Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  During the summer of 1963 Bert had been seeing Licorice McKechnie. Licorice was another acolyte of Edinburgh’s increasingly identifiable ‘hippy group’, chasing after the dream of an alternative lifestyle: Moroccan cigarettes, Jack Kerouac and the music of Charles Mingus. ‘Licorice’s parents disapproved of what was happening to their daughter and sent a couple of guys looking for Bert,’ remembers Owen Hand. ‘Archie Fisher, running the Crown at the time, was terrified there was going to be trouble at the club and asked me if I would come along this night. When I entered the club the guys were sitting at the bar and Archie pointed them out. I went over and asked if I could help. They left, never to return. Being a mean-looking person has had its rewards.’ It would not be the last time Owen Hand would rescue Bert from a heavy situation. But when the Festival finally came around, it was a situation of a more welcome variety that presented itself to all those in the city who had come this far with a bunch of songs and a battered guitar. The fairy godfather had arrived, and his name was Nat Joseph.

  ‘Somehow I persuaded Decca to give me a lot of money,’ says Nat, ‘to go and record the folk music at the Edinburgh Festival. There was a wonderful man called Hugh Mendel who was head of A&R [Artist & Repertoire] there at the time, and who’d discovered Tommy Steele. He liked the idea of folk music “coming up” but didn’t know anything about it. “Why don’t you go and make some records for us?” I think I’d originally gone in there looking for some sort of distribution deal or something.’ Never one to miss an opportunity, Nat got on to Bill Leader forthwith. Brian Shuel came too. On arriving in Edinburgh, the priority was finding out exactly what was going on in the way of folk music. In terms of the programme proper, not a great deal: a cheesy Edinburgh foursome called the Corrie Folk Trio & Paddie Bell (transmuted to the Corries the following year, when a career in television beckoned) were appearing in a show called Hootenannie; Robin Hall & Jimmie Macgregor were in residence at the after-hours Festival Club; and Bruce Dunnet was promoting Irish raconteur Dominic Behan, accompanied by Alex Campbell and Nadia Cattouse, in his own show Behan Being Behan. As far as the official programme went, that was it, but there was plenty going on around it. Archie Fisher, assisted by Owen Hand, was running his Outlook Tower ceilidh again. As Owen recalls, Bert and Archie had fallen out: ‘Archie was charging him money to get in.’ He was probably wasting his breath. For Ian Campbell, by this stage the only non-professional member of his own group, ‘it seemed that every folksinger in Britain had made his way to Edinburgh, either to appear in one of the innumerable fringe shows or to bum around for three weeks while taking whatever opportunity presented itself to do his thing’.16

  Rory and Alex McEwan, spurred on by the success of their Murrayfield shows the previous year, had rejected the Festival committee’s rather halfhearted offer of a week in some minor venue and taken the plunge themselves, hiring the Palladium Theatre for three weeks. It would stretch even their own considerable resources and would effectively mean putting on a ‘Festival’ show that would exist entirely independently of either Festival or Fringe proper. Throwing caution to the wind, the brothers rented a large house in Edinburgh, to provide accommodation for themselves and the other artists in the show and, unwittingly or otherwise, an essentially free bar for every other folkie in town. For the show, entitled Straight From The Wood, Rory and Alex brought in a revolving cast for the three-week run: from Ireland, the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem and future members of the Dubliners; from America, Carolyn Hester; from South Africa, the Manhattan Brothers; from England, jazz guitarist Diz Disley, trad singers Martin Carthy and Bob Davenport and, not least, the Ian Campbell Folk Group.

  The show was a late-night affair: for the earlier part of the evening an absurd man called Johnny Victory was running a variety show involving a tap-dancing accordeon player, a contortionist, a chorus line of bored-looking women in beehives and tartan bikinis and somebody with a plate-spinning act. Writing about his festival experiences some years later, Ian Campbell was still morbidly fascinated with this ‘flint-eyed little man who found it necessary to obscure his mafiosic face behind a red nose and a lurid tartan Andy-cap. The prat fall and the custard pie ran the gamut of his technique. I developed a sort of grudging admiration for Jolly Johnny because it seemed to me that to expose himself to the public with material such as his took not merely courage but a suicidal heroism. I began to know why Andy Stewart became such a big deal. With competition like this he could not fail.’

  An element of farce was endemic. Dominic Behan was effectively fronting a stand-up show, and standing up at all was the biggest challenge for those involved. ‘The gig was done in darkness with a spotlight highlighting the person performing,’ says Owen Hand, who was running the door. ‘It focused on Alex Campbell and found him asleep on his stool, completely drunk.’ The lighting man switched to the other stools, now empty as everyone else – eager to fill the vacuum, singing different songs, bumping into each other and falling over – rushed towards Alex. ‘Bruce fired Alex that night,’ says Owen, ‘and as Alex had no money we had to do a benefit night to get him the fare back to London. But the audience had loved the whole thing.’

  Rory McEwan, buoyed up by ecstatic press reviews and the consequent skin-of-its-teeth success of his own show, hired Leith Town Hall for a party on his birthday during the show’s run. The 432nd Light Artillery Regiment (Territorial Army), of whose boxing team Owen Hand was a member, were hired as waiters. Owen spent the evening in some embarrassment, explaining to the chaps that no, really, he was there as a guest. An after-party session at the McEwans’ place was more memorable still: ‘Imagine this as a scenario,’ says Owen, ‘Caroline Hester singing “Summertime” accompanied by Julian Bream on guitar and Larry Adler on harmonica. Sitting in a corner with an enormous beam on his face was Ravi Shankar.’ Ian Campbell’s fiddler Dave Swarbrick may also have been involved. ‘As I remember it, the only one who lost his way was Bream,’ says Campbell, ‘but I suspect that was not so much a reflection on his musicianship as an indication of the amount of alcohol he had consumed.’ HRH Princess Margaret, for whom Rory McEwan was official Scottish escort, attended the show and after-show party on another occasion, memorable to Ian Campbell for an incident with a temperamental trouser zip and for Dave Swarbick exiting the premises to a camera-flash barrage from a squad of paparazzi who were obviously expecting somebody else.

  It was in this rarefied atmosphere that Nat Joseph, Bill Leader and Brian Shuel hit town: the entrepreneur, the engineer and the image consultant. They lost no time at all in manufacturing what the records would later present, in two gently disingenuous volumes, as The Edinburgh Folk Festival: ‘There was a whole load of people up there,’ says Nat, ‘most of whom Bill knew, so Bill took me around saying, “This is the chap who’s conned Decca, etcetera, etcetera,” and everybody thought it was a huge laugh. They were wonderful people, and the parties were incredible. Somebody said there were a hundred different kinds of malt whisky and I seem to remember we got through fifty-two. It was a bloody good trip! I guess that’s where I met Ian Campbell and the people who later formalised themselves into the Dubliners.’ Nat and Bill put the word out and a host of the Edinburgh folk scene and its seasonal stragglers turned up for the session. Organising a venue had been the last thing on anybody’s mind. Dolina MacLennan was off in Glasgow for the day. She came home to the flat at 19 Bristo Place astonished to find a hundred people recording live albums in her bedroom: ‘I rang the bell and got hell from somebody because this recording was happening. “What the hell’s going on?” I said, or words to that effect! I think I recorded something for it.’

  Dolina was indeed recorded during the sessions, as were many others, but not all of them made the finished product. Those who did were Ray & Archie Fisher, Jill Doyle, Hamish Imlach, Owen Hand, Robin Williamson & Clive Palmer, Anne Briggs, Dolina MacLennan, the Ian Campbell Folk Group, Nadia Cattouse, Jean Hart, Lou Killen and Matt McGinn. Immediately conspicuous by his absence was Len Partridge: ‘I
was gradually pulling out of the folk scene,’ he says. ‘I had nothing against commercialism but I had everything against what it did to people. From a very, very happy band of innocents abroad, when money came into it people started climbing over one another’s backs to get gigs. I’d enjoyed myself far too much to let that screw it. I just gradually began to withdraw.’

  As they stand, the two Edinburgh Folk Festival albums represent a formidable and unique document of the Edinburgh scene more or less in its heyday – and the first time on record for many of those involved. But with hindsight, the opportunity had been there to create a document still greater. Two weeks after the event Melody Maker reported that Alex Campbell, Bob Davenport and John Watt’s Tregullion Trio had also been taped, along with three great ‘source singers’: Jeannie Robertson, Jimmy MacBeath and Willie Scott. Martin Carthy was in town at the time, likewise the McEwans, the Clancys and the proto-Dubliners; Davy Graham is also known to have been around (memorably pinching a tartan hat from somebody involved in the Johnny Victory show); and so too was Bert Jansch.

  After the farrago at Dolina’s flat Craighall (Waverley) Studios had been hired, where Brian Shuel shot several reels of candid black and whites that capture a mix of elation, tedium, humour and trepidation. Strangely, none of Shuel’s stunningly atmospheric images were used on the packaging. Instead, the sleeve fronts sported a nondescript graphic of an acoustic guitar while the flipside supplied suitably ambiguous information on the nature of the recordings and a few notes on each of those involved. No one remembers Bert Jansch being around, but there he is in the studio, playing his guitar at two angle-poised microphones on five frames of Shuel’s film.

  ‘It’s a little unclear to me what exactly occurred,’ says Robin Williamson. ‘He was about to marry Licorice and they had gone as far as publishing banns, which you had to do before getting married in those days. Licorice’s father was opposed to her marrying Bert and in the end, as it transpired, she didn’t. Bert left with Lynda at the drop of a hat, and what happened after that I don’t know. It didn’t seem very heavy-duty. Seemed like a nice enough girl, but I don’t remember what her second name was. Never saw her again. I lost touch with Bert round about there. But I’ve always been a friend of Bert’s and he’s always been a friend of mine.’

  Bert had decided he was going off to Morocco: perhaps he simply could not handle the inevitable confrontation with Licorice McKechnie’s family – and a tendency to walk away from conflict remains a hallmark of Bert’s character – thus removing her from the equation. Bert recalls their relationship as not being as serious as the youthful talk of a marriage would suggest. In the event, he took up with a sixteen-year-old from Dundee called Lynda. Lynda wanted to go on the adventure and had nothing getting in the way of doing so save the law – she was too young to get a passport of her own. So on 4 September 1963 Herbert Jansch, ‘general labourer and bachelor’, married Lynda Campbell, ‘shorthand typist and spinster’, at the Registry Office of the District of Provan, Glasgow. Both gave their address as 42 Denbrae Street, Glasgow.

  Bert could not even recall Lynda’s surname, but then again it was purely an arrangement of convenience: ‘I only knew her for about two months before this,’ he says. ‘We got married so I could get her a passport without her parents’ permission: she was sixteen, I was nineteen. We hitched to Morocco. We were there about a month and then we came back to London and we split up. We didn’t actually divorce then, but I’ve never seen her again. She went her way and I went mine. But it was a nice trip and it was good to be in a different environment – certainly an experience. The first time I’d ever been in a different culture completely.’

  Once Alex Campbell had introduced the possibilities of busking in Paris, Davy Graham had taken the process a stage further in extending the adventure down to Morocco – ‘the dope centre of the universe’ in Bert’s memorable phraseology.17 But whereas Davy had soaked up the music of Arabic culture to inform his own compositions, leading directly to the creation of the DADGAD modal guitar tuning, Bert was largely there for the experience. Getting home had been particularly interesting: Bert and Lynda ran out of money and were shipped back to London by the British Embassy. Bert’s passport was consequently retained until such time as the cost of the process could be recovered. There would be no more strolling down highways for the foreseeable future.

  The scale of the advance Nat received from Decca for what became The Edinburgh Folk Festival Vols. 1 & 2 has never been revealed, but to this day those involved in the sessions still argue the toss about who among those performing received the biggest fee: figures range between a fiver and tenner. Contracts had been signed and there would be no royalties. Nat returned to London with enough profit to buy premises in Hampstead – acquired from Collet’s and refitted as a record shop and distribution outlet – and to establish Transatlantic Records as a serious enterprise. They had a ready-made roster of acts just waiting for the call. ‘I remember saying to Bill, “These people aren’t signed up,”’ says Nat. ‘It felt like the basis of a label and Bill, I think, saw that he was running into a bit of a dead end at Topic.’

  The great majority of those whom Nat and Bill had met during the Decca project would make at least some contribution to the Transatlantic catalogue over the following years. The first to be signed were the Ian Campbell Folk Group. Nat had developed a great affection for the group, most of all for Ian’s ‘spiky but very intelligent’ character. Ian’s preference for ‘intelligent’ songs with socio-political messages impressed Nat, who was himself, for all his capitalist instincts, on the left wing of the Labour Party at the time. Although sounding more dated with the passing of time than many of their soloist contemporaries, instrumentally at least the Campbells would be the blueprint for all the British folk-rock groups of the later sixties. Their Transatlantic debut (TRA 110) was followed with an album by Jean Hart (TRA 111), another post-Edinburgh signing, though of less consequence. A few notches down the catalogue at TRA 116 came the first and eponymous album by a group destined to enjoy massive influence and longevity: the Dubliners. Nat and Bill would make the trip to Dublin and from there to a pub in the Wicklow mountains, contract in hand, with the sole intention of bringing back the boozy balladeers to a civilised recording studio. Remarkably, their trip would be successful. Like the Campbells, the group would make several more albums for Transatlantic, all selling well and all going a long way towards allowing the label’s A&R policy to expand into riskier, less obviously commercial areas – none more so, at TRA 125, than the eventual debut of Bert Jansch.

  Bert and Lynda’s marriage in Glasgow had been attended, and witnessed, by his friends from London: John Challis and David Blass. On their way to Morocco, Bert and Lynda had stopped off in London at the Blass family home in Cresswell Place. On his way back, and this time alone, Bert stopped at David and John’s new address, 19 King’s Avenue, Ealing, where he remained for some weeks. The attraction was not in the quality of the accommodation. The previous occupant of the dingy, cold and untidy two-bedroom flat was one Colin Thompson, whose estranged wife Sue was still living there with her baby. Although Blass had dropped out after six weeks, Challis was still embroiled in a Fine Art course at Ealing Art College and was friendly with Sue, a former college girl herself. In October Bert Jansch suddenly appeared looking for a floor to sleep on. The kitchen was available and so too, as the by-products of past-tense marriages, were Bert and Sue.

  ‘I remember John Challis’s mother made some remark like, “She can’t go around with him, he’s already married,”’ says Sue. ‘To which John replied, “That’s all right, so is she”! We were lovers for a while and then it petered out, although we had a kind of ongoing relationship even after it finished, as it were. My impression is he was around a lot to begin with and then he was here, there and everywhere. During his later visits I was staying at my mother’s about ten miles away, and of course I had a young daughter so I wasn’t very free at the time. There was never any definite, traumat
ic ending as such. Occasionally I’d meet him somewhere and find myself saying, “Ah-ha, come home with me …!”’

  Bert would use King’s Avenue as his London base over the next few months until Blass and Challis were obliged to relinquish the tenancy during the summer of 1964. He would be a fairly frequent if irregular visitor. ‘There were times we’d see a lot of him, times where he wouldn’t be around at all,’ says Challis. A handful of letters to Bert, from four regional folk clubs and a couple of personal friends, all dating from the first quarter of 1964 and preserved by John Challis’s sister Anne, testify to his geographical state of flux. At least one reply from a club organiser was addressed to Bert care of Adam Parker-Rhodes, at 112 Nicolson Street, Edinburgh, while Parker-Rhodes himself corresponds with Bert in Ealing during the same period. The contents of the letters also reveal Bert’s growing popularity by word-of-mouth: there are gigs confirmed or implied at folk clubs in Stoke (a repeat booking), Keele University (for expenses and door money up to £8), Sheffield University (£10 including expenses) and Leicester (£10 including expenses). The secretary of the Leicester club tells Bert that while he has clearly never played the club before he has ‘been asked for so many times lately by the members’.

  Given the nature of where everyone at King’s Avenue was at in terms of their own personal development and ambitions, these were strange times: Blass, expelled from school, dropped out of college and coasting on private means, was working up to retaking his A-levels but was in no hurry to do so;18 Challis was living on a student grant, attending a college where everything – music, art, conversation, lifestyle – was at the cutting edge; Sue, having already been through the same college and a disastrous marriage, was now a single mother trying to find her new role in life; Bert was perpetually broke, without a guitar but still determined to make music and some kind of living thereby. They were heady, intense times and all those involved have reflections that range from the profound to the bleak to the absurd.