Singing from the Floor review – 'a rich oral history of British folk clubs'

JP Bean's book recalls pre-Mumford days, when folk singers spurned stardom, had little money and were spied on by special branch

Laura Marling, Seth Lakeman, Kate Rusby, the Unthanks, Mumford & Sons: folk music is mainstream these days. But just over a half-century ago it was marginal, viewed with suspicion by parents and politicians, its principal practitioners living on subsistence wages and surveilled by special branch, its informal meetings sometimes shut down by police. As one of the more perceptive interviewees in Singing from the Floor, John Tams of the group Home Service, puts it: "I've never been to a Tory folk club yet." The individuals who set the template for folk clubs in the mid-1950s – Ewan MacColl, AL Lloyd, John Hasted, Hull's Waterson family, and American visitors such as Alan Lomax and Peggy Seeger – were all dyed-in-the-wool reds who viewed folk gatherings as grassroots revolutionary potential, and a captive audience for a communitarian message.

JP Bean's oral history of folk clubs takes the reader from the revival's earliest stirrings to gigs at the hipsterish Magpie's Nest in present-day east London. Its title is a reminder that folk music was a participatory culture, one that viewed celebrity and flash with suspicion and where divisions between "audience" and "star" were dissolved to what Richard Thompson calls a "brusque equality". Folk clubs, as Tams observes, weren't about dancing, but about listening to people who were "telling you stuff"; Martin Simpson adds there was an "intimacy of transmission". The youth culture of the late 50s, when the folk club network began to form, was a model of parsimony, an austere cottage industry huddled in tiny rooms above pubs, in sports clubs and village halls – or in more eccentric spaces such as Les Cousins on Greek Street in Soho, or the Yellow Door, the south London home of Lionel Bart, Wally Whyton and Tommy Steele. A lack of cash encouraged gritty commitment from artists, and this book is filled with moist-eyed reminiscences of nights spent on stinking mattresses, station benches, damp cellars and even a barn (a hotel room would have eaten up most of the fee).

Schisms existed almost from the beginning – "It was like puritans and cavaliers," says singer Harvey Andrews – as MacColl ran Ballads and Blues at the Princess Louise pub in London's High Holborn (later the renowned Singers' Club) as a petty dictatorship, a microcosm of imagined musical purity and authenticity. "He laid this stuff down whereby you had to sing from where you came from," complains revival singer Bob Davenport. "Traditional music was for entertaining, it wasn't for a further education class." For MacColl and other hardliners, folk music was a revolutionary tonic to fortify the troops against the advancing pop-music hordes. Eventually he set up, with Seeger, his own politburo – the weekly study sessions known as the Critics Group, a ritual of essentialism that was taken up elsewhere. In one Nottingham club, a panel of frowning committee members sat on a windowsill behind the stage, and their disapproving faces could be observed by the audience while the poor singer strove to please. For younger performers such as guitarist John Renbourn, these folk assizes were "sheer hell".

The tone changes by the mid 60s. A chapter is devoted to Bob Dylan's 1962–63 visits to London: the unknown American's eccentric appearances in various pub backrooms, accompanied by his arrogant manager Albert Grossman, didn't seem to win him many friends. Yet his rehearing of English and Irish folk tunes pushed him further towards an angrily poetic form of storytelling, and the music he reformulated – Dominic Behan's "The Patriot Game", Martin Carthy's arrangement of "Scarborough Fair" – gave permission to a new generation of singers to board the folk train. In Dylan's wake, musicians such as Bert Jansch, Renbourn, Roy Harper, Ralph McTell, Dave Cousins of the Strawbs, John Martyn and Sandy Denny took over the folk club circuit and drew in an audience with very different expectations of a night out. Musical tastes were leavened by pop, psychedelia, jazz and the proto-world music of Ravi Shankar, and loyalties were tested. "For a lot of people the tradition is an end in itself; for me the tradition is a place to start from," says multi-instrumentalist Phil Beer.

Folk was at its most impoverished, artistically speaking, when it threw its cap into the commercial ring. Among the few financial successes produced by this scene, singles such as Steeleye Span's "All Around My Hat", the Wurzels' "Combine Harvester", Fiddler's Dram's "Day Trip to Bangor" and Tony Capstick's "Capstick Comes Home" are seldom held up as instances of pop genius. Aside from the Rolls-Royce-owning guitarist Diz Disley, this was a milieu that placed its love of music above wealthy display. "No one I knew had a fridge or a car or a stereo in 1964," recalls Joe Boyd, the producer who launched Fairport Convention, "while even poor folk singers and coffeehouse waiters in New York and Boston had all these things." Numerous musicians recall an era of insalubrious sleeping arrangements, low performance fees and pitiful turnouts, yet there are also reservations about the current resurgence of folk music and festival culture: "People nowadays want to be superstars rather than playing in clubs in rooms in the back of a pub," grumbles Nic Jones.

Some of the liveliest contributions to Singing from the Floor come from Billy Connolly (who began attending Scottish folk clubs as a teen before forming the Humblebums), and from Mike Harding and Jasper Carrott, all sometime folkies who ended up as TV and radio comedians. Harding recalls writing "Rochdale Cowboy" after passing a Wild West re-enactment in Lancashire drizzle on his way to a folk gig, while Connolly recounts thumping a heckling audience member who turned out to be the club treasurer. "That was the end of my whacking days," admits the Big Yin. "I was the world's only violent hippie. I used to say, 'Don't let the long hair fool you. I like violence!'" Tracking folk's slow decline in the 70s, Bean collates reminiscences of the "colourful characters" who kept the clubs alive, where banter, between-song jokes and a capacity to entertain helped the form survive. A far cry from the revolutionary ambitions of the postwar folksters. Bean doesn't mention it, but the real legacy of the folk club as popular test-bed for radical entertainment in the 80s and 90s was the alternative comedy circuit.

Oral histories are often rich in behind-the-scenes detail and anecdote. But there is also something unsatisfying about the format, especially as a means of dealing with events from nearly 50 years ago. Too many key players are dead (Alex Campbell, Hamish Imlach, Jansch, Martyn, Denny and MacColl himself would have been key witnesses), too many memories are scrambled, the wisdom of hindsight has sometimes soured into cynicism or wistful disbelief.

Barney Hoskyns's oral study of Led Zeppelin, Trampled Under Foot, works well by filling in and amplifying the gaps in many other biographies and autobiographies. But a subject as undocumented as the folk scene calls out for orientation by a narrator, commentator or analyst to avoid producing a mere collage of transcripts. Bean organises his interviews into roughly thematic chapters, but a few parenthetical insertions with dates, album titles and so on would have been useful to guide the reader through the foggier testimonials.

Yet there is a telling story or unforgettable vignette on almost every page: the Watersons having to interrupt the recording of their masterpiece Frost and Fire in Bill Leader's Camden Town flat as aeroplanes roared overhead; a hopped–up Dylan questioning Martin Carthy about folk in a pub toilet ("Does Ewan MacColl live in a slum?"); Toni Arthur turning up to a prison gig in a miniskirt; Harvey Andrews's rendition of "Death Come Easy" leading to multiple injuries in a packed, collapsing pub room; the Young Tradition's Heather Wood telling an earnest German scholar at a folk conference "Look love, I'm sorry – it was about free beer and getting laid"; Davenport finding he'd been invited to one censorious folk club purely as an example of "how not to sing". I was left with the impression of a fascinating and energetic subculture genially clinging on to the humanity of music-making in the face of crassness and commodification.

Rob Young

The GuardianTramp

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