dave Kier. Dave knew Ewan MacColl, a fellow Communist who had recently turned his attention from propagandist theatre to the untrodden paths of harnessing his country’s musical past to the furtherance of its socio-political future. MacColl was on the lookout for someone with an interest in folk music to play guitar for him on a record22 and at that year’s International Youth Festival in Moscow. Steve very probably raised an eyebrow. But not so you’d notice: ‘We were all a bit left-wing in those days,’ he says. ‘But I was a professional musician. I’d charge as much to sing “God Save The Queen” as I would “The Red Flag”.’ Steve went to Russia and while there, from a position of not really knowing anyone on the British music scene, became acquainted with the City Ramblers, Jimmie Macgregor, Ewan MacColl and somebody called ‘Banjo’ George with whom, on returning to London, he secured a regular gig at the Tatty Bogle in Beak Street. ‘I used to get thirty bob a night, every night,’ say Steve, ‘which was a bloody sight better than milking cows! I’d been doing that from four-thirty in the morning till six at night for £9 a week. So I couldn’t believe my luck when I got this gig.’

  ‘Banjo’ George does not loom large in this nor perhaps in any other story, but the security of his trad jazz pub residency and the prospect of working on folk music with MacColl was enough for Benbow to make the transition to full-time guitar slinging in the West End. It is not certain whether MacColl himself was to be found at all or with any regularity in the environs of a skiffle club, but one of his cohorts and fellow architects of the British folk revival certainly was. In a scene where jeans and pullovers were the norm, A. L. ‘Bert’ Lloyd – never seen out in anything less than a three-piece suit and wide grin – was a distinctive fellow. The archetype of a jolly fat man, with bookish enthusiasm, Ewan MacColl once described him with no small affection as ‘a walking toby jug’, not unlike something out of Trollope. Generous with knowledge and encouragement, Bert Lloyd enjoyed his odd recreational forays to the cellars, regaling the young skifflers with feisty curios from the backwaters of British folksong and, according to Karl Dallas, going ‘out of his way many times to remark on Steve’s quality and the influence of Greek music on his playing’.

  Aside from a whaling expedition to South Georgia in the 1930s, Lloyd, born in 1908, had already made several field-recording trips to Eastern Europe and had, even by the late fifties, the double distinction of being a professional English folklorist in a field of one and of being only the second author that century to have published a book on the subject. It was all a matter of self-belief: ‘Tell a person that you are a folklorist,’ wrote MacColl many years later, ‘and that person will almost certainly respect you, in spite of the fact that he or she hasn’t the foggiest notion of what a folklorist is or does. Tell them you are a folk-singer and they will look embarrassed and hastily change the subject.’23 Karl Dallas for one – the Melody Maker’s great champion of folk music – would always harbour the suspicion that Lloyd’s oft-told stories of Australian sheep-herding, Antarctic whaling and the like were straight out of the realms of fantasy, but as a practising authority on folk music Bert Lloyd was not only a colourful character. He knew what he was talking about.

  The relationship between British folksong and the rhythms and drones of the Balkans held a particular fascination for Lloyd. Steve Benbow wrote little in the way of original material but one number strongly identified with him is the Greek song ‘Miserlou’. He had picked it up on national service in the Middle East and it was later recorded as an exercise in instrumental exoticism by Davy Graham, among others. By the time the heyday of guitar-toting folkist virtuosos came around, Lloyd’s influence had quietly taken root. It is a moot point that the tangible suspicion of Balkan modes and time signatures that pervaded many interpretations of the supposedly English and Irish songs recorded by Bert Jansch, Martin Carthy and others during the 1960s had a common source in the cross-cultural surgery of Bert Lloyd’s imagination. Benbow accompanied Lloyd on some of his Soho recitals and shortly afterwards did so on record. It was convenient that, for reasons no one can quite explain, Bert Lloyd was more or less the man in control of who and what was recorded for Topic Records during the fifties and sixties.

  Founded in 1939 and believed to be the oldest independent record label in the world, Topic had originally been the plaything of the Workers’ Music Association. Although viewed as a cultural wing of the Trades Union Congress, the WMA in fact never received official TUC support, although prominent members Alan Lomax and Ewan MacColl performed extensively for individual unions and TUC branches. ‘Though denounced by some as a Communist front,’ says Karl Dallas, himself both a Communist and active on the fifties folk scene, ‘the WMA and indeed all of us folkies were distrusted by the apparatchiki of the Party’s King Street HQ.’ It can nevertheless be generalised with confidence that the various left-wing organisations and the individuals prominent in folk music during the 1950s formed a complex, incestuous web. Topic parted company from the WMA in 1958, although it retained informal links. It was still, at that time, the only significant label in Britain dealing in genuine folk and traditional music.

  The Benbow/Lloyd recording of the English racehorse ballad ‘Skewball’ for Topic on a 1957 EP entitled Bold Sportsmen All was a landmark, but Steve was already in his own act performing a number of English traditional songs such as ‘Turpin Hero’, ‘Whaling In Greenland’ and ‘Musgrave And Lady Barnett’.24 His earliest and rarest solo recordings, from 1957, are a pair of EPs for the 77 label – one of English songs, the other of American. The label was a short-lived operation run by Dobell’s, London’s leading specialist record shop of the period. Their patronage was not matched by competence: when the records were issued Steve was horrified to find the tapes had been unintentionally speeded up by a semi-tone. Steve Benbow would find himself in great demand for quite some years to come as an artist suitable for what in today’s terms would be unimaginable radio and television exposure, but notwithstanding a fair few opportunities – and almost comical strokes of ill-luck to match – the selling of records in appreciable quantities was not to be. Given Steve’s unashamedly broad tastes in music, tasteful style in playing and a tendency, now regretted, to follow an easy-listening path, with all manner of choirs, bands and orchestras peppering his recorded work of the sixties, a critical renaissance seems unlikely. But in terms of folk music, in London in the late fifties, before anyone had heard of Davy Graham let alone Bert Jansch, Steve Benbow was almost certainly the best guitar player on the scene. He was all over the radio and, outside of the visiting black Americans, if you played guitar and sang folk songs he was the guy you aspired to.

  Clive Palmer, a young man with a banjo, intrigued by the sound of Russell Quaye and his subterranean dance band, was one of the regulars down at the Skiffle Cellar and at many other haunts around Soho. Equally intoxicated by the same scene was a young man known as Wizz Jones. Within a few years both would find themselves firmly established as enduring touchstones in the story of Bert Jansch. Both were Londoners, Clive born in 1943 in Edmonton in north of the city, and Raymond ‘Wizz’ Jones born in 1939 in Croydon in the south. From the age of eight Clive had been performing on stage as a vocalist with the Foster-Miller Dance Troupe – a tap-dance act – and in the various minstrel shows and music-hall evenings his local church organised. A little later he found a guitar which his brother, a French polisher, had renovated, swapped it for a banjo and started a little skiffle group – getting as far as the Carroll Levis Junior Discoveries show on TV. Subsequently at art school, Clive gravitated simultaneously towards the Soho coffee bars and the weekly meetings of something truly bizarre: ‘They used to be called BMG bands,’ he says, ‘banjo, mandolin and guitar players who would play in something like an orchestra. They introduced me t
o Alfred Lloyd, a Welshman, who was the best teacher of his day. He’d more or less retired from playing, but anyway I got an introduction and had these banjo lessons – all old Victorian stuff.’

  Wizz and Clive did not actually know each other in the fifties. ‘I came across him in Paris [in 1960],’ says Wizz, ‘sleeping under a bush in the Bois de Bologne. He told me always to carry a wet flannel.’25 They had frequented the same places in Soho and Wizz does recall seeing Clive around, this odd fellow with ‘a mysterious aura of aloofness’, but Wizz’s family background and post-war gloom in general had set him well on the way to developing his own reactionary lifestyle. ‘We were paupers but there was this middle-class attitude. I reacted against it. It was really juvenile, but I know why I did it. I was trying to break away from these chains, and it worked.’26 Wizz, with his outrageously long hair, patched Levis and a battered guitar purportedly held together with bits of leather, turned up in 1960 on an Alan Whicker report for BBC television’s Tonight on the phenomenon of beatniks in Cornwall. Sitting on a beach in Newquay, quite clearly a candidate for Britain’s first hippy, Wizz told the nation that all he wanted to do was play his guitar and travel. And that is exactly what he did.

  ‘Roy Hudd originally put me on a stage, gave me my first build-up: “Wizz Jones and the Wranglers!” I was eighteen years old, at this boys’ club that the police had started. It was a wonderful gig! That was directly out of the Bentley and Craig thing, because it caused such a terrible stir in Croydon: “What are we going to do with kids like this?”’27 East Croydon, his local station, was on the London to Brighton line, convenient for skipping off on a rave to the south coast. There were several theatres, music halls and cinemas in the town. One cinema, the Davis, was reckoned the biggest in Europe at the time and was on the touring circuit for top-drawer pop artists. As a teenager Wizz was able to see Bill Haley and Buddy Holly in the flesh, although whatever magical sheen the first names of rock’n’roll had it didn’t translate a few stops up the line to Tommy Steele and the 2 i’s contingent: ‘We were pretty disdainful about all that,’ said Wizz. ‘We didn’t mix with them – we were alternative!’28