by Colin Harper
‘I don’t know what Andy Matthews wanted in the first place but it soon arrived,’ says Roy Harper. ‘It was like a song that writes itself. And pretty soon he was surrounded by these people who all wanted to play at night and all roughly in the same style. It was like a synergy. I remember the first day I went to Cousins. It was all down to Peter Bellamy. I think somebody had told me he was planning to get his own record label together so I went to see him. He sat me down and said, “Okay, play me your favourite song.” So I played him “St James Infirmary”, plucked straight off a Snooks Eaglin record, to which he said, “Pretty good – you ought to come down to a place I know tonight and play some songs there.” And that was the Cousins. I didn’t look back – I knew this was the place I ought to be.’
Born in Manchester in 1941, and brought up in Blackpool, Roy already had a colourful past. This would not be unusual amongst those who would gravitate to the Cousins. Joining the RAF in order to leave school at fifteen, he stayed there two years reading poetry incessantly, eventually feigning madness in order to leave. Between 1959 and 1964, when he finally drifted into London, Roy had spent time in a mental hospital and in prison and had busked all over Europe. His first paid gig had been a poetry reading in Newcastle, but through Dylan the pursuit of words and music became suddenly more attractive. Once out of prison, he had married a zoologist called Mocky. Along with Ralph McTell, married to a Norwegian girl, Nana, and Wizz Jones, whose wife Sandy was an ebullient banjo player, Roy would be among the very few performers on the Cousins scene to hold down a marriage, although his would not prove as enduring as the rest. The only other performer of note to maintain a successful marriage was also one of the first people Roy saw performing in London: Alexis Korner.
Around May 1965, Alexis, his wife Bobbie and their family moved to a flat at Queensway. A more or less washed-up pop star by the name of Duffy Power was living nearby in Cleveland Square, in a uniquely elegant rooming house for musicians that had once housed the likes of Gene Vincent and Billy Fury and was now populated by hard-up jazz people. Born Ray Howard in 1942, ‘Duffy Power’ had been discovered in the fifties by pop svengali Larry Parnes and had been part of the same stable of carefully groomed British rock’n’rollers as Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, Johnny Gentle, Vince Eager and Gerry Temple (nee Keith De Groot). Some were successful, some not: Duffy, like De Groot, was of the latter category, although he had enjoyed numerous singles releases between 1958 and 1964.52
Once free of the teen-pop circus of package tours and lightweight material, Duffy would discover and embrace the blues and prove himself to be among the greatest R&B singers, harp players and songwriters of the sixties – unassailably powerful, sensual and in no small way driven by various traumas in his personal life. Duffy’s recurring mental problems, essentially paranoia and violent tendencies, would at least produce tangible artistic results in a series of peerless folk-blues-jazz fusion recordings cut during 1965 – 67, though mostly unissued at the time.53 The chilled-out atmosphere of the Cousins would become a constant source of solace to Duffy through the ups and downs of his professional and personal life during the latter half of the sixties. He would even meet his future wife Val there. But in May 1965, having determined that R&B was the way he was going to go but still unsure about how to make it viable, Duffy got an introduction to that perennial godfather of opportunities, Alexis Korner.
‘I knew of Alexis,’ says Duffy, ‘I’d seen him, I was a great admirer – used to copy him, sat on a high stool, bought a capo. I was just short of tying a strip of cloth round my head! So I went around to Alexis’s place and he says, “Here, Duff, we’re gonna work together.” Duffy and Alexis would work together for ten or twelve months, mostly as a duo around the folk clubs. They would also record an album later that year with bassist Danny Thompson and drummer Terry Cox as the latest version of Alexis’s Blues Incorporated.54 Duffy’s introduction to the Cousins was also through Alexis – the pair of them taking American singer Doris Troy there around May/June, assured of an opportunity to get up and have a blow.
‘She’d sung “Maggie’s Farm”,’ says Duffy, ‘and I can remember sitting in the cab on the way home saying to her, “I’d like to work on Maggie’s Farm,” and she said, ‘You would!’. It really pissed Alexis off because he really envied innuendo, couldn’t get it together himself! I played there with Eric Clapton one night as well. John Mayall played too, I think. We’d been at a party at Alexis’ and we all went down there. It was very interesting. A guy came up and said, “Could you turn it down?” I was playing harp, Eric had his electric guitar. “No man, I can’t turn it down,” he said, “it’s just not how it’s played.” I remember at the party we’d been playing and someone had asked Eric could he play “Fly Me To The Moon” and he’d turned to me and said, “No, we don’t do that sort of stuff – do we Duffy?” And I’m going, “Well, I’m not so sure about that …”’
‘I remember Duffy from hearing his rock’n’roll singles on Radio Luxembourg,’ says Ian Anderson, ‘and was dead impressed when this bloke showed up down the Cousins. He was just blowing everybody away, coming down and borrowing a guitar – and the monstrous amounts of energy and emotion he would wring from those songs … This was the only person I’d ever come across who gave me the impression that this might have been what it was like to have seen one of the old blues guys in their youth, in full flow with the devil in hot pursuit.’
Alexis was already a revered figure on the various club scenes, and respect was due by association to anyone he brought with him. Besides, Duffy Power – with a tendency to go ballistic at the merest hint of derision, and a performer of rare intensity – was not someone to mess with. During the Little Walter tour the previous year he had been so incensed at the quality of playing coming from one unfortunate individual on guitar – not, on that particular show, Bert Jansch – that he had taken to the stage and wrested the instrument from him. Walter, enjoying the opportunity for a break, had simply taken a seat in the front row and watched ‘the Duffy Power show’. These were the sort of people the Cousins was made for. It played home to all manner of tortured artists: depressives and eccentrics like Jackson Frank and Roy Harper,55 a drug-sozzled Icarus like Davy Graham and the dangerous-to-know Duffy Power. All, in their own way, troubled but brilliant.
‘Bert was a wild young lad, six years younger than me,’ says Gill Cook. ‘Our son Richard [Cook] was born in October 1965. He was very supportive but he wasn’t taking any responsibility then. Just one of those things. I was very fond of him and he was delighted I was having a kid, and when he started to earn money he’d send some. He’s still supportive like that.’
Released on 11 November 1965, Bert’s second album It Don’t Bother Me (TRA 132) featured songs that were very much reflections on his recent life in London – alternately tougher and lazier in feel and more self-assured than the vulnerable ballads and angsty guitar vignettes that characterised his debut, and even looser in composition. It had been produced by Nat Joseph and recorded as far back as April, in a real studio – the product of two or three afternoon sessions and several bottles of wine. Hinted at in the brief song-by-song sleeve notes, it was full of oblique allusions to the various comings and goings in Bert’s love life: ‘To be imprisoned by someone’s love can be as painful as not being loved at all,’ as he put it in a commentary on one composition. Both Jan and Beverley were mentioned by name in the notes; the situation with Gill was doubtless embedded deeply in the songs too; as indeed may have been Liz Cruickshank, who had stayed in London that summer, performing with Bert on occasion, before heading off to work in Canada for a time.
There was also a brief flirtation with politics on the new record, in ‘Anti Apartheid’. Bert had joined Donovan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Roy Harper and others at a Vietnam protest march back in May, but in contrast to his peers, politics would be a rare topic in his work: ‘I couldn’t be attached to one party or another,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know enough about politics at the time, and if I
didn’t know about something I’d stay away from it.’56 There were three instrumentals: ‘Tinker’s Blues’, in honour of Les Bridger’s cat, and ‘The Wheel’, inspired by the Cousins decor, were both solo, while ‘Lucky Thirteen’ was a mesmerising Renbourn composition involving both players. Comprising theme and improvisation on an unresolving chord pattern, it very clearly pointed in a direction that would be explored more fully on Bert And John, their first and only joint album, the following year. Bert’s original cyclical guitar epic ‘Joint Control’ had been recorded for It Don’t Bother Me but shelved, along with the otherwise unknown ‘Just Like You’.
Two other pieces that did make the cut, ‘Been On The Road So Long’ and ‘900 Miles’, acknowledged a debt to Alex Campbell and Derroll Adams respectively. Indeed, the former ‘recycled’ instrumental ideas from Bert’s arrangement of ‘Blackwater Side’, which had itself yet to appear on record. It is very possible that Nat Joseph had insisted on repeating the first album’s formula of contemporary songs and instrumentals which were Bert’s trademark. Recording traditional songs at this stage was, he may have felt, an absurd idea. As it transpired, the new record was always going to suffer in the shadow of its predecessor. ‘In the short term this LP will sell exceptionally well, as it has every right to,’ wrote Dave Moran, in Folk Scene, ‘but in the long run it will add nothing to that first LP.’ This was a typically held view, although floor-singers around the country were ready and waiting for it.
‘The first one had permeated out slowly,’ remembers Ian Anderson, ‘but by the time the second one came out he was famous enough that people wanted to grab it immediately. It was like Dylan – after an album or two you got it the day it came out and you learned the songs or else all the other local singers had learned them first. There was a guy in Bristol called Tim Clutterbuck with an amazing memory for words. I remember one Dylan album came out and he had the whole thing down in forty-eight hours. So in Bristol Tim was the man to beat, and I’m sure there were people like that around the country!’
It may have been felt that this was a more drug-influenced record than before, but while dope-smoking was abundant among the residents and visitors at Somali Road, Bert had ceased to be an active partaker. ‘A lot of my writing is down to just imagery,’ says Bert. ‘That’s exactly how Bob Dylan works: it’s just putting words together, just the sheer imagery of things flashing through his mind. They don’t mean anything at all. I am a songsmith of the same ilk. I dream up imagery that can pose questions, questions that bother me, therefore I put them into a song. But I don’t think I’ve got anything that’s of value to other people’s way of life or anything. All I hope to do is to give something to people that they can think about.’
‘I never saw Bert smoke,’ says Roy Harper on the question of marijuana. ‘I don’t know why he didn’t. It might have helped him. To me it’s always been a tool for writing.’ A year or so later, in an interview for Danish television, Bert was pressed for his own views on drugs. In spite of his personal stance and the tragedy of Buck Polley, Bert was not to be cornered into dogma: ‘It depends on the individual,’ he said. ‘The world’s been using drugs ever since it was created. It’s up to your own self to determine whether drugs are a good or bad thing. But also it’s up to the individual if it helps him to do whatever he wants to do.’57
‘I’m not a believer in “the drug created the song”,’ offers Donovan. ‘A lot of people say, “Was it all those drugs you took that made you write all those wonderful songs?” and I say, “Yeah, sure – why don’t you go out and buy some drugs and write some lovely songs yourself?” Having said that, fair enough, “Strawberry Fields Forever” wasn’t written on a cup of tea and a biscuit.’
Nobody was writing about Strawberry Fields at Somali Road, but the scene there was typical of student life in any generation – crazy and fun for a time, perhaps, but not something any sane person can tolerate forever. John Challis, for one, had been a student long enough: ‘It was getting a bit decadent to my way of thinking,’ he says. ‘Most of us had been smoking an awful lot of weed for something like five years without a break, and there was a constant stream of people going through the Young Tradition’s place downstairs. I was starting to feel that I needed a change of air. I eventually decided to go back to college and do a postgraduate year which began in January 1966. I moved in with my girlfriend in Ladbroke Grove. Hanging around on someone else’s scene doesn’t really progress you in getting your own shit together. I’m one of the world’s great hangers-out, but there comes a point where you really do have to buckle down and do some work.’58
During November, the EFDSS were running a conference of regional folk club federations. Danny Kyle, organiser of the Paisley club, was one of the delegates and being in town was invited to a party at Somali Road: ‘It was the first time I’d smoked hash,’ said Danny. ‘I had my guitar with me – a three-chord merchant, playing my wee Scottish songs, and in the room there was Bert, Davy Graham and all that crowd. They started chopping up this black stuff, cooking it and smoking it, and I had a go of that. Then the guitar work started and I just quietly put my guitar away!’ Roy Harper, who lived only a few streets away, was at the same party. It was something of a rare contact, either socially or professionally, between Davy (who had just returned from four months in the Middle East), and Bert and John. They were, at the same time, both his devotees and his rivals: ‘Suffice to say I didn’t even pick my guitar up,’ says Roy. ‘Bert put his down after about five minutes and five minutes later so did John. Davy never managed to turn his talent into a brand that people could go out and buy and enjoy, but in those days he was just amazing. He would turn up and play the entirety of Ravel’s “Bolero”, which is a pretty strange thing to do, but you could tell where each instrument came in – the clarinet, the trombones, the bassoons – all in one guitar.’
In January, Andy Matthews could tentatively announce that Davy Graham had agreed to a Cousins residency on Fridays. But it was not to last. Davy was not one to be pinned down, although every time he did appear there queues down the street are always recalled. In retrospect, though, Davy’s moment had passed. Future recordings would be patchy, if occasionally brilliant, but with everyone from the Beatles down discovering India, the novelty value of Davy’s easternisms could no longer be relied upon. He was no songwriter, either, and his releases would appear less prolifically than those of either Bert Jansch or John Renbourn, while his presence on the domestic scene would be constantly interrupted by trips abroad. Live recordings from the period testify to moments of brilliance, but by all accounts the drugs were making his performances and behaviour unpredictable.
‘If you were a casual listener you were hardly aware of Davy,’ remembers Ashley Hutchings. ‘Regular club-goers in London obviously knew Davy well but the casual listener would have known Bert Jansch, and Davy hardly at all. Because Bert was the man on the road. That was my impression. As a guy in the audience I was told I should go and listen to Davy; Bert was the one you went to see because you wanted to see him. He was a romantic figure, a figurehead. Insofar as the audiences were concerned, Davy was a shadowy character and Bert was a hero – and that is a very big difference.’
‘We only kicked in in 1956,’ says Duffy Power, ‘into what you could call rock’n’roll, and that includes the folkies. And the first one to pop up who was decent, who was quite bright and inspirational, using world ideas, was Davy Graham. But then along comes another bloke who’s better. He may not have had Davy’s original fashions, but he had much more of it in the fingers – and that was Bert. And then up comes another one and another one. I think for Davy that must have been a bit of a blow. He was an inspiration of his time. He was inspired, but not a genius. Then again it’s maybe a kind of genius once, when it’s your moment. There are lots of things like that in life, when there’s somebody who for a certain moment will fly, will burst into flame. He was ahead of his time.’
‘When he was on this planet, Davy definitely had a
n aura,’ says Ian Anderson. ‘He was a legend in front of your eyes. You could hardly believe that you were lucky enough to be in the same room, he was that good, and talking to him offstage he was a lovely, unassuming bloke full of enthusiasms. He liked to cultivate a bit of an image but he was basically all right. John Renbourn was also very approachable and we became friends. But Bert seemed to throw up an aura of “Don’t come near me”. Even in the back room at the Cousins you wouldn’t approach him. It wasn’t that he was unfriendly – you just wouldn’t go and strike up a conversation with him. It wasn’t the done thing. Whether that was something he erected, or we erected in our own heads, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t say I was unique in that view.’
Bert wound up his Cousins residency on 23 December 1965, handing Thursdays over to Alexis Korner for the following year. No doubt in the spirit of Christmas, that final night was a treat for the regulars and something symbolic for all those on the stage and for the venue itself. Appearing together for one night only, in the heart of Soho, the three kings: Davy Graham, John Renbourn and Bert Jansch.
7
Pentangling
By the dawn of 1966, Bert Jansch was unassailably a star of the ‘folk’ underground. He had never been played on the radio, had never appeared on television and had given only one interview to date, but his reputation was spreading. The name alone was memorable, and out in the provinces thousands of kids were inspired and intrigued.
