The Early Years

I was born in Marylebone, London in 1944, right at the end of the War. My Mother played light-classical pieces on the piano, which also served as the family bomb-shelter during the air raids.  I recall her playing with great fondness and still play an arrangement of Schumann's "Im Wunderschonen Monat Mai" on the guitar.  Later on, at school, I took music lessons with a patient man named John Webber who introduced me to Early Music which had yet to become part of the curriculum.  At the same time I sat my grade exams on classical guitar at the Guildhall, presided over by Adele Kramer.

An interest in Early Music has remained with me, not least in my approach to arrangement.  The classical guitar studies helped a lot in the transition to steel-string fingerpicking styles, "Faro's Rag" owes more to Fernando Sor than Madame Kramer would probably care to acknowledge.

In Britain in the late fifties the musical craze was for 'Skiffle', an amalgam of American folk, blues, bluegrass and jugband styles.  The big hit was "Freight Train"  which drew attention to Elizabeth Cotten's original, as well as to the work of such musicians as Leadbelly, Jesse Fuller, Josh White, Big Bill Broonzy, Brownie McGhee and Ramblin' Jack Elliot.  These players  all came over to England and their guitar styles left a strong impression on a generation of young skifflers.  As soon as I left school I went hitch-hiking,and met up with others trying to play like them.  Mac McCloud, Gerry Lockran, Mick Softly and Wizz Jones were already well on the way,and we were all in awe of Davey Graham.

Around this time I got my first playable steel-string guitar, it cost me a fiver and was an object of wonder and beauty.  It was a Scarth and, like Abbott and Aristone, a British-made dance-band instrument having an arched top and tailpiece but with a round sound hole.  It had its little idiosyncrasies - the action went up and down according to the weather, which could be counteracted by wedging a lollypop stick under the neck - a feature that merely added to its mystique.  You don't see too many like it any more! 

However, good steel-string guitars were few and far between with Harmony and Levin leading the field.  I was living on an old boat on the River Thames and stringing together tunes based on picking patterns, such as "Down On The Barge" and that old Scarth served me well - featuring on the cover of my first LP, in the traditional 'folk-singer-on-the-rubbish-dump' pose.

In the early sixties I attended Kingston College of Art fairly frequently.  The Art Schools seemed to be turning out more musicians than artists at that time.  The Yardbirds were at Kingston, as were Eric Clapton and Sandy Denny.  The R'n'B craze had replaced skiffle and the best band was considered to be Alexis Korner's "Blues Incorporated". 

I played in an Art School R'n'B band for a while, "Hog Snort Rupert's Famous Porkestra", using a borrowed electric guitar.  I found that some of the band's riffs sounded interesting played fingerstyle on an acoustic guitar and pieces like "The Wildest Pig In Captivity" came out of that.

There was one place, the Roundhouse in Soho, which had a more open musical policy and Gerry Lockran took me along with him to play a few tunes.  It was there that I met Dorris Henderson, a singer from Los Angeles, who sang blues and gospel and who was looking for a guitar player.  Dorris recorded two albums with me as accompanist, the first of which, "There You Go" has recently been re-released. We also had a regular spot on a weekly television show that had Alexis Korner's outfit as the house band and I got to meet his bassist Danny Thompson and drummer Terry Cox.

The one all-nighter with a permanent home was a club called "Les Cousins", in the basement of 48 Greek Street, that became the meeting place for guitar players and contemporary song writers, people who were unwelcome in the traditional clubs.  Visiting Americans used to play the 'Cousins' and I had the chance to hear some great players.  Derrol Adams, Sandy Bull, Jackson Frank, Paul Simon, Spider John Koerner, Danny Kalb and Stefan Grossman all showed up at some stage and there was a healthy interchange of ideas.

Around that time, 1963 or '64, I ran into Bert Jansch who was down from Edinburgh and playing truly exceptional original material, both songs and guitar pieces.  We shared a number of living places and played a lot of music together. 

We both admired Davey Graham who had just made a ground breaking record of guitar duets with Alexis, that included the original version of  'Anji'.

The domestic record companies were getting interested in what was going on in the world of 'Folk' and one, Transatlantic, used to send out their recording engineer with a tape machine to capture the 'authentic' sounds on location in deepest South London.  "Bert And John" was recorded that way, with blankets tacked up in the hallway to keep out the noise of our neighbours.  When "Bert And John" came to be re-released on CD, one of the selling points was the 'vintage sound'.