The present winter conjures up the vision of waiting for a bus in Seabrook on the coast road between Hythe and Folkestone and watching, through the sodium street lighting, the mass of snow falling on me and everything else. This was New Years Eve 1961 and I was leaving home for the first time. I got to the station in time but the train took nearly seven hours to reach Charing Cross through the Kentish snows. My first contact with work was to ring in and tell them I had been stranded on a train all night and would be in the next day. 1962 was not starting very well for this 18 year old.
My accommodation was primitive and had been found by a school friend who had moved to London about six months earlier. It was at the Youth Travel Bureau at 16, Cranley Gardens South Kensington and the room was split off from another resident’s room by a dividing wall of sorts. It was cheap and I soon found out why. The food was inedible, the rooms were freezing and the two characters who ran it knew full well that the cheapness kept a near full hostel throughout the year. Among the victims who endured this were some estate agency students of some kind who must have been studying nearby. As temporary residents these were the remand types, while we felt more like properly sentenced miscreants, especially when we found out that paying rent in arrears was not such a good idea when you went to move on. All the other landlords wanted rent in advance and so to be able to pay off the hostel’s rent in arrears and a new landlord all on one day meant that many people just did a moonlight flit.
Somehow or other we found a small bed sit further down the Old Brompton Road in Drayton Gardens. In one short walk we moved from South Kensington to Chelsea. It was a major cultural shift however. Our bed sit, with its own little balcony, was one room in an apartment on the third floor of Drayton Court opposite the Paris Pullman Cinema. This was what I would now call an art film venue in the nicest possible sense. I remember going to see Fellini’s 8½ but gave Last Year in Marienbad a miss as I was still trying to work out what the hec the other film had been about. Instead of becoming a film buff I became a regular visitor to our nearest acceptable coffee bar, The Troubadour, in Earls Court. Yet another short walk down the Brompton Road we soon discovered the club in its cellar which by today’s standards would be a health and safety nightmare. At the time it was a very warm, comfortable, and most important to a clerk with few prospects on £7 a week, just affordable. Such were my finances I never gave the poetry readings or the flamenco nights a go. I didn’t even buy copies of the new satirical magazine which was specially acquired by the proprietor hot off the press on publication day. When I did eventually borrow a copy of Private Eye I understood why the cafe had been filled with so much laughter so soon after its delivery.
The current Troubadour Coffee Bar and Club, which now occupies much extended premises, records on its website , ‘ the roster of troubadours ... includes Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Elvis Costello...’ but sadly doesn’t mention Martin Carthy ( awarded the MBE in 1998 for services to music) who was a resident singer. He also performed with Redd Sullivan’s Thameside Four. Sadly I don’t think I was there the night he brought along Bob Dylan anymore than I can remember Paul Simon dropping in. They would have all been part of a glorious procession of new voices from a world I hadn’t known anything about. At one time or another during those early years of the English Folk Revival anyone who was anyone, or no one, took a spot in that dark, smoky, crowded and wonderful cellar. I now know that Bob Dylan stayed with Martin Carthy during his cold winter visit to London. He had been asked to take part in a film for BBC TV called, Madhouse on Castle Street (1962) out of which came the The Ballad of the Gliding Swan.
It was so cold that he and Martin chopped up an old piano that happened to be in Martin’s garden for extra warmth from the open fire. I also now know that Martin is credited with being an inspiration for both Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and that there was an English folk tour circuit developing for American singers. That is why Simon and Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound came to be inspired by waiting in the cold for a train at Staly Bridge station where I am told a plaque notes this event.
The harmonies and singers I heard at the Troubadour in those days have stayed with me. I heard the guitar and the banjo played in a way which I had never heard on the Home Service or BBC television. I couldn’t understand where all this music was coming from; never having heard of Cecil Sharpe House or been aware of how much music had been preserved by the English and Scottish immigrants to America. I knew a bit about traditional jazz and followed skiffle’s short life. ‘Trad Jazz’ had been my first big musical enthusiasm in the late fifties but it was only later that I understood how all this joined up through the migrations to North America from Europe and the awfulness of the slave trade from which so many of our cities profited and on which many of our industries depended. I was eventually to learn the awful truth why the slave traders made sure there was a primitive banjo and other African instruments on board for the gruesome practice of ‘dancing the slaves’. By making them dance this warded off their wish to die while at the same time exercising them in an attempt to keep mortality rates at an acceptable level while the slaves were chained to the deck in the squalor of a slave ship. I had no idea that playing a funny sort of banjo in such a peculiar way ( nothing like George Formby or the Black and White Minstrel Show) had come to me by such a vicious route and at such an awful price. In the meantime the ignorance of my youth shielded me from this history while I soaked up the music of a momentous musical period I could not appreciate was happening around me.
Dacier
For full details of the Troubadour Cafe and Club and events go to: http://www.troubadour.co.uk/
Also, why not follow @FolkWorkshops on twitter
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