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55 f S


o after that fond initiation, Fri- day nights were folk club nights. It didn’t matter who was on. Great traditional song inter- preters like Nic Jones, Dave Bur-


land and Martin Carthy. Good-timers like Hamish Imlach, Alex Campbell, Derek Brimstone, Johnny Silvo and – in his rip- roaring pre-Planxty wildness – Christy Moore. Visiting Americans, blues gui- tarists, country singers, would-be comedi- ans… it made no odds. You went anyway.


You went to nail your colours to the mast because this was your tribe, your identity. You went to drink with your mates and to sing the roof off. You went to listen and learn. You went to meet like- minded souls. Some even went to get laid.


No mics. No hiding place. The much- maligned floor singer system wasn’t an issue at the Star. Not when you had won- derful characters like Danny Denningberg, the Labour mayor of Godalming, belting out When The Old Dun Cow Caught Fire as if his life depended on it. I often wondered what he would have made of Bellow- head’s version. And I once won a High Level Ranters LP in the raffle so no com- plaints about raffles here.


One night the Scottish travelling singer Lizzie Higgins – daughter of the great Jeannie Robertson – was the guest. She stopped halfway through a long bal- lad, stormed off the little area at the front which passed as the stage, burrowed in her handbag to fish out her purse and with a face like thunder and a choice, if largely unintelligible volley of curses, flung a bunch of coins at two girls who were giggling at the back and told them to get out. She carried on but her heart wasn’t in it, announcing at the end she’d never play the Star again… and to my knowledge, never did.


Lots of nights are embedded in the


memory. The club held a special concert to showcase Mr Fox, the only time an electric band ever played there. It was sensational. Another time there was great dismay in the place when MC Mark Berry announced that the advertised guests Robin & Barry Dransfield – probably the hottest act of the day – were unable to appear. Taking their place, he said, was a Scottish singer… called Dick Gaughan. There were groans. The Dransfields were dearly loved; nobody had heard of Dick Gaughan. But he came on, gripped the audience from the start, received encore after encore and of course went on to become one of the scene’s most compelling attractions.


Even the singers’ nights were impres- sive. Late in the proceedings on one such evening, there was a kerfuffle on the stair- case, the door flew open and in marched The Spinners, in full yellow-shirted stage regalia, to sing a few songs. Then the biggest folk stars of the day – they had their own TV series and everything – they’d been appearing at Guildford Civic Hall up the road but they were ingrained in the whole ethos of the clubs.


Because that was the way of things then. Enthused by the music, The Spinners had set up their own club in Liverpool. Just as the Watersons had done in Hull. Just as


Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger had done in London. Just as the High Level Ranters had done in Newcastle. Just as the Ian Camp- bell Folk Group had done in Birmingham.


And they all went up and down the country appearing at one another’s clubs. An organic scene born out of the short-lived skiffle craze that had implanted in a genera- tion of 1950s teenagers a fleeting knowl- edge and an enduring fascination with the American blues and folk songs which had fuelled Lonnie Donegan, The Vipers and all the other skifflers. And when skiffle per- ished as swiftly as it had arrived, the skiffle groups morphed into folk groups.


At the Ballad & Blues Folk Club in Lon- don presided over by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger burst into laughter hearing a Lon- doner called Long John Baldry attempting to conjure the spirit of the Deep South through the songs of Huddie Ledbetter. An ungallant reaction, maybe, which required an explanation before the club committee, who did not think any singer should be regarded with such disrespect; but it triggered a club decision that still gets hotly debated today… that perform- ers at that club should only play songs derived from their own heritage. They weren’t allowed, either, to repeat them- selves and sing the same song within a six- week cycle.


Widely ridiculous as this might seem – and hardly helped by MacColl’s authoritar- ian reputation – it forced the club’s resi- dents to back off from the American mate- rial they’d relied on heavily and discover and explore their own hidden tradition, the positive results of which are still vibrantly evident today.


But that was then and this is now. There are but a fraction of the number of clubs today than in their heyday… and they can be a chastening experience, populated by a clientele largely well beyond retirement age. You look around and think ,“what are all these old people doing here?” and then realise you are one of them.


We are a long way from the days when the likes of The Spinners, the Ranters and their ilk would plunge down south after finishing work on a Friday to


spend a weekend singing in London, drinking the city dry and sleeping on strangers’ floors before hammering it back to Liverpool or Newcastle or wherever in the early hours of Monday, hungover and bleary-eyed, to take their place at work.


Although… if you’ve got a few hours


the Young ‘Uns will certainly furnish you with a thousand and one hilarious anec- dotes about their adventures with exactly that sort of behaviour.


But we are a long way from the days when you could go to a folk club every night of the week in Liverpool, Manch- ester or London. The days when Bert Jan- sch, John Renbourn, Davy Graham, Roy Harper, John Martyn et al would drift into Soho’s all-night tumbledown Les Cousins club as a matter of course to play a little bit, drink coffee and have a sleep. The days when Paul Simon pleaded for folk club gigs and sat on Widnes station writing Homeward Bound. The days when Martin Carthy befriended Bob Dylan after meet- ing him at the King & Queens, taught him some traditional songs and took him back to his flat, where it was so cold they chopped up a piano (with a samurai sword no less!) for firewood.


artists’ eyes – do still exist, with loyal audi- ences supporting them each week; but they are becoming scarcer as those who’ve put their souls into running them for so many years lose the will and energy or, inevitably, pass away. In many ways these are the folk world’s real unsung heroes, investing a lifetime of passion and belief in the folk club ideal, obdurately keeping faith with their principles, even as the tide turned from the cool, trendy, revolution- ary spirit of those early days into cold indifference and, eventually, harsh scorn as musicians, audiences and organisers grew old at the same time.


T


Heroes like the late Ted Poole, a com- mitted socialist, singer and campaigner who recognised the connection between


A folk club in 1962. Floor spot from Bob Dylan. Bert Lloyd, Ewan MacColl and others listen…


he archetypal folk clubs of yore – dingy room in pub, floor singers, raffles, primitive ampli- fication if at all, front rows star- ing into the whites of the


Photo: Brian Shuel


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