Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  ‘It was low,’ says Blass. ‘Neither Bert nor John nor I had any sense of housekeeping. I wouldn’t say it was a terribly happy time. There were a lot of tensions – more, in hindsight, unconscious than conscious. Overtly we got on fine but I think everyone had a long distance to go before they knew “who they were”. It was the early days of the social and sexual revolution so nobody was sure of anything. Everybody lived in groups, everything was out in the open – there was no such thing as a private life. It was like being part of a revolutionary cell: there was no sense of being able to withdraw into privacy, and this really wasn’t down to the physical circumstances of living in a small place. So under those circumstances, where people haven’t quite got everything together, there can only be so much support or affirmation for each other. We lacked a warmth, I think.’ Sue is rather pithier in her assessment: ‘We seemed to sit around a lot smoking fags and drinking cups of tea.’

  Where Bert’s head was at, after a whirlwind marriage of convenience, an eye-opening trip to North Africa and a brusque repatriation back to the penniless drudge of real life, is anyone’s guess. Sue was just happy to be enjoying something close to the single life again: ‘We’d occasionally go to the pub, the Royal Oak in Ealing,’ she says. ‘He was quite sociable but he did have this habit of withdrawing – he’d be in the same room, but he’d be somewhere else. I never actually went to any gigs of his, but I don’t think he had many at the time. He was so talented and so sweet – that was the attraction for me – but one always felt that his mind was on something else, probably music.’

  Back in Edinburgh a few weeks later, Bert moved in for a period with Archie and Jill, by now renting a top-floor flat, beside the Greyfriar’s Bobby pub, from Owen Hand’s father, who lived below. Hand senior was a bus driver, used to working unusual shifts, not used to coming home to find that somebody had raided all the food from his fridge. ‘This went on for a while,’ says Owen, ‘until it was established that Bert was the culprit. We had an outside toilet on the stair and one day my dad was going down to the toilet and heard someone coming up. So he waited to see who came round the corner and it was Bert. “How you doing, son?” says Dad. “Fine,” says Bert, and walks straight past him and into the toilet, closing the door in his face. Big mistake. “You fucking bastard! You eat my bacon and egg, you drink my tea …!” He worked himself up into this fury and whacked Bert in the face when he opened the door. Bert went upstairs with his nose broken, Jill comes down the stairs shouting, “You’re a savage! An animal!” “I’ve never hit a woman in my life,” my dad says. “Send your man down!” Archie had the sense to stay where he was. Later that night my dad’s sat there with a bottle of whisky and Ruby from the Chinese restaurant and it’s all fermenting in his mind. He hears all these people arriving at the door and going up the stairs. They’re probably just sitting around getting stoned, but that’s not what my dad thinks. “They’re plotting against me!” he thinks. So eventually he got a hatchet, went up there and kicked the door in, brandishing this axe, to be viewed in horror by all these wide-eyed hippies. The relationship was over and Archie and Jill were asked to move out.’19

  By the beginning of 1964, the lure of London on the musicians of Edinburgh was becoming hard to resist. It was an effect that would exert similar influence on individual performers and other little outposts of folk music activity all over Britain and, a little later, on the first shoots of revival activity in Ireland. Some performers, like Hamish Imlach, were so popular in their own regional territory that they would rarely accept the long travelling and derisory fees associated with performing in London. For others of a cannier disposition, like Bert, it was a means to an end. ‘You didn’t actually make your living in London,’ he says. ‘But I think we were there to get our names in the Melody Maker. That got you into all the clubs in the country.’

  Having established a promising connection with Nat Joseph and Bill Leader through the Decca sessions, Owen Hand had removed himself to London by the tail end of ’63. He secured his position with a few gigs and later a residency at a new club Leader was running with Gill Cook called the Broadside, at the Black Horse in Rathbone Place, Soho. Leader’s plan for Owen was to position him in a band he was creating from scratch with political songwriter Leon Rosselson and two others, to be known as the Three City Four. They were destined to rehearse for six months, play two gigs and fold. For all his qualities, Leader never had much luck as an entrepreneur. Bert was as yet unknown to Leader, so his very first MM-advertised engagement was once again at the Troubadour, on 17 March 1964, a Tuesday, with another one two days later at a pub in Chelsea. He had travelled down a few weeks earlier and was staying at King’s Avenue with John Challis and David Blass.

  Challis, recognising his friend’s music as something truly exceptional, was a tireless champion: ‘Bert was covering a lot of ground at that that time – he was listening to jazz, country blues, modern blues and everything else. There were lots of people working in one area or another but nobody before Bert was actually putting them all together and blending them in that way. One of the tragedies about Bert is that he was so far ahead then that every bugger in the world copied him. People who’ve come later don’t realise that there was that time when he was unique: there was nobody like him. He just appeared, fully formed. I was a little bit in awe of him. I mean, here’s this guy, same age as me and I’m there trying to play Big Bill Broonzy’s “Guitar Shuffle” – he could do it, sing at the same time, change it around, turn it into something else. I got him a gig in the college. I just asked permission to use the lecture theatre at lunchtime, printed up some posters by hand and stood on the door charging half a crown. He made something like 30–35 bob [about £1.50], which wasn’t bad for a couple of hours’ work. I’d got a couple of good friends by the lapels and said, “You’ve got to hear this guy!”’

  One of John’s friends, an eighteen-year-old by the name of Pete Townshend, had recently dropped out to pursue his own music full time. It was the talk of the college: ‘Everyone was saying what a brave and risky thing it was to do,’ says Challis, ‘when he could very easily become an art teacher!’ Invited by Challis, Townshend came round to the flat to see what all the fuss was about.

  Born in Isleworth in 1945, Townshend had started in Ealing at the same time as Challis, in September 1961. Those who were interested in music at the college, particularly in the emerging sounds of rhythm and blues (R&B), soon found each other. It was perhaps no coincidence that Britain’s first dedicated R&B venue – Alexis Korner’s ‘Ealing Club’ – had located itself in the area from April 1962. The college music scene and the exchange of records, ideas and marijuana that came with the territory were formative influences on Townshend, Challis and their contemporaries. Although his father was a dance band musician, with the consequence that Pete had been brought up on Ellington, Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and so forth, he was ‘a late bloomer’ in terms of the depth of his musical knowledge. ‘Folk for me was skiffle,’ he says. ‘I’d had a couple of introductions to skiffle but I had no idea about where it came from. I had no idea, for example, that Lonnie Donegan was poaching from people like Leadbelly and Pete Seeger.’

  Covering Top 10 material and trad jazz, Pete had been a member of various school bands, with his classmate John Entwistle a constant feature on bass and trumpet. During 1962, the two friends had joined a band led by Roger called the Detours. Daltrey was at this stage on lead guitar and trombone. There would be a number of evolutions of name and personnel before they added Keith Moon on drums, in May 1964, and became The Who: the Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World.

  ‘It was in my second year, 1962, that I was first brave enough to get out my guitar amongst fellow art students and play it,’ says Townshend. ‘And very, very quickly I rose to some degree of notoriety at college. And in the early part of 1963 I landed very quickly into my “rite of passage”. In the school band I was in we were copying the Shadows and Acker Bilk. I’d had my ears pricked up by Bill Haley r
ather than Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis; by Acker Bilk rather than Louis Armstrong. I was quite naive – my first year at college I spent talking to a girl that I fancied with absolutely no idea that she fancied me too. And with music, I never went into the soup, ever. I waited for it to come to me. What happened when I was at Ealing was that I was bombarded with all kinds of influences. Mainly what was inspiring to me was rhythm and blues. But John Challis was one of the most interesting friends I had then because he was one of the people who, like me, listened to jazz as well. He introduced me to quite a lot of new jazz, like Charlie Mingus. So I was very conscious of the fact that John Challis had something that me and my American friends, who turned me on to R&B, didn’t have: he had a much broader knowledge.’

  ‘One of the reasons everyone was amazed with Bert,’ says Challis, ‘was because we were all struggling to do creative work in our own different ways and here he was, appearing fully formed at the age of eighteen or nineteen and it was pretty fucking scary! Somewhat later I got a bit interested in Zen and the idea of the Tao, or the Way – which is to see the world as it is free from all your own illusions. Most people have to struggle to reach this state of enlightenment. But occasionally someone comes along who is already enlightened and that, I think, was Bert. There is a Zen statement about this which says, “Before I was enlightened I was the most miserable man in the world. Now I am enlightened I am still the most miserable man in the world, but I am enlightened.” Part of his artistic endeavour was that he had somehow tapped into the Tao of misery, which is there in his music. What he was doing was as authentic as the traditional blues or folk music we were all listening to, but it was his. It was his thing. There you were sitting around with your mates, trying to play a Leadbelly number – and making a reasonable fist of it, because we weren’t fools – and suddenly it was as if you had met Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson, and he was the same age as you!’

  John Challis had been tinkering around on both piano and guitar from at least the time when he would sneak in as an under-eighteen to the Blues & Barrelhouse Club in 1960 and 1961. He would eventually become a very fine pianist, in the barrelhouse style. Soon after meeting Bert he gave up on any notion of playing guitar. Bert was still without an instrument of his own but Challis could be of service: ‘I had a Zenith, a dance band guitar with f-holes, and it looked very strange in folk clubs. It was a dog of a guitar, but Bert managed to make it sound like it was the most perfect Martin ever.’

  Round at the Challis residence, in a haze of pot smoke, two guitars were swinging. When Pete chose to call, there was a second Scottish guitarist in town: Archie Fisher. Archie, a rare visitor to London in the sixties, was appearing at the Troubadour on 14 March, three days before Bert’s engagement at the same venue. He had not long previously decided to adopt Davy Graham’s revelatory new DADGAD tuning for his own work in accompanying Scottish traditional song, for which its modal thrum was ideally suited. There was a knock at the door.

  ‘I remember that first meeting so clearly because it was so profound,’ says Townshend. ‘It’s a pity that I can’t remember subsequent ones. I found Bert very, very, very impressive. What I generally saw in the musicians I met at that time was competitiveness and ambition, and he didn’t have that – he didn’t have that sense that “I’m going to do something and you’re going to be impressed.” He’s two years older than me and two years older when you’re that age is quite a lot. But he just seemed to me that he was playing like a man twice his age, in a very fluid, eloquent style.

  ‘What was extraordinary about that particular occasion for me was that there was something very mysterious going on between the two players. I think Bert was using a regularly tuned guitar but the other player, I think, was playing an open tuning. They were discussing chords, and obviously one or the other was translating. I’ve often thought about this: if I’d actually said to them, “What are you doing? What’s different? Write it down.” I was too proud. I was too afraid to ask for the secret, and if I had have done what it would have done to change my style … They sat and played for about an hour and I just watched, really. There wasn’t a third guitar, although once or twice Bert gave me his guitar to play, but I didn’t play very much. They played “Angi”, I remember that – they were both playing that together. And that day I went and got a copy of the record, and I’ve still got it. The other thing that was quite popular at the time was Jazz On A Summer’s Day. The Jimmy Giuffre Trio did “Train And The River” [in that film], which also had descending notes and which, I think, Bert played also on this day. And I went home and immediately learnt it – about as contrapuntal as I ever got on the guitar! But I could [later] play “Angi” quite well. What I also remember him doing on that particular day was extemporising: he was making things up, they were firing off one another, and I don’t think I’d been in a room watching two people do that before. What I got was a sense that at that time he was the music: it sounds like a cliché, but that’s who he was. When you come across a really great musician, what happens is you realise that they do become their music – it overshadows everything. My sense then was that I had met someone who was already on a path. I made an arrangement to see Bert play at the Troubadour but I couldn’t go for some reason. Maybe we had a gig.’20

  Following the Edinburgh Folk Festival sessions with Bill Leader and Nat Joseph, Anne Briggs had more or less opted out of music – or, more accurately, had been obliged to sideline any interest in that direction. She had taken up with one Gary Field, known to the denizens of Edinburgh as ‘Gary the Archer’. ‘Gary was a wild character,’ says Bert. ‘I used to teach him guitar, and he and Anne used to go out shooting rabbits with bows and arrows. Gary was Jimi Hendrix: he looked like him, dressed like him, had the same stance, everything – and this was before Jimi had ever appeared on the scene. And when I met Jimi Hendrix the first person I thought of was Gary, ’cos Gary was a very quiet guy but he was violent – and I got the same vibe off Jimi.’

  While Bert had been away in Morocco, Gary and Anne had shared a flat with Robin and Licorice, but Gary was by all accounts on the very fringes of the fringes of the alternative scene. His father had enjoyed some honorary position within the gift of the Royal Family – Chief Bowman to the Queen, or thereabouts. To the recollection of John Challis, who harboured a wise instinct to avoid the man as far as possible, Gary was offered the title in turn and told them where to go. With Anne, he was an occasional partaker of the liberal hospitality offered by the Blass household. On one visit, probably during the summer of 1963 (Anne had a gig in London in July), the pair stayed for some weeks. Blass found Gary more fascinating than sinister: ‘I liked him. He was very off the wall. Many people in those days had an ideal of country skills and music and these folky things, and he fulfilled these ideals with great accuracy. A very interesting person. Although he did have a shadowy, negative side.’

  Field was in fact little more than a vagrant with an anarchic attitude, violent tendencies and a criminal lifestyle. He was eventually imprisoned for house-breaking. Anne herself is loath to recall the man: ‘It was two years of hell,’ she says. ‘I know what it’s like on the other side. A really, really bad time. My God, it sharpened me up.’ Anne recalls those ‘two years’ (actually nine or ten months spanning two calendar years) as a period with no involvement in music. Shortly before Easter 1964 she met Hamish Henderson on the street in Edinburgh and was invited to a conference being held by his School of Scottish Studies. ‘It was like a ray of golden sunshine in a really bad time. I decided to break out of the life I was living. It took some doing.’

  ‘Anne came round to visit my wife and I, having been beaten up by Field,’ says Owen Hand. ‘I was about to return to London on a bus organised by the Edinburgh branch of Young CND, who were going to the Aldermaston march. Anne was desperate to get away but had no money, so I arranged a seat on the bus for her. Once we got to London, Anne went her own way. Not long after this Field arrived in London with a crossbow over his
back, looking for her. He didn’t find Anne but found the trad singer Lou Killen who had been with Anne – and after a casual night drinking with him, stuck a glass in his face.’21

  With a lunatic like Field in town, wreaking revenge on anyone who had enjoyed the remotest association with his girlfriend, almost nobody on the folk scene was safe. Certainly not Bert. ‘I was heading into Collet’s one day,’ says Owen, ‘when I met Alex Campbell who told me to watch out as Field was in there looking for me. When I entered I saw Field and Bert standing at the back of the shop. Bert looked terrified. I approached Field and said I believed he wanted to see me. Field was as nice as ninepence and said it had been nothing important. I gave him my phone number and told him to give me a call if he later remembered what it was. Bert told me afterwards that Field had said to him, “When I go for him it will be with steel.” I guess he meant a knife. Soon after that was the incident with Lou Killen and Field took off back to Edinburgh. The next time I was in Edinburgh and came across him – in the Crown Bar, with a group of his followers – I asked him if he remembered what he had wanted to talk to me about. I then put it to him about his intention of using steel and asked if he would like to try. I forced him to back down in front of his followers. Field came from a similar background to myself and knew me from days when I was considered a bit of a hard man. I think he was frightened of my reputation, but he got his own back later.’22

  The EP Anne had recorded for Topic early in 1963 finally appeared in May 1964. With remarkable pertinence to her own experiences, its title was The Hazards Of Love. Recorded by Bill Leader, with a sleeve note from Bert Lloyd and a now iconic cover shot from Brian Shuel, its four traditional songs including ‘Rosemary Lane’, later recorded by Bert Jansch, were unadorned and beautiful. Anne had been given ‘Rosemary Lane’ by Paul Carter, who ran another traditional music label called Collector; the rest of the songs had come from Bert Lloyd. Although she would not record again until 1966 (four songs for The Bird In The Bush, another of Bert Lloyd’s thematic projects) and after that until 1971, there was already enough in the public domain to secure her reputation as a singer of rare quality and instinct. With Field having given up the chase, and her presence on the music scene revitalised, Anne was free to use what influence she had not for her own ambitions – for she had none – but on behalf of her soulmate Bert Jansch.