Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  However Bert’s character had evolved, it could not easily be faked. But was he really this lonely, angst-ridden character of legend? ‘I think he probably was,’ says Robin. ‘But I think we all were then. He never discussed his family. But then none of us ever discussed our families. We must have travelled, off and on, hundreds and hundreds of miles together and I don’t recall discussing pretty much of anything with him! We didn’t get around to talking about God or how the world is or the meaning of life or anything like that – stuff that you normally talk about when people have a discussion. A man of few words.’

  Bert’s travelling, like the chronology of his domestic arrangements, is impossible to reconstruct precisely. But he had certainly been to France at least once before September 1962: the date of a live performance in Glasgow which remains his earliest extant recording.18 In September 1963 Bert travelled to Morocco. He believes he had been to the South of France not once but twice before that: ‘I had friends in Edinburgh who used to renovate people’s houses in France and that’s how I ended up going there,’ he says. ‘They had a place in Nanturon, near St Tropez, and I used to hitchhike. We stayed there two or three months once. It was an absolutely gorgeous place, a Saracen village built in a circle with narrow streets and a centre like a village square. It was full of rich people. Every day a limousine would drive up, Brigitte Bardot would get out and sit outside this café. Every day – and I didn’t have the courage to go up and say hello.’

  Bert’s first trip to France was undertaken during the lifetime of the Howff, probably summer 1961. He had set off from Edinburgh with a friend, ‘a London guy who I’d met at the club. I remember getting caught with him on the railway. We were fiddling the fares – buying a ticket for threepence and travelling hundreds of miles. We stayed at his parents’ house out in Buckhurst Hill, just outside London.’19 The ‘friend’ subsequently absconded with Bert’s ‘Lonnie Donegan’ guitar. Not a good start. The pair had travelled to London with the intention of finding some work on a building site to earn some money. On his own, Bert at least tried to see the plan through.

  ‘I actually managed to get the whole squad sacked,’ he recalls, ‘because I refused to work in the rain. We were digging the foundations for a bridge and it started raining. I stopped work, went into the hut and drank tea – and they all followed me, all these big Irishmen. We were having a great time there in the hut until the foreman came in and sacked the whole lot of us. And that was my first day’s work!’

  While Bert was busy fiddling the fares down to London, a couple of young Londoners from Kingsbury County Grammar School were hitchhiking in the opposite direction. Their names are forgotten and they play no part in Bert’s story save to provide the first link in a chain that would lead, a couple of years down the line, to Bert’s first base in London: periodically sharing a flat with a cheery art student by the name of John Challis and a philosophical man of leisure called David Blass.

  ‘I started at Ealing Art College in September 1961,’ says Challis. ‘I’d done my first major hitch-hiking trip that summer, going across France with my girlfriend. So I think when someone suggested hitching to Edinburgh I might have said,“Yeah, I know how to do that!” Already there had been these other two friends who had gone up to the Edinburgh Festival that year and they had encountered the “New Departures” poets on the Fringe. They’d gone up as two nice little sixth formers to hear classical music and came back two raving beatniks. One of the people they’d got to know was a bloke called Adam Parker-Rhodes, a student at Edinburgh University. He was quite a major connection between us in London and the people up in Edinburgh. It was a base for a lot of us.’

  Bert was of course also friendly with Parker-Rhodes. Just prior to the New Year, Challis, Blass and a third friend, George Tapner, hitched up to Edinburgh – lured not least by the attraction of a bohemian arts scene and the amazing availability of soft drugs. Like Challis, whom he knew from Kingsbury County Grammar, Blass had enrolled at Ealing Art College in September. He lasted six weeks before deciding it was not for him. Aside from Parker-Rhodes, the pair had another potential connection to Bert: a Glasgow drug dealer called Neil McClelland. Blass believes that he first met Bert, in Edinburgh, via McClelland, and recalls the place where he was living at the time: a room in a tall building on the Grassmarket, shared with another person, no doubt Robin Williamson. Through a combination of circumstances and his family’s cosmopolitan, liberal values David Blass’s home in London had become an open house to his friends and to their friends. In this context, McClelland had met Blass the previous year.

  ‘McClelland was very intelligent and streetwise, but very dodgy,’ says Challis. ‘It might have been him who put us on to the Howff.20 When I went to the Howff the first time, which was a few days before this big do which I believe was going to be the last night, it was during the New Year period. We knew of Bert but we may not actually have met him by then.’ Strangely, although travelling to Edinburgh together, Blass became separated from Challis and Tapner and the two camps had consequently differing adventures: Blass did not visit the Howff but did meet Bert; Challis did not meet Bert but did visit the Howff.

  On what was almost certainly his next trip to France, in the late spring of 1962, Bert and another long-forgotten travelling companion stopped at the family home of David Blass, in Wembley Park. John Challis also turned up at the Blass residence that evening: ‘It was a place of far greater freedom and tolerance than we were used to in our own homes,’ says Challis, ‘so we were there a lot. I have this memory of the first time Bert appeared in the living room. I was sitting there having a drink, Bert came in with this other guy,21 was introduced, sat down and within a short period of time he’d got a guitar out, started playing it and we were all just stunned! I had some idea of where he was coming from because I was already into country blues and we’d also, all of us, been to various folk clubs, like the Ballads & Blues. But that was all people doing Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie stuff or traditional English music. Bert was around for a couple of days, but it was quite a while before I saw him again. The next time I saw him was when they were on their way back. By that time he’d written “Strolling Down The Highway”. I think it was one of the first songs he’d actually written rather than just taking an existing song and adapting it.’

  ‘I think I was semi-emulating Davy and a few others,’ says Bert, of his wanderlust. ‘The generation before me – players like Davy, Alex Campbell and Wizz Jones – had all done their fair share of busking around Europe, so I just naturally followed suit. You just busked wherever you went. I used to make just about enough money to get by. The best place I ever busked was in St Tropez with a blonde, buxom girl called Felicity, or “Fish” as she used to get called. We’d do an hour on the harbour front and make enough money for both of us to live for a week! We’d knock out Leadbelly numbers and anything else we could think of.’22

  Of Bert’s immediate circle, only Clive Palmer had already been to Paris, busking on the streets with Wizz Jones in 1960 or thereabouts. ‘I didn’t see him for years [after that],’ says Wizz, ‘and then I got a letter from Edinburgh, where he was living with Robin and Bert. I went up to see him.’23 Bert would no doubt have been made aware, then, of Wizz Jones’s adventures on the continent. He would already have been aware of Davy Graham’s travels. He had few contacts and no money, but the prospect of getting out of ‘Auld Reekie’ for a while was becoming irresistible: ‘I was open to the world,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to travel around and see a few places. But I also had this idea in the back of my mind that I wanted to be a folk singer.’24

  Clive Palmer, Wizz Jones and Davy Graham all had experience of Europe to impart but the greatest role model of them all, the king of the road both then and for years to come, was a Glasgow man. A deeply charismatic, romantic figure who ricocheted off every corner of the embryonic folk revival, never stopping long in any one place, save perhaps his kingdom on the streets of Paris, Alex Campbell was some years older than th
e Bert Jansch generation but still one of them. An entertainer first, with no left-wing ties, Campbell knew all about Ewan MacColl and his views and disdained them. MacColl would have reciprocated in kind save for one complication: Alex Campbell was married to Peggy Seeger, the woman he loved.

  ‘Alex married Peggy for Ewan,’ says Steve Benbow, ‘and the story is he never got paid. She couldn’t work here unless she had a work permit or became a British citizen. I think they used Alex. I don’t know why. A strange business.’ Ewan had fallen for Peggy on their first time meeting, in March 1956, but he was already married to his second wife, Jean Newlove. They met again at the World Festival of Democratic Youth in Moscow in July 1957. Peggy returned to Britain to work with Ewan in the spring of 1958, but someone reported her expired work permit to the Home Office and she was given two days to leave. She went to France but was deported back and forth to Belgium and Holland, in a sequence of international buck-passing, before finally ending up, seven months pregnant, at a friend’s flat in Paris.

  ‘Alex Campbell broke the chain of events by marrying me in Paris on January 24 1959,’ she later wrote. ‘It was a hilarious ceremony. The American priest, in surplice and sneakers, lectured Alex at length on his forthcoming lifetime commitment to the poor girl whom he had gotten into such trouble. The following day I arrived, unimpeded, in London, six weeks before the birth of my first son. I swore allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen and settled down with Ewan, with great upheaval for everyone concerned.’25 One must wonder whether the marriage was, to one of its participants at least, greater than a thing of convenience: ‘Alex, whenever he got drunk,’ says Bert, ‘that was the one subject he brought up. You’d have to take that on board to assess Ewan’s character.’

  Born in Glasgow in the 1920s, Alex Campbell was a true romantic: a tearful sentimentalist, a ribald comedian, a troubadour, a legend in his own lifetime and perhaps in his day the most loved man in British folk. He would be the British blueprint for the Bert Jansch generation. Alex passed through all the key places at all the key times, played some songs, gave encouragement to the young up-and-comings, and moved on along the road. He is recalled, for example, as an early performer at Cyril Davis and Alexis Korner’s Blues & Barrelhouse club in the late fifties; he was a regular at Malcolm Nixon’s Ballads & Blues during its ACTT period; and he managed one visit to the Howff, enjoying the place so much, in Hamish Imlach’s words, that ‘he ended up staying for days, missing gigs all over the country’. Alex Campbell, in the early years of the folk revival, was everywhere. But who was he and where had he come from?

  In response to what must now be viewed as the definitive Campbell interview, for Folk News in 1978, Dominic Behan wrote a lengthy letter questioning Alex’s version of history, effectively his place in the folk revival, and his ‘criticisms’ of MacColl. In fact, Campbell had been both generous and philosophical about his old adversary: ‘I don’t think there’ll ever be as good a writer as MacColl,’ said Campbell. ‘He’s written some rubbish but his work on the Radio Ballads, that’ll stand for all time. I went to see his show recently. After all the kerfuffle about him being him and me being me and never the twain shall meet, we are both doing literally the same kind of show. Because MacColl’s now a showman. I don’t know, perhaps he always was.’26

  ‘Alex certainly met Peggy when he was in France,’ wrote Behan, a tad mischievously in response, ‘but did he know Ewan well too? I do not recollect Ewan talking about him and I do not remember seeing him except in the circumstances I have described.’27 The circumstances Behan referred to were essentially those occasions, the earliest being the Edinburgh Festival of 1963, when Dominic and Alex worked together. Dominic was falling into the trap of believing that because he had not been aware of Alex prior to this (and Alex had initially been recommended to Dominic as an accompanist by Steve Benbow, otherwise engaged at the time), Alex had therefore played no previous role in the folk revival. He could not have been more wrong. In articulating a view held by many of those hundreds of younger performers – some destined for greatness, others to be no more than floor singers at their local club – a subsequent published response to Behan’s revisionism, from one Michael Sutton, provides a compelling testament to Alex Campbell’s place in history:

  ‘From giving encouragement and instruction to young performers,’ wrote Sutton, ‘we saw him giving due acknowledgement and homage to the original sources of the songs he sang and, above all, we saw him reaching out to audiences, many of whom knew very little about folk music, and turning them on to it – planting a rich harvest for others to reap. In those days the folk scene was a very factional affair, full of splinter groups with chips on their shoulders. But while the scribes and pharisees were haggling over the finer points of doctrinal orthodoxy in small back rooms, Alex was going out among the folk, spreading the good word.’28

  ‘What I do is so ephemeral, man, it’s a nothing,’ Alex once said. But he did not really mean it. ‘In those days it was like being a missionary. I was at a party once. There were fourteen people and thirteen said I was the first folk singer they’d ever heard.’ Alex Campbell reputedly made a hundred records in his lifetime. He never took them too seriously and, in any case, they never sold. As for himself, he always learned songs from people, not records, and only ever wrote a handful of songs himself. One of these, ‘Been On The Road So Long’, was penned in the early sixties and became his calling card, his ethos and his epitaph. Bert Jansch would record it several times during his own career.29

  ‘Alex was larger than life,’ says Dolina MacLennan, who put him up in Edinburgh many times. ‘A total and utter romantic, totally outrageous and a wonderful entertainer – full of jokes but always close to tears as well.’ ‘He was good at getting himself gigs,’ says Martin Carthy, ‘but he didn’t tour in the same way you do now. He’d come back from Paris in the winter, get himself some gigs and then go back to Paris. There were people who despised him, others who thought he was wonderful. In his way, he was a star.’

  ‘When you’re a young man you think you’re going to be a poet,’ said Campbell. ‘I came into folk music from poetry, reading the ballads. I never realised they were sung. Then it must have been 1947 or 1948 I saw Jean Ritchie at the Festival Hall. It floored me. [But] I never thought I would sing folk songs in my life. The whole thing’s an accident.’

  Campbell’s eventual embracing of music as a living and his near-invention of the troubadour lifestyle that went with it can be traced back to Baden-Powell, the ‘gang shows’ and the arduous country hikes that were part of a Glasgow boy scout’s experience. For a slum kid, it was the only way to see what lay beyond the concrete. By the 1930s Campbell’s family, originally from the Hebrides, were poverty-trapped city dwellers. His mother, father and two sisters had all died from TB in the same year. Alex was rescued from an orphanage by his grandmother who managed to bring him up on a meagre pension. Being involved in scouting’s contribution to the war effort in Glasgow enabled him to mix with the various Polish, Australian and American servicemen based in the city, and to soak up their songs and culture: ‘I knew Leadbelly songs during the war. I knew “Pick A Bale Of Cotton” before I heard it sung by anybody else. I knew “Goodbye Booze”. These were all wartime songs. [But] Northern children in my generation, in any town in Scotland, were brought up with a whole background of folk music.’

  Campbell got a job with the Civil Service and made his way up to Higher Executive Officer. One day, in 1955, he lost his temper, took it out on two of his clerks and was obliged to resign. Having already visited Paris and enjoyed the place, he returned on a whim and took a course at the Sorbonne. ‘I went over with £800 which was a lot of bread in those days and I ran through that in a month. So there I am without any bread or anything at all except a guitar, so I started to sing in the streets.’ It would be a way of life for the next six years.

  ‘I was lucky being in the right place at the right time in Paris. How was I to know there was going to be a folk revival? It w
as so unusual then to see a street singer. There were the chain-breakers and the sword-swallowers and the fire-eaters but there were no folk singers in the streets. It was against the law. It was foreigners like myself who would do it. I was singing Leadbelly, skiffle numbers, occasional Scottish songs that I’ve known since I was a wee boy. Then again, I didn’t consider them folk songs – I was just a skiffler.’

  After a year or so, Campbell and a hard-drinking American called Derroll Adams secured a residency at the Contrascarpe, a popular cabaret café, which Campbell maintained for three and a half years on fifteen shillings a night, seven nights a week. He continued to work the streets, and to sell the New York Herald Tribune around the cafés at midnight. ‘Paris at that time was a tremendous melting pot. We all mixed together: poets, painters, artists, writers. It became a sort of proving ground. Almost all the young kids like Wizz Jones, Malcolm Price, Davy Graham, they all came over. We had a system: the good cafés, the good theatre queues, that was for the residents, the guys who’d been there a long time. The new ones, you could tell them, “You work there …” I was called King of The Quarter at one time. I was more or less The Man.’