Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  Quite how the clearly incongruous duo of Jansch and Walter came to pass is unclear – conceivably Bill Leader had assumed that Walter, like previous bluesmen of his experience such as Memphis Slim or Brownie McGhee, was a self-contained performer, and only realised at the eleventh hour that accompanists were needed. Bert himself believes some other guitarist had failed to show up and that he was simply plucked from the audience to make the best of a bad lot. But Bert had been certainly booked and advertised a week in advance as the support act. It was clear from a preview by Jeff Smith that Davy Graham would be both accompanying Walter on his Saturday gig and also performing a solo spot with ‘some of his recent oriental inspired compositions’. Smith’s preview was the first time Bert had been mentioned in Melody Maker outside of the club ads: ‘With Little Walter on Friday is young blues guitarist and composer Bert Jansch. Bert’s new group may be doing a couple of spots too.’ It was also the only time that Bert and John Challis’s embryonic band would get a mention. The third member, Keith De Groot, had once gone by the name of Gerry Temple – a minor rock’n’roller in the ‘stable’ of pre-Beatles pop svengali Larry Parnes. Allegedly, it is De Groot’s harmonica on Millie’s 1963 novelty record ‘My Boy Lollipop’. ‘He’d fallen foul of Parnes ostensibly because he was taking drugs,’ says Challis, ‘but I think it was also something to do with Parnes being a bit of a dodgy character.’ The only dodgy character Bert saw was De Groot himself: ‘He was very shady,’ says Bert, ‘a drug dealer basically. The cops were always after him. He kept disappearing!’

  De Groot’s saving grace was his talent as a bongo drummer; he was also a fine Chicago-style harp player, clearly inspired by Little Walter. A tape of the trio rehearsing in the front room of Challis’s mother’s house survives and is a remarkable document of what might have been. Three numbers are played, all instrumental: a magnificent, mesmerising take on ‘Angi’; a six-minute Chicago-style twelve-bar jam; and an extemporisation on an otherwise unknown but archetypal Jansch riff. Bert plays electric guitar, Challis plays piano and De Groot plays bongos, harmonica and bass guitar. He was also to be the group’s featured vocalist.

  ‘I don’t think we ever did a whole gig as a band,’ says Challis, ‘but we had spots at places like the Troubadour and the Scot’s Hoose. It had to be somewhere with a piano. Bert was trying to get Bill Leader to front up some money to buy an electric keyboard, which would be portable. I’d bravely volunteered to play one, although at that time I hated electric keyboards. I was thinking in terms of an organ, like Graham Bond but more folky! Everybody at Ealing was into Chicago blues and I was also listening to prewar city blues: Sonny Boy Williamson, Tampa Red … We actually did a Tampa Red number with the band.’

  Bert was thus not entirely unfamiliar with the pantheon of electric blues, but on 25 September 1964 the immediate problem was not with Tampa Red’s material but with Little Walter’s. An additional problem was actually finding the gig at all – at an Irish pub in Willesden Green, temporary accommodation for the Broadside club. ‘Nobody knew where it was and it didn’t look like a folk club – it looked like a cheesy dance hall,’ says Challis. ‘It was all a complete dog’s breakfast. Thinking back, I get the feeling Bill Leader was in a bit of a panic and had asked Bert to get him out of a spot. Bert was well versed in country blues but hadn’t heard any of Walter’s music. But it so happened that I had an album, The Best Of Little Walter. So Bert borrowed it for the afternoon, tried to learn some numbers off it – which couldn’t have been too hard for him – and I arranged to meet him down there later in the day, where he gave me the record back.

  ‘There were only about three people in the club when we got there, very early evening, and one of them was Little Walter, who’d just drunk his first bottle of whisky of the day and was starting on the second. He was still quite compos mentos, obviously used to it, but at the same time on a slightly different wavelength to where I was. On the other hand, I’d had several spliffs before we’d set out. So I became completely tongue-tied, thinking, “Bloody hell, it’s Little Walter!” Bert and everybody else just cleared off and left me with him, and they were obviously having a row in the back room. So he’s standing there going in and out of focus and I’m sure he was having the same problem with me, and neither of us could think of a thing to say. SuddenIy I remembered this record which was in a carrier bag. So I took it out and said, “Would you mind autographing this for me?” “Sure, have you got a pen?” He sat down, licked the end of the pen – which was a biro – and spent about five minutes more or less drawing his signature from memory.’

  The show itself was no less awkward. ‘Jansch’s gloriously slovenly playing was the stuff of nightmare for the formally trained but sweet dreams for the attuned,’ as one commentator later put it. ‘With unnerving instinct he might add or deduct a half bar or so from a twelve-bar blues, the dictionary definition of mistake expressed as style; he took risks with all the split second timing and casual aplomb of a high-wire act.’43 Little Walter had no interest in the circus. ‘It must have been so strange to him,’ says Bert. ‘He was trying to get me to play as simply as possible but of course I tend to play quite a few lines all at the same time. He was slightly thrown.’ ‘It was an embarrassing night,’ says Gill Cook, ‘but good fun in hindsight!’

  A few days earlier Gill had put a little sign up in Collet’s saying, ‘Best Blues In Town: Bert Jansch’. It had a confirming effect on another young guitarist plying his trade on the club scene, John Renbourn. Chris Ayliffe, an accompanist for a young blues singer called Jacqui McShee, had been telling him how good Bert was and the card in the window was the final incentive. Renbourn went with Ayliffe to see Bert at Bunjies – a little coffee bar in Litchfield Street, unusual among London folk venues in rarely advertising – and came away suitably impressed: ‘I heard the first set and he was just unbelievable, wonderful,’ says Renbourn. ‘We went to the pub in the interval and Bert was there having a drink, but although we went back for the second set Bert never came back!’44 Bert’s next gig was the one with Little Walter, whose desperate plea to Bert of ‘Easy on the fingers, baby!’ remains Renbourn’s abiding memory of the occasion.

  ‘They were chalk and cheese,’ says Challis. ‘It was obviously very hard going for both of them. They took a break, more drinking was done and the break got longer and longer. Never mind the stress that Bert was under trying to play this completely alien form of blues, by the time the break arrived I was completely out of my face myself because of all the stress I’d been through! Actually, I felt very sorry for Little Walter. Here he was 5000 miles from home, pissed out of his head in Willesden and trying to put a show together with a load of people who didn’t understand him. What he must have thought of it all …’

  Many years later an interviewer, Michael Watts, was surprised to find, amid the few furnishings and belongings apparent in Bert’s then current abode, a copy of ‘Green Onions’: ‘He laughed when it was remarked upon,’ wrote Watts, ‘and said he always played Booker T a couple of times a week.’ There was a story behind it. In his early twenties he had lived in Ealing with a boogie woogie pianist from Ealing Art College and a friend of Pete Townshend’s. There was a café next door to the college where they all used to sit and drink tea and share a joint, and on the jukebox would be Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and Booker T. ‘And when I listen to that my brain goes bang, right back back to those days.’45

  6

  Nineteen Sixty-Five

  ‘After only three weeks at Willesden Green the Broadside is moving back to town.’ As the Melody Maker of 3 October 1964 could report, Bill Leader’s club had been offered the Scot’s Hoose, a public house on the northern fringes of Soho. The following week, the all-new Broadside was opened by Roy Guest, in one of his last engagements as a folk singer. Things were beginning to change. For both Bert’s career and the British folk scene as a whole, the next few months would see changes to mark the ending of one era and the beginning of another.

  If there is a
line in the sand between the old order of ‘folksong’ epitomised by Ewan MacColl and his left-wing agenda and the new dis-order of individual ‘folk singers’ whose songs espoused largely personal politics, none more clearly in the vanguard than Bert Jansch, then it lies on Friday 16 April 1965: a date that would see both the release of Bert Jansch and the opening of a new club called Les Cousins at 49 Greek Street, Soho. In the period between the Little Walter gig of September 1964 and the point where he finally became a recording artist in the public domain, Bert would settle permanently in London, build a constituency second to none among his peers and a reputation to rival Davy Graham’s. ‘Swinging London’ was just around the corner: by the time the summer of 1965 had passed ‘the Sixties’ had arrived.

  ‘I was trying to find somewhere to stay,’ said Bert, ‘and I’d somehow got involved, possibly as a result of working at Bunjies, with Les Bridger. He had a pad and so I naturally attached myself to him.’1 Bridger is recalled as someone who knew where it was at but could not necessarily do it himself. ‘It broke your heart really,’ says Bruce Dunnet, MacColl’s organiser. ‘A lot of the folk-singing people were not good singers but they had a good repertoire and got away with it on that. But Les was a lousy guitarist and a lousy singer.’ Nevertheless, as a resident performer Les had been fronting numerous clubs from as early as September 1962. On 17 November 1964, with blues singer Jo Ann Kelly as co-host, Les opened a club dedicated to ‘folk blues’ at the Hole In The Ground in Swiss Cottage. Bridger’s pad, shared with a cat called Tinker, was nearby and Bert moved in. He found his new flatmate fascinating: ‘Les used to sing cockney songs – had the right accent. He made an album of these things which he was very proud of and it was dreadful. But you could never determine his age. He had grey hair when I met him. He now lives in Copenhagen and looks exactly the same.’

  Earlier in November Bert had played two gigs with Wizz Jones, one of the godfathers of the ‘folk blues’ style who had already met Bert in Edinburgh in ’63, in passing, and a year later in London. By then, like anyone else with their ear to the ground, he was aware of Bert’s growing reputation: ‘I was gigging upstairs at the Black Horse,’ says Wizz, ‘and I came down during the interval and was sat down at a table talking to somebody and there was this young guy sitting next to me in a combat jacket. I didn’t know who he was, thought he was a labourer or something. But I’d seen him before, and suddenly I realised, “Hey, I’m sitting next to Bert Jansch.” You couldn’t get anyone more anonymous. But then if you saw him onstage he had everything, he had amazing charisma – a true original. When I first started playing I used to busk the streets with Long John Baldry and Davy Graham. I sat down and tried to learn Davy’s songs. At the same time Bert was up in Edinburgh doing the same thing. Bert got to grips with it, perfected the style and went on to become a total original. When he hit London you wouldn’t believe the impact he had. He was dynamite. Nobody had heard anything like it. If you’re a young, good-looking guy and you’re playing really well and playing something so different and so exciting you don’t need any kind of stage personality, you can just be cool. The fact that you don’t say much or you’re very laid back – you can be like that. When you’re older it’s stupid, you can’t do it. But Bert was a young, cool guy on the scene and he came alive onstage just by playing.’

  The first of their gigs together was at the Buck’s Head in Mitcham where Wizz was resident. Wizz Jones having a regular gig at all was something of a breakthrough. John Renbourn had been a devotee for years: if Davy Graham, the clean-cut ‘retired colonel’ with the incongruously mad music, was the instrumental excellence, Wizz represented the very essence of what looked to be such an attractive, bohemian lifestyle. ‘Wizz was the main guy to listen to in the early days,’ says Renbourn. ‘But he didn’t actually have any gigs, ’cos he had such long hair and bare feet that he wasn’t allowed into most of the clubs.’

  One Wizz fan at that Buck’s Head gig was Ralph McTell: ‘Unfortunately Bert was out of the game. He stuck a matchbox in his mouth, blew out the matches all over the audience, said, “That’s an old folk custom”, and wobbled off, which was all the sort of stuff legends are made of.’ Ralph’s brother Bruce, who would wind up managing both Ralph and Bert ten years later, was more intrigued with Bert’s slurred, unintelligible diction: ‘Needle Of Death’ he heard as ‘Need A Dad’. That same month Bert’s first child was conceived. Its mother was Gill Cook.

  Bill Leader dropped out of his role in the Broadside club shortly after it reopened at the Scot’s Hoose in October. The mantle of organiser passed to Gill Cook. By the end of the year, finding it ‘a bit of a struggle’ on her own, Gill deferred to the most actively entrepreneurial Communist in town: Bruce Dunnet.2 As 1964 passed into 1965, Bill Leader continued his periodic process of recording the strange and indefinable music of Bert Jansch.3 A few years later Bert was able to recall that, in terms of material, ‘about half the album was already there and I had to write the other songs while the sessions were going along’.4 With Leader emphasising to Bert that the essence of what he did was in his own material, this was a creative period: a time when Bert’s stage repertoire would increasingly shift from borrowed blues to original compositions.

  ‘The trouble with recording,’ says Bert, ‘is that, as the word says, it records what you’ve done. A painting, once it’s done, is there for all time, but music is not so. Music is an instantaneous thing that happens and changes. Anything to do with me – the writing, the material – it’s now, it’s not yesterday. Yesterday’s gone. I never listen to the albums. Once it’s recorded, it’s past. I’m much more interested in the actual creation of songs, to create ideas and eventually put them down on paper or on tape, to record them in one fashion or another. It’s an art form to me.’

  Once Bill felt that his recording of Bert was representative and complete the problem became where to place it. ‘There we were with this tape,’ says Bill, ‘and nobody was interested: Topic weren’t interested in this “drug stuff” and Nat Joseph wasn’t interested because he couldn’t see that there was a market for it. People who were tuned into Bert were into the totality of text, music and performance – all three added up. Nat was a lyrics man. I came across this several times in trying to sell him ideas, that if I typed out the words I’d be more likely to get a contract than actually playing him a tape. He probably did recognise the quality of Bert’s songwriting but he certainly didn’t act very quickly.’

  ‘Bill came in to the shop one day,’ says Nat, ‘and said “I’ve done this record, I’d like you to listen to it and I’d like to sell it to you.” I remember listening to it and thinking some of the songs were terrific, really terrific. “Running From Home” was the first I heard. I was less struck than everybody else was on the guitar work. To me it was always the words that communicated. I don’t think Dylan became great because he played great harmonica – Dylan became great because his words said something to his generation. The same could be said of Bert Jansch.’ A period of time elapsed and Bill became edgy. But it transpired that Nat had been lobbied by the fearless Anne Briggs and was now aware of the ‘word on the street’. He was prepared to take a chance. The deal that was agreed, an outright sum of £100 for the purchase of the recording with no royalties subsequently payable, is perhaps questionable only in hindsight. It went on to sell in excess of 150,000 by 1975, and remained on catalogue at full price until the label was sold in 1978.5 But in the early months of 1965 it was not a question of what was fair but whether Bert wished to have a record released or not. Nobody else was queuing up to do so.

  ‘Perhaps if I’d been a cannier person, sitting on it for another six months,’ says Bill, ‘we might have done a better deal. But there comes a time when a record has to be released for an artist and if you miss that you bugger up his career. So we did the deal and it was a hard bargain. I think Nat thinks I’ll go to my grave resenting that but I don’t in the least: a deal is a deal.’

  ‘Artists who recorded were
very rare then,’ says Bert. ‘Bill said this was probably the best offer I could get. I had no idea about royalties or anything like that in those days and so I said yes. The songs on there are instant snapshots. I was just fooling around doing gigs, not thinking about these things. On reflection I was a bit annoyed about the deal that was set up between Bill and Nat. They certainly took me to the cleaners.’

  Subsequent to the deal Nat felt the record was a little short and asked for three more songs, duly provided. When the record was released, Bert would receive mechanical royalties for those three tracks alone. Nat arranged to meet Bert in a pub and a long-term contract for his publishing was signed, with Transatlantic’s publishing arm Heathside Music. Some years later, when the contract was examined, it was noticed that only part of Bert’s signature had been caught. Somewhere in London there is a bar table with a reasonable claim on the minuscule Transatlantic publishing royalties of Bert Jansch. ‘The reason I didn’t sign him as a recording artist at that time,’ says Nat, ‘was because he was regarded as Bill’s artist and Bill didn’t have an arrangement with him.’ Nor would he.

  Folk, Blues & Beyond was Davy Graham’s manifesto at the very dawn of the new era. Released in January 1965, three months before the first Jansch record, it epitomised the sense of adventure abroad in all forms of popular music at the time and crystallised ideas that other guitarists would explore for years to come. Bert had already taken what he felt he needed from Graham’s playing, from the tape of ‘Angi’ years previous to the alternate tuning DADGAD and the regular trickle of licks filtering second-hand through Martin Carthy. Folk, Blues & Beyond would be a revelation to the wider constituency but it would alter little the path which Bert was already on: ‘There was something he said,’ recalls Wizz, “You listen to other people and you copy but you don’t do it for long – you find your own thing.’ He got to the point where he didn’t listen to anybody. He was very much on his own trip.’