by Colin Harper
Ironically perhaps, the final chapter proper is the most sketchy in its detail: this is partly to avoid situations which may yet have repercussions for Bert Jansch and/or for others. There is, for example, one pseudonym employed in this chapter which, while obvious and no doubt amusing to those in the know, is there by that individual’s request. Save for that one, I welcome as ever any correspondance on the matter of corrections!
I gratefully acknowledge the recollections, and often subsequent time and effort in responding to written queries or in referee-ing draft chapters, freely given by the following:
Kresanna Aigner, Ian Anderson (Folk Roots), Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull), Dave Arthur, Steve Ashley, Chris Barber, Steve Benbow, David Blass, Maggie Boyle, Anne Briggs, Martin Carthy, John Challis, Rod Clements, Frank Coia, Gail Colson, Gill Cook, Charlotte Crofton-Sleigh, Judy Cross, Maggie Cruickshank, Donovan, Bruce Dunnet, Pete Frame, Dick Gaughan, Owen Hand, Roy Harper, John Harrison, Dorris Henderson, Mary Hogg (nee Jansch), Mick Houghton, Ashley Hutchings, Hamish Imlach, Andy Irvine, Bert Jansch, Heather Jansch (nee Sewell), Loren Jansch (nee Auerbach), Martin Jenkins, Wizz Jones, Nathan Joseph, Peter Kirtley, Danny Kyle, Bill Leader, Jo Lustig, Bruce May, Jacqui McShee, Dolina MacLennan, Ralph McTell, Christy Moore, Michael O’Dhomnail, Clive Palmer, Len Partridge, Nigel Portman Smith, Duffy Power, Val Power, John Renbourn, Brian Shuel, Al Stewart, Sue Stockwell (formerly Thompson), Steve Tilston, Pete Townshend, Norma Waterson and Robin Williamson.
I have also benefitted from correspondance, some very detailed and much of it included herein as direct quotation, with the following people who were not interviewed on tape: Joe Boyd, Dan Ar Braz, Dave Cartwright, Karl Dallas, Robin Denselow, Jerry Gilbert, Gordon Giltrap, Davy Graham (via Kay Thomson), Rab Noakes, Stuart Wallace and John Watt. In addition, many of those who were interviewed also corresponded with clarifications, corrections and many kind words of encouragement.
In addition to the co-operation of those who played a direct role in the story, I am grateful to everyone who responded to my requests for reminiscences as published in Acoustic Guitar, Blues & Rhythm, Folk Roots, Mojo and Record Collector and also to the readers of Rosemary Lane. I would like to thank in particular, for photos, memorabilia and ‘ordinary fan’ recollections: Kieran Bracken, Neil Brown, Dave Burrows, Doug Dalwood, Alan Davidson, Steve DiBartola, Mike Fox, Lars Fromholt, John Gibson, Colin Grafton, Rod Harbinson, Mike Head, Bob Jones, Richard Lewis, Mauro Regis, Chip Reynolds, Bill Stephens and David Suff. Particular thanks to Brian Shuel for great generosity – repeated, with typical enthusiasm, in his co-operation on this edition’s new cover design – with regard to his unique and splendid photo collection. The photo section design (and endless reams of scanning) was gamefully undertaken by Mark Case.
There are many people who provided generous support either practical or in terms of encouragement, and often over the protracted period of this book’s creation. Very special thanks go to Colin and Anita Davies for putting me up innumerable times in London, with a remarkable generosity which single-handedly made research trips and consequently, in no small measure, this very book possible. If Anita suspected the whole thing to be a figment of my imagination, I have been relieved at last to prove her wrong! Also in terms of hospitality, grateful thanks to Jules, David and Connie; Kate Casey; the late John Platt; John and Jo Renbourn; Heather Jansch; Steve and Maggie Tilston; Bert and Loren.
I am also grateful for the support of the following writers – from general encouragement to specific help on their topics of expertise: Dr. Mark Archer, Stuart Bailie, Johnny Black, Sean Body, Chris Charlesworth, Tony Clayton-Lea, Nick Coleman, John Crosby, Karl Dallas, Mike Dewe, Peter Doggett, Pete Frame, Jerry Gilbert, Pat Gilbert, Ceasar Glebbeek, Raymond Greenoaken, Chris Groom, Geoff Harden, David Harrison, Clinton Heylin, Dave Ian Hill, Trevor Hodgett, Patrick Humphries, Ken Hunt, Jim Irvin, Richard Johnson, Neville Judd, Anthony ‘The Destroyer’ McCann, Ewan McVicar, John Platt, Chris Smith, Mat Snow, Val Wilmer and Ian Woodward. I am especially grateful to Sean Body of (the sadly no more) Helter Skelter bookshop for his regular ‘on call’ assistance in answering queries at no cost to myself.
For access to archive print material I am indebted to: the staff of the National Sound Archive at the British Library; the staff of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Ian Anderson for the Eric Winter archive; and many other individuals credited above. For particularly elusive material I recommend the service offered by Clive Whichelow at ‘Backnumbers’: www.backnumbers.co.uk And for all the reams of cheap photocopying, thank you to Joan and the office staff at Christian Fellowship Church, Strandtown. I’m sure you were wondering what it was all for!
It would be a lonely business working entirely in a vacuum on a project like this. That task, others like it and life in general are enriched by having pals like Trevor Leeden, Carol-Anne Lennie, Chris Fowler, Judy Dyble and the Mellow Candle girls Alison O’Donnell and Clodagh Simmonds – fellow enthusiasts and the finest of people, an email away. The cap is similarly doffed to Matt Quinn and Jan Leman, film directors and fellow travellers in the ‘promote Bert’ club, for their example and encouragements. If only this book were to generate enough interest for someone to commercially release your work on DVD … It would be remiss of me not to thank here also – for quite remarkable tolerance of my extracurricular schemes, of which this book is but one – my colleague Geraldine Devlin, at a certain music college library in Belfast.
Two books that were directly inspirational to both my approach and my confidence in this venture: The Inklings: CS Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkein, Charles Williams and Their Friends by Humphrey Carpenter (George, Allen & Unwin, 1978) and Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro (Bloomsbury, 1996). I recommend both as triumphs of biographical writing. In similar vein, it was a thrill to find, since the book’s original publication, that Errol Fuller, author of wonderful, inspiring books including The Great Auk (Errol Fuller, 1999), Extinct Birds (OUP, 2001) and Dodo: from Extinction to Icon (Collins, 2002), was as much a fan of my work in this book as I was, and am, of his. Thanks Errol!
One acknowledgement oversight in the hardback version of this book concerns its very title. Although never recorded by Bert, ‘Dazzling Stranger’ is a stunningly poignant song written by Alan Tunbridge and recorded by Wizz Jones on his eponymous and now rare 1969 LP. The song seems to me to encapsulate the combination of fragility and profundity that defined the best of the 1960s singer-songwriters. The original Wizz Jones recording can be heard on the 1992 compilation The Village Thing Tapes while a re-recording inspires the name of his 1995 album Dazzling Stranger, on the US label Scenescof. Further information on Wizz and mail-order facilities for his past and present releases can be found at www.wizzjones.com
Last but not least, thanks to my family for all their support and my love and deepest gratitude to my wife Heather, who first met me in December 1997 and was thrust fairly swiftly thereafter into the rarefied lifestyle of playing partner to a biographer. It was in no small measure through Heather’s unquestioning support that it was possible for me to dedicate a year, over 1998—1999, more or less exclusively towards the writing this book. And let’s not forget to add on a few late nights in January 2006 as well. I’m afraid to say, Heather, that all that bashing-away on the PC at two in the morning wasn’t the cat working on a rip-roaring bestseller – it was only me. And now I’ve stopped.
Notes
CHAPTER ONE
1. There are, for example, only five bearers of the Jansch name in the current Austrian telephone directory – one of them named Herbert.
2. Margaret was granted a divorce from Herbert Jansch in 1954.
3. Disc, 18/4/70. Even in the mid-seventies, when songs about the experience had worked themselves out of his system and when he had been a modestly well-known figure within Britain for some time, and regularly visible on television during the Pentangle years, 1968 – 72, Bert could still claim to feel ‘bitterly disappointed’ that his father had never bothered to get i
n touch.
4. Ptolomaic Terrascope, 7/97.
5. ‘The Saturday Movie’, In The Round, 1986.
6. NME, 21/5/77.
7. As note 3.
8. Quotes combined from: Zigzag, 9/74; Frets, 3/80; Dirty Linen, 10/90; Ptolomaic Terrascope, 7/97. Bert has told this sory several times, with slight variation in detail – principally, on how old he was when trying to build guitars. Various ages between seven and fifteen have been given, but the inspiration of Lonnie Donegan would place this activity most likely between 1956 and 1958.
9. Guitarist, 3/95.
10. ‘When I Get Home’, Reflection, 1971.
11. Zigzag, 9/74.
12. As note 3.
CHAPTER TWO
1. Guinness Encyclopedia Of Popular Music (Concise Edition, 1993)
2. As note 1.
3. Alexis Korner: The Biography, Harry Shapiro (Bloomsbury, 1996). Although the British Musicians’ Union employed a ban on American musicians working in Britain between 1935 and 1956, in response to a similar ban on British players in America, blues artists were nevertheless able to slip through the net by applying for work permits as ‘entertainers’ rather than ‘musicians’. On the subject of Broonzy’s anti-racist commitment, several national newspapers in the UK reported on 22/1/ 99 the bizarre instance of racism engendered by the regular and well-intentioned singing of his song ‘Black, Brown and White’ in a school assembly in Bury. The irony of the chorus, ‘If you’re white you’re alright / If you’re brown stick around / If you’re black get back, get back, get back’, was clearly not appreciated as the heads of those assembled regularly turned to the only black pupil in the school.
4. Acoustic Routes, BBC Scotland 25/1/93.
5. The Story Of The Blues, Paul Oliver, 1969 (Updated Edition, Pimlico 1997).
6. As note 5.
7. Skiffle: The Story Of Folk-Song With A Jazz Beat by Brian Bird was published in 1958. Forty years later, the skiffle buff’s bookshelf trebled in weight with an anecdotal compendium from Chas McDevitt Skiffle: The Definitive Inside Story (Robson, 1997) and an academic analysis from Mike Dewe The Skiffle Craze (Planet, 1998).
8. ‘The first king of Britpop’, Neil Spencer, The Observer, 10/1/99.
9. Mike Dewe, in The Skiffle Craze, concludes that there is no evidence for the word ‘skiffle’ being used to describe a form of music as such, or being part of any group’s name, before the war. Rather, it was one of many euphemisms to describe a house-rent party. He also mentions the tantalising story of one Bill Skiffle, a poor black man particularly known for such events. Karl Dallas points out that Alan Lomax wrote an interesting piece for MM in the fifties ‘relating skiffle to the minstrel shows of Victorian times, pointing out that though black influenced (like the minstrels) it was in fact very English (like Morris dancing and the sea shanty, both black influenced English movements). This is relevant in considering Lonnie Donegan’s later career in panto (another black import) and cabaret.’ On a similar theme, Mike Dewe makes the observation that while the ‘original’ American skiffle was largely instrumental and piano based, its British counterpart was guitar based and largely vocal.
10. Adapted from the uncredited sleeve note to Brownie & Sonny’s At The Bunkhouse, 1965. Much of the preceding biographical material on the pair also derives from this source, which seems more reliable than contradictory information on McGhee in the Guinness Encyclopedia.
11. The Skiffle Craze, Mike Dewe (Planet, 1998). In the preface to this comprehensive and authoritative account of the movement’s rise and fall, Dewe notes that from conversations with Chris Barber himself ‘there seems to be a query as to Lonnie Donegan’s involvement with his band prior to 1952’. Other evidence appears to contradict this recollection.
12. As note 1. Ken Colyer, in his autobiography When Dreams Are In The Dust (Ryarsh, Kent, Milbury 1989), recounts how he acquired a collection of Leadbelly 78s in New York and a guitar in Canada during 1947. These are emphasised by Mike Dewe as possibly crucial events in the skiffle story, although both he and Shapiro mention the curious case of the Original London Blue Blowers, a seemingly unrecorded 1945 – 48 British ‘spasm’ band – ‘spasm’ being a variation on skiffle based around kazoos and exemplified during skiffle’s boom years by Russell Quaye’s City Ramblers. The OLBB resurfaced on the 1957 bandwagon as the Bill Bailey Skiffle Group.
13. As note 11.
14. As note 8. Karl Dallas recalls that ‘Rock Island Line’ got its first airplay on the BBC’s Sunday morning Christopher Stone show: ‘Jeff Smith of MM told me that when the song came on he immediately slapped on his tape recorder – which most of us had in readiness at all times because “folk” snippets on air were so few and far between – and was quite irritated later to find that it was not in fact a “genuine” black artist singing, but a cockney cowboy from Glasgow.’
15. Dirty Linen, 10/90.
16. As note 8. It is fair to say that of all the skifflers Donegan had always employed the widest repertoire, adapting material by white folk and country artists including Woody Guthrie, the Carter Family and Hank Williams into his act.
17. ‘A Raver’s Guide To Soho’, John Platt, Comstock Lode, c.1979. Some of this material was later included in his London’s Rock Routes (Fourth Estate, 1985).
18. The People, 6/10/57. Sourced from ‘English Folk Revival: The Early Years’, Colin Irwin, Southern Rag No.19, Jan-March 1984.
19. Emblematic of the period, the 2 i’s was a coffee bar with a smoother, hipper agenda (daddy-o). It opened its doors in 1955, catering for sharply dressed suburban kids and became in no time at all the prime source of all those clean-cut British ‘rock’n’roll’ crooners – Tommy Steele, Terry Dene, Cliff Richard et al. – who littered the stages of producer Jack Good’s throwaway pop TV programmes for the next few years: ‘It was the first and most successful purely teenage meeting place,’ notes Platt, ‘complete with juke box. When skiffle started Tommy Steele worked there, promptly got discovered and they were made.’ The first mention of Bunjies operating as a music venue was in February 1962 when Colin Wilkie and Malcolm Price started a folk club on the premises. Unlike other Soho venues, it rarely advertised in MM and thrived on word-of-mouth. Back in the fifties, with some poetic justice Chas McDevitt – who had enjoyed a 250,000-seller hit with veteran songster Elizabeth Cotten’s ‘Freight Train’, unscrupulously claiming the authorship himself – ploughed his royalties into a Soho coffee bar of that name, modelling it on the 2 i’s, aiming it squarely at the beat crowd and failing to fool anyone. Cotten had been employed as a nanny to the Seeger family in America, and Peggy had helped her to copyright the song although, as Steve Benbow suggests, ‘I don’t suppose she wrote it either. It’s the same chord sequence as “Railroad Bill” …’ With some assistance from her Brit-folk pals, Cotten sued MacDevitt and his singer Nancy Whiskey in 1960. MacDevitt maintains in his 1997 book Skiffle that the problem was amicably settled out of court but Whiskey was fed up with the whole affair and successfully disappeared until 1998’s ‘Roots Of British Rock’ skiffle revival show at the Royal Albert Hall. She sang ‘Freight Train’.
20. The Skiffle Cellar opened during 1957, although Quaye’s City Ramblers had been active since 1954, playing often at the Princess Louise during 1956. Also on Greek Street was John Hasted’s 44 Skiffle Club. The John Hasted Skiffle & Folksong Group, as they were known, included future soloists Redd Sullivan and Shirley Collins. Their repertoire, reflecting Hasted’s keen hope for a full-scale folk revival, included British songs alongside the standard American fare. Karl Dallas points out that Hasted was ‘a very influential figure in his time, doing more to spread the gospel of folk outside of London than anyone else’. Hasted was then a doctor of physics at University College, later a professor at Birkbeck. Dallas met him through Russell Quaye’s first vocalist, Hylda Sims, whom he had met at a Young Communist League social. ‘Since I am virtually musically illiterate,’ says Dallas, ‘I used to sing him my new songs over the phone from my newspaper
office in Fleet Street to his physics lab at University College and he would note them down to appear in Sing.’ Hasted married in the early sixties and his wife persuaded him to ‘give up’ folk.
21. Benbow himself has never given the matter much thought: ‘What about Elton Hayes?’ he suggests. ‘He was Alan A’Dale in the Robin Hood TV series. He was accompanying English folk songs on guitar when I was at school. A very good guitarist. I used to listen to him on Children’s Hour …’ Regarding Elton Hayes, Karl Dallas believes he accompanied a ‘proper’ traditional singer, Bob Arnold, on a couple of HMV 78s. Arnold subsequently enjoyed fame in that everyday story of country folk, The Archers, on BBC Radio 4.
22. Barrack Room Ballads, Topic 1958.
23. Journeyman: An Autobiography, Ewan MacColl, Sidgwick & Jackson 1990. Subsequent MacColl quotes this chapter are from this source unless otherwise credited.
24. None of Benbow’s recordings are currently available on CD. I’m indebted to John Beecher at Rollercoaster Records for providing a copy of an as yet unreleased 1958 live tape – an intoxicating melange of folk, jazz, cabaret and calypso.
25. ‘Cynic’s Progress’, Maggie Holland, Folk Roots 10/90.
26. As note 25.
27. As note 25. Bentley and Craig were two Croydon youths who were charged with shooting a policeman during a robbery in 1951. Derek Bentley was executed for the crime but there was widespread public controversy at the time, believing Craig (too young to be hanged) to be solely responsible.
