 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.
|
Andrew Whitehead's blogWelcome - read - comment - throw stones - pick up threads - and tell me how to do this better! Archives
January 2020
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed