Bridget St. John

Bridget St John – The Reason John Peel Started His Own Record Label

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Ahead of Bridget St John’s gig at The Trades Club, we zipped back in time to 1969 – the year John Peel fell in love with Bridget’s velveteen folk voice and launched a label to pro…

There are many words you could use to describe the late broadcaster and DJ John Peel. Passionate. Obsessive. Instinctive… One thing’s for sure, he was a man who knew his own mind. When Peel liked something, he went all-in.  He had the gumption to commit.

On its release in 1978, Peel famously played The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks twice in a row on his radio show, hailing it “the perfect pop song”. The opening line – “Teenage dreams so hard to beat” – is etched on his gravestone in Great Finborough, Suffolk.

Peel was always fiercely devoted to the subjects of his admiration. He granted 24 BBC Peel Sessions to his most treasured band of all time, The Fall. And his gushing promotion helped boost a catalogue of other artists in their raw infancy, not least The Smiths, Marc Bolan, The White Stripes, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Kanda Bongo Man, Joy Division and, of course, Half Man Half Biscuit.

In the late 60s, when he moved from pirate radio to the BBC, Peel stumbled across a young folk singer, Bridget St John, and instantly became a colossal fan. So much so, in fact, that he felt the burning desire to start his own record label, largely in order to capture Bridget’s work and get it distributed to a wider audience.

Speaking years later he explained “nobody else was going to record her stuff.” Through artistic endeavour, he felt he had to.

So, in 1969, Peel set up Dandelion Records – named after his pet hamster – with business partner Clive Selwood. The label’s first release was Bridget’s debut album Ask Me No Questions, recorded in just 10 hours and produced by Peel himself.

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Bridget St John: The enduring quality of an iconic folk singer

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Bridget St John

Exploring the life and music of Bridget St. John, the folk singer-songwriter who recorded some of the scene’s greatest records, before fading into obscurity.

By Ben Forrest

Earth is awash with injustices, and the music industry is certainly not short of them either. Over the course of musical history, there have been countless gifted, groundbreaking artists who have spent the vast majority of their lives under the radar while inferior artists and false prophets reap the rewards of mainstream success. The landscape of folk music seems particularly susceptible to producing these forgotten heroes in the form of figures like Bridget Anne Hobbs – better known as Bridget St John.

England, particularly London, during the late 1960s, was a particularly vibrant place to be for a myriad of reasons. The popular image of the city during that time was one of mods, mini skirts, and rock ‘n’ roll domination as the hippie counterculture movement slowly drip-fed itself over the Atlantic. A far too often overlooked aspect of the era, however, is the vibrant folk music scene which blossomed during this time. Although record companies did not welcome this wave of folk with open arms, artists like Vashti Bunyan, Nick Drake, and Bridget St John were creating some of the greatest music of that period.

Bridget St John had secured her start in music as a teenager, buying an acoustic guitar and playing folk music across the pubs and Universities of South Yorkshire throughout the mid-1960s. Soon, the bright lights of London beckoned her down south, where the vocalist and songwriter soon found a home among people like John Martyn and Robin Frederick. After continuing to hone her songwriting and performance skills, St John became one of the most promising young artists in the London folk scene.

 

This reputation, along with her newfound connections, soon led to the folk star crossing paths with John Peel. Like so many artists both before and after her, it was the radio DJ who gave her a proper start, inviting her to record four songs for a Peel session. Including renditions of original songs like ‘Ask Me No Questions,’ these first Peel sessions, recorded in August of 1968, did not have a huge impact on the musical mainstream, but the awe-inspiring quality of St John’s voice and songwriting could certainly not be denied.

These sessions with Peel eventually led to St John recording her debut album, Ask Me No Questions, with the radio presenter the following year. Again, this record would not storm up the album charts or earn the performer a primetime slot on Top of the Pops, but that was hardly her aim. Folk music has never been about commercial success or popularity; those qualities are directly contradictory to the roots and spirit of the movement.

Particularly on her debut album, you get the sense that St John was singing these songs because that’s what she was put on Earth to do; that incredible voice would have been wasted as an office clerk or retail worker. The songwriter always had something to say, whether that be a social comment, a musing on romance, or an ode to nature, and each of these would be delivered with an unparalleled level of beauty and grace.

Perhaps more so than any other folk musician of the period, St John’s voice seems to drown out every other sound around you, as though she is speaking directly to you, the listener. On Ask Me No Questions, the diegetic sounds of birdsong and nature culminate in a truly ethereal album experience that widespread audiences in the 1960s simply were not ready for, it would appear.

Bridget St John released four albums between 1969 and 1974, none of which made much of a commercial impact. The closest the vocalist came to mainstream notoriety was likely her stunning collaboration with the psychedelic hero Kevin Ayers on his 1970 track ‘The Oyster and the Flying Fish,’ one of the most endearing duets of the psychedelic period. Like many overlooked folk stars of the late 1960s, St John retired from music during the 1970s and lived much of her life in the shadows.

Thankfully, though, audiences soon caught up to the timeless quality of her material, causing something of a resurgence in her work. During the 1990s and early 2000s, St John returned to writing, recording, and performing, and at the same time, much of her early material began to be reissued and reappraised. She even got the chance to perform with Ayers once again, recording ‘Baby Come Home’ for the psych star’s final album in 2007.

It may have taken some time before Bridget St John witnessed the recognition she so richly deserved, but the fact that her music is still being discovered by music obsessives around the world is testament to the timeless quality of her recorded material. While much of the rock and pop recorded in the late 1960s has become outdated and, often, cringeworthy, records like Ask Me No Questions remain fantastically relevant and emotionally affecting within the present day.

Source: Bridget St John: The enduring quality of an iconic folk singer

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.

Bridget St. John: From There / To Here: UK/US Recordings 1974-1982

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Animated by a sense of endless potential and patchwork charm, a new box set collects the influential British songwriter’s work during a transitional period.

By Stephen M. Deusner

Sparrowpit is the fanciful name of a small village in Derbyshire, a small cluster of old buildings located at a bend in the road almost halfway between Sheffield and Manchester. In 1973, the folk singer Bridget St. John settled there and wrote songs for what would become her fourth album, Jumblequeen, the centerpiece of a new box set, From There / To Here: UK / US Recordings 1974-1982. Judging by those songs—which chronicle divorce, grief, confusion, loneliness, and a very gradual recovery of self—she lived there during a period of extreme upheaval. “Her gentle man has left her after just four years of life, it became impossible to call her ‘wife,’” she sings on the song she named for that place. “Now she has no place she can call her home, has to start all over this time on her own.” “Sparrowpit” is a torrent of jigsaw syllables delivered against a runaway melody and a folk-funk arrangement. The music suggests a life moving too fast, and St. John sounds like she’d love just a moment of calm: “If you’d like to help her better, got to take her under your wing.” She might as well be singing that directly to the good people of Sparrowpit, asking for all the peace and quiet such a quaint village promises.

Jumblequeen is an album about emotional wounds, about feelings too extreme to corral or even identify. So why does St. John sound like she’s having so much fun singing these songs? “Sparrowpit” is almost jubilant, like a game she’s playing with the listener, especially when she dives into her lower register. Even on the saddest songs, though, she savors certain details, certain turns of phrase. She dispenses wisdom casually, especially on the devastating “I Don’t Know If I Can Take It.” Even at such emotional extremes, these songs make space for hope and possibility, as though St. John knows she’ll leave Sparrowpit stronger and more clear-headed than ever. “I want to be where someone loves me best of all,” she declares on “Want to Be With You,” and she makes it sound like the most perfectly natural desire of all, and a perfectly achievable one, too. Jumblequeen is, as its title implies, a piece-by-piece self-portrait by an artist who’s not quite sure how the final puzzle picture will look—but she relishes the process just the same.

Along with the dusky timbre of her voice and the bounding eccentricity of her phrasing, this is a crucial part of St. John’s appeal as a singer and songwriter: It’s not that she makes sad sentiments sound happy, but that she finds a kernel of creative joy in confronting such hardships. She seems to love turning pain into something useful, or beautiful, or fun. In other words, she doesn’t write simply to express herself. She makes music to move through the world. From There / To Here, which collects Jumblequeen along with several discs of rare and unreleased tracks, traces St. John’s movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s, recounting her story of moving halfway around the globe to find a community of like-minded souls, trying but failing to keep record labels interested, working with various producers and collaborators, and gradually settling into a more grounded life as a mother.

St. John was supposed to be a star. In 1968 John Peel started playing her music on BBC radio, in particular her single “To B Without a Hitch,” and he even started a new label—Dandelion Records—just to put her songs out into the world. Her ’69 debut, Ask Me No Questions, featured just her voice and her crisp guitar picking, and her second album, 1971’s Songs for the Gentle Man, added softly psychedelic flourishes of strings, horns, and flute. Like John Martyn and Kevin Ayers, St. John pushed against the strictures of British folk-rock, incorporating American country and R&B elements into her music, which made the press take notice even when the public did not. Dandelion had rocky promotion and rockier distribution, and the label folded mere months after releasing St. John’s third album, 1972’s Thank You For…, essentially marooning her and her potential hit single, “Nice.” Those albums were compiled on the excellent, if dully titled, 2015 comp Dandelion Albums and BBC Collection, which serves as preamble to From There / To Here.

If Sparrowpit is the “There” in that title, then the “Here” is New York City. After Jumblequeen performed no better than her previous albums, St. John was dropped by yet another label and moved across the Atlantic. She found a musical home in Greenwich Village, then more than a decade past its folk-revival heyday but still a bustling neighborhood for musicians, and she booked sessions with new collaborators and even recorded an album’s worth of material with Stuff, a popular crew of session players. It would take 20 years before those songs got a proper release on the 1995 comp Take the 5ifth, which is the second disc in this set. It shows an artist casting in all directions for inspiration, as though a new country presents a new set of possibilities. “Moody,” her first demo recorded in America, opens with a springy bossa nova riff, then blossoms into a lush arrangement with a chorus of saxophones and an electric guitar solo. But St. John wrings as much sound from the two syllables in that title, which only makes the key change at the end sound all the more ecstatic.

Occasionally Take the 5ifth and the unreleased demos on the set’s third disc sound a little too slick and professional, which distracts from her vocals and robs the music of its intimacy. The Stuff recordings in particular are moored in the marina of yacht rock, a curious development for St. John, but it brings out something in her voice and pushes her in new directions. She adopts an accusatory tone on “Chamille,” her voice like barbed wire in such a silky arrangement, and by rounding out her vowels and drawing out her consonants, she tries to stop time on “Song for John,” a eulogy for the Beatle, written and recorded in the wake of his death in 1980. What could easily have been a maudlin ballad quoting “Working Class Hero” and “All You Need Is Love” instead becomes a weirdly affecting eulogy not for the man but for what so many saw in him, all the possibilities he perhaps reluctantly represented. “This is more than a light put out,” she insists. “This was more than fire dying.”

That sense of endless potential is what makes this music so lively and rambunctious nearly half a century later, and it’s perhaps why a new generation of folk artists—including Ryley Walker, William Tyler, and Steve Gunn—has found inspiration in her work. She thrives on all these different sounds and styles: an artist in love with all the possibilities of music, the infinite ways she might sing a single syllable and all the subtle gradations of emotion a melody might convey. That makes From There / To Here a patchwork set, but St. John has always been the queen of jumble.

Source: Bridget St. John: From There / To Here: UK/US Recordings 1974-1982