Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Nine)

 

There are some things about 2025 I would be quite happy to forget, events that leave me feeling cold inside, and there are some things from this year that I hope will be with me forever. I am pretty sure that seeing Bonnie Dobson perform on a baking hot summer’s evening on an old boat moored near Canary Wharf is something I will never forget, and I know that this is a memory I shall cherish. She was backed by The Hanging Stars (minus a couple, plus a few, apparently) who made a glorious chiming folk rock racket over which Bonnie ably projected with the grace and grit of someone far younger than her 84-years. It was an incredibly moving occasion.

Ahead of the show I couldn’t help overhearing a conversation between, I think, Bonnie’s daughter and a guy in a Topic Records t-shirt who was clearly involved with the folk scene and mentioned that he’d been lucky enough to get Bonnie out of ‘retirement’ in 2012 to appear at an event to mark the 50^th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s first British performance, which was at the King & Queen in Foley Street, in London’s Fitzrovia district, which made me choke on my apple juice as this was a pub I had once known well.

Back in, I think, 1990 I went to a series of shows at the King & Queen, saw some very special performances there, but I am pretty sure no one mentioned Bob Dylan had played there in 1962. It would have been a nice cool connection to play with. Why didn’t anyone tell me? Oh well, what the hell. Too late now. Anyway, the story goes Bob was in London, having been invited to be part of a BBC drama, and at a loose end one evening went along to a folk night at the K&Q organised by Martin Carthy, who recognised Bob from a current copy of the Sing Out! magazine and got him to sing.

I am sure Martin tells the story far better than me, and has no doubt had to repeat it many times. Something I read about Martin a couple of years ago on The Quietus’ site has stayed with me, and that was where he talks about Miles’ Sketches of Spain: “I think it’s a very beautiful album. I had it because somebody told me to go and buy it. I saw it in a box at Mole Jazz close to Kings Cross Station, near where a friend of mine Sydney Carter, who wrote songs, used to live, and thought ‘Well they’re supposedly hard to find, I should get one.’ Then it sat on my shelf, ignored for years. One day, I just put it on and was completely transfixed by the music.”

Coincidentally or not, I have been thinking a lot about Martin Carthy and Sydney Carter recently. I am guessing those among you of the same vintage as me will immediately associate Sydney’s song ‘Lord of the Dance’ with school assemblies, possibly along with something like ‘Morning Has Broken’ which had been a hit for Cat Stevens. Until recently I assumed this was one of Cat’s own songs, but it seems the words are by the poet Eleanor Farjeon and are set to a traditional Gaelic melody.

I also assumed ‘Lord of the Dance’ was as old as the hills, something reinforced on hearing echoes of it in Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. In a way it was, as both Copland and Carter drew inspiration from the old Shaker hymn ‘Simple Gifts’. Sydney’s words were from the early 1960s, and his hymn was never a hit as far as I know. So, how did songs that were never commercially successful become so ingrained in the public consciousness? I am thinking also of things like ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’ and ‘Little Boxes’, songs which seem so much a part of my youth, and I am sure I am not alone in saying that.

Recently I was rereading Margery Allingham’s The Beckoning Lady, featuring her wonderful invention Albert Campion in a 1955 novel with a rural Suffolk setting and a plot which takes place at the height of Midsummer. A short while ago there was a vogue for ‘folk horror’, and if this book was not celebrated as part of all that then something went horribly awry. It’s one of my favourite Campion books, and there is a real Wicker Man feel to the festivities at the heart of the story. As the party ends and the dawn arrives, the hosts Tonker and Minnie are “sitting on a couch which had been brought out of the drawing-room, listening to Lili Ricki, the new Swedish Nightingale, singing Sydney Carter’s lovely song against a lightening sky.” Tonker joins in and sings: “The youth of the heart and the dew in the morning / You wake and they’ve left you without any warning.”

It's an intriguing mention. Was there a family connection to Allingham’s husband, Philip Youngman Carter? I don’t know. They did both attend Christ’s Hospital school in Horsham, but not at the same time. Anyway, ‘The Youth of the Heart’ is a popular song Sydney wrote with the pianist Donald Swann of Flanders & Swann fame. I guess anyone my age will instinctively know F&S’ gnu and hippopotamus songs, even if they know little else about the duo. Indeed, there are millions like us who still insist on pronouncing the name of the animal as g-nu, and probably expect them to talk too and say: “How do you do?”

Another reason why I have been thinking of Martin Carthy and Sydney Carter is that they were regulars on the Hullabaloo series broadcast on ATV in late 1963. This was nothing to do with the American show and was instead a lovely low-budget showcase for folk and rhythm & blues performers. Network released 13 shows on DVD back in 2020, and they really are a joy to watch. Sydney’s performances in particular are quite something, not least because he looks like he has just wandered in off the street and has agreed reluctantly to sing some of his satirical, topical songs. He cuts quite an alarmingly sinister figure somehow.

There are so many gems on these DVDs, and I particularly recommend the closing sequence of the first show where a very dapper Long John Baldry sings ‘Bo Diddley’ with Cyril Davies’ Rhythm & Blues All Stars and the South African vocal trio the Velvettes. In the audience is a little cluster of mods (sitting behind a very excited Martin Carthy), one of whom rather wonderfully peers through a pair of lorgnettes. Incidentally, there is in circulation a quite remarkable 1968 TV variety show performance by Long John of Bonnie Dobson’s signature tune ‘Morning Dew’, apparently the first song she wrote.

Not everything of interest from the Hullabaloo series seems to have popped up on YouTube yet. The Spinners singing ‘Dirty Old Town’ would surely bring a tear to any eye, years before the group became TV light entertainment regulars. And the reason I bought the DVD set was in the hope of seeing rare footage of Jean Hart singing the South African kwela ‘Humba Lily’. It turns out she was backed by Davy Graham, Fitzroy Coleman and the show’s resident bassist Pete McGurk, and it’s a remarkably vivacious performance that is even more wonderful than I had dared hoped.

Davy also accompanies Nadia Catousse as she sings and plays the folk/calypso number ‘Long Time Boy’, which I suspect some of us will know from the version by Nadia that’s a highlight of the early Numero Group release, Belize City Boil Up, in their ‘Cult Cargo’ series. I don’t think I have ever seen any other live footage of Nadia, so this is special. Incidentally, it is still a mystery to me why her 1970 LP Earth Mother remains out of circulation. It is such a great record, a mixture of studio and live recordings, with Danny Thompson unmistakably playing bass on the studio sessions.

Among the songs on the LP is ‘The Message’ which is a Donald Swann setting of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s words of peace. The highlight, for me, of Earth Mother is the beautifully poignant ‘Bermondsey’, which way back when was included in the project The London Nobody Sings. As the post says, the song’s composer was recorded as being unknown, but if you read the comments on the site now you’ll see how, many years on, the fascinating and unexpected story of its origins emerged. And as one of the first comments points out Donald Swann with his Singers also performed the song.

Coincidentally or not, I recently also found out that Donald might have been the first to record ‘Lord of the Dance’. I thought the song had its debut on a 1966 Elektra EP produced by Joe Boyd, featuring Sydney Carter with Martin Carthy, the Johnny Scott Trio and the Mike Sammes Singers. But I came across a 1964 Donald Swann EP on Argo of Sydney Carter songs, including ‘Lord of the Dance’ and ‘Friday Morning’ (a song whose bitter irony was lost on Enoch Powell who called for it to be banned). You live and learn.

That Donald Swann EP, wonderfully titled Songs of Faith and Doubt, has on its front cover an atmospheric 1949 shot of the bomb-damaged St Mary-le-Bow church in Cheapside. It would also be a fantastically appropriate photo for any new editions of Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness which also dates from the late 1940s and is mostly set amid the post-Blitz dereliction of the City west of St Paul’s and east of the Monument: a square mile but not the square mile. It’s a book which when I read it a year-or-so back had an enormous impact on me, and I believe strongly that it features some of the most vivid poetic evocations of a London passed, like this:

“The maze of little streets threading through the wilderness, the broken walls, the great pits with their dense forests of bracken and bramble, golden ragwort and coltsfoot, fennel and foxglove and vetch, all the wild rambling shrubs that spring from ruin, the vaults and cellars and deep caves, the wrecked guild halls that had belonged to saddlers, merchant tailors, haberdashers, waxchandlers, barbers, brewers, coopers and coachmakers, all the ancient city fraternities, the broken office stairways that spiralled steeply past empty doorways and rubbled closets into the sky, empty shells of churches with their towers still strangely spiring above the wilderness, their empty window arches where green boughs pushed in, their broken pavement floors – St Vedast’s, St Alban’s, St Anne’s and St Agnes’, St Giles Cripplegate, its tower high above the rest, the ghosts of churches burnt in an earlier fire, St Olave’s and St John Zachary’s, haunting the green-flowered churchyards that bore their names, the ghosts of taverns where merchants and clerks had drunk, of restaurants where they had eaten – all this scarred and haunted green and stone and brambled wilderness lying under the August sun.”

That’s beautiful, isn’t it? Some say the actual plot of The World My Wilderness doesn’t bear close scrutiny but that’s hardly the point, and anyway it works for me. Very roughly, it tells the story of Barbary, a damaged 17–year-old who has seen too much during WW2, and who is sent to live with her father in London away from her mother’s home in France where she has been part of traumatic things, including the execution of her stepdad as a collaborator and helping the underground Resistance. Her beloved soulmate and stepbrother Raoul is separately sent to school in England, but nothing can keep them apart. Strangers in a strange land, Barbary and Raoul find sanctuary running wild among the bombed-out ruins of that square mile of London.

It has only just struck me that Barbary as a name has apt echoes of barbarian (as in ‘young savages’ which would become a catch-all phrase for ‘juvenile delinquents’ of many a moral panic) and the Barbican Estate which would later stand on the area where roughly Barbary and Raoul would hide and play. Rose’s wonderful use of language also allows her to play with the idea of maquis as being both the Resistance fighters and the wild areas of shrubs and bushes where these kids have grown up too quickly. When Rose writes “the maquis is within us, we take our wilderness where we go” it has odd echoes of Roky singing ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’.

It occurred to me while reading The World My Wilderness that we were only half-a-dozen years away from Ken Russell’s immortal photographs of London’s Teddy Girls or the Metropolis’ ‘Bombsite Boudiccas’, which were published in Picture Post, and also the young females in Roger Mayne’s street photography of the same time. It’s rather disconcerting to think this is concurrent with all the old traditions and spells in Margery Allingham’s The Beckoning Lady.

There is also the now often-viewed clip from a 1959 documentary of Ken Russell’s where Davy Graham sits among bombsite rubble and plays a heartbreakingly beautiful version of ‘Cry Me A River’ as a beat girl wanders past clutching a black balloon. Her look seems to connect to a passage in The World My Wilderness: “Along the paved path between the strawberries and currants came Barbary, treading silently in rope-soled shoes, stopping once to pick ripe strawberries where they gleamed through the net. She wore brown corduroy slacks and a leather jacket, and carried a rucksack on her back; her coat pockets bulged.” At this point she was heading back to the ruins of London she had made her sanctuary after unwillingly staying with relatives amid the “darkness and secrecy, the misty, dreaming twilight of the western Highlands.”

Watching those old episodes of Hullabaloo, it is striking how perfectly Davy Graham could blend in as an accompanist, and presumably as a pretty much impromptu one. In the earliest shows he can be seen backing Carolyn Hester who must have seemed a stirringly exotic creature on the UK folk scene back then. When Bonnie Dobson played on the Theatreship recently she mentioned Carolyn in referring to a 1962 article in Time magazine on ‘The Folk Girls’, one of those perennially lazy catch-all pieces, and you got the sense the comparison to Joan Baez still rankles. As Bonnie added as an aside, she really wanted to be Aretha.

Bonnie Dobson as a soul singer? Yeah, why not? Her rendition of Dino Valenti’s ‘Get Together’ that night was incredibly soulful. It is a song Bonnie describes as being more relevant than ever, and on her current record with The Hanging Stars there is a magnificent folk-rock reinvention of the song which Bonnie first recorded on her self-titled 1969 LP, one salvaged by Rev-ola in 2006 – a reminder how much we owe Joe Foster and his label. That 1969 LP of Bonnie’s is so lovely, and there are moments when on ‘Bird of Space’ that I am reminded of Broadcast and their equally lovely The Noise Made By People and specifically the songs ‘Unchanging Window’ and ‘Papercuts’. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the crystal clear and wonderfully precise enunciation as Bonnie and Trish sing.

When Bonnie and her boys performed ‘Get Together’ onstage they were joined by another guitarist who added another dimension, someone who looked oddly familiar, and the introduction to the new version similarly sounded strangely familiar. It was bugging me for days what it reminded me of, until I found myself singing ‘The Chocolate Elephant Man’ by Biff Bang Pow! Coincidentally no doubt? Or is it? That extra guitarist I eventually worked out was Ben Phillipson, and on looking up his previous I noted he’d recently been playing as part of the Comet Gain community, and I strongly suspect that David Christian has an initiation rite for new recruits involving side one of Pass The Paintbrush, Honey.

I had actually forgotten Comet Gain covered Biff Bang Pow!’s gorgeous ‘She Never Understood’, but then Comet Gain would not be my chosen specialist subject should I appear on Mastermind. Nevertheless, curiosity did lead me to Comet Gain’s recent LP, Letters to Ordinary Outsiders, which unexpectedly at times made me grin (those awkward Dexys-style conversational intros are great fun) and had me imagining odd similarities to Dreams, that record Bonnie Dobson made with the Hanging Stars.

Coincidentally or not, they share the same producer in Sean Read, a name I recognise, and aptly seeing the Hanging Stars play a short set of their own songs I thought they had a bit of a Rockingbirds thing going on. And, though I didn’t recognise him, Sean was there with Bonnie onstage, playing keyboards, adding the occasional blast of trumpet, plus percussion, and all that.

Comet Gain always intrigue me. It’s one of the great names for a pop group, yet I confess they disappear from my radar regularly until every now and again a new release registers and I give a mental thumbs-up, for the world seems a better place for having them in it still.  I admire their doggedness, and I am sure there is plenty of overlap aesthetically and attitudinally in the eternal Venn diagrams of life. I do still have (somewhere) a poster for their Say Yes! to International Socialism EP, which is a very cool pop artifact, plus once in a while the Réalistes version of ‘Kids at the Club’ sounds like the best thing ever.

Anyway, that record Bonnie made with the Hanging Stars is wonderful, and the title track, ‘Dreams’, which closes the LP, is particularly special and incredibly moving. Once again I had a nagging feeling for a while that it reminded me of something, and eventually settled upon Ruth Copeland’s ‘Prologue: Child of the North’ from her Self Portrait LP, a record I hadn’t played in ages, but half-a-dozen of the tracks still sound so strangely wonderful, especially ‘The Music Box’ (one of the songs from Mario’s Café!) and her version of ‘The Silent Boatman’ with I assume Northumbrian pipes as well as a church organ as part of the accompaniment.

It is a record I immediately associate with the very early 1990s and Cheapo Cheapos on Rupert Street where I saw Self Portrait one day and bought it for pennies purely for the Invictus connection.  I became rather obsessed with it, though It would be many years before I found out anything more about Ruth, and I suspect that was part of the appeal. And how can you not love a record that starts with the singer talking about how she has North Sea wildness in her bones, the rivers and valleys and swaying meadows of Durham in her heart?

It is a song about the possibilities of going back, which I guess is partly why I made the connection with Bonnie’s ‘Dreams’. They are two astonishing compositions and performances. I am not ashamed to say Bonnie’s song makes my eyes fill with tears every time I play it, and I have played it a hell of a lot lately. In the song she dreams of places and faces from her past, but realises that while you can always go home, you can never go back – not even in your dreams.

The mention in the song of the time she spent in Somerset in turn connects to her lovely composition ‘Sweet Somerset’ which I first heard on the excellent 2010 Bear Family set Vive La Canadienne that pairs her 1972 LP with the 1964 Mercury LP For The Love of Him which she made with the great Bobby Scott. Talking of which, there are a distressingly small number of clips of Bonnie on YouTube, but I recently found a 1966 episode of Let’s Sing Out recorded at the Ontario College of Art and, at just under seven minutes in, it features a mesmerising performance by Bonnie where she’s singing Bobby’s ‘A Taste of Honey’. I think the look on Len Chandler’s face says it all.