Newspaper Articles
An interview with Ralph McTell
Andy Farquarson
Spring 2001
It is a bright spring day in London's west end. The ghost of Lord Reith looks down as Ralph McTell strides into the art deco splendour of Broadcasting House. Tanned, smiling and dressed in a French raincoat, he looks fit and stylish.

It turns out that McTell is a great admirer of the Beeb. "I'm here to do some interviews for local radio to promote my book and concert tour," he explains. "I think the BBC does a good job supporting roots, folk music and acoustic music - without it, the genre would get virtually no airplay."

We discuss the recently introduced Radio Two Folk Awards. Purists may argue an awards ceremony is the antithesis of 'folk', that the music should be performed for its own sake by people who are just the carriers of a tradition and who seek no plaudits. That's not a view McTell shares. "The genre has broadened to include a huge range of singers, players, writers, composers and highly individual interpreters of older forms. Recognising them as the BBC does is not only timely: it draws attention to the music, it encourages, it helps spread the word."

It's been a busy year for McTell. The new decade started with the recording and release of Red Sky, his latest album. Recorded at Dave Pegg's Woodworm Studio, it features Fairport Convention and other musicians as sidemen. "We spent four months on it," says McTell. "I hit a high point with some of those songs and I hope I can maintain that standard. Also, it was marvellous working with such great players, with friends I've known for years. Over half the tracks are first or second takes. "But," he adds with a smile, "the drawback of Woodworm is there's a pub dangerously near and Peggy is a great one for late-night hospitality."

Red Sky features no fewer than 19 new songs. Clearing a backlog? "No, not at all, I had a spurt. A lot has been happening in my life and those songs come from maturity, from experience, from being the age I am." Which, incidentally, is 55 although you'd hardly think so to look at him.

Publication of the first volume of McTell's autobiography, Angel Laughter, has been another highlight of the year. As a natural raconteur and story-teller, McTell found the book flowed easily. "Mind you," he observes, "I don't think it would have happened at all without the word-processor, a wonderful creative tool. Why should there be metaphorical brownie points for slaving away with a quill pen and guttering candle?" Not that there's anything mechanical about Angel Laughter - it's warm, lucid and whimsical, anecdotally recounting a typical working-class upbringing in postwar Britain. But the stories are underscored by deeper themes of family upheaval, fading innocence and the transition from childhood to adolescence.

So is McTell pleased with the past twelve months? "I'm never complacent, never smug, but yes - a creative year. I'm pleased with the book and the album and both the tours have been good." In fact, the spring tour sold-out houses virtually every night.

"I think that was due to three factors: the album's impact, increased media coverage, and improved organisation and promotion. I hope people see I can still write with an edge, that the poetry and musicality are more accomplished, that I'm still doing good work. Interestingly, many of my contemporaries seem on a roll too. Bert Jansch is attracting a lot of interest from younger guitarists like Johnny Marr and Bernard Butler; John Martyn is just about to go out again with an acoustic line-up; and Richard Thompson is drawing big audiences. Singer-songwriters once had to be angry young men, mad guitar poets - now we're all middle-aged mad poets, we've come of age."

On his latest tour, McTell's trademark guitar accompaniment is augmented by a spell at the piano and rags on steel guitar. "I consider myself a poor pianist but I love playing. I've bought an electric piano and reintroduced some key songs for the first time in years. Numbers like Naomi, Old Brown Dog, England, The Irish Girl were all written on piano. It'd be great to use a grand every night, those great waves of sound coming at you but I don't play the sort of halls that have a grand piano lurking in the wings."

And the steel? "I'd always hankered for one - people have been saying for years it would be ideally suited to my rag-time style of playing. Now at last I've succumbed to temptation and done a swap with one of my collection," (he owned twenty-four instruments at last count). "The National steel plays beautifully and I love it, love its voice. The audiences seem to enjoy it too - it's a great glittering monster of a tin-can."

To fellow musicians, McTell's name is a byword for guitar virtuosity. But he is notoriously modest about his ability - "I'm not just a strummer, I can play a bit of rag, I can do bottle-neck, I can play Robert Johnson stuff." However, he is proud to admit he takes great pains when it comes to stagecraft.

"People don't come to see you mess about with the microphone, drop your capo on the floor, or litter the stage like a guitar shop. That's just boring for an audience. So is constantly twiddling and retuning - someone once told me I couldn't really be a folksinger because I didn't spend half the evening tuning up."

McTell gives a lot of thought to assembling a well-structured show with a balanced setlist. "I take account of changes in tempo, the 'weight' of the material, the sequence of key changes. For example, if I played a song in A I wouldn't follow it with one in B flat - I'd go to something in, say, D or G. It may sound pedantic but why should an audience's ear be jerked roughly from song to song?" He laughs. "Sometimes I wonder whether it makes any difference - I bet Dylan doesn't know what he's going to play until he walks out there."

"I think steering the mood is important too. If I play something deeper and more reflective I won't follow it with an upbeat rag - it's too much of a leap for the audiences' emotion. I wouldn't play Bentley and Craig (which deals with the hanging of an innocent youth) then follow it with Kenny the Kangaroo."

A performer should always consider their audience first and foremost, McTell believes. "Professionalism and showmanship are very important and they're not incompatible with sincerity and the honesty of the individual songs. I want to give a show which is more than just the songs. When I chat between numbers, I talk to the audience not down to the floor or to my hands - I look at the people out there. I try to establish intimacy, connection."

He admits to feeling very alone and exposed on a stage. "I can hear a sweet wrapper in the back row, sense anyone shuffling in their seat. I think: 'Uh oh, I'm losing you'. But on a good night, if there's enough light, you see everyone rapt, engaged, and that's fantastic."

To some extent, McTell's concerts are characterised by the contemplative themes or the suppressed anger of his songs. He acknowledges his performances increasingly demand concentration from the audiences. "One regular at my concerts pointed out to me I seemed more intense than I once was and asked me if was because of time."

Is it? He pauses. "Yeah - one is increasingly aware that time is infinite but one's own may not be. I don't mean I'm about to shuffle off - far from it - but I feel that if one has something to say, a contribution to make, get busy. Don't waste time navel-staring, work, generate that intensity. Get out there, be strong, do it - no padding, no filler. I may still be doing all the things I always have but there's an edge now because of time".

Don't imagine, though, that a Ralph McTell concert is sepulchral or gloomy. Far from it. He adroitly weaves lighter material through the serious numbers and punctuates the set with quirky observations and stories, always impeccably delivered and often very funny. "I learnt a lot, especially about timing, from Billy Conolly," he says (the two are long-standing friends). "Also, I love to hear people laughing. Especially women - I think it's so sexy. I imagine what a turn-on that must be for people like Billy, or Jasper Carrot or Mike Harding.

"Laughter from an audience, that sense of connection, is very rewarding. But so is the deeper applause when you hit a nerve, touch hearts with a song. As opposed to the applause of relief, the 'thank-fuck-that's-over' sort," he adds with a chuckle.

Back to the passage of time. "The most important, the most wonderful thing, in the last twelve months has been the babies," he says, referring to the birth of his first two grandchildren (one to his daughter Leah, the other to Billy, one of his three sons) last year.

Perhaps it is grandparenthood that has highlighted the roll of the years? "Yes, I think it is." He is obviously utterly besotted with both babies, the most recent additions to what he describes as the "small but growing Clan McTell". But then fatherhood and family have always been key inspirations in his songwriting.

"My song Barges is more than a pleasant memory of two young brothers on their summer holidays - it's all about not having a dad." His father walked out when McTell and his brother Bruce were very young. "Mr Connaughton appears to be a simple song about an upstairs neighbour but the subtext is again about boys needing father figures."

That poignant theme of fatherhood and desertion also pervades McTell's autobiography - the trauma obviously stuck. "Critics describe my work as 'gentle' but my family upbringing was as tough as anyone's."

Another volume is on the stocks but McTell draws the line at extending the story to cover his career. "By the time I made it as a musician, a lot of my contemporaries were drinking and shagging themselves blind deaf and daft. But I wasn't - I was married by then, my life was shared. And that's private."

McTell married Nanna in 1966, they're still together, tight-knit, and have four grown-up children. To what extent is his father's desertion responsible for McTell's intense commitment to family? "It's shaped me totally," he replies without hesitation. "As I've said before, when I go home, the door shuts. I just try to be a good husband and dad."

A worthy aspiration of which Lord Reith would have heartily approved.
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Newspaper Articles
Streets ahead
There's more to Ralph McTell than his busker's classic, Streets Of London.
Andy Farquarson on a man who's written over 300 songs about ordinary lives
The Guardian
Friday May 14, 1999
Melton Mowbray isn't the most obvious place to search for heroes, treasure and sentimental stories. But all three are here tonight, somewhere. This hero, Ralph McTell, has remained popular for three decades, filled the Albert Hall and worked with Phil Collins, Rick Wakeman, the Everly Brothers, Bert Jansch, Tom Paxton, and Fairport Convention among others.

Billy Connolly calls him "one of Britain's best singer/songwriters, a national treasure" - and that's not just Glaswegian hyperbole. If you only remember Streets Of London, his plaintive 1970s hit, you've missed out. That was then. This is now, and Streets is by no means the best of 300-plus songs on a score of albums. And after 32 years in the business, McTell is still writing, recording and touring.

Before tonight's show, he's subdued. He tests the sound system meticulously, tunes up, files his fingernails, fidgets. "I'm always nervous before I go on. But that's OK. You walk out, they can see you're on your own, they clap, and the confidence comes. I tell myself 'You're one lucky bastard; all these people have come to hear you play'." Sure enough, on stage he relaxes.

It's his first gig since Christmas but after the first numbers, he gets into his stride and performs an excellent two-hour solo acoustic set. His voice, a warm baritone, has been tempered over the years by "a warehouseful of Old Holborn" (he kicked the habit after Albert, his parrot, imitated his smoker's cough).

The playing is very accomplished, a finger-picking style which draws on Delta blues, ragtime, folk, country and bluegrass. "Nearly all my guitar heroes are black, American, usually blind and most of 'em dead. That said, I regard my style as peculiarly British, something that grew out of the 1960s". A clutch of long-distance loyalists has turned up for the gig - from London and Leeds, Suffolk and Slough. But most of the audience is local; Middle-Englanders leavened with a scattering of youngsters, a few folkies and an old hippy or two.

He thanks his public after every number and punctuates the set with quirky anecdotes. "People probably know the songs better than I do. The stories give them something extra, get them laughing, give them more of a handle on me".

In the dim light I can just make out the flushed faces, half-shut faraway eyes, tremulous moist lips miming every word. There's a secretive feel: what memories, personal stories, is McTell unlocking? I find out after the show.

But first, rewind to Putney a week before the concert. Although it's chucking it down, the photographer has coaxed McTell onto the muddy Thames foreshore. Whippet-thin in his 1960s publicity shots, he's now a sturdy thickset man, the once angular face full and kindly. He climbs back, mired and smiling. "Let's go inside and talk." And talk he does. Once started, he natters away, a natural raconteur.

Born Ralph May in 1944, he grew up in Croydon. "The fifties were austere but there were certainties, codes. I know it's a cliché, but we really didn't lock our doors." There's much of his early years in his lyrics: an upstairs neighbour, Saturday morning at the pictures, Sunday school. "I'm not religious now, but it fascinated me as a kid. I love the ceremonial and hymns - you can hear the influence of hymn tunes in my song structures - but I ceased to believe in it by the time I was 10."

At which age he got his hands on an old ukuele and a copy of The George Formby Method. "The book said 'Put your fingers here and here'. I did, and a chord came out. I was thunderstruck - it was like magic!" Three more chords and he'd mastered Swannee River. It being the late 1950s, he joined a skiffle band. The magic and passion have stayed with him ever since: he's a guitarist's guitarist and an encyclopaedia of folk and blues lore.

The beatnik culture of the 1960s introduced him to black music: jazz, blues and R&B. "I discovered people like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. I loved the music. I thought, what the fuck's a mojo, where can I get one, and how do I get it working?"

He bought a guitar, learnt to pick ragtime blues and hit the road. "We'd go down to Brighton and sit on the beach looking windswept and interesting. I first met Rod Stewart that way, hitching on the Purley Way with a guy called Italian Tony." Then it was Cornwall, a place whose "unique spirit got to me, a mix of swashbuckling seafarer bravado and Methodist rectitude".

After that, Paris, Yugoslavia ("I felt a madness there, even then") and Greece. "I thought, this is great: colour, music, travelling and experience, all to no end other than the journey. It was a time of freedom, of dope and hope. 'Live fast, die young, change things'. I bought the whole package."

Wannabe Woodie Guthries paid their dues in those days. "I busked all round Europe with a guitar on my back. I was shy; it wasn't in my nature to play in front of people, but I had to eat." He overcame his reticence so successfully that by the mid-1970s his freewheeling days were over. "I'd got a family and found I had a musical career, somehow."

That's a bit of an understatement: he had recorded half-a-dozen albums, played the huge Isle of White festival, taken Sydney Opera House by storm and sold out all of his lengthy tours - as well as having penned Streets Of London, which sold a million copies worldwide. He looked set to stay big.

Instead, he chucked it in. Shackled by the ghost of Streets, disillusioned by touring with a band (which "became a nightmare") and plagued by management problems, he spent the early 1980s presenting children's television. The songs around which the shows were built weren't exactly chart-topping material. And they were anathema to folk/blues purists.

Losing the plot in a dark decade? "That woman" [he means Thatcher] "was quite clearly mad and very dangerous. It's impossible to forgive her." Why didn't he lash out? "In some performers - Billy Bragg, for example - the outrage came raw, almost ranting. With me, it was quieter but just as deeply felt, just as personal." He shrugs. "I've always used my anger gently. Perhaps it's more insidious that way."

Recharged, he released the Bridge Of Sighs album in 1986, followed by Blue Skies Black Heroes, a homage to blues and ragtime. In 1992, the BBC broadcast The Boy With A Note, "an evocation of Dylan Thomas in words and music". Re-recorded as an album, it is an ambitious piece, of which McTell is intensely proud. "Two or three years went into that. It's grown-up work." Sand In Your Shoes came out in 1995 and Travelling Man, a double CD of live performance, coincides with the current tour.

Despite the quality of his work, his resilient popularity and the amount of air play he gets, the press has largely ignored him. Does that rankle? "It used to, but not now. I'm still here: people buy the CDs and turn up to the gigs, and that's its own reward."

Many of his songs deal with issues: war, ethnic cleansing, racism, addiction, care in the community. "I've always championed underdogs, the dispossessed and downtrodden. I do it quietly but I hope that songs make people stop and think." He wrote The Enemy Within ("that woman's hateful description of the miners") in despair at the destruction of the coal industry and, more recently, staged a benefit concert when Cornwall's last tin mine was threatened with closure. "I don't know how much effect it had ultimately, but if it paid the wages bill for a week it was worthwhile. Like the songs, it was what I could do."

Perhaps the cause he feels the most personal engagement with is the case of Derek Bentley, the teenager with learning difficulties who was executed after a shooting. "It happened just round the corner: my mum knew the Bentleys. I was about eight, but even then I could see the horror and injustice of executing a teenage for a murder he didn't commit." His song Bentley and Craig ("You can pardon Derek Bentley/ who never took a life/ Derek he can never pardon you") led to a meeting with Iris Bentley - and to McTell's involvement in her campaign for justice.

"The Home Office treated that family disgracefully for 40 years but Iris soldiered on with resolve, with dignity. It's tragic she died before the conviction was quashed." The executioner's account, reprinted in the Guardian, "was incredibly chilling, the ultimate argument against capital punishment. I've shown it to people all over the world."

He talks easily and freely ("I'm very heart-on-my-sleeve") but not about his private life. He married Nanna in 1966: they're still together and have three sons and a daughter. He will say only: "When I go home, the door shuts. I just try to be a good husband and dad."

A contented family man - there's no obvious connection with songs about fractured relationships and lost love, songs that capture what he describes as "the sweet comfort of melancholy". They're romantic, poignant, sometimes downright sentimental. "I write them honestly, seek to touch hearts. Sentimentality is not necessarily something to criticise."

But if they're not telling his story, then whose? I ask some of the audience after the show, as McTell spends a patient hour in the bar chatting to his followers and signing mementoes. "You feel he's singing just to you..." "He understands us..." "He expresses the things I can't say," they sigh.

He certainly expresses one woman's feelings perfectly (she won't give her real name). She recalls a secret friend she once had, who filled her head with Noel Coward metaphors. In return, she gave him McTell's Bridge Of Sighs album. He told her it sounded clichéd and schmaltzy, but he ended up liking it, particularly Dreams Of You ("And if love is good/ then how come it hurts so much/ I long for your kiss, your body, your sweet touch").

McTell didn't perform Dreams Of You at Melton. A good thing, perhaps: this follower would probably have wept her contact lenses out. But isn't that the point of love songs? Good ones are universal, hitting the spot by telling your personal story: yours and everyone's. So a tip of the cap to campaigns and causes, but hats off to heroes, sentimental stories and to Ralph McTell: guitar whiz, troubadour and national treasure.

• Ralph McTell's Travelling Man is released on the Leola label on May 4.
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Newspaper Articles
And the dude played on 
Ralph McTell's street cred may have taken a knock back in 1974, but he can still sing you a song that'll make you change your mind.
Colin Harper
The Independent (London)
September 13, 1997, Saturday
Tonight in Huntingdon, Ralph McTell begins a 46-date tour that marks, refreshingly without a single item of anniversary merchandise or even a passing mention in the promotional advertising, his first 30 years in showbiz. It is with an irony as subtle as the singer-songwriter's own work - dealing as it so often has, in its own quiet way, with everything from old age to homelessness, autism, addiction, injustice and racism - that such radical barnstorming, however sheepish the clothing, should be kicking off in the very heartland of Conservative values.

It comes as no surprise to find that the image of Ralph McTell as cardiganed heir to the tottering throne of Val Doonican in the family entertainment stakes is one that's become increasingly irksome to the man himself ever since "Streets of London" was a worldwide smash in 1974. "It's a shame when a good song becomes a cliche and people are embarrassed by it," he sighs, and obviously not for the first time. "But, by any criteria, I have to say that it is a good song - even if I didn't particularly like it at one time myself - because the world knows it, it gets played in schools, people learn to play guitar to it, and maybe some of them get a perspective about alienation and loneliness through it. I can't knock it." Which doesn't stop other people. But what other people? Not that long ago French and Saunders memorably rounded up a squad of rock's guitar heroes for a TV sketch revolving around the premise that McTell, arraigned in the dock before a judicially attired Dawn French, had conned a generation with a play-in-a-day guitar book that didn't work. John Williams turned the gig down, but McTell was duped into being there and couldn't wriggle out of it. The result? A nation of twenty- and thirtysomethings marvelled sympathetically at the man's sheer good-blokishness for months thereafter.

"The funniest thing was, straight after we'd done the thing in one take, and I was trying to find my manager to break his nose, Lemmy out of Motorhead went up and asked for his money - and it was only a 30 quid appearance fee - and they said, 'Well, er, it's the BBC, Lemmy, you'll get the money in due course.' 'I want it now,' he said. And they actually had a whip round among the camera crew to get him his 30 quid! So I was standing there, just staggered by this - it was real rock 'n' roll, and it took the heat out of it. And of course when the show went out, people would point at me in the street and shout 'Guilty!' I couldn't believe how well the whole thing went off."

Credibility's a slippery cove. It's taken as read that Ralph, writer of gentle melodies, careful words and delicate sentiments doesn't have any. Yet even random listening to his albums reveals a powerful craftsman whose best work transcends its period of creation. A straw poll among friends and colleagues reveals some surprising results too: musicians, from heavy metal guitar players to Irish traditional singers, have absolutely no hesitation in calling him top man; young women, and I have no explanation for this, have simply never heard of him; while media folk tend to chortle and launch into good-natured banter concerning cabaret acts and Radio 2.

But, for some brief period around the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, Ralph was well on his way to the land of the Nick Drakes and the Tim Buckleys - those doomed adonis types who reside in a posthumous netherworld of boxed sets and glittering retrospectives in Mojo. He was, as contemporary reports confirm, the popular sensation of the whole vast, end-of-swinging- Sixties event. Surely the biggest audience of his career?

"Yes, apart from Episode 10 of Alphabet Zoo, when we hit seven million," he muses, with a deadpanningly profound grimness. "But it's a shame really that I couldn't have gone on seamlessly from the Isle of Wight 'cos it couldn't have got more cred than that, could it? I mean, there I was in front of 250,000 people with an acoustic guitar, two mikes and absolutely no crowd-manipulation powers, just the songs. I was on for 35 minutes, it went down a storm, I got an encore and it was just amazing. . ." He can remember exactly what he was wearing on the day too.

But no, the great god of rock iconography had other plans for the young man from Croydon - and who is to say they haven't had their own quieter, subtler rewards? Certainly Ralph isn't denying his gratitude for an enviable career that's maintained concert hall audiences over three decades and still encompasses, at his live shows, three generations. Others may have burnt out only to live on in the imaginations of biographers and dream- seekers years hence, but Ralph has just dealt with his muse in a less sensational, but no less passionate, manner.

"I really don't try to offend and shock," he says. "I want people to be stimulated by what they hear from me and maybe discuss it. I'd never say to somebody 'You're talking a load of shit you fascist bastard' - that's not my way. I take 'em on but I do it in a different way. With Tim Buckley, and some of the others that passed on, I always felt they knew everything too soon and wrote with a certainty that leads to a finality. What would they have done at 45? What would they have done at 50? Whereas me, I didn't know, I suggested, I put some things across - very gently, perhaps too gently for some people - but I've been finding out. I'm 52, I'm still not entirely certain and I'm still looking to back up my theories and opinions through the response of others as I share them in songs. . . I think I've just put that rather well!"

His communicative powers are at their height, he works out every day, his memory is razor sharp, but he knows his time is coming.

"I can't bear it when people talk about legendary players and say, 'Yeah, he was OK, but he was a bit tired.' You shouldn't be tired, you should be on the ball - I hope people never say that about me. But it's getting harder and harder to gain the fitness for these long tours. It's a young man's game."

There may be no box-set, but a biography is imminent and right now autobiography is absorbing all the man's creative energy. He's written only one new song in two years. A worrying trend? "Well, it used to worry me tremendously," he says, "but then the kids aren't breaking down the doors to get the latest Ralph McTell album any more. I also think that I should only write when I'm really moved to. But I started to write a little memoir about growing up in the 1950s and it's still going on! I've written pages and pages and I know it's going to be OK because I go into a kind of daze when I know I'm writing good stuff. I mean, right now I could get up from my word processor, walk out the front door and meet someone I knew when I was seven years old and not be surprised - I'm right there, really there, like a catharsis, and I'm really excited about it. I'm also much more interested in working hard and getting a good show across than when it was easier - when I was current, when the audiences were guaranteed. I carried my nerves and insecurities on-stage and it all rushed past. Now I actually go out there and love to work."

Ralph McTell plays Hinchinbroke Arts Centre, Huntingdon, tonight (tel: 01480 452119)
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Newspaper Articles
Rocking in the Isle
Mail on Sunday 
Weekend
2 March 2002 
The last Isle of Wight festival in 1970 was a far cry from the hippy ideal of love and peace.  DAVID JONES tracks down some of the people who were there. 

On a blustery winter’s day, the lonely wheat field stretching in the shadows of Afton Down, on the Isle of Wight, is a picture of rural serenity.  Every so often, however, when the seasons change, some small relic emerges to remind us of the extraordinary spectacle that unfolded here, one late-summer’s weekend, 32 years ago. 

The farmer’s combine might unearth a string of wooden love beads, perhaps; or a rambler might stumble upon the half-buried stem of a dope-smoker’s pipe.  And sometimes, when the field is very dry, one can even discern a long, dark outline etched in the ground; the path of an 8ft high perimeter fence, erected in the forlorn hope that more than half a million hippies might somehow be corralled. 

Staged in August 1970, the third and final Isle of Wight pop festival was intended as a vast, communal celebration of the flower-power ethos, which had blossomed three years earlier in the so-called Summer of Love.  Featuring such rock luminaries as Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Doors and Joni Mitchell, it was to have been Britain’s answer to Woodstock.  But instead of furthering the cause of peace, love and harmony, the nation’s biggest ever outdoor gathering was marred by violence and chaos, and three decades on some believe that it sounded the death knell for the entire hippy ideal. 

Gazing at a faded original poster hanging on the wall of his Malibu beach-house, Rikki Far – then the gauche, silver-tongued compere and now a business tycoon – describes it as ‘the weekend when rock’n’roll lost its virginity’.  Folk singer Ralph McTell, now 57, who received £100 for his 45 minute performance, is more expansive.  ‘I think it was probably the end of something,’ he says.  ‘We all felt that we were contributing to some big thing we couldn’t name.  It sounds unbelievable, but there were people who really believed they could change the world through their music.  In the end it was a glorious failure.  I don’t think anything was quite the same after that.’ 

History suggests that the Streets of London singer is right.  The rock superstars retreated to their mansions, and pop music became a cynical big business.  People seemed to grow more selfish and materialistic, and a gentler, more innocent, if hopelessly idealistic, age was lost. 

Nevertheless, for the 500,000 or so shaggy-haired, kaftan-clad revellers who hitch-hiked south and jammed the flotilla of steam ferries to the Isle of Wight, 1970 will never be forgotten.  In retracing the story behind the Great Festival, I spoke to some of the key figures involved, from the philanthropic ex-seaman who started it all, to the young lovers who got married there – barefoot of course – on a whim.  Their memories paint a remarkable portrait of life at the start of the 1970s. 

Looking back now, one wonders how the festival was ever allowed to take place.  The Isle of Wight council was run by a cabal of retired military top brass, such as Admiral Sir Manley Power and Commander Rees-Millington.  They were fiercely opposed to an invasion by ‘the great unwashed’, fearing their gardens would be trampled and their grandchildren corrupted. 

In 1968, however, when a bearded, left-leaning old salt named Ron Smith came forward with plans for a small-scale pop show to raise money towards the building of the island’s first swimming pool, they reluctantly granted permission.  The event was such a success that another was sanctioned the following summer.  This time Bob Dylan topped the bill and the attendance increased more than 20-fold, to over 100,000. 

Rees-Millington was horrified and set about blocking plans for a third event.  ‘We don’t want these peddlers of dirty drugs,’ the commander spluttered.  The residents’ fears were recorded in a log-book kept by Freshwater parish council.  ‘Such a thing is of Satan whose every moral principle is let loose,’ one parishioner wrote. 

However, perhaps realising that the festival would bring massive revenue for local traders and fearing they might alienate young voters, the island’s elders declined to put a stop to it.  They allowed Smith and his sidekicks Ron and Ray Foulk to stage the event in an isolated field at East Afton Farm.  ‘It was pure malice,’ says Smith, now in his 70s.  ‘They knew full well that the down was overlooking the festival site and that everyone would be able to sit on the hill and watch it for free’. 

The council imposed another stringent condition.  Determined to keep the hippies from ‘rampaging’ through the nearby village, they insisted that the field be surrounded by an 8ft corrugated steel fence.    ‘It looked like Dachau or Belsen,’ sighs Rikki Farr, the pop impresario son of heavyweight boxing champion Tommy Farr, who had been recruited as a front man by the Foulk brothers.  ‘That fence was the antithesis of everything that should be associated with a musical event.  And what happens?  The kids come along and – as we told the council – they tear it down’. 

The catastrophe which followed may have been partially caused by the location and the fence, but there were sinister elements which needed no excuse to cause mayhem.  Prominent among them were the Hell’s Angels and a group of French, Spanish and Italian anarchists, who objected to the £3 entry fee, insisting that music was ‘for the people’ and should be free. 

Their efforts to incite the huge crowd to rebel were aided by the nihilistic rock singer Mick Farren, doubtless disgruntled because his band, The Deviants, had not been invited to perform.  Before the festival opened he and his cronies – who called themselves The White Panthers – meandered through the sea of tents, distributing leaflets urging the fans not to pay. 

For Smith, Farr, and the Foulk brothers, it was all a waking nightmare.  Hopelessly outnumbered, their 250 hired guards were unable to prevent sections of fencing being torn down, and there were rumours that a sniper was ready to shoot the artists for daring to charge appearance money. 

‘Every so often, cola cans containing bullets would be handed up to me on the stage,’ Farr recalls.  ‘They were saying, “Make it free or we’ll assassinate you.”  I would pass their messages on to the audience.  I told them everything.  One maniac with wild eyes and a little beard somehow got on to the stage while Joni Mitchell was singing.  He grabbed the mike and it hit her in the mouth before they dragged him away’.  

Amid all the mounting chaos was a great deal of fun and good humour.  Exhausted after overseeing the site construction, Ron Smith decided to join the nude bathers in the Compton Bay surf.  ‘I thought, why not’, smiles Smith, who was no young hippy, but a respectable engineering firm boss in his 40s.  ‘When I looked up to the cliffs I could see the councillors and the local Tory MP, Mark Woodnutt, staring down through their binoculars, so I gave them a little wave to wind them up’.  For the Fleet Street newshounds the ‘skinny-dippers’ made sensational headlines. 

Another major story was the impromptu marriage of a long-haired New Zealander named Allen Funnell, aged 23, and his girlfriend Carol Kelly, who was just 19 and fresh out of convent school.  The couple had only known each other for five weeks, having met at another festival, but they had immediately dropped out of their sensible jobs and journeyed to the Isle of Wight to help build the site. 

To the Press they epitomised the spirit of the times, and Carol became instantly famous as The Bride from Desolation Row, the name given to the festival shanty-town where they had pitched their tiny bivouac. 

Their wedding, conducted by the Reverend Robert Bower in the 15^th century church at nearby Mottistone, was described by Michael Fielder in the Daily Mail: ‘Friends from Desolation Row filled the front two pews of the church.  One was bare-chested under a cape.  Another self-consciously held a bunch of red carnations given to the bride by a local resident.  Behind the hippies sat three elderly ladies from the village, wearing their Sunday best’.  A rival newspaper later bought exclusive rights to Allen and Carol’s story for all of £40. 

The couple splashed out on champagne, which they swigged from paper cups in the muddy field, and spent their wedding night in a local hotel, where Hendrix – only weeks from death – happened to be staying in the next room.  The rest of the money was spent on a battered green van in which they drove off, never to be heard of again. 

I tracked down the hippy bride and groom: Carol to New Zealand, where she lives with her new husband and works as a freezer factory manager; Allen to Wilmslow, Cheshire, where he runs an IT consultancy and lives with his second wife, Jacqueline.  On their wedding night, it transpires, they conceived a son, whom they named Leon after the rock singer Leon Russell (not among the festival performers).  He was born on May 2, 1971 and now lives in Bedfordshire.  The couple produced another son, now aged 28, but parted after seven years together. 

Both have fond memories of the bizarre marriage ceremony, and their time together.  ‘It was a really memorable part of my life, it was excellent actually,’ says Allen, now in his early 50s but still a devout rock fan.  ‘I would do it again.’ 

Carol looks back ‘with a mixture of embarrassment and fondness’.  Now a youthful 50, she says: ‘You have to remember that we were living through a social revolution, and we were shaped by the times.  Things were more colourful and vibrant, and I was a bit rebellious.  What we did was a historical accident that changed the whole course of my life, but I wouldn’t undo it because it was a wonderful experience, and we had two marvellous sons.  In the end, though, Allen and I wanted different experiences.’ 

She recalls being given away by someone who appeared from nowhere wearing a multi-coloured kaftan and wig.  But she regrets not telling her widowed father of her wedding plans.  When he read about it the next day ‘he just about dropped off his perch’. 

Though Carol confesses to the occasional joint, Allen was against drugs, and they steered clear of the pushers who flooded the festival site.  Others were less cautious and, as the days wore on, Commander Rees-Millington’s doom scenario became reality.  ‘It was just mayhem,’ says Caroline Coon, founder of the drug rehabilitation charity Release.  ‘There were police just picking people off the road and we realised that the atmosphere at this festival was more menacing than any other we had been to.’ 

By today’s standards, the police anti-drugs operation was pathetically amateurish.  One senior officer, Ray Legg, knew so little about narcotics that he had to read up on the subject before going into action.  ‘I was expecting four or five arrests a day, when in fact we did over 50,’ he recalled.  ‘My biggest problem was the first one I arrested.  He kept running around the room naked.  I had to keep him here all the next morning until he went to court because I had no clothes to put on him.’ 

More farcical still were the efforts of supposedly undercover detectives.  Their disguises were so poor that they even failed to fool local residents.  ‘They put on wigs and flares, but we had a chuckle because you could spot them a mile off,’ says Mrs Diana Crowhurst, who sold snacks at the festival to raise funds for the Ladies Circle and Rotary Club.  Any festival where the Ladies Circle was welcomed couldn’t have been all bad, surely?  According to some villagers it was.  ‘You couldn’t walk down the street, you had to pic your way through the bodies,’ sniffed the local GP’s wife, Julia Sheard.  ‘It was only when you got nearer [the site] that the smell hit you.  It was like the monkey house at the zoo.’ 

On the final day, a bleak Bank Holiday Sunday, the festival organisers finally gave up trying to keep out the gatecrashers and opened the doors to everyone. Ron Smith reckons that fewer than half the 500,000-plus fans paid for tickets, and so, an event that should have made him and his fellow directors into millionaires, made a monumental loss.  At least Mr Smith had the foresight to sever his ties with the organising company, Fiery Creations, before the bubble burst.  His young partners, Ron and Ray Foulk, were forced to retreat to their makeshift headquarters in a nearby mansion – hotly pursued by dozens of creditors. 

‘I’ve lost faith in everything,’ Ray Foulk said as he fled the garbage-strewn festival site close to tears.  The lingering hippies never heard his lament, so it was left to Rikki Farr to deliver the final withering message: ‘To all the good kids who came here, I say goodbye,’ he yelled emotionally at the retreating crowd.  ‘To the rest of you – go to Hell!’

ooOoo

1970s: I remember… 

Victoria Wood, comedian: ‘I had a dark green PVC maxi-coat which had cost something unbelievable like 12 quid and I looked like a bottle bank.  All the second years at school wore long black skirts, black tank tops over white blouses with huge sleeves and long petal shaped collars – very gloomy.  You needed to be very pretty indeed not to look like someone with a very small part in Upstairs Downstairs.’
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Newspaper Articles
Obituary
Nathan Joseph
Founder of pioneering folk and blues label Transatlantic, and theatre agent of note
Robin Denselow
Monday September 12, 2005
The Guardian
Listen to Ralph's comments on Radio 5 Live
Nathan Joseph, who has died at the age of 66, played an important role both in the development of the British record industry and in British theatre. He founded and ran Transatlantic Records, one of the first fully independent British record labels, which had an enormous influence on the development of the British folk and blues scenes, and later changed direction to become a theatrical producer and agent.
Nat, as the folk world knew him, worked with everyone - from musicians such as Bert Jansch and the Dubliners, to comedians such as Billy Connolly and the playwright Arnold Wesker, whom he also represented. Wesker described him as "an agent who was a father, brother and uncle figure rolled into one, which made him also a special quality of friend. More, he was a thorough negotiator."
Joseph was born in Birmingham. His father was a businessman, working in the metal industry, who had just started his own business when he died at the age of 47. His son was just nine. Nat would later take over the firm, and transform it into a modern waste treatment plant, as a sideline to his main career. An only child, he was brought up by his mother, and educated at King Edward's grammar school. He won a scholarship to Queens' College, Cambridge, where he read English and was noted for his comic performances in college revues. The financial problems caused by his father's early death left him determined to succeed in business, and his colourful career started almost as soon as he left university.
After a year "teaching, and then bumming around the USA", as he put it, he decided that "I had to earn some money, and returned to England determined to start a record company." So in 1961, aged 21, he did just that. He was asked to act as agent for various US labels, but the deal depended on him selling enough of their records within just a few months. He did so, by "trudging around southern England carrying samples in paper bags", and then set out to look for records that could be produced in Britain.
Once again, he succeeded, this time by recording a bestselling set of controversial sex therapy albums. He followed up by matching folk singer Isla Cameron with actor Tony Britton to record a song-and-poetry set, Songs of Love, Lust and Loose Living, and went on to record poetry albums by Christopher Logue and Adrian Mitchell, jazz by Annie Ross and blues by that most influential of early British bluesmen Alexis Korner.
Much of the most inventive music of the early 1960s emerged through the British folk scene, and Joseph was an enormous enthusiast. He first signed the Ian Campbell Group and then the Dubliners, before moving on to make the Transatlantic label the home for many of Britain's greatest guitarists and songwriters, from Bert Jansch and John Renbourn to Ralph McTell. Renbourn said that with Transatlantic he was "virtually free to record whatever I wanted".
My own first meeting with Joseph was at the Beaulieu folk festival in 1966, when I was a student dabbling in singing and songwriting. As I came off stage, I found a delightful and enthusiastic man waving a publishing contract at me. I signed, of course.
Thankfully for Transatlantic, Joseph also had some genuine musical talent on his books. Jansch and Renbourn were successful solo artists who went on to form the much-praised Pentangle, while another of his signings, the Humblebums, consisted of that rock-star-to-be, Gerry Rafferty, along with Billy Connolly. Other Transatlantic acts included the Sallyangie (which involved a young Mike Oldfield), those great harmony singers the Young Tradition, and American bluesman Stefan Grossman.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, it was crucial for anyone writing about folk or blues to drop into Joseph's London offices in Marylebone high street to find out what he was doing, though the conversation could soon swing to comedy, rock or the US music scene. Apart from his British acts, Joseph distributed a wide range of American labels, and had an adventurous catalogue that included world music celebrities from Ravi Shankar to the Chilean star Victor Jara.
In 1975, Joseph sold his controlling interest in Transatlantic to Granada, and two years later retired from the music industry. It seemed like the end of an era, but it was merely the start of a new career in his early love, the theatre.
As a producer, he presented plays in Britain and on Broadway, including Alec McCowan's Kipling in 1984, and Brian Clark's The Petition, starring Sir John Mills and directed by Sir Peter Hall in 1986. His theatrical agency represented young designers and stage directors, and, in 1985, he became the sole representative of Arnold Wesker.
Joseph was that rarity, a shrewd, inventive businessman who cared for, and understood, a wide spectrum of the arts. He was also a keen sports fan and a life-long supporter of Birmingham City football club, and Warwickshire cricket team.
He leaves his wife of 40 years, Sarah, and their two sons, Joshua and Gideon.

Nathan 'Nat' Joseph, record company founder, theatrical producer and agent, born July 13 1939; died August 30 2005.

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