A CURIOUS MIX OF BRITISH FOLK MUSIC AND AMERICAN POLITICS
The Young Tradition, formed by Peter Bellamy, Royston Wood and Heather Wood. They recorded three albums of mainly traditional British folk music, sung in arrangements for their three unaccompanied voices.
In the late 1960s, London became the centre of the English folk music revival and The Young Tradition moved there, sharing a house with John Renbourn, Bert Jansch and Anne Briggs.
Singer with the 1960s folk group the Young Tradition, whose songs ranged from sea shanties to haunting treatments of traditional music
Heather Wood, who has died aged 79, was the last surviving member of the Young Tradition, heroes of the 1960s folk scene in the UK and North America with their rousing three-part unaccompanied harmonies, clothes that made them look like rock stars and songs that ranged from sea shanties to a haunting treatment of the Lyke Wake Dirge.
The Young Tradition was the name of one of many London folk clubs in the mid-60s, and it was held in a pub then known as the Scots Hoose, near Cambridge Circus in the West End. Peter Bellamy and Royston Wood were two regular singers there, and Heather “just joined in from the audience” in 1965. The three of them found that “people would pay us to sing”, and were managed for a while by Bruce Dunnet, who ran the club and suggested they took its name. Later they became regulars at the Les Cousins club in nearby Greek Street, where they sang alongside Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, who lived above them in Somali Road, West Hampstead.
Signed to Transatlantic, in 1966 they released their first album, The Young Tradition, which included the Lyke Wake Dirge, the story of a departed soul making a hazardous journey to purgatory, as well as their gutsy treatment of the Tyneside colliers’ song Byker Hill. It immediately established their reputation.
Unlike the other great young unaccompanied vocal group of the era, the Watersons, the Young Tradition were not from the same family and were three very different individuals with different styles who “made up our own harmonies”. Bellamy loved the blues, Royston had roots in classical music, while Heather said she was influenced by “the Everly Brothers and years of school and church choirs”. What they had in common was their love of folk music, and a commitment to meeting and learning from veteran traditional singers such as Harry Cox or the Copper family.
Their second album, So Cheerfully Round, was released in 1967, the same year they were invited to the Newport folk festival in the US, where Heather remembered them singing informally with Janis Joplin. In the same year they recorded an EP of sea shanties, Chicken on a Raft, which was released in 1968, while their final studio album, Galleries, which came out in 1969, included guest appearances from David Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London, Dave Swarbrick and Dolly Collins.
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.
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.