Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  Crafted and muscular as it was, Folk, Blues & Beyond did little to hide Graham’s essential weakness as a vocalist. It was clear that some of the album’s reviewers would prefer to regard Davy Graham solely, and begrudgingly, as an experimental accompanist for the eminently more acceptable Shirley Collins. Curiously, the album of the Collins/Graham project, Folk Roots, New Routes was released only a month later, in February 1965. Welcomed perhaps more wholeheartedly for its ideas than its actuality, it was nevertheless a blueprint for what would later emerge as British folk-rock.6 By coincidence or otherwise it also contained five songs that Bert would soon be adapting to his own more visceral arrangements.

  By the time both albums were released Graham’s lifestyle had taken a notorious turn. ‘He lived with danger all the time,’ says Martin Carthy. ‘He decided to become a junkie. He did that quite deliberately because his heroes – people like Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, all those guys – were heroin addicts. It was like part of the furniture: you were supposed to become a junkie to be a serious musician and Davy took all that in. At the time it was legal and you got it on prescription. I remember when it happened because I did a session with him at Lansdowne Studios in Holland Park the very day after he first took it. I think it was a session for Nadia Cattouse. We were walking down the road and he told me, “I had my first fix yesterday.” He was a good man, but he was always a very strange man. I remember meeting Alexis Korner three weeks later and his opening remark to me was, “Do you know what that stupid bastard has done?” And it was basically bye bye Davy for four years.’

  ‘The trouble is artists are self-indulgent,’ Graham explained, some years later. ‘It never occurred to me that art was self-indulgent. I always thought art was the product of self-denial. It seems to me you deny yourself something to acquire a technique over an instrument. When you’ve got the technique it’s as if you’ve got a dog. The neighbours don’t understand you.’7

  Davy Graham’s path became a thing of dark rumour on the folk scene, but mostly known only to his fellow performers. ‘Dope was everywhere on the folk scene,’ recalls Pete Frame, a wide-eyed fan turned club organiser. ‘You were cool if you smoked dope. It was like a division from the Steve Benbow generation.’ For audiences, the late Buck Polley was the only link between folk and hard drugs, and he was becoming an almost mythical figure. ‘Alex Campbell was everywhere in those days,’ says Frame. ‘He’d get pissed and go on about Buck and give you a half-hour sermon on the dangers of drugs. He was like a schoolteacher that all the kids admired ’cos he could talk their language. He was older but he was such an incredible, romantic character.’

  Bert Jansch was carving his own niche in the annals of romance too – less populist but no less arresting. His ‘Needle Of Death’, in memory of Polley, was a fragile but profoundly striking song for the times – a ‘really outrageous, beautiful song’, as another young songwriter called Neil Young would shortly discover, across the world in Canada.8 Relatively simple in structure, it would be one of the very few Bert Jansch songs to be covered on record by another artist – in this case, later in the year by TV folk personality Julie Felix on her Second Album — and covered widely in performance among his peers.

  ‘It was an incredibly popular song,’ says Dave Arthur, who was performing then with his wife Toni as an English traditional duo. ‘It was the only song we sang out of context with the traditional stuff. We had somehow linked into it because he was serious about it. He disowned it later because it became such a cliché, but at the time we believed it. It had an enormous influence on us and everyone else because it was of its time – very much music of the sixties but also very much to do with what was going on in London.’

  Luton was thirty miles from London and the kind of town where everyone left school and worked at the local car factory. Growing up there, Pete Frame was ‘one of those guys who found out about Bob Dylan through Peter, Paul & Mary’. By the end of 1961 he had taken a job in London, at the Holborn office of Prudential Insurance. Outside the office building was a prime spot for busking, regularly occupied by one Les Bridger. Frame gradually discovered the esoteric delights of Collet’s record shop in nearby New Oxford Street. It was the only place in town where one could find Elektra and Vanguard imports.

  ‘In February 1964 I went to see Pete Seeger at the Festival Hall with my friend Mac,’ says Frame, ‘and we came out completely blown away. We both worked at the Prudential: Mac goes into work on Monday, gives his notice in and clears off. He just couldn’t cope with work any more after that. He wanted to be on the road, doing all that romantic travelling about. He went off and sold toffee apples on the beach at Cannes and never looked back. I was too insecure to do any of that. It would be another five years before I could summon the courage to “drop out and do my own thing”, which had by then become eminently fashionable.’9

  In a manner typical of many others in isolated little towns across the country, Frame became enraptured by the ‘underground’ feel and promise of the new folk music. For a start, there was a beatnik scene at a pub called the Cock in nearby St Albans: ‘There were guys there with flared matelot-style jeans. They’d noticed Dylan’s leg on the front of Another Side Of Bob Dylan and had sewn big denim triangles into their Levis to be like him – though whether Dylan had flared his jeans or merely patched them was a matter for conjecture. Whatever, people were starting to copy him. By the end of the year, some of us had decided to start a folk club in Luton. I took on the administration: booking acts, taking care of advertising, handling the money. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, of course, but I was on a mission to bring interesting singers to Luton – to enrich the lives of culturally deprived provincials like myself.’ There was already a traditionally oriented folk club in St Albans, at the Peahen pub, and a regular at both this club and the Cock was an eighteen-year-old by the name of Donovan Leitch, known to his friends as Don and, very soon, to the world at large as plain Donovan: ‘Britain’s Bob Dylan’.

  Donovan was born in Glasgow in May 1946. His family – socialist, self-educated and working class – had remained there until he was ten and then moved south to a newly-built council estate in Hatfield. Failing to acquire the right qualifications for art college, Donovan spent time labouring in factories and on building sites and sometimes helping his dad on a cake stall at Hatfield market. He bought into mod culture in a big way, riding scooters and following favoured R&B groups. In May 1964 he caught Bob Dylan’s concert at the Festival Hall and folk became his new bag. That summer he trekked down to the West Country with a friend, Mac McLeod; they took waiting jobs at a hotel and busked in their spare time. More to the point, Donovan wrote ‘Catch The Wind’, in the vein of Bob Dylan: a beautifully simple tune with the abidingly intangible impression that its words might in fact be saying something important. Dylan had worn a black corduroy cap on the cover of his first album. In homage to Bob, Don returned from Torquay with not only a wonderful song but a Cornish fisherman’s hat that would have to do. But he had not entirely lost interest in R&B. One weekend in November he joined a gang of friends on a rave to Southend to sleep on the beaches and support the Cops’n’Robbers, St Albans’ very own Rolling Stones. During the interval, completely drunk, Donovan got up and sang maybe five songs including one of his own. A fairytale situation ensued: the group’s manager Peter Eden was mesmerised, brought in local songwriter Geoff Stephens and arranged for Donovan to make a demo record at Stephens’s publishers, Southern Music, in Denmark Street: ‘Tin Pan Alley’. Stephens and Eden would be his management. The next step was introducing their discovery to the producer of hip Friday night pop TV show Ready Steady Go:

  ‘They listened and they looked,’ says Donovan. ‘In retrospect I think they said, “This guy is going to do what Dylan did. We’ll have him.” And so I was on the show. For the first two weeks I wrote songs about the charts and about myself. I wrote “Talking Pop Star Blues” and I wrote a song about Tom Jones and Gene Pitney and sat with Cathy M
cGowan and talked about sleeping rough on the beach – it all happened in a period of weeks.’

  Donovan was British pop’s very own Dylan-hatted minstrel boy with pretty tunes, troubadour tales and a lifestyle to match. Not everyone was impressed. Andy Irvine, just returned from five years in Dublin, was one: ‘I remember him sitting there telling the presenter he’d just hitch-hiked down from St Albans. “Yeah, right,” I thought.’ Others were of a similar mind. Donovan had become resident on RSG at the end of January and within a week he was a national sensation. Letters of outrage poured in to the pop papers from folk fans and Dylan buffs. For an inexperienced teenager, Donovan’s reaction was admirably serene: ‘I can’t see anything wrong with adopting a style,’ he replied to one detractor.10 He would be justifying that position for the rest of the year. For the papers it was a godsend, the best controversy in ages and a shot in the arm for the rumbling ‘folk boom’ debate. Even his guitar was controversial. Echoing Woody Guthrie’s slogan, ‘This machine kills fascists’, Don had taped ‘This machine kills’ to the body of his instrument. How, the Melody Maker wondered, did he justify that? ‘Well,’ said Don, ‘I didn’t think there were any fascists left – until I got into the music business.’11

  Just prior to his TV debut, Frame had asked Donovan to be the resident singer of his new club, due to open at the Dolphin coffee bar on 20 January. Donovan was tied to his managers’ game plan but he did recommend Mac McLeod. Another local player of note, Mick Softley, would also be a regular. The opening night was a great success. ‘It was a small, claustrophobic basement with a huge supporting column obstructing the view of anyone who didn’t get there early,’ says Frame. ‘But it was the coolest place in town.’ McLeod was not long in recommending an amazing guitarist he had met called John Renbourn. Renbourn was duly booked for 24 February. It was a memorable night: ‘Mick Softley had played,’ says Frame, ‘he was sitting down rolling a cigarette and Renbourn started playing “Judy” and as soon as Mick heard it he dropped his tobacco and just shot up to the front to get a view of this fantastic playing! I remember going to a gig in Borehamwood soon after that and it was Renbourn and Beverley, which was amazing – Renbourn, the stoned Julian Bream of folk guitar, and Beverley the most attractive art-school folk singer you could imagine. She was singing songs like “Wild About My Loving” and he was picking away behind her. At one point just before the solo she sings “If you want my loving, you gotta bring it with you when you come…what are you gonna bring John?” And John replies, “Les Bridger!”’

  Shortly after Bert had moved in with Bridger, in November 1964, Renbourn called round with Dorris Henderson, an exotic young American he had just met at the Roundhouse.12 John had recently decided to move up to London from Kingston while Dorris was not long off the plane from Los Angeles. Both were looking for a place to stay. Dorris wound up at Gill Cook’s flat, where Anne Briggs was also staying at the time, while John moved in with Bert and Les. John had been born in Kingston in August 1944 – almost a year younger than Bert, and more middle-class in background. At school he had played electric guitar in a band by the name of Hogsnort Rupert & His Famous Porkestra. During the summer of 1962, however, he had hitch-hiked in the West Country and been intrigued by the acoustic musicians he stumbled across: ‘I heard guys playing who said, “This is something from Davy Graham”, but I didn’t hear Davy till a bit later, when I was going to Kingston Art School and playing guitar all the time instead of doing art. Wound up in a club called the Wooden Bridge in Guildford; the R&B thing had started then and Davy was playing there with John Mayall. Davy was the one for me, as he was for just about everyone else – I used to follow him around after that and learn from him.’13

  Renbourn was mentioned in Melody Maker despatches as a resident of the Guildford Folk Club as early as February 1963. A year later his name appeared again, this time as a guest at Derek Serjeant’s Surbiton club. It would appear periodically thereafter in connection with the clubs in Surbiton, Woking and Richmond. Coming out of art school with no money, somebody had offered him a Scarth guitar in a backstreet for a fiver ‘and fortunately the pub scene had started, so I drifted into that’. In September ’64 he had twice seen Bert performing and the very day after the Little Walter gig he had performed in central London himself, bottom of the bill to Malcolm Price and the Country Cousins at Malcolm Nixon’s Hootenanny, Ballads & Blues club. A month later Gerry Loughran, who had provided Bert with his first platform in the capital, gave John a more memorable gig at the Roundhouse. ‘That was the first time I got paid,’ he says. ‘It was a fiver. And it was Scottish!’

  Renbourn was a gifted musician. What he lacked, compared with Bert, in musical invention and individuality of expression, he made up for with an increasingly inquisitive approach to the nature and mechanics of music and a technical brilliance that was, like Davy Graham’s, the product of relentless dedication. John’s arrival in London as a young guitar slinger looking for opportunities was part of a pattern that would be repeated ad infinitum as the decade progressed; Dorris Henderson’s story was a little more unusual. Americans were still, on the British folk scene, a rarity. Dorris had been working as a civil servant in Los Angeles, singing Appalachian mountain songs in her spare time. Her brother, in the USAF, had been stationed in Britain and recommended it. Dorris saved some money and got on a plane. Dark-skinned and attractive, and vocally magnificent, she stumbled into the folk scene and was welcomed with open arms. On her second day in town she discovered the Troubadour, sang there and met Curly Goss, organiser of several clubs, including the Roundhouse. There she met Renbourn. Dorris was given a residency at the Roundhouse and, again through Curly, auditioned successfully for a new live music show on BBC television: Gadzooks! It’s All Happening.

  Bert, John and Les moved en masse to a new flat in King Henry’s Road, between Swiss Cottage and Chalk Farm – still only half a dozen stops on the tube from the city centre. There would soon come a time when Bert and John would be all over the London scene but in these early days of their association, both were helped along by the extraordinary popularity of Les Bridger as a club resident and consequently as a patron to the potential guest artists sharing his flat. Bert and John would both enjoy bookings at the Hole In The Ground Tuesday club, while opportunities were tripled by the end of January with Les and Jo Ann Kelly taking the residencies of new clubs at the Red Lion in Borehamwood (Wednesdays) and the Black Bull in Barnet (Mondays). Jo Ann also took a Thursday residency at the White Hart in Grays, Essex, where Bert and John would similarly be among the early guests.

  Either side of Christmas Bert tried out his new trio with John Challis and Keith De Groot on at least two bookings, at the Scot’s Hoose and the Troubadour. There was a further trio gig at the Troubadour in May, but it was little more than a sideline for Bert. The solo album he had recorded with Bill Leader would appear on Friday, 16 April.

  One of the band’s gigs had been shared with Anne Briggs. Anne was more visible on the London scene at this time than she had been before or would ever be again.14 Three Fridays in January she was on the bill at a new purely traditional club that Gill Cook was running with Roy Guest at Cecil Sharp House, but several of her other gigs in town would be shared with Bert. As both were in the same city with time on their hands, a roof over their heads and a friend with a flat that was empty during the daytime, they would also – for the first and only time – come together to write songs and learn from each other’s music. It would be a remarkably fruitful period, whose achievements would have an impact on the work of both artists, and on many others besides, over the coming years.

  ‘Bert would come around to Gill’s flat during the day when there was nothing else to do,’ says Anne, ‘and we’d work together for our own personal interest on traditional songs, with his dramatic guitar playing. We discovered that they could really gel together. Once he started elaborating on what I’d come up with I had to move fast to keep up, so it really brought my guitar playing along. He’d write a verse,
I’d write a verse. I’d come up with a tune, he’d play it, he’d elaborate on it. It was a very creative period but it only went on for a very short time.’ The process was almost accidental, to Anne’s recollection ‘there was a lot of stuff that just drifted away – if it wasn’t together by the end of the afternoon, forget about it’. But three original songs survived, to filter out on albums by both Bert and Anne individually between 1966 and 1971: ‘Go Your Way, My Love’, ‘Wishing Well’ and ‘The Time Has Come’.15 The last was composed by Anne alone, the others jointly, but all three combined otherworldliness, foreboding and melancholy and were quite unprecedented in any genre of popular music.

  More importantly than the quality of individual songs however was the development of a new approach to accompanying traditional music that was superficially similar to that explored by the Collins/Graham project but freeer of form, looser in feel and as sensual and fresh as the content of the first song it was designed for: the one-night-stand Irish ballad ‘Blackwater Side’. For all the rivalry that would develop between Jansch and Graham over the next few years, real or imagined, Graham would come to regard ‘Blackwater Side’ at the very least as ‘a masterpiece of its kind, and I do not use that word loosely’.16

  ‘All the traditional singers I knew at the time, like Jimmy MacBeath and Jeannie Robertson,’ says Bert, ‘were older people and you couldn’t exactly say, “Could you just slow that down and repeat that verse?” But Anne, because she knew all these songs, I could quite happily get her to sit and go over the likes of “Blackwater Side” a few times until I’d worked out how to do it on the guitar. This was the first time I’d ever actually sat down and taken a folk song other than a Woody Guthrie-type song – a number that had a definite melody line that I couldn’t change – and consciously created a backing to go with it.’17