Ten Years of the Strawbs - From Donegan to Dali in Five Easy Stages por Jerry Gilbert

Strawbs fue el primer grupo del que fue miembro Sandy. Con ellos grabó un álbum con la primera versión conocida de Who Knows Where The Time Goes? si bien no se puso a la venta hasta 1973 después de que la grabara con Fairport Convention. Al dejar Strawbs se unió a Fairport a finales de 1968.

Ten Years of the Strawbs - From Donegan to Dali in Five Easy Stages
Jerry Gilbert, ZigZag, September 1975 
THROUGH A ten-year period that has seen them frequently under-rated, and a time when they probably least deserved it the subject of mass adulation, the Strawbs have forever remained innovators in the face of change.
In answer to the inevitable question why the Strawbs had remained together as long as they had, Dave Cousins once voiced that it was because he and Tony Hooper were still together. Well that's no longer true and yet despite wholesale team change the Strawbs one more album and one more American tour later - still show no signs of calling it a day. In fact right now they are arguably at their most stable with a line-up that most punters wouldn't have fancied for five minutes together, particularly faced with the task of building up a new momentum after the departure of Richard Hudson and John Ford.
And so with twelve LPs, a hastily arranged (and much postponed) interview safely in the notebook, memories of concerts as far afield as London's South Bank and Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, and recollections of nine or ten earlier interviews with Dave Cousins, I sit down to write a fairly faithful chronicle of events which has seen a complete transmutation from the Strawberry Hill Boys, bluegrass group, to the Strawbs, progressive rock band and chartbound dilettantes.
"IT'S HARD to pinpoint when the Strawbs actually began because nobody ever really said 'Let's form a group'," mentioned Dave Cousins, although his recollections of the early sixties seemed surprisingly vivid as we set out to sketch the early picture.
"As far as music was concerned Lonnie Donegan's 'Rock Island Line' was a major revelation after Frankie Laine. I remember reading in the NME or something that he was supposed to sound like Leadbelly so I went out and bought 'Backwater Blues'. From there I started to get interested in people like Muddy Waters, and in fact I really hated rock'n'roll - the more disenchanted I became with Lonnie Donegen, the more I got into the blues.
"I learnt to play Leadbelly stuff and then I became interested in sifting through the stuff at Cecil Sharp House. I started to listen to 78's by Jack Elliott and I used to see him play down at the Troubadour. By the late fifties I was playing guitar flat pick style like Jack Elliott."
But Dave Cousins had scarcely developed his musical style with any great precociousness. He was fifteen before he first started playing guitar, and after a sound initiation he went to Leicester University where any form of musical contract was at a premium - in fact, says Dave, it was virtually non-existent.
Cousin's early testing ground had been the folk clubs of South London. He'd shared an interest in music with schoolfriend Tony Hooper from the age of thirteen and they'd started listening to records together, venturing down to Eel Pie Island and the London Apprentice at Isleworth. When they started to pick guitar together, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly songs would be the order of the day.
"I remember Ron Kane and Don and Audrey Leatherbarrow who eventually got together as the Messengers and were much admired/envied because they got a recording contract. Then there was Hazel who went to Brazil and Suzie Shahn, who was a banjo player, and Arthur Phillips, Tony and myself.
"Through Suzie I became very interested in playing banjo, and after I'd got a banjo I listened to a lot of Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger records, and became obsessed with the idea of playing banjo like Peggy Seeger. I developed this further at university where I heard Earl Scruggs' style from an American banjo player and the whole MacColl doctrine which had influenced me so much suddenly went out of my life. So after university I got together with Tony Hooper and Arthur Phillips, who was a mandolin player, and we became Britain's first bluegrass band. It must have been terrible although I've still got some tapes."
SO BY the mid-'60s the Strawberry Hill Boys were effectively launched, and for Cousins' growing expertise on banjo there was a sympathetic foil in Arthur Phillips who, Cousins recall, was "a great mandolin player who could also frail banjo and pick a guitar better than most". He had also been taught by Ralph Rinzler and Peggy Seeger and had collected a song from a Scottish tinker which appeared, with appropriate credit, in Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's definitive British folk song collection at that time.
"Eventually we rehearsed up a few songs and decided to try our luck at a folk club run by Russell Quaye and Hilda Sims in the back room of their house in Clapham (Quaye was better known as the leader of the New Lost City Ramblers) and we plucked up the courage to play two songs, Tony singing and playing guitar, Arthur on mandolin and me on five-sting banjo. We went down pretty well and to our surprise somebody come up and asked us to play a club in Brighton. He asked us what we called ourselves, there was a moment's silence because we hadn't thought about a name, but since we had been rehearsing in Strawberry Hill and our heroes had been groups like the Foggy Mountain Boys, the Stony Mountain Boys and the Rocky Mountain Boys etc, the Strawberry Hill Boys seemed appropriate - so there we were. We played that gig in Brighton for £2, went down extremely well and things have gone well ever since."

*

DAVE COUSINS remained obsessed with bluegrass and old timely music - Reno and Smiley, Flatt and Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Bill Clifton… "It was Bill who took me off on a tour of American air force bases and he introduced me to Pete Roberts, who played with the Country Gentlemen at one time. Pete Sayers and Pete Stanley were also around, but as far as I remember I never sang much in public before 1964-65 because I was too shy. 
"Anyway, soon after that I started to write my own songs and gradually that began to take over - I remember 'Ever More' was the first song I ever wrote.
"So we started to play a couple of gigs a month - mostly in Brighton, in fact we never really got further north than Hull and we only ever played Scotland twice. We did one gig on Blackpool Pier with Gerry and the Pacemakers and the promoter didn't like the name the Strawberry Hill Boys so we were billed as David and Anthony."
By this time Arthur Phillips had left the band - or more to the point he fell out with Dave and Tony, largely because it was his land rover that was conducting the band to and from gigs and he was getting a raw deal on the petrol so he just packed up and went. In his place came the unlikely Talking John Berry, whose speciality was the talking blues of Woody Guthrie, and he remained a Strawberry Hill Boy for some six months.
"The main problem with John was that he was primarily interested in the Lime-lighters so for a while we were doing all this harmony stuff, wrapping ourselves round one microphone and harmonising to our hearts' content. I remember John even refused to go onstage with us once until we'd eaten a packet of peppermints because we'd just had a meal heavily spiced with garlic."
Needles to say the relationship soon ended and the Strawberry Hill Boys were searching for a bass player. But in the meantime Cousins and Hooper had found a fair bit of success as promoters/residents at the legendary White Bear in Hounslow - a club that Dave insists was always well ahead of its time and specialised in being one of the first Arts Labs to present people like David Bowie, mime artists Tony Crerar and poet Pete Brown. "It really used to pack them in," he says.

*

THEN ALONG came Ron Chester man, and eight years ago the Strawbs sampled their first taste of any real success. "Tony knew Ron from the Enterprise Folk Club in Hampstead and I remember he was an extremely awkward looking character but he played alright and he could only go on stage with eight pints of beer inside him which suited us fine; also he had a van so he was well in…. 
"About the same time we started to include more of our own songs alongside the hillbilly tunes but we couldn't get anybody to record us - I remember taking tapes to Decca, Pye and Philips but nobody wanted to know at that time.
"Well anyway we carried in doing our own tunes and the most notorious was one called 'The Man Who Called Himself Jesus' which was very popular at the poetry and folk sessions run by Sonja Kristina at the Troubadour in Earl's Court. The song was written after a Danish friend told me about a man who had walked into this record shop and declared himself the Messiah. The song was considered quite shocking at that time and when it was eventually released as a single the BBC were extremely cautious which made me indignant because the equally controversial 'Jesus Christ Superstar' was being played heavily.
"It was then that we realised that songs like 'The Man Who Called Himself Jesus' and 'Tell Me What You See In Me' didn't really fit with the Strawberry Hill Boys, and as people were already referring to us simply as the Strawbs, the Strawbs we became."
Enter Sandy Denny. "It was downstairs at the Troubadour that I first heard Sandy Denny. She looked startlingly attractive in a white dress and hat, and she sang like an angel. I thought she was the best thing I'd ever seen and immediately after she'd finished her couple of songs I asked her if she fancied joining a group and I was quite surprised when she said yes, although we did have a fair reputation on the folk scene by then.
"We cut some demo tapes with Sandy after rehearsing with her for a couple of weeks. I remember it was at Cecil Sharp House and Trevor Lucas (who eventually married Sandy) put down some rhythm on the back of a guitar case. At that time Tom Browne, who is now a BBC DJ, was doing folk programs on Danish radio, and he took the tapes over to Copenhagen in order to fix us up with a couple of weeks' work at Tivoli. He also played the tapes to Karl Knudsen at Sonet Records, who said he'd like to record us, and since no one in England wanted to we agreed.
"Karl thought we wrote songs as good as the Beatles and I think 'Nothing Else Will Do' was one of the most popular songs as the time. Anyway I knew Alex Campbell had gone over to Denmark and done an album for £100 and I thought we could."
(A quick digression: 'Nothing Else Will Do Babe' is the only time Dave Cousins wrote 'babe' into a chorus. He became acutely aware of the indiscretion immediately he'd written it but that song remains one of the earliest songs identified with the new-look Strawbs.)

*

FOR TWO WEEKS the Strawbs played their season in Tivoli, recording by day and appearing at the club at night. The 'studio' was the stage of a cinema and the equipment was two-track stereo although like good folkies, the Strawbs recorded the entire set 'live'. "There was no masking for sound, it was just straight down onto tape and I realised at that time we really needed a drummer - on that album we used a Danish drummer (Ken Gudmand)." 
Yet this was far from being the start of an auspicious recording career. Dave Cousins' effort to place the tapes were frustrated and it took a whole sequence of events before the Strawbs - minus Sandy - would up with A&M Records.
"I was supposed to come back and play the album to Polydor but they wanted us to re-record it and Sandy said 'oh no'. Then Tito Burns wanted to take us on and in the confusion Sandy got tired of waiting and left. Sonja Kristina then did a couple of gigs with us but it didn't work out so we were back to being a trio again and still with no prospects of getting the record out.
"Anyway, somewhere along the line Polydor said 'yes' but they wanted a single so we went in with Gus Dugeon, a recording engineer at Decca who lived in the flat downstairs from Tony Hooper, and he'd just produced his first album (the first Ralph McTell album with arrangements by Tony Visconti). So we went in and recorded 'Or Am I Dreaming' and 'Oh How She Changed' and Karl said it was the best production he'd ever heard."
By chance Karl sent the finished tapes to Dave Hubert at A&M Records in Los Angeles and by a remarkable quirk of fate the Strawbs not only became the first UK act to be signed to the mighty A&M label but back in the UK A&M product was being pushed out by Pye, one of the companies who had turned down the band. "When we walked into Pye everyone assumed we were American," recalled Cousins wryly.

*

THUS PLANS to renovate the album with Sandy Denny were abandoned and it was not until eighteen months ago that the album came out on the budget price Hallmark label under the title Sandy Denny & The Strawbs: 'All Our Own Work' (Hallmark SHM 813). I assume it is still available and I reckon D.C. made a good move in allowing the tapes to be put out on a cheap label five years after recording (how many other bands would give a vote of confidence in the accomplishments of their first recording exploits?). There are a lot of people who still remember these songs doing the rounds, particularly this first recording of Sandy's immortal 'Who Knows Where The Time Goes' (who says the Strawbs, or to be more precise Sandy and Dave, weren't ahead of their time, vintage 100mph banjo picking and all?) 
Back to the story. 'Oh How She Changed' and 'Or Am I Dreaming' was released as a single on the A&M label and on the strength of that the band played a Southern Television show with Tony Blackburn, a well known beat singer of the day.
"The single became David Symonds' record of the week and generally did us a lot of good, although, by this time I kept getting these ideas for more meaningful songs. 'The Battle', for instance, was just a game of chess, obviously it was also about the futility of war, but suddenly I started to get a bit ashamed of some of my early songs." ('The Battle' was a 22-verse epic, the highlight of the band's first A&M album and could, had the phrase been coined then, have made Ben Hur look like an epic.)
"'The Battle' and also 'The Man Who Called Himself Jesus' were the turning point, and since then every song I've written has always had a very definite and positive reason."

*

BY THE MIDDLE of 1969, Strawbs was in the shops and being hailed as a masterpiece of contemporary folk music at a time when the Al Stewarts and Roy Harpers were trying to prove that the emerging British folk writers were every bit as good as their American counterparts. They weren't, of course, but whilst Harper and Stewart went to their respective, rhetoric extremes, Cousins had found not only a new form of polemic but a totally unique musical setting. His recollections on the recording of that album speak for themselves - small wonder it was a prototype. 
"We set out to do the album with Gus Dudgeon and the prime requisite was a thirty-six piece orchestra closely followed by a genuine five piece Arabian band found in the Omar Khayyam Restaurant who spoke no English and thus all instruction had to be conveyed in the only common language - French. Then there were other noted celebrities such as John Paul Jones, Nicky Hopkins and Ronnie Verrell from the Ted Heath Band. In fact almost the entire Ted Heath Band were re-created for one title which, needless to say, has never appeared anywhere.
"With pride we played the finished product, complete with specially recorded spoken links, to a vice-president of A&M who announced with a gasp that it wasn't quite what they had expected from the two tracks which were the basis on which we had been signed. We were asked to replace the less compatible tracks with some additional titles, and as these were more recent songs anyway we were quite in favour, so with less lavish orchestration we recorded 'The Battle', 'I'll Show You Where To Sleep', 'That Which Once Was Mine' and 'Pieces of 79 And 15' which was centered around Tony Hooper's bizarre experiences in his several extremely seedy London flats."
The new assembly was eventually issued in May 1969 as the Strawbs' first album and the abandoned tracks have been preserved for posterity, though one title 'Ah Me, Ah My' surfaced on the Grave New World album.
To compare the changes the Strawbs underwent in that year, listen to the captivating innocence of Sandy Denny singing 'Tell Me What You See In Me' and then follow the course of that song through its modal changes on Strawbs, dominated by the male voice of Cousins and the frenetic work of the Arabic band who threaten to take possession of the song totally, although there is quite a degree of compatibility with what the Strawbs were into at that time.
"Looking back the main criticism of our first album was exactly that - our folk fans maintained that it hardly sounded like us on stage and that was quite valid as we were still an acoustic trio at the time. We did several live radio and TV shows though on which we augmented with other musicians. On BBC's Colour Me Pop we were joined by Paul Buckmaster on cello, Terry Cox of Pentangle on drums, Roger Coulam of Blue Mink on organ, Tony Visconti on recorders and David Bowie, who was recommended by Tony Visconti.

*

THE NEXT THING was that Tony [Hooper] and I produced a group from Shrewsbury called Paper Bubble and we got Hud and John along because the Velvet Opera had played at the White Bear quite a few times. Rick was on keyboards and I thought then how remarkable that band could be without ever imaging that six months later it would all come true and John, Hud and Rick would join Tony and I in the Strawbs." 
American singer Tony Visconti was to exercise further influence on the band in the coming months, and since the Strawbs hadn't hit it off well with Tony's partner Gus Dudgeon (he and Cousins had argued continually during the mixing of Strawbs, mainly about the relative level of the vocals), the band asked Visconti if he agreed to do so.
Prior to that there had been another significant step when Dave Cousins had approached Joe Boyd with a view to producing. The latter couldn't meet the commitment but in discussing the nature of the album Dave said he wanted to add cello and Joe recommended Clare Deniz, the principal cellist with the Sadlers Wells orchestra whom he had used on the first Nick Drake album Five Leaves Left.
"The arrival of Clare coupled with Tony's classical style arrangements triggered off a new approach to the music, and Tony also encouraged me to read The Tibetan Book of The Dead which inspired 'I'll Show You Where To Sleep' and 'Vision Of The Lady Of The Lake' (another 28-verse epic)."
Clare Deniz contributed greatly to the new 'group' sound that manifested itself on Dragonfly, an album that was far more faithful to the group's stage show at that time and was thus in complete contrast to the first album. It is easier to see why Clare's stay in the Strawbs was so short than it is to say why Dragonfly failed to win the same acclaim that had been bestowed on Strawbs. 'The Vision Of The Lady Of The Lake' was augmented by Rick Wakeman, Paul Brett (another long time associate of Cousins and member of the Velvet Opera) and Danish drummer Bjarne Rostvolt and aside from that there was very little overdubbing.
On Clare Deniz: "She was a vegetarian who didn't smoke, drink or go in pubs which imposed a great strain. I wrote out the cello parts myself which took me hours. I bought a book called The Rudiments Of Music and it was all very laborious, in fact I had to re-write the parts because I'd written them all in the treble clef."
On the album itself: "We blew all our advances on the first album, which was astronomical at the time, so the next album cost us £1,500 instead of £6,000. We decided to record in Denmark because we knew it would be considerably cheaper, and although the studio was still in the cinema it had at least gone eight-track. The only problem was that we couldn't use the studio while the audience was in during the evening. It therefore became fairly exhausting as we were recording from mid-day to five and from midnight onwards.
"Tony Visconti was producing and Dragonfly turned out to be our least popular album of all time probably because it was so different from all the others - I honestly don't think anything went wrong as such, and 'Vision Of The Lady Of The Lake' I still think is a colossal song - on and off it took me a year to write. The basic track was put down in Copenhagen and the overdubbing was done at the newly opened Morgan Studios.
"The problem with that song is that the boys got bored with it and I could see their point of view so I did that song on my own onstage.
"No, I think Dragonfly had some nice songs on it - they were mostly new songs although 'Josephine For Better Or For Worse', written for Dominic Behan's wife, was a new version of one of the rejected songs from Strawbs, having originally been recorded with nightclub piano from Nicky Hopkins, and a breathy trumpet solo, an unappreciated tribute to Herb Alpert. Dragonfly itself was a song about an attractive Swedish girl and was the first song to be written on a newly acquired dulcimer - as for the remainder of the songs they were largely descriptions of the beauty of the English countryside.
"But I like that album - I was trying deliberately to write English folk songs at that time and I still sing a couple of songs off that album."

*

BUT IF COUSINS was consciously aiming at writing 20th century balladry then his singing found the contrivances to match. Indeed the timbre and tonal qualities of the Cousins vocal chords caused many a purist and erstwhile Strawbs fan to recoil in horror. "OK, I was trying to sing in that English folk idiom,' Dave concurred. "The wavers in the voice were deliberate but that's now developed into a style more than anything else although my voice was being heavily criticised in the those days. It still sounds the same although now it's become distinctive." 
In any event Dragonfly didn't set the world alight and as a result Dave Cousins and Tony Hooper decided to give themselves a year to make the band successful failing which they would throw in their hand. A complete change of approach was called for and suddenly the most logical permutation of all fell into place - Cousin, Hooper, Ford, Hud and Wakeman. Cousins, and Hooper drew £15 a week to sustain themselves and paid the other three musicians £25 each.
In the meantime another musician had come and gone - Lindsay Cooper, who had been brought in as a replacement for Clare Deniz, and it was he who proved to Cousins that there was no longer room for acoustic instrumentation in the band. Another victim of the new Strawbs' outlook was their faithful bass player Noddy Chesterman who quit during the same period. Missing the more homely environs of the folk scene he joined Noel Murphey and Shaggis (Davey Johnson) in Draught Porridge.
"Lindsay had switched from cello to bass but he had to go because string bass just didn't fit anymore," explained Dave.
Thus the Cousins, Hooper, Cooper, Wakeman line-up survived only a few months and suddenly a huge paradox was created. Clare had left because, quite apart from the vagaries of life on the road, her cello playing was falling below par deprived of the usual 'x' hours per day practice session to which classical musicians are dedicated. Meanwhile another keyboard wizard who had been formally trained, was itching to get his rocks off on a bit of rock'n'roll and live a life of debauchery. Thus the clash with acoustic bowed stringed instruments became insurmountable and Wakeman proceeded to wear his new role like a king.
"Rick wrote and said he really liked Dragonfly and he said it was the first time he'd ever had his name credited on record. I had a drink with him and it turned out he was only working in a pub at that time so I offered him the gig. The problem was that he was planning to get married a week later and we had a gig in Paris - so we took him to Paris for his honeymoon."

*

THAT PARTICULAR gig was the Rock'n'Roll Circus, and Wakeman must have wondered what he'd let himself in for as he spent much of his time backing circus acts and then discovering that Salvador Dali was also on the bill. The band became firm favourites with Dali, a relationship that has been maintained through the years. In fact on their last American tour the band were booked into the Beacon Theatre on Broadway and Dali, hearing that the band were in town, showed up much to the delight of the New York gossip columnists. 
But amidst the general confusion fortunes began to turn for the Strawbs, and the catalyst was undoubtedly the new management that the band had acquired. Towards the end of 1969 they met Mike Dolan and his brother and business partner Jim Dawson. "They really believed in us and helped us out of our problems. They were willing to invest money in us and I suppose that's why we've remained with them over the years (they are frequently to be found at all hours in the pub over the road in Homer Street though Cousins enjoys a better dart-board than business relationship with Mike Dolan these days I understand).
In 1970 Hud and Ford happened along and made up parts four and five of the most commercially successful band to date (or at least laying the foundation work for opportunist Dave Lambert to jump in on the crest of the wave).
"I knew that the Velvet Opera was on its last legs and we all got together at the White Bear one night-that was how Hud and John joined.
"But the problem was we had this Queen Elizabeth Hall concert scheduled and it was our first major concert. We'd also agreed to play it solo and we had only five weeks to rehearse - well, that really put the pressure on."
It was July 1970 and the band, under-rehearsed, their first major solo concert ahead of them, decided to record the set for their next "live" album Just A Collection Of Antiques And Curios. Against all odds fortune favoured the brave, the band went down a storm and next day Rick Wakeman was being hailed the pop find of 1970 (patronised by Keith Emerson, front page of the Melody Maker, etc, etc).

*

THE CONCERT ALBUM contained the stirring 'Martin Luther King's Dream' which took over from 'The Man Who Called Himself Jesus' in terms of polemics and popularity, the brilliantly sequenced four-piece 'Antique Suite' (life, death, the ages of man, Herman Hesse inspired); five minutes' worth of keyboard magic with Wakeman throwing in every trick. Side two: the mystical 'Fingertips' with Hud playing some haunting sitar, the beautiful 'Song Of A Sad Little Girl' and the marathon 'Where Is This Dream Of Your Youth', which appeared on Dragonfly and deserved another chance. All in all it was the most disparate and unlikely album the Strawbs had yet made but for some reason it hung together superbly well. 
"It was quite daring, I suppose, "says Cousins modestly, but by the time the album was released in October 1970 the momentum was such that either Cousins or Wakeman could have carried the band single-handed.
Antiques And Curios received rave reviews and it seemed that while the youthful Wakeman was sat the controls, his long blonde hair making him a rivetting figurehead, the Strawbs could do not wrong.
The problem, as Dave Cousins knew too well, was how long could the Strawbs' expansion keep pace with the mercurial outbreak of Wakemania?
© Jerry Gilbert, 1975.