Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  Some may be less certain of this but in the meantime, to Carthy’s recollection, MacColl himself would delight in going down to the coffee bars of Soho in the company of Bert Lloyd, tapping into the energy of the patently frivolous skiffle craze and thrusting their performances of English traditional songs at the innocent punters. As Carthy concedes, ‘Ewan always wanted to be in control of any situation he was in, and usually was,’ so one can only speculate that his very presence, demeanour, age and authority were sufficient in commanding attention from an ill-educated crowd of musical thrill-seekers. But one situation the godfather of the folk revival could not and would not tolerate was to share a platform with a man called Alex Campbell – a denim-clad wanderer from Glasgow who was not only taking his degree in applied folk music entirely contrary to MacColl’s syllabus but who was also, and not without intrigue, the recently-wed husband of Peggy Seeger.

  There was a drama being played out there that few were aware of at the time, but of which many would speak in hushed tones over the years to come. For the moment, though, a more public drama was to be Martin Carthy’s immediate way forward. With terrific luck he walked straight from school into a job as a prompter at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, and subsequently toured with the company – including a most illuminating trip to Glasgow – as assistant stage manager and cameo player in a production of The Merry Widow. For Carthy, the times were as exciting as they were for all the other young adventurers in music around London – Wizz Jones, Clive Palmer, Andy Irvine and many more who had effectively dropped out of conventional society to try their hand on the ethnic fringes of popular music. ‘You’re eighteen, nineteen, twenty – all balls and no forehead,’ says Carthy, ‘and you just go at it. As far as you’re concerned it’s all happening because it’s all happening around you.’ They had no idea at the time, but exactly the same thing was going on in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

  3

  Edinburgh: The First Days

  Directly opposite St Giles’ Cathedral at 369 High Street, it was no coincidence that the Howff was where it was. In a cobblestoned thoroughfare full of ale houses and vendors of tartan-tinned shortbread, a street winding right the way up to Edinburgh Castle – ancient seat of Scottish government and latterday magnet for tourism – and a street beating annually at August as the heart of the Edinburgh Festival, there would always be an opportunity for somebody staying open later than anywhere else. And increasingly, as the fifties turned into the sixties, there was a golden opportunity for somebody offering something with a dash of colour about it for a post-war generation that was trying its best to avoid the drab indignity of national service. Roy Guest, an individual almost as colourful as his own press material of the period would have had you believe, was about to become that somebody.

  Born at Izmir in Turkey around 1934/35 and brought up in Wales, Roy was brilliant at the business of making things happen. One cannot say with assurance that Roy Guest’s prime motivation was financial – there have always been easier ways to make money than folk music – but assessing the man who more than anyone else broke the ground for folk music as a viable, sizeable concert hall commodity during the sixties, the lure of lucre was not the least part of the equation. On the other side of the coin, in merging the polished public persona of his press appearances and his unquestionably self-written album notes of the period – a remarkable catalogue of self-aggrandisement in the guise of modesty – with his achievements and the pithier recollections of those around him, a near-reckless, steam-rollering bravado appears.

  Roy had trained as an actor, teacher and film editor before finding his niche, and folk music was perhaps no more than a vehicle for his energies. Later career flirtations saw him promoting cabaret in New York, late sixties pop for Brian Epstein’s NEMS organisation and chamber music as something akin to ‘the new rock’n’roll’ in the early seventies. In 1975 somebody booked the Royal Albert Hall for 31 December 1999, the eve of the millennium. Two years short of that date, Roy’s will had revealed just who that giant of foresight had been. ‘He was the most extraordinary organiser the folk scene has ever known,’ says Martin Carthy. ‘He worked very, very hard but he also had a magic touch – he had a genius for it. To give an example, he was out of it for fifteen years and was asked to organise a folk festival at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon – the impossible hall to fill. And he filled it. He broke the record. He walked back in, organised this folk festival and then disappeared again. And it was brilliant. Brilliant! Occasionally you got the feeling he was financially a little naughty, but one way or another he fired up all the people who were around him – either he’d anger them or he’d inspire them. As a singer he was crap.’

  Roy had been passionate about acting since the age of twelve. Leaving Bedales School at eighteen – and there was always something ‘public school’ about his persona, on call as a tool of influence whenever necessary – he spent three years in the early fifties at London’s Central School of Drama. A further two years were spent in repertory theatre at Ipswich and Bromley. ‘The plays were mainly rubbish but I did learn how to run a stage, and I did learn discipline.’1 Roy moved on to a teaching sojourn at Summerhill, where he first began singing and playing guitar, with the students, before opting, so far as the self-mythologising of his later published recollections can be trusted, to try a round-the-world singing trip. ‘He would earn his fare to Canada by singing on the streets of London where he met many buskers and began the nucleus of a collection of songs and humour. He made the crossing to Canada in 1956, landing with a guitar and $5.’2

  ‘It was in Montreal that I picked up the local paper and saw that at a meeting at the local Union Hall there would also be folksongs from someone described as P. Seeger. I went along and he absolutely blew my mind.’3 Roy had heard Seeger previously on record, but at that time and in that culture Seeger’s real-life impact would have been considerable. ‘I was moved by the songs, the humanitarian message, but most of all by Pete’s exhortation to us all to go out and sing: “It’s easy – you can do it!” I was sure I could. With a battered guitar I was soon leading groups, rowing the boat ashore. After two months I was singing in public and getting paid for it. And I was artistic – a folksinger – part of the new youth who were going to remove the Establishment for good and all. My falsetto on “Wimoweh” had to be heard to be believed.’4

  There is irony, of course, in Roy’s published recollections of the period but something of the subversive nature of the whole folksong experience – widely pilloried by a scared America as the musical vanguard of Communism at the time – certainly appealed to his psyche. He later revelled in telling a story from this period of a 500-seater concert appearance with Guy Carawan at Seattle University becoming a 15,000+ rally based entirely on hostile pre-publicity. Hearing his records today, one cannot imagine the substance of such an event being anything less than the dampest of squibs. ‘I sang bad songs because they had a message I believed in. I sang funny songs because they made people laugh. My hair was long and the image was an easy passport to success, financially and sexually.’5

  Around 1958 Roy returned to London and wangled a recording deal with Saga, under whose auspices he ran a number of shows at the Festival Hall billed as ‘Roy’s Guest Night’. His absurd self-description as ‘Britain’s Burl Ives’ reflected his promotional flair, and he inevitably secured exposure on TV and radio. By the time he appeared on the Scottish scene, Roy was able to tell people he had appeared on Tonight before Robin Hall & Jimmie Macgregor. The story was probably true and people were naturally impressed. The fact that Roy Guest could establish his reputation with a single nugget of information and an understanding of communication within a given context – a new city, new people, a compact scene – demonstrates a facet of what made him great. Just not as a singer.

  Back in London, Roy became increasingly aware of the folksong revival: ‘I didn’t like it,’ he declared. ‘Hostile men with nasty stares and intense girls who didn’t notice me. Middle-age
d people too and people who asked where I got that version of that song. I began to feel insecure.’6 The reference was thinly veiled. Roy’s nemesis was one person, and one person who could certainly know a phoney when he saw one: Ewan MacColl. One night, seemingly in 1958, Sam Larner, one of the greatest ‘source singers’ of the era, appeared once and once only at the court of the folk revival. It was an evening that had a profound effect upon Martin Carthy and doubtless upon the many others who were there. And somehow Roy Guest, one of the most breathtakingly banal singers of any era, had talked himself on to the bill.

  Sam Larner was an ex-herring fisherman from Norfolk who had first sailed in the 1890s and is remembered now as the star singer and story-teller of MacColl’s third and most celebrated Radio Ballad, Singing The Fishing. ‘What a wonderful person he was!’ wrote Ewan many years after the event. ‘Short, compact, grizzled, wall-eyed and slightly deaf, but still full of the wonder of life. His one good eye still sparkled at the sight of a pretty girl. We brought him to London to sing at the Ballads & Blues, and for several hours he sat and sang and talked to the several hundred young people, who hung on his every word and gesture as though he had been Ulysses newly returned from Troy to Ithaca.’7

  And then there was Roy. ‘I ought to thank him for dragging me along there,’ says Martin Carthy. ‘I saw Sam Larner and it changed my life. Ewan gave Roy this glowing introduction and it was clear that Roy had really done a job on him. He started his first song and I watched Ewan’s face turn thunderous. He was furious, he knew he’d been had – and I don’t think that would have happened too often. But Ewan’s response was remarkable. He let Roy sing his allocated amount of songs in the first half and again in the second half, but he made sure people went away thinking only of Sam Larner. I doubt very much if anyone remembered a single song that Roy had performed.’

  Credited on its sleeve to Roy Guest & the Tennessee Three – purportedly comprising a rather larger group of people including Robin Hall and Jimmie Macgregor – the Saga release Cowboy was, in Roy’s subsequent spin, the product of a three-hour drinking session. A record of Wild West favourites, it went on, in the embroidery of Roy’s recollection, to sell two and a half million and top the Austrian album charts for months. Implausible as the tale may be, if this material was the kind of hokum Roy was foisting on MacColl it is no wonder he went down like a lead balloon.

  Nevertheless, like Steve Benbow, Roy was becoming something of an airwaves regular. Early in 1959, Saturday Club producer Jimmy Grant had thrown Steve and Roy together along with a few others – including Jimmie Macgregor and his wife Shirley Bland – as a group, purely for broadcasting, to be known as the Wanderers.8 ‘He wanted a folk group,’ says Steve, ‘so we were! Roy had declared he was Britain’s answer to Burl Ives. He was a very good performer, a terrific showman. But not a very good guitarist.’

  In August 1959 Roy was, in his own words, invited to the Edinburgh Festival. If it was becoming clear that he was not himself on any fast track to becoming a spokesman for a generation, he could still create the platforms for those who were. For both folk music and the man, it was a case of the right place and the right time. A cartwheel was rolling down a cobbled street. It could have crashed at the bottom. With a dose of ‘enlightened self-interest’ that would have made Alexis Korner proud, Roy Guest applied his melange of magic, risk and acumen and began forging by stealth a bandwagon of national proportions.

  During the summer of 1959 the occupancy of 369 High Street was in the hands of a Scottish nationalist group called the Sporran Slitters. Their table talk was intriguing: ‘They kept on saying that they’d see each other down at the Howff,’ said Roy, ‘and when I asked them what they meant they said they’d found the word in the poems of Burns, meaning a place of assignation, where rebels, drunkards and all sorts of rogues would meet. When we decided to use the place as a centre for folk music during the Festival I said, “Let’s call it The Howff, with capitals.” And so we did. It was meant to run for three weeks, but there was such an atmosphere going that it ran for two years.’9 Those ‘two years’ spanned 1959 – 62, peaking during the Festival of 1961. There were few folk music entrepreneurs around in those days and none in Edinburgh. Roy had discoverved a place where the musical grass-roots murmured as vibrantly as London’s and where the position of ‘big cheese’ was still vacant. He effectively applied for the job, got it and within two years he had turned a gaggle of disparate talents into a happening scene and transformed the dank, derelict cubby-hole of some ludicrous secret society into the talk of the town.

  Owen Hand had stumbled across the Howff, just prior to being called up for national service, in its first few days of being. ‘A poet who rented a room from my dad was a member of the Sporran Slitters,’ he says, ‘and told me about the hippies who had rented their meeting rooms for the Festival period, so I had to go have a look-see. My first impression was that Jill Guest was gorgeous and I also liked the accessibility of the music. Due to local bylaws they were not allowed to charge admission and got their money by having a silver collection. I went along every night. After the Festival they just kind of stayed on and so we had the makings of a club.’

  Owen was perhaps the first of the future Howff regulars to discover the place. Close behind him was the imposing figure of Len Partridge, the godfather of Edinburgh folk-blues. Born in Dunkeld, Perthshire in 1938, Partridge’s interest in the guitar had been engaged in the early fifties by an old lady in a neighbouring village called Meggie Rae, the grandmother of a friend, who happened to play a number of instruments. ‘She played none of them very well,’ says Len, ‘but she had a remarkable ability to create enthusiasm in others. I played, or tried to play, in isolation for a long time because I didn’t know anybody else who played guitar apart from this old lady. Somewhere along the line I became aware of Huddie Ledbetter and couldn’t believe the sound he made, and of course discovered it was a thing called a twelve-string guitar. One night, 1956 or ’57 I’d imagine, I heard this same sound emanating from the television and it was Rory McEwan, on the Tonight programme.’ Len wrote to Rory and received an immediate reply saying ‘Christ, amazing, you know Leadbelly …’ and a distant friendship began. ‘He was an incredible help – all sorts of things I couldn’t figure out at all he knew, because he’d spent time in the States and was a fairly intuitive musician anyway. He’d been to see Martha Leadbetter in the days when she still had Leadbelly’s guitar and he’d met and played with a lot of people. Basically, he had the access and we didn’t.’

  Before even skiffle had made its presence felt, Rory McEwan would be sending back to his pen pal Len reels of tape and discs of all sorts of fascinating discoveries from his regular travels in America. Len was also put on the trail of acquiring a twelve-string of his own. He had already tried shopping for one in Edinburgh but received only blank expressions. McEwan himself had found his in a pawn shop in Galveston, Texas for $12. But a friend of his, Cyril Davies no less, was having one made by one Emile Grimshaw of Piccadilly, in London. ‘Cyril wasn’t at all bothered if I had one made out of the same design,’ says Len. ‘I learned quite a lot from Cyril but Rory was the biggest single source because he was totally free with his knowledge – all he needed was someone who was interested.’

  By the time Roy arrived on the scene, Len had already made several trips to London, solely in pursuit of music. He had checked out Davy Graham at the Gyre & Gimble, and Cyril and Alexis at the Roundhouse, had bumped into Steve Benbow, and had made enough of an acquaintance with Ewan MacColl to know that it was not one he wished to take further. He had also met ‘Rambling’ Jack Elliott and his wife Jean and was consequently surprised, driving down Edinburgh’s High Street one evening, to see a man with a stetson getting into a car, carrying a guitar case and accompanied by a young woman. ‘I thought, “Good God, it’s Jack Elliott,”’ says Len. ‘So we followed the car in an incredibly convoluted journey round Edinburgh finally ending up in a mews where there was nowhere else to go. I got out and walke
d forward, whereupon the window wound down a fraction and a voice asked plaintively, “Can I help you?” It was Roy. He’d obviously come north on a runner and thought we were whoever it was from London that he was on the run from. He was definitely very frightened. We thought it was hilarious.’ The incident was brushed aside and Len, with his obvious interest in music, was invited along to Roy’s weekly party on the High Street.

  Bert Jansch was no more concerned with the history of the Howff than he would be in the coming years with the provenances of any other folk club. He would turn up and they’d be there. That was all he needed to know. Regarding the Howff, it was the early weeks of 1960 and a couple of people called Archie Fisher and Jill Doyle were offering guitar lessons ‘and obviously, at sixteen years old, I fell madly in love with Jill Doyle’.10 Jill, who had the distinction of being Davy Graham’s half-sister, is remembered by her contemporaries more for a certain reputation with men than for any guitar playing of note. She had arrived up from London with Roy, using the name Jill Guest, and people naturally assumed they were married; in those days, living together was a rarity and people in Edinburgh did not ask questions. Bert took lessons from Jill for no more than a month, exhausting her knowledge and thereafter looking to Archie for further enlightenment. Archie consigns the whole business to the realms of myth: ‘Bert came along, spent one lesson with Jill and learned all she knew and then spent two lessons with me. The reason it took me two lessons was I took him out and got him drunk during the first one.’11