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"So I just say fare thee well ..." - UPDATED

7/5/2019

Bob Dylan at the Pindar of Wakefield, December 1962 - copyright of the photographer, Brian Shuel

This marvellous photo was taken by Brian Shuel during Bob Dylan's first visit to London in December 1962. The venue was the Pindar of Wakefield on Grays Inn Road (it's now the Water Rats!), where the Singers' Club - then run by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger - gathered every week. Was this Dylan's first ever public performance in the UK? Well, that's discussed in my Curious King's Cross - here's the link. But because of Brian's photographs, Dylan's performance at the Singer's Club is the best known episode of the 21 year old's initial musical encounter with London.

I have often wondered about the young women in the photograph who are so clearly enraptured by Dylan and his music. Who are they? How did they come to be there? A week or two back, I gave a talk about Curious King's Cross at Holborn Library and showed Brian Shuel's photo - one of those who had come along came up at the end to say that she thought she recognised one of the women in the photo.

That's how I came to have a cup of tea the other day with Natasha Morgan - she's the woman in the bottom left of the photo.

Natasha was then sixteen, living with her left-wing parents in Surrey and she had a few months earlier travelled with a coach-load of folkies - 'lovely people' - to a CND peace march. She knew Bob Davenport, already a key figure on the folk scene, and in spite of her parents' concerns about a young woman wandering alone around King's Cross - Davenport would make sure she got a taxi home - she was a regular at the Pindar's folk evenings.

'I didn't know Bob Dylan was going to be there - the name didn't mean anything to me', Morgan recalls. 'But he was so different from the other singers - for a start he was young, and he didn't simply sing the traditional, unaccompanied songs.'

'At the Singers' Club there was an emphasis on being authentic - many of the singers and performers were older men, a bit beery, slobbery. You had to watch your bottom with some of them - they were always saying "come sit with me". Dylan was very different from that.'

Next to Natasha Morgan in the photo is Anthea Joseph, now dead, who was already an important figure on the folk scene. Natasha was friends with her brother, Tom - a 'natural troublemaker' in the words of the obituary of him in the Camden New Journal.

The legion of Dylanologists has tried to resurrect every one of the singer's set lists - but there is no unanimity about what Dylan played on his handful of informal appearances during that desperately cold London winter.

Morgan is fairly sure he sang 'Masters of War' at the Singers' Club and thinks that he may also have performed 'Blowin' in the Wind'. A few months afterwards a friend taught her to play guitar, and her initial repertoire included 'Blowin' in the Wind' and 'Don't Think Twice'.

She saw Dylan several times on later concert tours - but never again looked on with such rapt attention.

... and from the poet Jeff Cloves, who was also there

Jeff dropped me an email from Stroud when he came across my write up of Dylan's Pindar of Wakefield appearance in Curious King's Cross - I'm posting it here with his permission:

this morning Dennis Gould
passed me a book
from his Stroud bookstall here
saying
you'll like this
it's about Kings Cross
and there's stuff
about Peace News in it

I've written on and off
for PN for 50 years
but my immediate
thought was
I wonder if BD's gig
at the Pindar of Wakefield
gets a mench?

well I've just read
the chapter
Don't think twice
and only then did I bother
to look at the cover
and there found your name
I already know
I'll love this book
so well done
and well said

I was a member
of The Singers' Club
and went
to that Christmas special
Albert Grossman was there
and another of his slaves
the black folk singer Odetta
who also performed
Dylan sang three songs
and then Grossman
growled from the back
that'll do Bobby
and that was that

it could be that
Peggy Seeger
Bob Dylan
and me
are only people left alive
who were there that night
and it was the last time
I went to The Singers' Club

I went because I liked
the idea of a Christmas Party
but had already decided to leave –
it's political hectoring
and its almost Stalinist rigidity
about what was
proper folk music
drive me and others away

Odetta and BD were
surprise guests and not billed
I was familiar with his
first LP but didn't own it
around 70/71 when I was
contributing to Zigazag
I wrote an account of that gig
and named the songs
I used to think
my memory was faultless
and would last forever
but now I'd have to find the
back issue of ZZ
to find out what they were

I know Ross
who runs Five Leaves
from PN days
and a few years ago
he published an anthology
called Utopia
which includes a piece by me
about Stroud
and the nearby once-anarchist settlement
the Whiteway Colony

before mum and dad
returned to East Barnet
after the war
they rode their tandem
to Whiteway feeling vaguely attracted
to the idea of moving there
in fact its freewheeling bohemianism
free-love and nudity
was too much for their
working-class puritanism
and so
I didn't grow-up there
but in suburban East Barnet

I look forward very much
to reading the rest
of your book
and it's already
forming in my mind
that I could write
a piece about it and Bob Dylan
for International Times
which publishes my poems
quite regularly

anyway
more power
to your radical elbow

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... and from the poet Jeff Cloves, who was also there

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"So I just say fare thee well ..." - UPDATED

... and from the poet Jeff Cloves, who was also there

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