Two singers who went into Europe
There was, I know, a time when I didn't actually know Shirley Hart and Colin Wilkie,
but, when I pause to think about it, I can't really imagine it. During the chequered
course of twenty years on the folk scene, I have made thousands of
acquaintances, hundreds of friends, scores of close friends, and a handful of very
special friends. Colin and Shirley are in that Last category. So much so that I seem
to have known them always.
Perhaps as a consequence of this, I can't remember in much detail just how I
came to meet them. And, to be honest, Col and Shirl aren't much help, because
they can't remember either. Having said that, you may perhaps begin to wonder if
I'm completely out of my mind when you read the next few paragraphs: they are full
of precise dates
but those dates don't come out of my head. They are from the columns of Melody
Maker, I96I-I962. At that time I was writing for MM a weekly column called Focus on
Folk that chronicled the events of the then infant folk club scene. Some of the more
enterprising clubs used to advertise in the classified columns under the heading
Folk Forum, which exists to this day.
In the I5 April, I96I issue, there appeared an ad for a new club, to open on I9 April
at the Star and Garter in Bromley, Kent. Resident singers: Colin Wilkie and Dick
Larque. Opening guests: Alex Campbell and Dave Cousins. During the first few
weeks of its existence, the Bromley folk club featured, among others, Winston and
Mary Jane Young (a Canadian couple who enjoyed immense popularity during a
two-year stay in Britain), Enoch Kent, Gerry Lockran (in those days he
spelt it Loughran), Redd Sullivan, Long John Baldry.
Later in the same year (5 August), there's a reference in my column to the York
and Albany, a pub, that is but a stone's throw from Cecil Sharp House. The folk
club, previously known as the York and Albany club had, at my suggestion,
changed its name to the Topical and Traditional, and the note names the residents
as John Brune, John Cain, and Shirley Hart. I had previously met Shirley at Cecil
Sharp House and had been completely knocked out by her singing - in those
days, entirely unaccompanied traditional. The new club had a good, informal
atmosphere, as near as you can get to a ceilidh round your own fireside, and when
the hat was passed (there was no admission charge) the organisers suggested a
single modest bob.
About this time, if I remember rightly, Shirley was working as a librarian, but she
soon pulled up her stakes and made for Paris. Just a couple of weeks before she
left, I arranged for Shirley to appear (on 30 September) at the Troubadour club in
Earls Court. I had persuaded Jenny Barton, who was running the club at the time,
to put on Stan Kelly, Henry Morris, myself - and, Shirley Hart.
We aren't absolutely sure, but Shirley and I think it was Shirley's first paid gig. I
do know that we ran the evening very much in a singaround style, doing a couple of
songs apiece, rather than singing in longish sets. I also know that Shirley was
acuteIy nervous, and that the evening was a very successful one.
lt was about this time that Shirley Hart
and Colin Wilkie met. She was the booked guest at the Bromley Star and Garter on
25 October. Then, she made for Paris, where she met up with Alex Campbell, and
sang at the Contrascarpe, in those days the mecca for all folk performers in the
French capital.
Also about this time, we hit something of a crisis on the folk scene. Pete Seeger
was scheduled to come to Britain for a November concert tour. You may find it hard
to believe, but, although Seeger now fills any damn hall he pleases, any time he
comes over, in those days almost nobody was interested in putting him on in a big
concert. Provisional arrangements for a Royal Festival Hall concert fell through,
and it seemed that Pete would not have a London venue of any real size. Bruce
Dunnett, then organiser of Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's Singers' club, and
I, representing Sing magazine, called together an informal committee to see what
we could do about it.
'The committee included Bill Leader of Collet's record shop, Gerry Sharp of
Topic Records, Jenny Barton, Anthea Joseph, organiser of Alex Campbell's club at
Richmond - and Colin Wilkie of Bromley. Dunnett searched for days for a
I000/2000 seat theatre or hall, didn't find one. took a deep breath, and booked the
Albert Hall. Filling it seemed a preposterous idea, but we were willing to have a go.
Nobody should ever minimise the amount of work Bruce put into filling the Albert
(we did it!), but his right-hand man-of-all-work was Colin Wilkie.
lt took us all quite a while to recover from the Seeger tour, but, after Christmas,
Anthea Joseph and I were offered Tuesday nights at the Troubadour for a folk club,
and, with Colin, we launched the Comeallye club. lt opened on I6 January, I962,
with Colin as resident and Louis Killen as our first guest. The declared policy of the
club was to put on people who at that time were getting little or no exposure on the
London scene, and besides Louis, our early guests included Johnny Silvo, the
Hoddesdon Ceilidh Singers, Carolyn Hester and Dick Farina (who later married
Joan Baez's sister Mimi, and was tragically killed in a road accident), Pete Stanley,
and many others who have gone on to make a name.
Shirley came back from Paris and teamed up with Colin. Attitudes on the folk
scene then were much more rigid than they are now, and the pairing of these two
seemed very strange at that time. Shirley still sang a thoroughly traditional
repertoire, mostly unaccompanied - one of the reasons, perhaps, why she had
not done better in Paris, from which she wrote to me 'Here, the guitar is God.'
Colin, on the other hand, was much more of a professional entertainer, with a
marvellous line in side-splitting patter that he still retains - indeed, the duo was
described
as 'the ethnical Shirl and the entertainical Col.' However the mixture seemed to
work. They appeared, on 3 April, at the Comeallye
and did numerous bookings in London and the Home Counties.
But it wasn't long after that (nobody
remembers the exact date) that Colin and Shirley took off for Paris, and from there
started to work on the Continent generally. The work was a mixed bag of cafe
dates, busking, concerts, a little radio work, and so on. They have been back to
Britain many, many times since then, of course, but Colin and Shirley slowly began
to build their reputation and their home in Europe, long before the term Common
Market had been invented.
One of the last major gigs they played in England was the Horsham festival, on
26 May, I962. Compared to the big events we now see at Loughborough,
Cambridge, etc, it was a very modest affair, organised by Tony Wales,
now the press and publications officer of the English Folk Dance and Song
Society. Colin and Shirley went down extremely well, and
were asked to lead the closing song of the festival 'Will ye go, lassie, go?' A
small, now-defunct, label (Arco Records, later Fable Records) put out an album of
selected items from the festival, and that album, Welcome to the folk festival, very
much a collectors' item, has on it George Townsend, a fine octogenarian singer
from Lewes in Sussex, now dead, George Belton, Bob Blake, and (believe it or
not) me.
The only people to get two tracks on the album are Colin and Shirley, who sing
Margret Barry's song 'The Blarney stone' and 'The sweet nightingale', known by
almost everyone who has ever been in a folk club for that wonderful chorus line 'As
she sings in the valley below.'
As a result of this album Colin and Shirley made an ep for the Fable label. It was
called Colin Wilkie and Shirley Hart sing and the four tracks were "The
Waggoner's lad", "Girls of Ontario", "The fickle young man" - a lovely French song in a singable
Translation by Shirley and "Kelvin Grove" Colin played banjo and guitar very
tastefully on this record, and his banjo-picking on "The Waggoner's lad" appealed
muchly to Hedy West on her first trip to England.
I was in touch only sporadically with Colin and Shirley in the middle sixties. I
remember getting from them an ep of a group called Les Landsmen, recorded on
the French Columbia label: the trio on that disc consisted of one Tom Everett, and
Colin and Shirley. The arrangements, syrupy after the manner of the times (some
would say the practice still persists), were all 'sur un theme du folklore'. You would
have recognised 'The fox went out on a chilly night' (the only song on this ep sung
in English), and 'La chanson du rossignol' as 'The sweet nightingale', but I
wonder if you would have identified from the titles 'Buvons, le vin est bon' as
'Follow the drinking gourd', and 'Les femmes n'ont pas de chance' as 'The
waggoner's lad'. In 'The fox' the singing is heavily popped up, but the other three
songs are beautifully sung. Then, as now, Colin and Shirley's diction was
impeccable.
For a long time, Colin and Shirley were settled in Stuttgart, Germany, and, apart
from their success as club and concert performers and regular visits to various
European festivals, they were getting radio and some television work. They were
also turning out a few records for the English market on the Saga label. With John
Pearse, they did a record for Saga's sister label, Society, called Folk '66. Colin
sang one of his own songs 'George Barker' on an anthology record called Folk
Scene after the magazine of that name that flourished in I964/65, and the duo
made "We travel the road" for the German Polydor label. The songs and sleeve
notes on this album are in English, but the record has never been issued on this
side of the English Channel.
During these years, Colin and Shirley would spend up to four or five summer
months in Britain, where they were always in great demand on the club scene, but
they made only a few big appearances here,
including an Albert Hall concert I organised for the Musicians' Union's benevolent
fund in I963, and a couple of tours of major concert halls (Swansea, Exeter,
Birmingham, Brighton) in I966, under the sponsorship of the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament. In these concerts, Colin and Shirley appeared with (among
others) Julie Felix, Derroll Adams, Harvey Andrews, the 3-City4, Guy Carawan, Alex
Campbell, the Watersons, and Cyril Tawney.
In I967, I was invited to the Burg Waldeck festival in Germany, where I saw Colin
and Shirley performing on what by now had become their home ground. They had
moved to a very well designed and modern house in the village of Stockheim, near
Heilbronn, and were touring in Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia and Switzerland, as
well as in Germany itself. Their performance had not changed radically. lt was
better, of course, as you'd expect from a couple who had sung together for six
years, and there was a fair admixture of Colin's own songs in their repertoire, but
the traditional British songs were still there and flourishing on foreign soil.
By this time, Colin and Shirley were the friends and colleagues of Germany's
leading singers, Franz-Josef Degenhardt, Hein and Oss Kröher, Schobert and
Black, and many others. I've been back to Germany many times since I967 and
have learned to enjoy the work of these splendid performers, many of them writing
their own material.
Last year, the German Label Da Camera Sound issued Sunflower seed, an lp of
Colin and Shirley that must be considered a breakthrough for them. The songs
were all Colin's, and the backing included some magnificent keyboard work from
Milcho Leviev. (The record was reviewed in Folk Review, July I972). Their latest
offering, on the German Plane label, is an album called "morning". Two of the songs
on it (Karl Dallas' 'The family of man' and Derroll Adams'
'Portland Town'), are songs Wilkie and Hart were singing for years before they became
popular. The other eight are Colin's songs.
These include 'The soldier's song' - a blast against the 'glamour of army life',
'Wat Tyler'
- a long ballad about the peasant's revolt, 'Willow and rue' - a song of lost love,
and 'Morning' - possibly the only bearable song ever written about the Aberfan
tragedy. This last song is written in a very low-key fashion, and simply describes
the events of an ordinary day in a village that becomes identified only in the very
last word of the song, and it is very movingly written and performed.
(Sunflower seed and Morning can both be ordered through Collets record shop,
70 New Oxford Street, London WC1. There's a book of Colin's songs available
from Feldmans.
Shirley und Colin have been settled for some years in Stockheim. They have a
son, Vincent, who is nearly four, and, as the time for his schooling approaches,
they would prefer to enjoy a stretch off the road. 'We've sung', says Shirley 'in every
town of any size and some towns of no size in Germany and Switzerland. Going by
petrol receipts, we have covered about 120,000 kilometres (close on 75,000 miles)
in the past two years. We have had 467 (I counted them myself) rave notices over
the years in European papers, and three dreadful pannings. But the first fine
romance of the road has worn off after twelve years and we've both got a let's-
settle-down urge'
'We get a tremendous charge from actually being up there und performing,' says
Colin, 'but oh, that long dusty road! All I see is a bowel-like trail of autobahns and
other roads.'
Settling down should be a possibility. Colin is busy on quite a lot of radio writing.
Last year he did four programmes for Swiss radio, illustrated with records and by
Colin and Shirley's live singing. He's also done several profile programmes (on,
for example, Derroll Adams, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie), and a number of his
stories for children have been broadcast, besides a twelve-part serial. The Wilkies
have also made several tv films, most of which, says Shirley, are 'stolen' by Vincent
who'll be signing autographs soon.
Meanwhile, singers who go to Germany continue to drop in on Colin und Shirley
(turn left at Brackenheim: it's easy to find) and they are very much in touch with the
British scene as a consequence. They are singing und writing first class songs,
and it's my guess that they will continue to do so for many years.
Eric Winter, 1973