A Writer of Songs

By Harvey Andrews

In the second volume of his musical memoirs, Harvey recounts the highs and lows of the 60s and 70s when he was recording with major record labels.

Recalling the recording of Writer of Songs and Friends of Mine, he explains how and why he wrote the songs, the mostly untrue legends that surround his song Soldier, and how it caused a furore that led to it being mentioned in the House of Commons. He also explains why Hey Sandy was very nearly consigned to the bin, yet went on to be #2 in New Zealand and his first big success at The Cambridge Folk Festival.

It was a time of TV appearances, radio shows and tours. Paul Simon, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Steve Goodman, Ozzy Osborne, Focus, The Kinks, ELO, Abba and many others crossed his path.

Find out why a gun was drawn on him in a dressing room, how a Dutch TV show went horribly wrong, and how he turned down the opportunity to be a Euro pop idol.

Like his songs, his story is often funny, occasionally sad, but like his final album title - that’s life!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781447789888

Book preview

Contents

Prologue

False Start

Football Crazy

Writer of Songs

Andrews and Cooper

Friends of Mine

Highs and Lows

Fantasies from a Corner Seat

The Camera and the Song

Ann Dex and C.S.E

Someday

Back on the Road Again

Beeswing

Prologue

It was 1964

In my previous book, Gold Star to the Ozarks, I told the story of my life in Birmingham up to the moment I made the decision to go to the Jug of Punch folk club in Digbeth to audition for a floor spot performing my first three songs. Fortunately they were well received and my new life began.

This volume is the story of the next twelve years, 1965 – 1976, where I had the opportunity to perform and record at the highest level at a time when music was a major component of all our lives and hundreds of writers, singers, and bands were all competing for the elusive chart success that would lead to wealth and celebrity.

My own attitude to these two sirens was always ambivalent. I wanted the songs to succeed, but I was distrustful of celebrity. However, I tried my best to reconcile these differences and had a journey I could never have imagined possible as I spent my lonely teenage nights in the front room of 85 Kenilworth Road, Birmingham, staring out at the brick wall on the opposite side of the road, singing along with Sinatra and Holly.

By 1964 folk clubs were opening all over the country at an amazing rate and young people were flocking to their local pubs to cram themselves into upstairs rooms to sing with, or listen to, whoever was willing to get up and have a go, with or without a guitar. Some sang traditional English ballads, some specialised in Irish or Scottish music and others were writing their own material. It was a ‘great big melting pot’ of words and sounds that attracted a generation born during, and just after, the Second World War. Its appeal seemed to be to the better educated, to students, and to those politically left of centre, who had a cause for which song was becoming an accepted vehicle of protest.

There were only a handful of people who were good enough as singers and who had a big enough repertoire of songs to qualify them as a guest artist, and the demand for their services was growing by the day. Most of the folk clubs wanted to book an artist every week and would pay a fee for anyone who could do two half-hour sets. This meant each club would make about fifty bookings a year, so very quickly new young performers started to appear on the circuit, realising that they could make a little money, have a lot of fun, and even turn full-time professional if they could prove themselves good enough in front of folk audiences.

It was a maelstrom of opportunity and encouragement; unregulated, disorganised, but growing at a phenomenal rate and peopled with intense and determined musicians and singers who loved the music and wanted to be part of it.

The enthusiasm was infectious and I was soon swept up in it.

As I wrote in a song many years later:

It’s the journey isn’t it?

That’s why we’re here

It’s the where we go in the time we’ve got

It’s the course we steer

It’s the journey isn’t it?

The way we try

The way we win, the way we lose

The reason why

Is the journey

False Start

On the 24th November 1965, only thirteen months after my first floor spot at the Jug of Punch folk club in Birmingham, I am presenting a concert at Coventry Teacher Training College where I had been a student for three years from 1961-1964.

I have already returned once and played their new folk club but now I am to be master of ceremonies at the first major folk concert in the college’s history. Booked to appear are a young up-and-coming songwriter, and the American Derroll Adams, a legendary companion of Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, and mentor of our own Donovan whose single ‘Catch the Wind’ has been a summertime hit.

Our two guests are getting on famously in the dressing room as I go out to do the opening spot. The hall where I used to dance at weekend hops is packed full of students in rows of seats. It’s a strange feeling to be back on the same stage where I made my first public appearance at a college function singing ‘Moon River’, ‘Portrait of my Love’ and ‘True Love Ways’ in a suit and tie accompanied on piano by a student friend. Tonight I am in denim jeans and a black polo neck sweater. I am playing my own guitar. The front row seats are entirely taken up by lecturers, many of whom taught me. They are probably as surprised as I am at the route my life has taken in so short a time. Miss Brown, the formidable Principal, sits on the aisle seat.

As I perform a short opening set the audience are very encouraging and my five songs go down well. I then introduce our first artist.

I already know that he is a bit of an acquired taste. He is not in the mould of Bob Dylan, the most widely known folk artist, and he is certainly not like any of the popular folkies appearing in the charts or on television such as Peter, Paul and Mary, Robin Hall and Jimmie MacGregor, or Cy Grant. These are the singers with whom most of the audience are familiar. They sing cheerful chorus songs and inoffensive traditional or contemporary ditties such as ‘Puff, The Magic Dragon’, ‘Footba’ Crazy’ and ‘Yellow Bird’. Our guest’s best-known song is about drug addiction, but I feel that the drugs of choice in my ex-college are still probably Watneys Red Barrel and Babycham.

I give our first guest a short introduction, extolling his dominance of the contemporary folk scene in London. To tentative applause he takes the stage, making no attempt to acknowledge the audience. Throughout his set he sits hunched over his guitar. He is no great singer and his songs require close attention. His guitar playing is exceptional but his voice drones and his melodies are unadventurous. The audience are definitely fidgety as the interval approaches. Some of the lecturers wear puzzled expressions.

Meanwhile, in the dressing room, Derroll Adams is getting very friendly with a large bottle of whisky.

After a short interval most students and all the lecturers return to the hall and I open the second half with a comedy song and a couple of choruses to liven things up and then I say:

Ladies and gentlemen, it is now my pleasure and privilege to introduce to you a folk legend. Our final guest has worked with many of the great names in America and is a friend of Donovan. You’re in for a real treat, so please welcome from Portland, Oregon, Mr Derroll Adams!

A burst of applause greets Derroll’s appearance. He shuffles on stage wearing a weary Stetson, faded jeans, cowboy boots and a prolific beard. Carrying his banjo he looks the archetypal rambling, shambling, hard-living folkie and the audience settle back in anticipation of the uncorrupted real thing. Derroll stands before the two microphones swaying slightly, and with a smile that takes in the whole auditorium he begins to play.

It’s immediately obvious that the banjo is out of tune. Derroll’s soft, gruff voice sings us a line about travelling on a train before he stops. Muttering to himself he turns the tuning pegs of his instrument and plucks at the strings. This takes all of a minute. Eventually satisfied, he starts again. The banjo is more out of tune than ever. We hear the one line about travelling on a train before he stops and repeats the tuning process. After three more abortive attempts he has been on stage for six minutes and still has not got beyond the first line of the first song. The audience are now muttering louder than Derroll who realises that he should say something and take control. Staring down at the lecturers and the Principal, he says:

Someone ... on the front row ... just farted.

There is an eerie silence. All breathing in the hall has stopped. I watch from the wings, horrified, as first Miss Brown and then the collected lecturers stand up and crocodile silently down the aisle and out of the hall, the swing doors crashing shut behind them. The silence is broken by the simultaneous exhalation of two hundred students, followed by a roar of laughter, a cheer and a long clap. Derroll beams. The audience are now in the palm of his hand and he proceeds to do an out of tune set of songs that delights everyone.

I got my first proper booking, as opposed to a floor spot, by supporting the Ian Campbell Folk Group at the Stratford-upon-Avon folk club on the 2nd of December 1964. I was paid £2.10s (£2.50), which was a quarter of my weekly teaching wage. This was not the first time I had been paid for singing. I had been a choirboy at St Martin’s Parish Church in Birmingham’s Bullring where a wedding could earn me ten shillings. This was very different. Now I was being paid as a serious entertainer performing my own material to a paying audience. It was a most wonderful feeling to take those two green one pound notes, and the red note for ten shillings, and put them in my wallet. The next day I went and paid them into my bank account before showing my bankbook to my parents with a feeling of real pride allied with excitement. How far could I take this newfound opportunity?

The Campbell group ran the Jug of Punch folk club in Digbeth Civic Hall in Birmingham where I had made my first appearance before an audience, singing my own songs, in late October. The hall was a short walk from the Bullring and the entrance was down an alleyway. Inside the door was a table where Dave, the patriarch of the Campbells, took the entrance money. He and his wife also sang occasionally, and their pièce de résistance was ‘The Road And The Miles To Dundee’, a song about the city from which they had originally immigrated to the Midlands. The group was composed of two of their children, Ian and Lorna Campbell, who did most of the lead singing, plus Lorna’s husband Brian Clarke on guitar, John Dunkerley on banjo, guitar and accordion, and Dave Swarbrick on fiddle and mandolin.

The Campbells had a manager called Ioan Allen who was the brother-in-law of Ian and Lorna. He realised that the folk world was growing exponentially and needed some organisation. He also realised that there was money to be made from this new music, so he had set himself up as an agent and manager. After seeing me in Stratford he offered to take me on to his fledgling agency and manage my bookings. He would charge me 10% of my fee. I didn’t think twice before accepting, and so six weeks after my first appearance at the Jug of Punch I was suddenly inside the folk world, looking out on a future that seemed to be rushing towards me at a frightening speed.

Three months later in March 1965 I appeared on the bill at Birmingham Town Hall with the Campbells and Rory McEwen, a Scottish folk singer, well known to the general public from television appearances. As I stood at the microphones I found it hard to begin. I was rooted to the spot because I was standing where Buddy Holly had performed seven years before in 1958. The journey I had made in just five months seemed incredible to me. Here I was in my hometown performing to a full house, and in the audience were my mother and father, as amazed as me at what was happening. It was my first concert appearance and, although I was understandably nervous, I found I could face a bigger gathering than at a folk club and enjoy performing for them in a more formal setting.

In April 1965 Ioan arranged for me to sign with Transatlantic Records, a label run by Nat Joseph, which was beginning to specialise in British folk music. I received an advance of £25.00 and the contract was to run until the October, with a two-year option. I also agreed to my songs being published by the company.

Getting a recording contract was the dream of so many young people at that time. When I was growing up, posters advertising variety shows used to have descriptions of the performers below their names. Max Miller the comedian was ‘The Cheeky Chappie’; Tommy Trinder, another comic, had as his by-line ‘You lucky People’, which was his catchphrase; but a singer like Donald Peers would just have ‘Recording Artiste’ beneath his name. Now I was one myself and the excitement I felt at achieving that appellation was immense. Within a few weeks I was in a recording studio in London laying down what were basically my first five songs. I sang them with just my own guitar accompaniment and they were released on a compendium album called ‘Second Wave’ in May 1965.

Listening to them today it is obvious that I was recorded too early. My voice was still that of a trained choral singer and my lyrics were largely uncrafted. ‘Ice Cream Man’, written as an exercise to warn my junior school class about the dangers of running across a road unsupervised, is positively embarrassing. Years later, at the Cambridge Folk Festival, Peter Bellamy of The Young Tradition would somehow get behind me as I walked around the site and then start singing the chorus. He knew it wound me up. ‘Kids Colour Bar’ was my first audience favourite but ‘Harvest of Hate’ is the song that showed there was a songwriter in there who might have a future.

In June I was back at the Town Hall appearing with Diz Disley, The 3 City 4, Derroll Adams and Julie Felix.

Diz was a man apart, a musical phenomenon. He was a jazz guitarist à la Django Reinhardt, a raconteur à la W.C.Fields, a chaotic performer of a ragbag mix of material that suited a certain type of folk audience who loved him to bits and excused his foibles. He was always broke and sold his guitars regularly to raise funds. In the early 60s he once sold a Clifford Essex Paragon De Luxe to Vic Flick on Charing Cross Road for £40, which was a fair sum in those days. Flick used this guitar to record the James Bond theme. It is now on display in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On a ferry back to the UK mainland Diz sold a superb Maccaferri guitar because he had no ready cash at the time.

He drove around in an old hearse that struggled to do over fifty miles an hour. I only travelled in it once. Diz was driving us to a gig in Birmingham and as we passed a bus stop he saw a young man standing waiting for a bus and carrying a guitar case. We were going past him so slowly that Diz had time to wind down his window, lean out, and shout to the lad, Give it up dear boy, before it gets too much for you!

His reputation for lateness, or not turning up at all, was legendary, but he was such a loveable eccentric that he was always forgiven by club organisers, who hoped for the best when the booked evening arrived, waiting at the door of whatever venue they ran, anxiously listening for the unmistakable sound of the hearse’s engine.

Julie Felix, an American resident in the UK, was a rising television star. A visual version of Joan Baez, she later appeared on the BBC television programme ‘That Was The Week That Was’ with David Frost. She did a fine job introducing the national audience to the songs of Tom Paxton and other young writers, and countless children sat on the floor of countless nurseries singing along with Julie’s hit recording of Paxton’s ‘We’re Going To The Zoo’.

In July I made my London debut at the Troubadour folk club on Old Brompton Road. This was THE folk venue in the capital. The clubroom was the downstairs cellar of a coffee bar and was really small, but on most nights it was crammed with folkies. Performers visiting London would drop in and sing a few songs from the floor and there were young local singers who formed a nucleus of residents, so the audience never knew who might be entertaining them. On my first visit I met another aspiring songwriter called Al Stewart, who later emigrated to America where he became very successful.

As all of this was happening I was teaching full time as well as appearing regularly at folk clubs in Birmingham and the greater West Midlands area, travelling by bus and train, and eventually by car. The paucity of guests available in the early days of the folk club explosion is evidenced by the fact that in twelve months I made seven appearances at five different folk clubs in the city of Coventry alone. In Birmingham I played at eleven: The College of Technology, Aston University, West Midland College of Education, Selly Oak, The Holy Ground, The Grotto, Peanuts, McDonalds, The Monday Scene (with Kenny Ball’s Jazz Men!), Le Metro, and, of course, every Thursday night at the Jug of Punch, where I tried out the new songs I was either writing or learning so I could incorporate them in my performances. There were more than enough folkies to sustain all these venues in one city.

In the summer of 1965 I finished my probationary year’s teaching and obtained my full certificate. I then resigned from my old junior school where I had served my apprenticeship despite the cajoling of the Headmaster and his prophecies of doom for my musical career. This enabled me to travel further afield when necessary. It was a risk, but one worth taking. If things didn’t work out, I could always return to teaching.

Some of my bookings were now paying £10, just below the weekly wage I would have received as a full-time teacher. The least I was paid was £5. Being paid for singing, writing and entertaining was a wonderful feeling that I never lost or took for granted for the next fifty years.

Of course I was also a member of the folk audience, and it was a very exciting time. On nights when I wasn’t performing I would go to whatever club was open to see other singers and hear new songs. I was learning at a very fast rate. I was seeing the very best the new music could offer, particularly those artists making their first tour of Britain from America.

At Birmingham Town Hall concerts I saw Buffy St Marie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, The Rev Gary Davis and finally, Bob Dylan. It was his last solo appearance before turning electric.

Watching the man who had inspired me when I was a student was an unforgettable experience, but for me he was never to be the same again. There was a presence and a strength that came from his being just one man and a guitar that was the very essence of what attracted me when I first listened to his albums. Although I will always acknowledge him as the inspiration for my lifetime in song writing, as he progressed I soon found other writer/performers whose work was more to my taste.

Sitting with me at the Dylan concert were Ian and Lorna Campbell. They were not enamoured of the man or his music and were dubious about the influence he was having on the folk scene, but they were curious to see him perform. The group had released a single of Dylan’s song ‘The Times They Are A’Changing’ and it was doing well in the lower reaches of the charts until Dylan’s record company rush-released his version which shot up to the top ten.

At the Jug I saw Malvina Reynolds, who as a grandmother had written ‘Little Boxes’; the great blues men Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee; the brilliant instrumental group The Lost City Ramblers; traditional country music specialist Bill Clifton; and, unforgettably, Jesse Fuller, a black blues singer who wrote ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’ and performed as a one-man band with five instruments. British singers like Alex Campbell, Bert Lloyd, Malcolm Price, Jeannie Robertson, Shirley Collins, Cyril Tawney and Ewan MacColl also appeared, as did fringe performers such as Diz Disley, Johnny Silvo and Alexis Korner. One day I was asked to meet Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody, at New Street railway station to escort him to the club. I was in Heaven!

Ian soon realised that the new vogue for singer/songwriters was to be encouraged as it would attract a younger and wider audience to the club, and I was in the right place at the right time to benefit from this.

On one memorable Thursday night I was in the bar at the Jug when a guest performer turned up a week late. Ian gave him some