by Colin Harper
Alex would also make forays back to Britain. The sixties were approaching and the London folk scene rapidly growing. ‘When I came back MacColl was a huge influence on the scene. I sang at the Ballads & Blues when he was still singing there. I think maybe we didn’t get on too well because, maybe, I was more of a Scotsman than he was. I’ve a tremendous respect for the guy but I didn’t like his approach to the people.’ Campbell had first heard MacColl on record, and had assumed him to be an Englishman imitating a Scots accent. When MacColl’s diktat of singing only music from one’s own national or regional background came along, Campbell was having none of it: ‘I was of the opinion that I loved Guthrie songs particularly, and I was going to sing Guthrie songs. Whether I was doing it authentically or correctly or not I didn’t give a damn. So much so that it crystallised in an article in the Observer that said you were either a MacCollite or a Campbellite. I was put into a position that I never wanted to be in. [But] those days were good days because there was excitement and controversy on the scene. Josh MacRae called it “Schism & Booze”. But it made me get to the point where I almost refused to sing any Scottish songs just in defiance of everyone expecting me to. If there hadn’t been that controversy I would have developed differently. I would have been singing my own songs a lot earlier than I did.’30
When the spread of folk clubs around Britain began in earnest, Alex became a victim of his own generosity and reputation as an entertainer: ‘I found I was being asked to open folksong clubs. There were very few pros in those days. I don’t think anyone would ask Ewan MacColl to open up a club. For a start, he’d charge a lot more. I went on to open up maybe six hundred clubs. When I reached my nadir it must have been about 1962. I was getting fifteen to thirty bob a night from the clubs. I was sick and fed up with it all.’ By this time Alex was living in London with his partner Patsy and the first of their children: ‘There was one Christmas Eve, we had one egg in the house for the three of us. An egg, that was all. I said, “Fuck it, Patsy, I’m going to go out and busk.” So I went up to Regent Street and it was marvellous. I really worked, I put on a show. I’d just got to the end of my second song and the police came up and stopped me. I said, “For Christ’s sake, fellas, let me alone. I need the bread.” “We can’t,” they said, “you’re blocking the whole of Regent Street. There’s no traffic moving.” There were literally thousands of people there. I walked away disconsolately. I thought: “What am I going to do?” And I bumped into Bruce Dunnet. I told him the story and Bruce gave me ten quid. We got a chicken and everything else and that was a good Christmas. Then, of course, it picked up. I rolled along with the revival. But that’s how low it was.’
By the 1962 Edinburgh Festival, the city’s folk scene was firmly established and there was much fun to be had. Martha Schlamme, for a start, was back in town and performing this time at the Palladium. ‘Alas there is no longer a Howff,’ she lamented to Eric Winter, ‘and Edinburgh will not be the same.’ Bert Jansch, now on the verge of becoming a folk singer and actually performing his songs in public places at regular intervals, is conspicuous by his absence from any anecdotes of that year’s shenanigans. It may be conjectured that he was off travelling in France at the time. Archie Fisher, meanwhile, was running a ceilidh with Jill Doyle/Guest at the Outlook Tower, on hire from the Church of Scotland, and fronting an after-hours club in a disused toffee factory down by the Grassmarket.
‘The sweetie factory operated on two levels,’ says Hamish Imlach, ‘two big rooms, where there were jazz bands and various folk singers like myself getting thirty bob a day to be there and fill in with songs when needed. We were able to doss on cattle mats in the chocolate room. It was a remarkable place. I recall seeing the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Cleo Laine and Geraint Evans all perched on the plastic cattle mats and Albert Finney riding in on a motorcycle. The Police hated the place because it was a club – you could pay for membership that lasted the three weeks then bring your carryout with you. In the second week they sold some basic food, then the police were able to close it down because of catering standards.’31
Eric Winter had a great time introducing three divas from the far reaches of folksong to each other at that year’s festival: Martha Schlamme, Portuguese singer Amalia Rodrigues and Scots balladeer Jeannie Robertson. The venue was the Outlook Tower, and Owen Hand recalls the ensuing singing session, bristling with rivalry and one-upmanship, as one of the great nights of the revival. For the first time ever, folk events were accepted as part of the official Festival, with a series of shows at Murrayfield ice rink, hosted by Rory & Alex McEwan and presenting as guests the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem from Ireland (well-established in America, but rare performers in Britain); Carolyn Hester from America; London songwriter and broadcaster Sydney Carter, who brought with him a young West Indian singer, Nadia Cattouse; the classical guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream; and, representing the locals, Dolina MacLennan. Such a programme was indeed a concession to the new genre but the real breakthrough in presenting folksong to the masses in a festival/concert setting was going on elsewhere.
‘Centre 42’ was the name of the enterprise, emanating from Resolution 42 passed by the Trades Union Congress of 1960 which recognised ‘the importance of the arts in the life of the community especially now when many unions are securing a shorter working week and greater leisure for their members’. The aspiration was to build a ‘Cultural Palace’ (to be constructed in London, of course) to be known as Centre 42. But before such plans got off the drawing board, Centre 42 came into existence as a touring festival, setting up in a given provincial town for a week, targeting ‘deprived’ working-class audiences, taking a week off and then moving on to the next town. As an attempt to devolve culture and art from London to the provinces it was a grand ideal. The playwright Arnold Wesker was at its helm, with Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd looking after the musical programme for the opening night concerts of each festival. A pilot event took place at Wellingborough in 1961 and was successful enough to be extended to cover five more towns the following year: Hayes, Bristol, Birmingham, Nottingham and Leicester. With a week off between each event, it was effectively a nine-week tour. Part of the brief was to involve singers from the areas the tour stopped in. At Nottingham, in August 1962, one of those to audition was Anne Briggs, who would become not only a travelling companion and early champion of Bert Jansch, but the greatest English traditional singer of her generation.
‘I got a bunch of O levels and I was going to try and get into Durham University to do Fine Art,’ says Anne. ‘But after a year in sixth form Centre 42 came along and I thought, “Yeah, a bird in the hand’s worth two in the bush – go for it.”’ Anne had been hanging round with a couple of lads from her village who had taught her a little bit of guitar, encouraged her to sing and accompanied her on a few coffee bar folk sessions in Nottingham. ‘Woody Guthrie was a big hero,’ she says. ‘I used to do all his stuff.’ It was nevertheless for English songs that Anne would become known, and even then there were recorded sources to learn from: ‘I’d heard an Isla Cameron LP when I was fifteen and it was the first time I’d heard a modern recording of unaccompanied traditional singing. I’d heard field recordings on the radio of women from Barra bashing tweed around, but hearing Isla Cameron and then Mary O’Hara was a revelation. I had a tape recorder and I would record BBC folk programmes and learn the songs that way. There were other folk singers around Nottinghamshire, although the bias was very much American – even in the way they presented English and Scottish material. But I knew “my” songs as soon as I heard them, and I’d sing them my way.’
The night of the Centre 42 concert Anne sang at least two songs, unaccompanied: ‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’ and ‘She Moves Through The Fair’ – two songs, coincidentally, that she would record live in Edinburgh for Decca the following year, without a trace of American influence. Anne’s entire recording career happened as a direct result of Centre 42: ‘I think, in hindsight,’ she says, ‘it cons
olidated the woolly beginnings of the folk music revival. It made people in different parts of the country aware that they weren’t just doing their thing in isolation. There were folk clubs in Nottingham, Bristol, Manchester, all over, and it brought things together and established a network. If nothing else, Centre 42 made the folk music revival coherent.’
Archie’s sister Ray Fisher, who would later record with Anne and who performed on four of the five festivals herself, was intrigued to discover the extent of the musical activity around Britain that had developed with varying degrees of independence from London. The scene going on in Tyneside, led by the likes of Lou Killen and Johnny Handle, was particularly fascinating (Ray would subsequently marry Tyneside musician Colin Ross). Aside from repertoire, it was different in one crucial respect: ‘They were linked somehow with London, by people coming and going, by records, by politics or whatever else,’ she says. ‘The same thing was happening in Birmingham with the Campbells and in Manchester with Harry Boardman. Wesker realised, “Look, we’ve got this musical activity going on in all these cities – we can utilise that!” It was all happening at the same time. We knew that it was going on because people would turn up in Glasgow and say, “Hallo, I’m from Manchester,” [but] the interaction between each city had been minimal. Even between Glasgow and Edinburgh.’32
Wesker, whose play Chips With Everything had been a recent success, was bankrolling the tour largely from his own pocket. Among its key participants were the Ian Campbell Group from Birmingham. Alongside the Spinners and the Watersons they were among the earliest groups in the revival, none of whom was yet fully professional. Nevertheless, the Campbells had committed themselves so fully to Centre 42, undertaking three of the five festivals (those within travelling distance of home), that only Ian Campbell and fiddler Dave Swarbrick were able to hang on to their day jobs. Some years later Campbell wrote an incisive memoir of the experience: ‘Along with the Clarion Singers we worked under Charles Parker in a group he had formed, called the Leaveners, to find a theatrical form for the techniques he had evolved in the Radio Ballads; we also appeared on the folksong concerts which were a highlight of all the festivals, and on the other six evenings of the week we were among those devoted enthusiasts who elected to bring Culture to the Masses by singing folksongs in the bar-rooms of selected public houses.’33
Bringing folksong to the pubs was a recognition by Wesker that his formal events were more likely to see audiences of middle-class, left-wing intellectuals than bona fide workers. Campbell concluded that the folksong concerts were a triumph, the Leaveners’ performances a more qualified success and folksong in the pubs a disaster: ‘I look back on those evenings with a distinct lack of nostalgia,’ wrote Campbell. ‘I can think of few tasks less rewarding than trying to present traditional music to a bar-room full of non-folkies who have not asked for your attentions and who have come looking for a pint with the lads and a game of darts.’ Reactions ranged, he felt, from indifference to derision. ‘Strangely enough,’ he mused, ‘although we were not being paid, we had undertaken to do the job and it never occured to us to give up and go home.’
Anne Briggs, having herself signed up for the rest of the tour, did not have that luxury. ‘My family disowned me,’ she says. ‘I left home a runaway. They couldn’t understand what was happening, threatened to put a court order on me to keep me at home but as I pointed out, it was only four weeks to my eighteenth birthday. But for a couple of years I was out on my own. After the festivals, the Centre 42 movement felt a bit guilty about all this and offered me a job in their offices in London. I was a “go-fer” and I had a very interesting six months, nipping about all over London to theatres and galleries and such like, and I was getting gigs there on the back of it.’ It was all experience that would later stand both her and Bert Jansch in good stead.
Bert Jansch was something of a prophet without honour in his place of origin. The transition from bedroom composer to performing musician was a vague one, although Bert recalls his earliest bookings around the Scottish Lowlands and North of England. He believes his first professional gig ‘as opposed to just messing around’ was at a particularly happening folk club in Rotherham: ‘It was a huge club,’ says Bert.34 ‘All the clubs in those days would hold up to four hundred people, and the universities too were incredible. You just don’t get it now. People would just book you after a fashion and you’d hitch-hike to the gig. So I did a lot in the North of England, like Sheffield and other universities. I don’t think you bothered about what kind of music you were playing at that time – anything and everything that came into your head. Prior to that, music was what you heard – the radio, your sister’s influence, your brother’s or whatever.’
Of all the clubs in Fife, he was only ever invited to play at one: the Dunfermline Howff. In Glasgow, he would quickly build an audience but it would not be a completely smooth process. Folksong was a working-class, increasingly young person’s music and any young performer on the scene in those days would be expected to fit into one of two camps: traditional music or contemporary songs espousing the correct political values. Robin Williamson and Bert Jansch were unusual in being markedly non-political. Robin, whose traditional bent at that stage opened up many more bookings than would be offered to Bert in the Scottish clubs, recalls a lot of his own early work being promoted by the Communist Party. Bert was singing, composing even, in his own oblique manner, the odd civil rights song, but there was no great cause being followed. No cause, that is, beyond the desire to travel and play music for a living.
‘You’ve got to remember that most of us in Glasgow were working in the shipyards or involved in trade unions,’ said Danny Kyle, one of that city’s earliest club organisers. ‘Glasgow’s industrial, Edinburgh isn’t. It’s as simple as that. There was intercity rivalry – we were the hard nuts of Glasgow, they were the poofs and charlatans of Edinburgh. Thank God that doesn’t exist now. I remember Bert playing at “Saturday Late” in Cleveland Lane, in Glasgow. Gordon McCulloch led a group of people that were against anything that wasn’t either political or traditional. Bert went on and started to do his thing, which was very unusual then – excellent guitar work, obviously, but quite different from the “ban the bomb” songs everyone else was doing. I’ll always remember Gordon McCulloch and the others made paper hats, like clown hats, out of newspapers, and then just totally sherracked him – heckled him to the point where Bert walked off. All of us had a narrow mind of some sort in those days and Bert was innovative, not doing the popular stuff like the rest of us. The sad thing is that Bert, given his head, would have played all the things that he’d written and all that he was getting into, but he would also sing traditional songs.’
The Glasgow Folksong Club had moved to 31 Cleveland Lane around March 1962, and that same month the club’s regulars took the half-hour bus trip to the nearby town of Paisley to pack out the opening night of a new venture, the Attic Club. Ian Campbell’s group were the club’s first-night guests and Danny Kyle its organiser. On 22 September, the Melody Maker reported the Thursday night club’s move to a Royal Air Force Association building in Abbey Street. What it did not report – and after all why should it – was the performance there a week or two earlier by somebody called Bert Jansch. Captured on a battered reel-to-reel by a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, it remains the earliest known recording of Bert Jansch and reveals beyond any doubt how extraordinary, for that time and place, his music really was.
Frank Coia, the schoolboy responsible, had become a regular at the Glasgow Folksong Club and was captivated by its atmosphere: ‘You sat on the floor for the most part, no seating at all, no public address system as such, so any artist was totally acoustic. It was unlicensed, although you could get soft drinks. It was a very popular club, the little “in” place in Glasgow at the time. Somebody had told me Bert Jansch was worth going to see and there was a flyer saying he was one of two people from Edinburgh playing their own style of folk-blues, Davy Graham being the other. It would have b
een early ’62 when I first saw Bert. It was totally mindblowing because nobody was doing what he was doing. As soon as I found he was playing again in Glasgow I did everything I could to beg, steal or borrow a tape recorder. I just had to put it on tape.’
Coia subsequently recorded Bert on several occasions: by his own testimony, all prior to the release of Bert’s first album in April 1965. The matter of dating and dissembling the Coia recordings is, however, a complex one and a later date in 1965 for at least four of the songs now seems certain. There were perhaps as many as four public performances and a living-room session recorded during that three-year period, most of which have survived intact, albeit jumbled together on a single copy reel. The fifty-six remaining tracks, of which thirty have been issued on CD, provide an invaluable insight into Bert’s presentation, style and repertoire at the dawn of his career. The presentation alone was something else:
‘He had this sort of attitude,’ says Coia. ‘It was like he was cocooned in his own world of music – everything else was peripheral. He would just tail off one number and mumble into another. It wasn’t professional in its presentation but it was a complete performance at one sitting. You could hear a pin drop when he was playing. It was usually a guitar which he wasn’t familiar with and he’d put it out of tune after almost every number, because he was playing so hard – pulling the strings, which was his technique. The tape recorder was positioned beside him. When he actually started his set that was it – he was wrapped up in it and normally had to be prompted whenever there was a break. He was shambolic in terms of appearance and very introverted. I suppose you could say people were a bit scared to approach him in conversation – they would be a bit gob-smacked from his playing.’
‘We were all trying to escape from something,’ said Danny Kyle, ‘and all of a sudden you could put on a backpack and bomb off to France – at least in your head you could – because of that music. All of a sudden, when I listened to Bert Jansch, I didn’t have to be a shipyard worker. I could see “le continent”. We were all reading Kerouac and here was a man saying through the guitar what Kerouac was alluding to in his books. That opened up poetry, guitar work, travel. With Davy Graham you could go and sit in total awe of the man. With Bert you would go and listen and look and you would say to yourself, “Here, perhaps I could do some of that,” because he made it seem attainable.’
