Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  18. Sue Thompson: ‘Dave had independent money from some invention of his father’s or something, and so he never had to do any work. In a situation like that it becomes all too easy to become a dilettante – in Dave’s case to get an expensive camera, take up photography for a while and then pick up something else. Bert was the opposite – I don’t think he ever had any money!’

  19. Bert’s version of this incident is less colourful: he had, he believes, stumbled in on Mr Hand and the woman from the Chinese restaurant enjoying rather more than a bottle of whisky.

  20. Like John Challis, Pete Townshend was already familiar with the work of some of the people who had influenced Bert. The local record shop, otherwise rather conservative, stocked Leadbelly, Broonzy and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. These were consequently amongst the earliest records Townshend bought, but both he and Challis had already been exposed to the exotic record collection of a couple of American friends at the college. Tom Wright and Cam Bruce were studying photography. In Pete’s eyes, Tom was ‘a glamorous figure’, chased by girls, abundant with grass – perhaps too abundant. The police clamped down and a swift deportation order was applied, with the effect of a vast collection of prime US vinyl suddenly adrift. Records by Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, Ray Charles, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Smith, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf, even some Joan Baez and all sorts of other goodies on the Chess and Imperial labels – none commercially available in Britain at the time – were looking for a home. They didn’t have to look very far. Some of the collection was sold to David Blass; the bulk of it passed on long-term loan to Pete Townshend. It would provide both the knowledge and impetus for Pete to build up a collection of his own. Similar to David Blass, who enjoyed private means, Townshend was becoming relatively well-off within his peer group, albeit working long and hard for the privilege. His ‘school band’ the Detours had landed themselves on the books of a professional agency in November ’62 and were soon accumulating lucrative residencies, corporate socials and wedding gigs. His family were not wealthy but, by the time he met Bert, Pete was sharing a fine apartment with a friend, the rent easily covered by a student grant, and making phenomenal money with his band. From November ’62 well into 1964, the Detours were playing four or five shows a week at upwards of £12 a night. At the same time Pete was trying to get himself a degree. ‘I did go to my course leader and discuss the problem,’ says Townshend. ‘He was saying, “You’d be very good at graphics, you could be a good painter, what do you want to do?” At that time I was a bit whacko – I was talking about installation scuptures, auto-destructive art, all kinds of weird things. “The distraction is, I’ve got this little group,” I said, and he replied, “Well, how much do you make in this little group?” “Oh, about £30 a week.” “Leave!”’

  21. Anne played an unadvertised gig with Lou Killen at the Troubadour soon after she had arrived in London, around April 1964. Killen was, or had been, romantically involved with traditional singer Frankie Armstrong around this time. Anne’s next advertised gig was 31 July at the Broadside club at the Black Horse, with Alex Campbell.

  22. Owen married his current wife Ruth in 1965. In 1966, after Owen had spent time as a professional folksinger in London, they were back living in Edinburgh: ‘On one occasion,’ continues Owen, ‘when Bert was coming to visit Ruth and I in Edinburgh he saw Field in the railway station and ran away from him. The following day we had the drug squad round with warrants to search the premises and the persons of Bert and myself. No one knew that Bert was in town except the three of us, and of course Gary Field. I later challenged Field on this matter but he swore he had no involvement. Soon after this he was dead and I shed not one tear.’

  23. Gill Cook believes that Bill Leader had actively brought Bert down to London after the Edinburgh Folk Festival sessions with a view to making a record. Given that Bill had made similar overtures to Owen Hand this seems plausible but neither Bill nor Bert recalls this: it seems the recording of Bert Jansch was largely ad hoc, as described.

  24. Quote sourced from Touched By The Hand Of Bob, Dave Henderson, The Black Book Company, 1999. Like Briggs, Joan Baez was (from her career-making appearance at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 to the point in 1963 when she met Dylan and began covering his songs) exclusively a singer of traditional songs, and from the more mournful end of the genre at that. However, by 1963 Baez had released four albums and appeared on the cover of Time magazine, which is where any superficial comparison to Anne Briggs must be jettisoned as an attractive but unsustainable idea.

  25. Released in 1963, Hootenanny In London had been coordinated by Wally Whyton who was reportedly as ‘embarrassed as hell’ to find Briggs, who had simply been in the audience during the recording, prominently featured on the sleeve. Martin Carthy, yet to make a proper solo recording, was among those actually on the record: ‘No point in trying to hide it,’ he says. ‘It was dreadful.’ It could always have been worse: the working title had been Surfin’ Hootenanny.

  26. ‘The Spinners Tapes’, Karl Dallas, Folk News, 9/77. Further Spinners quotes are also from this source.

  27. In mid-1964 the Spinners went further down the road of light entertainment with a thirteen-week series for BBC Manchester called Dance and Skylark (during which they turned fully professional) wherein they were persuaded to perform with trained animals and sing sea-shanties from the deck of a ship wearing sou’westers. As long as the music retained some integrity, they felt, the tom-foolery that went along with it was fine. Occasionally, the demands of Light Entertainment were hard to swallow – a parody of ‘The Desert Song’ involving a dance routine in pin-striped suits is recalled – but the group knew the pros and cons of their medium and how far they could stretch it: ‘We had an unaccompanied British ballad on TV in 1964, you know,’ said Tony. ‘This is what people forget.’ The ballad in question was ‘Henry Martin’, later recorded by Bert Jansch.

  28. ‘Two Festivals’ Part 1, Ian Campbell, Folk Review, 5/77. There were thirteen episodes of Hullaballoo in all: two series, taped in June 1963 and circa April 1964. Remarkably, all survive.

  29. A second series of The Hoot’nanny Show, announced for autumn 1964, was never broadcast but was superseded in October 1964 by a new show, Singalong, also recorded in Edinburgh, with TV veterans Martin Carthy and Nadia Cattouse resident. Many people recall The Hoot’nanny Show’s producer W. Gordon Smith using it as a vehicle to feature his protégés the Corries, who went on to enjoy many more years of tartan TV celebrity in the manner of Hall & Macgregor. Surprisingly few recall Roy Guest’s involvement.

  30. It would appear that Roy had initially been on the Davidson Agency’s books as an artist before proving himself, by virtue of his massively attended ‘Brighton Hootenanny’ in June 1964, as a promoter whose golden touch was within a field outside of the agency’s previous experience. An MM piece by Ray Coleman in February 1964 had reported the Davidson Agency’s recent conference with delegates from student unions around Britain. A spokesperson noted that ‘the delegates did not go so far as to say that the next pop music rage would be folk, but they are certainly moving towards that music more than anything. It would seem folk is the coming thing.’

  31. Gill Cook believes the hotel session was the result of Owen, Bert, herself and Marian McKenzie (of Owen’s Three City Four group) leaving a Soho folk club at 2 a.m. and stumbling into Gary Davis and Otis Spann in D’Arblay Street ‘looking for some action’.

  32. ‘A Raver’s Guide To Soho’, John Platt, Comstock Lode c.1979.

  33. ‘The Alex Campbell Tapes’, Karl Dallas, Folk News, 6/78.

  34. Acoustic Routes pilot film, 1990. The pub was Finches, later homaged in a Jansch composition.

  35. Enhancing his theory, Townshend also believed, wrongly, that one of the previous tenants of 19 King’s Avenue had been a convicted heroin dealer. Regarding Bert’s appearance, as John Challis notes: ‘I remember Bert coming to London and being very broke and wearing a suit that someone had bought him, t
he idea being that he had to look respectable to make a career in London! He got very embarrassed about wearing this suit. I’d just bought myself a new pair of Levis so I gave him the old pair. They were pretty well worn out but Bert was glad to get them.’

  36. Part of this quote as note 32. Bert has subsequently denied or forgotten seeing an actual gig, as opposed to rehearsals, by The Who. Mid ’64 was nevertheless the period where Pete was perfecting his guitar-smashing routine, having begun it by inadvertently poking his guitar through the low roof at the Railway Hotel, Harrow.

  37. Bert would already have been aware of the Mingus tune ‘Better Git It In Your Soul’ (spelt variously) from its inclusion on the 1959 CBS live album Mingus Ah-Um – a favourite among the Edinburgh set. Another version appeared on the 1964 Impulse album Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, while a third (renamed ‘Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting’) was on Blues and Roots (1959). The EP in question was in the Philips Jazz Gallery series, released in 1960 and featuring the Mingus Ah-Um version. Pete would not have been aware that Bert already knew the tune. The matter is intriguing as both Jansch and Davy Graham would go on to record versions of the tune in late ’64, both released on albums in 1965. Bert maintains that his version, effectively rewritten and consequently retitled ‘Veronica’, comes directly from Davy Graham’s arrangement. As the Coia recordings seem to suggest, Bert was playing a version of this before either artist had recorded it. Davy Graham confirms that he was indeed playing his ground-breaking arrangement of the tune ‘a number of years’ before it appeared on his Folk, Blues & Beyond (1965) LP. The problem, then, is how did Bert hear it? He didn’t witness Graham playing anything until autumn 1964 but may conceivably have heard Davy’s arrangement on an amateur recording of the guitarist made in London in 1961 by Len Partridge. He had, after all, worked out ‘Angi’ by similar means. Entirely incidental to this, around 1961/62 Davy and a friend ran a somewhat bohemian café in Forest Hill, London. Its name, of course, was ‘Café Mingus’.

  38. One of the High Numbers’ Railway gigs, in August, was advertised in Melody Maker’s Folk Forum. Surely some mistake …

  39. Partly from Leader’s Tapes (BBC Radio 2, 1998), partly as note 9.

  40. Bert also recalls staying with songwriter Paul McNeil – almost certainly during the summer/autumn of 1964. Never a major name, McNeil had been co-billed with Bert on his 17 March 1964 Troubadour show, where Bert recalls him being a resident. At that time McNeil, Carthy and Paul Simon all lived near each other in Swiss Cottage and comprised, from Bert’s perspective, something of a clique. McNeil later partnered Linda Peters on record.

  41. Two guitars were used on Bert’s first album: one for accompanying vocal pieces, one for instrumentals. One had been borrowed from Sandy Darlington, of the duo Sandy & Jeannie, who lived nearby to Bill Leader, the other was owned by Les Bridger. Bert became flatmates with Les circa October/November 1964 and wound up purloining Les’s guitar to the extent of paying its h.p. instalments.

  42. This is conjecture: Bert distinctly recalls meeting Davy and Shirley at Leader’s flat and believes them to have been recording there in parallel with his own sessions. Graham was living nearby: ‘He’d be walking round like a young retired colonel,’ says Leader, ‘brisk walk, short hair cut, which was out of keeping at that time and very out of keeping with the sort of idea you had of him as well’. Davy himself recalls only the Decca sessions for Folk Roots, New Routes. Either way, Bert first saw Davy playing during this time and at Bill Leader’s flat.

  43. Penguin Encyclopedia Of Popular Music (2nd Edition), ed. Donald Clark (Penguin, 1998).

  44. ‘Roots Of Renbourn’, Maggie Holland, Folk Roots 4/93.

  45. MM, 17/1/76.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1. Zigzag, 9/74.

  2. From January 1965 Gill Cook partnered Roy Guest in running a club at Cecil Sharp House, where Roy had just taken the job of EFDSS agent. Gill, however, found Roy ‘rather slippery’ and the association was brief.

  3. The recording period is debatable. Bert has variously suggested it was ‘two or three sessions’ or a case of ‘every month or two I’d lay down a song until we got enough to fill an album’. The truth is somewhere in between. I estimate it to span September 1964 to January 1965. Bill Leader had previously, at his flat, recorded contemporary songwriter Paul Simon, on 23 April 1964. Topic turned the recordings down, they were never offered to Transatlantic and they have never surfaced since.

  4. Sounds, 9/1/71. Roughly half the material on his first album is glimpsed on the Glasgow live recordings of 1962-65, recorded largely prior to Bert Jansch’s release.

  5. 150,000 is the last figure quoted anywhere regarding the sales of Bert Jansch. The record has been repackaged several times, on both vinyl and CD, but its influence remains greater than its relatively modest sales may suggest. The figure of £100 for the album’s rights has become legendary but Bruce May, who managed Bert in the seventies, saw the contract then and was amazed to find that Nat, a stickler in matters of business, had deducted £10 for something or other. Bert received £90.

  6. Davy Graham’s project with Shirley Collins racked up at least thirteen performances between July 1964 and 30 May 1965 – some club dates but mostly concerts, concluding at the New Lyric Theatre with the New Jazz Orchestra. Shirley, a mother of two young children at the time and already pursuing a heavy schedule as a solo singer, had had enough: ‘It was really masterminded by my then husband, John Marshall,’ she told Folk Roots. ‘I didn’t think it was ever quite right, but I think it was a brave experiment. It became very difficult working with Davy because he was talented but moody, and a late train-catcher. It was a really interesting episode of my life but when John wanted to push it a bit further, into working with a jazz orchestra, I opted out.’

  7. ‘Folk Routines’, Ken Hunt, Folk Roots, 5/97.

  8. ‘In the eye of the hurricane’, Jas Obrecht, Guitar Player, 3/92. ‘The first record that he made,’ continued Young, ‘great record. I was particularly impressed by “The Needle Of Death”. This guy was just so good. Years later I wrote “Ambulance Blues” for On The Beach, and I picked up the melody from his record – the guitar part, exactly – without realising. Years later someone mentioned it to me and sure enough, it’s almost like a note for note cop of his thing. I did meet him once when I went to England in the early seventies and got together with Pentangle. But I had a big limo and everything, because I didn’t know where I was going, and they kind of had an attitude about me, like I was a pop superstar and kind of a dickhead.’

  9. Pete Frame’s vocation began with founding the pioneer music magazine Zigzag and the ‘Rock Family Trees’ for which he is still best known. Part of this quote, like others below, is from an interview with the author, part from Frame’s detailed memoir ‘Catching Dreams From The Clouds’, Zigzag Wanderer, No.5 1999.

  10. MM, 6/2/65.

  11. ‘Donovan: heading for fame or misfortune’, Bob Dawbarn, MM 20/2/65.

  12. Dorris Henderson has often cited her arrival in London as being early 1965 but in MM, 14/11/64 she was ‘currently taking London by storm’. The following week she is mentioned as resident at the Roundhouse. She has also said that her second gig was at the Student Prince. Not so. Dorris was indeed at its opening night, along with Alex Campbell, but the venue only opened on 2/1/65.

  13. ‘Roots Of Renbourn’, Maggie Holland, Folk Roots, 4/93. Davy Graham played with the second version of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers for about three months, subsequent to his 1961 – 62 association with Alexis Korner. Unlike Korner, blues-purist Mayall was only ever advertised once at a folk venue, the Troubadour, 22 June 1963, with Martin Carthy.

  14. Between October 1964 and March 1965 Anne had fourteen advertised gigs in the London area: five were with Bert.

  15. When Bert came to record ‘Go Your Way’, on Nicola (1967), he wrote an extra verse for it, giving the song a sense of despair missing from Anne’s more poignant reading on Anne Briggs (1971): ‘I never sang it becau
se I never felt easy about that particular verse,’ says Anne. ‘There was always angst in Bert’s life and I think that came through. I don’t think I suffered angst at all.’

  16. ‘Davy Graham, acoustic pioneer’, MM, 18/7/70.

  17. Part of this quote from Dirty Linen 10/90, part from an interview with the author.

  18. The only occasion Bert and Anne performed together was for the BBC documentary Acoustic Routes, filmed at the old Howff building in Edinburgh, March 1992. They played ‘Go Your Way’ and ‘Blackwater Side’.

  19. Journeyman: An Autobiography, Ewan MacColl (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990). Unless otherwise noted all further MacColl quotes in this chapter are from this source.

  20. As Far As The Eye Can Sing: An Autobiography, Frankie Armstrong with Jenny Pearson (The Women’s Press, 1992). As the group continued, Armstrong notes that: ‘Ewan’s incapacity to brook criticism became increasingly evident and those members who would voice criticisms on behalf of the group would often be verbally annihilated by his articulate, mind-blitzing self-defence. He could always produce half a dozen authorities to justify any action he took.’

  21. Noted down by Richard Lewis, Bert’s 19/3/65 set was: ‘Key To The Highway / Rockin’ Chair Blues / One Day Old / Come Back Baby / John Henry’.

  22. There is an element of conjecture here. Anne cannot recall exactly why the co-writing with Bert at Gill’s flat stopped suddenly but feels that one of them must have gone off travelling. The evidence points at Anne, who is known to have been involved with Koerner for a while. Koerner’s first UK gig – at yet another club run by Les Bridger – was 14 March 1965. There are suggestions that Anne may not have turned up for some advertised London shows in February and March, with none advertised for April. But she was certainly present again for a show with the Dubliners on 7 May, leading indirectly to her long-term involvement with Irish musician Johnny Moynihan.