Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  Relying on rooms lined with egg-boxes, a microphone, a two-track tape machine and a good instinct, Leader initiated a process that would almost single-handedly, like the photography of Brian Shuel, document the folk revival. The judgement, breadth and tenacity of his work has possibly never been fully appreciated. Leader’s first recording for Topic was of the Irish musicians Michael Gorman and Margaret Barry. He would later bring hordes of Irishmen back to his Camden flat, line up a crate of Guinness and press the record button. It was simple but effective. The late fifties and early sixties were the pinnacle of the London-Irish scene, centred on the pubs around Camden. Skiffle had run its course, Ewan MacColl had his thing going for the cognoscenti, his erstwhile associate Malcolm Nixon was trying to get something else happening with an expanding stable of more ‘commercial’ artistes and the blues scene patiently nurtured by Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner would only really kick in from 1963 on. At the dawn of the sixties, the Irish scene was musically the most visceral and exciting thing in town and, as a movement, the least ambitious of the lot.

  Working for Topic in those days paid poorly, so in 1960 Bill took a day job as manager of Collet’s record shop at 70 New Oxford Street. Collet’s core business was as a publishing house, based in Wellingborough, with an overt left-wing agenda. They had several outlets in London, including a Chinese bookshop and a Russian bookshop, but the flagship was a political bookshop on Charing Cross Road. What became their folk, blues and jazz record shop had begun as a department of this earnest emporium around 1958. By 1960 it was in New Oxford Street where it would remain throughout that decade and beyond. With the escalation of recording opportunities, Bill’s sojourn at Collet’s was relatively short, around three years. As the sixties wore on and the magnetism of London’s folk clubs became stronger, the place would become a virtual hostel, mailing address, meeting point and advice centre for all manner of musical road warriors. The person who would become most synonymous with the place, and with these aspects of community welfare over and above the job description, arrived shortly after Bill, and initially as his assistant. Her name was Gill Cook.

  From a grammar school background, Gill had been a regular at all the folk and blues clubs in London, and had been a member of John Hasted’s London Youth Choir. She took a job as a lab technician in Cambridge and found the good times in danger of stopping. ‘It was a terrible job,’ she says. ‘I was half a student, which meant terrible money and having to go to evening classes every night. I got pissed off, went to work for a bookshop instead and while I was there got a call from Bill Leader up in London saying, “Do you want a job?”’ Gill had met Bill through Eric Winter. Eric, a full-time journalist and Melody Maker contributor, had been living in Cambridge and commuting to London, and in his spare time had helped run Stan Kelly’s Skiffle Club at the Dog & Pheasant: ‘It wasn’t really skiffle at all,’ says Gill. ‘It was just a platform for Stan and he was wonderful!’10 Winter and his family moved to London in the late fifties, and Gill would often come and stay while taking in the folk clubs – through all of which she inevitably made the acquaintance of Bill Leader. She took the job.

  That same year, 1960, a zestful young man by the name of Nathan Joseph – Nat to the world at large, though he never cared for the abbreviation himself – graduated in English from Cambridge University. With the offer of a junior teaching post at Columbia University, New York, he flew to the States and, for the first and only time in his life, ‘freaked out’. It was a pent-up reaction against years of academic grind: ‘I decided I really didn’t want to do that any more. I decided to cut and run and bummed around America for the best part of a year, doing various things but earning enough money to get right round the States – which was a lot less easy then than it is now. Towards the end I was thinking, “Well, when I get back what the hell am I going to do?”’

  Nat had always been ‘mad on showbusiness’ and harboured vague aspirations to be a writer. Words rather than music were his thing and in both script and performing capacities he had enjoyed something of a reputation on the university revue circuit. He and a friend, Stephen Sedley, later Lord Justice Sedley, had had a cabaret act that was purportedly the only one better paid than David Frost’s on that scene at the time. ‘I didn’t have enough confidence in my writing or enough contacts to do that professionally but I could see, going around America, that something big was happening with gramophone records as we knew them then.’

  Nat made contact with a number of record companies, particularly in the spoken word field, wrested ninety days’ credit from them and, having no real capital whatsoever, shipped their product over the ocean, dashed back himself and feverishly trawled samples around the record shops of southern England, to whom he gave sixty days’ credit. He did well enough to keep the process going, particularly with a language series Conversophone, but he nevertheless realised that real money would only be made through marketing his own products: ‘I had to come up with some idea that would not necessarily be what I wanted to record but would make enough money so I could start a bona fide company. I remember thinking, “What interests the British public?” and I put three things down: money, sex and royalty.’

  The Queen was unavailable, money was dull, so sex it was. Nat recruited a controversial sexologist, Dr Eustace Chesser, under the pseudonym Dr Keith Cammeron, and recorded three albums in a series entitled Live With Love. Pressed up as catalogue numbers TRA 101, 102 and 103, they were the first three releases on Transatlantic Records. The scam worked: ‘We got about a million pounds’ worth of publicity for nothing,’ says Nat, ‘including the front page of the News of the World. There were discussions on the radio about sex records and how evil they were, but actually they were so tame it was unbelievable. Wouldn’t cause a ripple in Woman’s Own today but they sold what in those days was an enormous amount – nearly a hundred thousand records.’

  One day in 1962 Bill Leader was behind the counter at Collet’s ‘and this little fellow with a squeaky voice came in’. It was Nat: ‘He tried to sell me some albums on sex education which he thought were going to be a surefire winner and I seem to remember he had a EP on how to give up smoking. I remember he rang up the press agent in charge of getting the smoking EP off the ground and gave him such a mouthful of abuse it quite made my hair stand on end. He then suggested that maybe I should like to help him produce some records.’11

  Leader also had vague aspirations to run his own record company, and would finally take the plunge in 1969 with Leader/Trailer – twin labels designed as outlets for folk music recordings of a highly specialised nature and for club singers respectively. When it came to the music business, Bill was a people person, a friend of the artist, a softly-spoken idealist with a well-developed mechanism for co-existing stoically alongside the more preposterous individuals and situations that life in the music game has to throw at one; Nat was a hyperactive pragmatist and businessman of cultured accent and literary bent who would make, by and large, the kind of records he liked and could retain a certain pride in releasing but who was nevertheless, within the confines of his determinedly non-pop music focus, always chasing the big return. For the rest of the decade, with Bill freewheeling along in a freelance capacity and Nat blustering ahead as the archetypal entrepreneur, the pair would build a unique catalogue of work by artists who in many cases would have looked long and fruitlessly to have found another outlet. Not least among them was Bert Jansch.

  Songs Of Love, Lust & Loose Living (TRA 105) continued on the sex bandwagon, adding music to the equation with Shakespearian actor Tony Britton, Theatre Workshop veteran Isla Cameron and Nat’s pal Stephen Sedley on guitar. TRA 106 was a quirky collaboration between songwriter/evangelist Sydney Carter and comedy actress Sheila Hancock, while TRA 107, released in March 1963, was the ingenious Loguerhythms, pitting jazz singer Annie Ross with the poetry of Christopher Logue. TRA 108, an LP by satirical songster Cy Grant, then enjoying a high profile on David Frost’s TV show That Was The Week That Was, was the point w
here Bill Leader joined the team. He was shortly followed by photographer Brian Shuel.

  Shuel had started working as a freelance photographer in 1960, working particularly with his father-in-law James Boswell who edited a magazine. ‘The plan was for me to art edit and take photos for the magazine – a cosy arrangement which continued until he died in 1971, and which kept us alive very nicely while we got on with more important activities on the folk scene!’ Boswell lived round the corner from Topic supremo Gerry Sharpe. He was asked if he would care to become a Topic director himself, and provide free sleeve designs while he was at it. ‘He knew absolutely nothing about folk music,’ says Brian, ‘so he decided that he and I would go on a tour around Britain to dig the scene. I think he really wanted me to drive him but I saw it as an opportunity not only to get a few pictures on record sleeves but also, maybe, to work up a good magazine photo-story on the long-running folk “revival” which, incidentally, never came to pass though I’m still getting the pictures onto sleeves – and into books!’

  The first stop was an Alex Campbell show in Croydon, May 1962. The jaunt continued through Teeside, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Dunfermline and back to London, where Shuel soon became a part of the scene he was documenting. He found himself largely on the ‘Topic / Bert Lloyd / MacColl & Seeger approved side of things’, and was bemused by the whole business: ‘There was terrific factionalism. I was never quite certain what it was all about but I think most singers not approved by the above thought they were a load of pseuds who took themselves far too seriously. And I have to say, in retrospect, that they could well have been right.’

  Brian became known to Bill Leader and consequently to Nat Joseph. It was still a small scene. ‘Nat showed me the record sleeves he had already done,’ says Brian. ‘I remarked, in my tactful way, that they were complete crap, which had the surprising result of my designing all his sleeves for the next six years!’ By this time Bill had also introduced Nat to folk music: ‘I was soon hooked,’ says Nat. ‘Visits to Ewan MacColl’s club in London and Ian Campbell’s Jug of Punch in Birmingham made me into an immediate enthusiast. Particularly Campbell’s club, where I sensed a more joyous and modern approach.’12 The Ian Campbell Group, trademarked by fastidiously written harmonies and Dave Swarbrick’s fiddle, would be Nat’s first signing from the folk scene. Brian Shuel’s first Transatlantic commission was the sleeve photography for This Is … The Ian Campbell Folk Group (TRA 110). It was also where the story of Transatlantic, as the home of contemporary British folk music, really begins.

  In the early months of 1963, when Bert was in London for the first time casually trying his luck as a folk singer, Nat Joseph was busy setting out his stall with a series of eight Sunday night concerts at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, running the gamut of folk, cabaret, spoken word and comedy. TV stars Robin Hall & Jimmie Macgregor topped the first night in March alongside Steve Benbow and the Thamesiders; the next one featured Tony Britton with Isla Cameron, plugging their own particular brand of love, lust and loose living; another one paired Benbow with comic surrealist Spike Milligan; there was a ceilidh night with step dancers (a good thirty years before Riverdance) on St Patrick’s night and a ‘ban the bomb’ night on Easter Sunday, coinciding nicely with the annual march to the controversial nuclear facility at Aldermaston. There was no such thing as a bandwagon too far for Nat Joseph. As a businessman, he was a sharp operator. Less sharp, by all accounts, was Malcolm Nixon.

  Following the fall-out with MacColl that led directly to the founding of the Singers Club for the pure of spirit and the all-new Ballads & Blues for the lovers of fun, Nixon had set himself up as manager of Collet’s Chinese Bookshop opposite the British Museum. It would be little more than a front for running a folk agency. Hall & Macgregor were on his books, likewise Alex Campbell, Long John Baldry, Steve Benbow, Archie Fisher and an increasing portfolio of others. On the one hand Nixon’s artists were getting a lot of work, but on the other he was running his operation like a lunatic. ‘He had me in Thurso one night and Southampton University the next,’ says Steve Benbow. ‘It was ridiculous. I came straight off the stage, a bloke picked me up in a car, took me to Aberdeen Airport then down to Southampton, then back up to Scotland again, then back to London to do a broadcast. Every weekend I did this bloody broadcast from the Playhouse in Northumberland Avenue. My wife used to meet me with clean clothing and that was it, off I’d go again! So I was touring, doing two-hour concerts on my tod, and he had me coming backwards and forwards – and I just broke down.’

  1963 could have been the year for Steve Benbow. He was regularly on the TV and radio, was fronting his own column in Melody Maker, had a contract with EMI/Parlophone and was enjoying a series of folkish novelty singles produced by George Martin. BBC light entertainment colussus Billy Cotton was covering Benbow’s material on his big band radio shows, but as yet few were actually buying the records.13 EMI were clearly chasing a particular gap in the hedge marked, as hindsight would reveal, ‘Val Doonican’. A number of things started to go wrong: firstly, the Beatles came along; secondly, Val Doonican himself came along; thirdly, with a guy like Malcolm Nixon running your campaign, who needs enemies?

  Steve managed his one and only Albert Hall appearance in September 1963, on an all-star bill of Nixon’s folk finest, but by the time a BBC producer rang him up at the end of year to say, ‘Loved your Lyric show with Spike, fancy doing his TV series next year?’ Steve was laid up in hospital, stressed and overworked. By the time he did the series, Muses With Milligan, as musical resident, Val Doonican was fronting his own nationwide vehicle and having chart hits with the same kind of material Benbow had been peddling previously to no avail. Steve’s fate was sealed: he had gone shamelessly down the path of schmaltz and not quite made the boat; it was too late to chase credibility. But then the option of becoming a successful singer-songwriter-guitarist by being ‘credible’ first and saleable next simply did not exist in 1963. Bob Dylan was arguably in the process of inventing the procedure. Though his momentum was of a slower-burning nature, in Britain Bert Jansch would be the next in line.

  Some time in the spring of 1963, Bert Jansch and Anne Briggs made their way from London to Scotland. Anne had a gig at the Dunfermline Howff in May and organiser John Watt had been gracious enough to include Bert’s name in the local press ads – possibly the first time it had appeared in print. Though flagged as a ‘London based blues singer’, he was not really based anywhere any more: the flat sharing-arrangement with Robin and Clive was in the process of dissolving, and in any case he was now of a mind not to limit his horizons to Edinburgh. As a guitar player he had already outstripped his one-time master Len Partridge and he knew it. So too did Len: ‘Bert was the only person who ever apologised for being better than I was, which I thought was quite funny! I don’t know how I was meant to take it, but he seemed quite concerned at that time that he was now better than I was. There were lots and lots of people better than I was, and there would continue to be ever more so.’

  Drew Moyes’s Glasgow Folk Centre had just opened for business at 45 Montrose Street, and Bert and Anne may well have played the new venue at this time. Certainly, one of the Glasgow visits recalled by Bert’s young fan and tape recorder enthusiast Frank Coia was made in the company of a dark-haired girl with an English accent – both travellers road weary and in need of a bath, duly provided. By August, the Folk Centre was describable, in the words of Eric Winter, as ‘a seven days a week mecca’ for the folk buff, with folksong and poetry sessions on Wednesdays, late night Saturdays and Sundays alongside ‘coffee bar, reference library, instrument lessons and rehearsal and recording facilities’. What Winter neglected to mention was the name of the young man almost certainly providing the instrument lessons: Bert Jansch.

  Gigs were hard to come by and, like Hamish Imlach and Archie Fisher before him, tuition meant steady income and food on the table. As it happened, putting food on the table was not necessarily the concern that it might have been. Bert was now enjoying h
ospitality in Glasgow at the home of Archie Fisher’s family: Morag ‘Ma’ Fisher and her many daughters. ‘It was a convenience for me, being fed,’ he says. ‘It went on for months.’ Bert had often stayed with the Fishers before, and by this stage Ma Fisher was providing welcome hospitality for anyone and everyone on the developing folk scene: ‘There was always an open door,’ she explained, many years later. ‘My own favourite was Bert Jansch. He was the one really. He was one of the family. Some folk thought he was Archie’s brother. He couldn’t have had a better brother than Bert.’14

  Archie at this time was over in Edinburgh with Jill Doyle/Guest, running a Tuesday night folk club at the Crown Bar. Anne Briggs certainly played there, and possibly also Bert: ‘Archie was incredibly supportive of young singers and musicians,’ says Anne. ‘You’d never go hungry or never not have a roof over your head. In fact, his entire family was great in that respect.’ Shortly after he had returned disconsolate from London Robin Williamson had initiated his own club at the Crown Bar, on Thursdays, with Clive Palmer and the initial involvement of their increasingly errant flatmate Bert Jansch. ‘It was basically the only way to get a place to play,’ says Robin. ‘It was always full – ran for two or three years.’ ‘I think this is where the division started,’ says Bert. ‘Archie’s club became very much more traditionally orientated, whereas ours went the other way – contemporary and more freaky stuff for the stoned heads, as you might say.’15