Anne Briggs

A ‘New’ Song by Anne Briggs: “The Cruel Mother”

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By Patrick Maginty

The latest issue of Uncut magazine arrived here on Thursday. I don’t usually buy music mags these days, the last time I bought this magazine was a couple of years ago when they had a Nick Drake special issue with a free CD of cover versions of Nick’s songs. What made me buy this latest edition was because it contained a free CD called Deep Roots, A Celebration Of Topic Records. What really got my interest is that it said it contained a previously unreleased song by Anne Briggs. I needed to hear this song!. I knew that Anne hadn’t been anywhere near a recording studio for about 50 years, so where did this song come from I wondered. As soon as I got my hands on the CD I put it in the music machine. Topic Records is one of the oldest independent record labels in the world which is celebrating its 85th birthday this year. This CD contains some wonderful folk music by the likes of RichardThompson, Martin Carthy, June Tabor, Nic Jones, Norma Waterson, Shirley Collins, Martin Simpson, and many more. 

To my ears though it is Anne who effortlessly steals the show with her version of The Cruel Mother. This song is a traditional English murder ballad which has been a popular folk song since the middle ages. It has been recorded previously by the likes of Judy Collins, Ewan McColl, Joan Baez, Steeleye Span, and Bonnie Dobson. Anne’s recording was apparently found on a reel-to-reel tape recording along with three other songs. These four songs will be included this year as bonus tracks on a de-luxe reissue of her seminal 1971 album Anne Briggs. That is something really to look forward to. On this dark haunting song Anne’s transcendent ethereal voice is accompanied by her gentle unobtrusive guitar playing. Last night I looked on YouTube to see if anyone had uploaded a video of the song and was surprised to find that nobody had. “People have to hear this song!”, I thought to myself. I have never made a video from an audio file before but decided to try and do it. You can see the resulting video below. I hope you enjoy it as much as me. The video only has one photo of Anne on it, but that was all I could manage to do. The joy is in the listening however, and I must say after all these years that it is wonderful to hear a new song by Britain’s finest ever folk singer. Thank you very much Uncut magazine and Topic Records.

Source: https://patrickmaginty.blogspot.com/

Review: “Les Cousins” – The Soundtrack Of Soho’s Legendary Folk & Blues Club

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By Dave Thompson

Les Cousins: The Soundtrack Of Soho’s Legendary Folk & Blues Club

Cherry Red (3-CD set)

Talk about the British folk scene of the 1960s and, sooner rather than later, the name Les Cousins will come up — no, not another of the unheard legends that bestrode that era like an arran-sweatered colossus (although there were plenty of those around at the time), but the venue wherein said colossi strutted their stuff.

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An unprepossessing Greek Street restaurant, where the young Al Stewart shepherded the evening’s acts on and off the stage; where Sandy Denny and Paul Simon were as likely to appear as a toothless Irishman singing “Danny Boy”; where both the folk boom of the mid-1960s, and the variants that followed in its footsteps were born.

Les Cousins Club Continental opened in October 1964, in a space that once had held the Skiffle Cellar. A failure in that form, it reopened, sans the last two words, in April 1965, with a solid diet of folk music, and remained in action for the next seven years. During which time, more or less every British (and many American) folk artist of note either played there, or at least stopped by.

This box set — amazingly, the first to truly focus upon Les Cousins alone, as opposed to the overall scene of the day — merely scratches the surface of the club’s renown. Three discs of (many of) the venue’s best known guests could probably be followed by 30 stuffed with lesser known talents, and 300 of complete unknowns. If only anyone had recorded their performances…

Unfortunately, if there are any unknown live-at-Les Cousins tapes circulating… well, they’re still unknown. The 71 tracks spread across three discs here are universally taken from studio albums, although so many of them are hard (if not impossible) to find these days that that is nothing to sniff at.

Neither is the roll call of talents. Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny, Al Stewart, the Young Tradition, the Incredible String Band, Donovan, Julie Felix, Wizz Jones, the Third Ear Band, Plainsong, Bridget St John… Anne Briggs, who is due for the super deluxe treatment later this year, shares space with the immortal Nadia Cattouse; Hamish Imlach with Mudge & Clutterbuck; Paul Simon with Shirley Collins. And while the song selection is not as adventurous as some browsers might demand, it is certainly representative of the artists involved.

Of course, for a true impression of what a night at Les Cousins might have sounded like, the BBC would need to uncork the long mothballed London Folk Club Cellar tapes, the corporation’s own approximation of a venue such as this in the mid-late 1960s. A taste of that is, in fact, on tap in a forthcoming Martin Carthy BBC sessions box set, and we can only hope that more is in the pipeline, while anyone who actually remembers the show is still around to appreciate it.

In the meantime, however, let Les Cousins be your guide to a unique period in British folk, and the unique venue that catered for its admirers.

 

Dave Thompson is a contributing editor at Goldmine, contributing the Spin Cycle vinyl and reissues column and more besides. A much published author, his latest book An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock was released in July 2023. He has co-written autobiographies by Eddie and Brian Holland, New York Doll Sylvain Sylvain and Walter Lure of Johnny Thunder’s Heartbreakers. His memoir The Grunge Diaries is in the Goldmine Store.

“I don’t know who I am, I don’t know what I am… but I am” Anne Briggs interviewed

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In a rare and remarkable interview, the elusive folk singer talks frankly about her extraordinary life and her brief but indelible career

One of the wildest talents of her generation, ANNE BRIGGS retired from music in 1973, leaving only a handful of recordings behind her. Now, in a rare and remarkable interview, this most elusive of folk singers talks frankly with Jim Wirth about her extraordinary life, her brief but indelible career – and why it had to end so soon.

Anne Briggs is reading the labels attached to the trees in Kew Gardens. Slight but steely, she veers off the path at every turn, silently trampling across lawns and occasionally clambering up raised beds. If she could drown out the noise of the aeroplanes coming in to land at Heathrow, she might almost be in her element. The most mythologised singer of the 1960s folk revival has lived in rural Argyll for the past few decades, and her animal instincts have been frazzled by a rare visit to London to attend Topic Records’ 80th-birthday celebrations at Cecil Sharp House. Dressed today in jeans, a red zip-up jumper and hiking shoes, she reluctantly comes out of the greenery and folds herself into a seat in Kew’s café. “I find being in the city totally devastating,” she tells Uncut, hands in constant motion. “Bad. I lose my sense of direction. I get lost. All the time, I get lost.”

Briggs was no less disoriented when she first moved to the capital aged 17, drawn south from nottinghamshire by the prospect of independence more than recognition. An instinctively brilliant interpreter of traditional song, Briggs became a subtle, elliptical writer on a par with her on-off boyfriend Bert Jansch, with a dangerous reputation to match. In a 1971 edition of Sounds, folk critic Jerry Gilbert summed the footloose Briggs up as “a female Kerouac”. However, the 74-year-old is adamant that her rambling role model was never On The Road’s Dean Moriarty, but instead the feral child of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. “I learned to read when I was about five years old and all I wanted to be was Mowgli,” she says. “Mowgli could do all of the things I wasn’t allowed to do.”

Briggs effectively retired from music in 1973, after deciding that a lone foray into folk rock – released decades later as Sing A Song For You – was not good enough to be released. Pregnant with the second of her two children, she abandoned what was left of her singing career to work in some of Britain’s remotest places with her partner, forester Pat Delap.

“I’ve always been an outside kind of person,” she says, struggling to be heard above the sound of the air conditioning. “I’ve been a professional gardener in one form and another. I’ve spent the past 20 years outdoors; I had a contract with the Forestry Commission and then with the Crown Prosecution Service, helping the guys who are doing community service – keeping their clients occupied.”

In 11 years as a singer, Briggs released an EP and two full-length albums, as well as recording tracks for two Topic Records compilation albums – 1963’s The Iron Muse and 1966’s saucy The Bird In The Bush – and 1963 and 1964’s Edinburgh Folk Festival LPs. Even factoring in Sing A Song For You and “Four Songs” – a more recent EP of pieces scavenged from old radio sessions and a live tape – her entire recorded output amounts to barely three hours of music. However, the extraordinary power of her voice, supernaturally clear and eternally distant, has given Briggs an abiding appeal like few of her contemporaries. “I love the almost dispassionate delivery of Annie, and the starkness,” modern folk polymath Eliza Carthy tells Uncut. “The directness of the delivery and the purity of her voice – it’s like a dagger. It cuts right through you.”

“It’s all there on the albums,” adds Steve Ashley, Briggs’ long-term friend and one-time collaborator. “You can still hear that magic. She was also completely unpredictable.”

On bad nights, Briggs dissolved on stage, forgetting lyrics and abandoning songs as she battled with her profoundly ambivalent attitude to performing. She always sang with her eyes tight shut, making no attempt to reach out to the crowd; her transcendent nights might be the ones when she managed to blank the audience out entirely. “I was always singing to myself,” she says, momentarily cheery. “I hated being in front of an audience. I was nervous. I was just so fucking nervous. I’m so fucking nervous being here with you. I didn’t like being watched. I didn’t like having my photograph taken. Perhaps I felt that I was never empowered to be important.”

Anne Briggs was born in Toton, Nottinghamshire, on September 29, 1944. Now one of Nottingham’s western suburbs, Briggs says it was “a little rural pocket” during her childhood. Her upbringing was no bucolic idyll, though. World War II cost Briggs both her parents; her father – a sapper – contracted tuberculosis while on active duty, and her mother – a nurse – was diagnosed with the same condition at the time that her only daughter was born, dying when Briggs was five.

“She never left hospital,” Briggs says. “I only have one memory of her, which is looking up at this lady who’d been painted. It was a big day for her and the nurses: her daughter’s coming to visit her, and they made her up, bright red. It frightened me. She was like a puppet.”

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