Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  Soho historian John Platt has described the Black Horse as ‘a sombre Victorian pub which was the first to be reached up Rathbone Street but usually the last entered’.32 Immediately after the Dylan incident, the Broadside was obliged to move on (although it did return to the Black Horse for a few nights during the summer). Ostensibly, the landlord wanted his upstairs room ‘to run posh functions’ instead. The club moved to El Toro in Finchley Road, at which point Bert was deemed worthy to grace its stage if not its advertising.

  Owen meanwhile was in something of a dilemma: his wife, by this time with a baby daughter, had refused to move to London with the consequence that Owen had been travelling back to Edinburgh at weekends – just about the only time his much anticipated Three City Four group could rehearse. He arrived back home one weekend to find his marriage on the verge of collapse. The only way to save it was for Owen to give up on his hopes and dreams in London. It was a blow to all concerned: the group had just about got its act together, having performed two gigs – one at the Black Horse, one at the Golders Green home of Stephen Sedley’s father, to an audience of ‘rich Jewish Communists’. Owen took a few days to wind up his affairs in London and then cadged a lift for himself and Bert from a guy with a small sports car. It was at the end of May, straight after a gig Bert was doing at El Toro: ‘The trip goes down in memory as one of the worst of my life,’ says Owen. ‘The two front seats were taken by the driver and his mate, while Bert and I sat up at the back and froze. The journey took twelve hours, with numerous breaks to allow Bert and I to get our blood circulation going again. When we got to Edinburgh the wife had gone anyway, so what was the point? I didn’t see either her or my daughter for over a year.’

  Owen stayed on in Edinburgh for the next six months or so, but Bert was still travelling back and forth between his home city and London, where he had fallen under the wing of Alex Campbell. Campbell was also giving his generous patronage to another young musician, David ‘Buck’ Polley. Polley’s passion was restoring old cars but he was also, most unusually for those times and for the folk scene, a user of heroin.

  ‘When I could afford a new pair of jeans I’d give away my old pair to some guy who wouldn’t have as much bread as me,’ said Alex. ‘Buck Polley, I was such a hero to him he used to buy the clothes I gave away so he could wear my clothes. I bought a black cowboy hat, so he bought a black cowboy hat. When we came back to this country from Paris, Buck and me, we had an old 1928 Morris Isis – beautiful car. We used to take Anne Briggs and Bert Jansch with us and they’d do floor spots and they’d get work, because nobody knew them then. Bert got my old jeans jacket, which I believe he has to this day. It’s his sort of lucky piece, which Buck had bought off some other kid that I’d given it to in Paris. I said to him once, “Jesus, none of my records are selling very much, Buck.” That was before we went to cheap LPs. “Well, Alex,” he says, “die and they’ll sell a helluva lot.”’33

  Campbell tried to get Polley off the drugs and thought he had been successful, but ‘some bastard in Brighton turned him on again’ and a week later, on 20 June 1964, he was found dead, aged twenty-two, of acute morphine and cocaine poisoning: an ‘incautious overdosage’, a suicide. ‘He had a lot of trouble with his wife and kids,’ says Bert, ‘It was just the pressure, I think, of home life that got to him. He scored in the pub and the next day he was dead.’34

  Bert and one of his Edinburgh friends had tried heroin once only, around the time of the trip to Morocco, but his general appearance and demeanor and the sheer incomprehensibility, to some, of his music would taint him with an unwelcome and wholly unjustified reputation for years to come. ‘I’m sure whenever I saw him I thought two things,’ says Pete Townshend. ‘One, he was a really good musician, and two, was he carrying? My take at the time was that there was a possibility that Bert was a junkie. He did look like one. In hindsight, he actually looked quite poor, but I suppose how we interpreted that in middle-class West London was that he must have pissed it all away.’35

  The greatest irony of all was that the song which would effectively make Bert’s name, ‘Needle Of Death’, was an elegy for Polley and a stark reflection on the consequences of hard drugs. ‘This image went around the country that Bert Jansch was a junkie and it was totally erroneous,’ says Owen Hand. ‘Because people knew Bert and I were close they would ask, “Has he given up the junk yet?” He wrote “Needle Of Death” and people automatically assumed he was junkie. As far as I’m concerned Bert never went near junk. Alcohol was his problem.’

  It was not only the ‘folk boom’ that characterised 1964 in Britain; this was also year two of the ‘beat boom’. The Beatles, who for Bert ‘never entered my life’, had made a pivotal impact the previous year, being followed not least by the Rolling Stones, whose originality may have been slow off the mark but whose sound was altogether tougher and more keenly influenced by the same kind of R&B that was doing the rounds in Ealing. The only pop/beat/R&B band with which Bert had enjoyed any personal connection was yet to make its mark on the national consciousness, but had certainly made its mark on his: The Who.

  ‘I always remember going to one of The Who’s first gigs in Ealing and being astounded, me as a folkie watching Pete smashing his guitar. The sheer volume and ferocity – I couldn’t take that at the time. I saw them rehearse once at the Three Feathers [in Ealing], that’s where I first saw them as a band. Pete would be rehearsing his windmills. What a thing to rehearse! I don’t know if they were into the whole mod look at the time, but I wouldn’t have said they were scruffy – but then nobody looked particularly scruffy next to me. I remember being round at Pete’s flat in Ealing, with blue neon lights, the windows blacked out and piles and piles of blues singles. He was quite an expert.’36

  ‘Pete’s flat was a focus for quite a lot because of his big record collection,’ says John Challis, ‘and I can remember him experimenting with his sound system. There was one occasion everyone who came into the place had to lie down on the couch with a twelve-inch speaker on their chest while he whacked the volume up. Record wise, Pete had just about everything that was available at that time. One of the acts everybody loved at Ealing were Booker T & the MGs. I remember playing “Green Onions” to Bert. He really liked it.’

  ‘I can remember Bert coming to Woodgrange Avenue,’ says Townshend, ‘where my mother had a house. We had the apartment upstairs and I remember him coming around, making him tea or coffee, rolling joints together, and I can remember listening together to a single on EP format that John Challis had bought of “Better Get It In Your Soul” by Charlie Mingus which had just been released.37 Bert had heard it the day before and he’d been playing it at John Challis’s. I actually went out and bought a copy of it. A brilliant recording.’

  This was a formative period for both Townshend and Jansch. In April 1964, The Who had failed an audition for a BBC radio broadcast. In May, they encountered Keith Moon and fate’s hand was kinder. From roughly July to October they flirted with a new name, the High Numbers, enjoyed a twelve-week residency at the Railway Hotel in Harrow,38 released their first single (albeit to minimal impact) and acquired the management that would eventually take them to a national level the following year. Bert was trying for the same thing, in a vague sort of way, but other than being in London and looking for gigs he had not the slightest idea how to go about it.

  The Railway was a regular haunt of John Challis’s and consequently, when he was in town, of Bert. The promoter of The Who’s summer residency at the place, on Tuesday nights, was Richard Barnes, another of John’s college friends: ‘I remember one night they did a version of “Smokestack Lightning” which was very much, with hindsight, leading towards The Who sound,’ says Challis. ‘The amps were whacked up as high as they’d go, with this incredible rumbling filling the room. At the time I don’t think I’d ever heard anything so loud. It felt as if an iron bar had been driven through my head from one ear to the other and I’d been lifted up!’ As the public debut of what was to be
his only real experiment with being a member of an electric band, Bert would find himself playing at the same venue, along with Challis and a host of dimly recalled others during the interval of a popular local act whose only national success would be winning a new bands competition on Ready Steady Go!: the Bo Street Runners.

  ‘Because I was into the R&B thing quite heavily, Bert was toying with it,’ says Challis. ‘He didn’t really like playing electric guitar. I think it was to do with the volume and because it was restricting his rhythmic and melodic freedom. I thought he was rather good at it, myself. The Bo Street Runners’ guitar player was another guy from my old school, Gary Thomas. They were playing the gig and they let us use their gear to do an interval spot. They had an electric piano in the band and I was playing that. I’d abandoned my guitar to Bert, as you would.’

  ‘I don’t know why I wasn’t more interested in electric guitar at the time,’ says Bert. ‘I think it was the paraphernalia that had to go with it, the amplifier and so on. Too much bother. Trying to get a gig was bad enough, without having to lug an amplifier around!’ The very idea of Bert, the quintessential acoustic man, playing electric guitar in an ensemble situation at all was itself the by-product of a still more remarkable scenario. In 1962 Brian Knight, an early protégé of Cyril Davies’s, formed Blues By Six. Credited as the second electric R&B group in Britain, coming between Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated and the Rolling Stones, Knight’s group were arguably more ‘authentic’ but certainly less successful than either. Various line-ups of Blues By Six came and went between 1962 and the band’s dissolution by mid ’65, and at one point around the middle of 1964 there was the very real possibility that either Blues By Six would take the electric blues world by stealth with an amazing and highly unusual new rhythm guitar player from Edinburgh or that the name of Brian Knight would feature in the footnotes of yet another career other than his own. In the event, it just about manages the footnote.

  Challis and Bert had gone as a team to audition for Knight’s latest line-up, somewhere in West London. As Challis recalls, it was memorable for all the wrong reasons: ‘The drummer was a window cleaner and he turned up in his overalls and there was his bucket mixed up with his kit! The embarrassing part was they offered me the job playing piano but they didn’t want Bert. Brian said, “Oh, the audience won’t want to see you using a capo”! It was like the blues equivalent of a jazz purist. So I didn’t take the job either. I rang him up and told him I’d hurt my finger moving furniture.’

  Prior to the failed audition, Bert and John were already toying with the idea of getting their own band together. ‘But being the sort of non-managerial people that we were and are,’ says Challis, ‘we couldn’t get it together at all.’ The interval jam at the Railway may well have been the first and last fumbled outworkings of the band idea, but somehow the notion survived a while longer, gaining a new lease of life with the addition of a third adventurer and remaining an option right up to the release of Bert’s first album in April 1965. It was an album whose time for recording had now come.

  ‘There was a big swell of opinion about the importance of Bert and what he was doing,’ says Bill Leader, ‘but it was Anne Briggs really who took me firmly by the throat and said, “Look, for God’s sake you must do this record.” At that time I was working mainly for Topic: bedroom recordings went to Topic, studio recordings were commissioned by Nat Joseph. But this was a bedroom recording and it was done on spec. I always think of Bert, and Annie Briggs too, as archetypal. I suppose there were people like that before them. There certainly seem to have been hundreds since, but they were the first. I don’t quite know how to describe them.’39

  It was probably in August or September 1964 that Bill agreed to make a record with Bert and to take on the onerous responsibility of persuading a record label, any record label, to release it. Bert and Gill had been regular visitors to Bill’s flat at 5 North Villas, Camden. Indeed, having nowhere else to stay, Bert was now temporarily living there.40 During the summer Challis’s student grant had run out and the flat in King’s Avenue had been waved goodbye. What was to become the eponymous first album – the ‘blue album’ of legend – would be recorded in the kitchen at North Villas. Leader had bought an old Revox machine while the room itself, soundproofed with blankets and egg-boxes, had what he believed to be a certain magic in its natural acoustics. Like the home recording set-up of early sixties British pop producer Joe Meek, this casual operation was both revolutionary and absurd: ‘He had a Revox set up in one room,’ says Martin Carthy, ‘and you went and stood in the other room, with the microphone, and he’d give you the signal, which was the light going on and off. It didn’t always work, so you’d be standing there and the door would open and he’d say, “You can start now if you like”, and the door would shut! I’m making a joke of it because it’s funny now, but at the time the opportunity for making decent recordings just didn’t exist. So when Bert went into a proper studio to make his second album it was a giant leap forward.’

  Give or take the ownership of a usable guitar, Carthy’s scenario is exactly how it was on the handful of sessions that would result in Bert’s first album: ‘Bert sat on the edge of the bed,’ says Leader. ‘We borrowed a guitar and he just sang his little heart out.41 I don’t claim that I fully understood or appreciated his music when I first heard it but I suppose I had my “junior entrepreneur” kit on, because I was recording things that seemed to be interesting and important at the time, and this fell into that category. We took three tapes out that we wanted to use, took them along to a studio and put some reverb and equalisation on to them and ended up with something that was a bearable master. Technically it’s dodgy – there’s more dropouts on some of those tracks that I’d care to admit to – but musically it’s wonderful stuff. So it still lives, in spite of all its faults.’

  Bill had by now left his job at Collet’s, in favour of running Nat Joseph’s new Transatlantic record shop near Hampstead Heath and being on call to engineer recordings for the new label. But the Bert Jansch album was not the only project he was doing on spec. He was also putting time and effort into something equally strange: the Collins/Graham project. With the encouragement of Austin John Marshall, the entrepreneurial husband of Sussex traditional singer Shirley Collins, the time was now right for Davy Graham the maverick technician to take further the idea of eastern-influenced guitar accompanying traditional music from the British Isles. Both Melody Maker and the Observer, for whom Marshall worked at the time, had previewed a ‘not to be missed’ concert on 29 July 1964 at London’s Mercury Theatre. The performance marked the debut of an experimental partnership between Graham and Collins, with the stated aim of merging traditional song with modern jazz. ‘The concert will have an Eastern flavour,’ noted MM writer Jeff Smith. ‘For two years Davy’s interest in oriental forms has led him to experiment with different tunings, themes and rhythms (he recently spent three months in the Arab quarter of Tangier, sitting in with the local groups).’ The following week, Smith had declared the concert both musically successful and profitable, announcing a further concert date for the duo in September and suggesting that Ember were likely to record the partnership.

  In the event, it would seem that Davy and Shirley began recording the eventual Folk Roots, New Routes later that year with Bill Leader, and only provisionally.42 Through Alexis Korner’s persuasion, Leader had recorded Graham’s ‘Angi’ in the basement of the Camden flat two years earlier. In the intervening period, Graham had been enjoying a long residency at Nick’s Diner in Fulham which he had begun in 1961. In this context, he had cameoed in the Joseph Losey film The Servant (1963), while an album deal with Pye’s budget label Golden Guinea, secured to some extent through the influence of TV comedian Bob Monkhouse, had allowed the release of Davy’s first and least representative album. The Guitar Player (1963), garishly packaged and boasting bizarre if dextrous six-string arrangements of such middle-of-the-road staples as ‘Yellow Bird’ and ‘Cry Me A River’,
was Graham’s bistro repertoire minus the clatter of cutlery. The album’s chief benefit to Graham’s longer-term career was in introducing him to A&R man Ray Horricks. He would subsequently record a series of albums, under Horricks’s direction, for Decca. The Collins/Graham LP Folk Routes, New Routes was consequently optioned by the company. They would choose to release it in February 1965 – one month after Graham’s first album proper, the remarkable Folk, Blues & Beyond.

  Bert would sit in on some of the Collins/Graham sessions. It was the first time he had had an opportunity to watch Graham playing although he was already familiar with his techniques, mostly through Martin Carthy: ‘Martin was forever coming up to me and saying, “Hey, have you heard this one yet?”, and he’d show me something he’d picked up from Davy. I’d be learning all his licks second-hand!’ Midway through the sessions for the Jansch and Collins/Graham albums, Leader enlisted both guitarists for something quite extraordinary: they were to accompany, on respective nights at Leader’s Broadside Club, the Chicago blues legend Little Walter Jacobs.

  The originator of the amplified harmonica style synonymous with Chicago blues, Little Walter was a man with a hard-drinking, tough-talking reputation who would die young in a street fight in 1968. Walter’s best years as a musician were already behind him when he toured Britain for the first and last time in the autumn of 1964. But amplified blues was all the rage, and the red carpet was waiting. A UK single would be released to coincide and there would be several appearances on TV pop shows, including Ready Steady Go!, the barometer of all that was hip and happening. Coming to prominence as harp player in Muddy Waters’s band during the early fifties, Walter had struck out with a series of records under his own name that had been R&B chart hits in America. The last of the series, a brooding interpretation of Broonzy’s ‘Key To The Highway’ in 1958, was just about the only thing in his repertoire with any possible connection to the repertoire of Bert Jansch.