Edinburgh and Vancouver – where people are strippers AND comedians

Vancouver’s placid Folk Festival before the Great Hula Hoop Robbery of 2013

I am driving up from London to Edinburgh today.

Being at the Edinburgh Fringe for what amounts to four weeks can be like living inside a rather noisy and crowded bubble. But, if you think it’s noisy and crowded in Edinburgh, think what it’s like in Vancouver.

Anna Smith, this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent e-mailed me before I set off for Edinburgh at 6.00am this morning.

“Last night,” she told me, “only 200,000 people showed up for the annual fireworks show in Vancouver…. 400,000 had been expected and the Vancouver Police Department had issued a radio advisory that vast numbers of people were going to be performing public urination. I saw no evidence of that at all and the streets smelled normal this morning.

“Vancouver is awash with festivals at this time of year – There’s the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, the International Buddhist Film Festival, the Powell Street Festival (of Japanese Culture), a Brazilian Festival, at least two Latin American Festivals, a Caribbean Festival and Gay Pride Week.

“For the last, a rainbow version of the Canadian Flag is flown merrily on flagpoles all over downtown, all the major Canadian banks have rainbow-coloured feather boas and ribbons fluttering everywhere and a zebra crossing on Davie Street has evolved into a rainbow crossing.”

Anna has been working at one of the festivals – the Folk Festival.

“I was a receptionist in the massage tent,” she told me, “booking massages for the artists. I recognised one of them from his name tag – one of Canada’s top violinists whom I had known thirty years ago, when I was a striptease artist in Toronto.

“I greeted him with the words: Holy shit…It’s Ben Mink! and he was so surprised to see me he immediately telephoned a recluse we both knew in Ontario so I could say Hi…

Complementary cucumbers were on display

“Later during the festival I had a conversation with Marie Lynn Hammond, who cleverly realised that I was ‘Nurse Annie’ – one of the characters I performed as, in striptease AND comedy.”

Yes, Anna was both a striptease artist AND a comedian – so it was not/is not just Malcolm Hardee, Martin Soan and Bob Slayer who combine the two vocations.

Anna continued: “Marie Lynn Hammond’s bass player Dennis Nichol asked me: You are Nurse Annie?? Can I have your autograph?

“I thought he was joking, but he insisted. I was flabbergasted. Nobody has asked for my autograph for the last thirty years – except for building managers wanting it on my rent cheque.

“We had a conversation about the good old days before cassette tapes were invented and strippers had to dance to live music. It turned out that he had once played at the Zanzibar Circus Tavern on Yonge Street in Toronto, which is the first place I danced professionally.

“The only sad thing that happened during the festival was a public announcement that there had been a theft of hula hoops and juggling balls…. WOULD THE THIEF PLEASE RETURN THE HULA HOOPS AND JUGGLING BALLS the plaintive announcement said.

“I thought,” Anna told me, “that perhaps the spirit of Malcolm Hardee was roaming the forests and mountains.”

But no.

With luck, though, it will be roaming the venues, streets and pubs of Edinburgh over the next four weeks.

What comedian Alex Frackleton learned from Billy Connolly 24 years afterwards

Alex Frackleton, poet, back in 1989

In December, 1989, Alex Frackleton attended a surprise 50th birthday party for Scots folksinger Danny Kyle in the small town of Strathaven, outside Glasgow. About thirty people were hanging around in the bar downstairs while Danny Kyle performed upstairs.

Alex is now a comedian. Back in 1989, he was a poet.

“Why are we waiting?” Alex asked.

“Billy is coming,” came the reply. “We need to wait.”

“Of course,” Alex told me yesterday, “the penny hadn’t even gone into the slot and I had no idea who he meant, so I just stood there with my pint waiting for this guy called Billy, who was quite obviously fucking late, to turn up. A few minutes later the bar door opens and in walks Billy Connolly with his banjo case.”

Alex continues the story…

* * *

I’m introduced to Billy as a poet and we talk about the poets we like and our conversation takes us to William Topaz McGonagall, whom I love because he is so bad that he’s just brilliant – a comic genius without ever realizing it.

The late ‘great’ Scottish poet William McGonagall

“I’d love to do something on old Topaz,” says Billy.

“Like a routine?” I ask.

“Naw,” says Billy. “Naw. I’d like to do something that honours him.”

“Perform one of his poems?”

“Naw, I could never perform one of his poems. Not on stage. It wouldn’t fit in with what I do live.”

“But,” I asked Billy, “if you were to perform one of his poems which one would you do?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” says Billy. “The Tay Bridge Disaster!”

“A classic!” I said.

“Indeed!” said Billy.

It’s time for Danny’s surprise, so we all troop upstairs and burst through the doors just as the applause for his last song begins to fade; then we all start singing Happy Birthday to You.

Danny, always the showman, introduces all of us to the audience of about two hundred, because all the surprise guests are talented musicians and singers, except me: I can’t sing to save to myself, let alone play a musical instrument.

He then introduces Billy – who goes up and does about twenty minutes of then-unheard comedy material about the G-spot. People are falling off their seats laughing and I am mesmerized because, while I had heard him on LP record, I had never seen the man perform before. This is a master craftsman at work. Billy finishes to thunderous applause and Danny comes back on stage and says:

“Thank you, Billy. Thank you very much indeed. Now, ladies and gentlemen, my next guest is a young man whom I’ve had the pleasure of watching over the last half-dozen years mature into a fine poet and performer…”

I look at him and I think: You utter bastard! Putting me on after Connolly, you cunt!

“Will you please welcome on stage the Very Poet, Alex Frackleton…”

I have to go up there. I don’t want to but I must because this is now my job and it’s my friend’s 50th birthday. As I pass Danny on the stage, we have eye contact and I’m sure he sees my fear, confusion, betrayal, bewilderment, not to mention the fucking panic in my eyes – but he just smiles and gives me a big, matey wink, as if to say: Aye, I’ve landed you right in the shit here – Deal with it.

I perform my poem How To Be An Individual.

There are a number of gags throughout Individual but the best one comes about two thirds of the way in. I turn my head left of stage and Connolly is pissing himself laughing.

Nothing will ever take that memory away from me. It means that much to me.

I finish to rapturous applause and I exit the stage.

Billy tells me: “That was fucking fabulous, Alex!”

“Thank you.”

Alex at the Hradec Festival, 2010

“Naw,” says Billy. “That really was superb! You should perform The Tay Bridge Disaster! You’d bring it to life!”

“I’ll think about it.”

I never did get around to doing it.

I’ve been performing as a comedian here in the Czech Republic for the last four years and, while my comedy has been received well-enough for me to have repeat bookings at the European Theatre Festival… maybe I should take Billy’s advice and bring The Tay Bridge Disaster to life. Looking back and telling you about that 1989 event today, I have realised I am far, far more comfortable as a performance poet than as a comedian.

Billy did eventually perform The Tay Bridge Disaster in the 1994 BBC TV series Billy Connolly’s World Tour of Scotland.

The night Bob Dylan got booed for going electric and changing the world

“The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter” album by the Incredible String Band. Unlike Bob Dylan, at least they could sort-of sing

I was never a fan of Bob Dylan. He could not sing.

But, in the 1960s, when they were still influenced by Hinduism and before they discovered Scientology, I was an enormous admirer of The Incredible String Band. It was through their records on the Elektra label that I first became aware of the highly influential producer Joe Boyd.

Along the way, he also produced Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, REM, Billy Bragg, Taj Mahal etc etc and opened the highly influential UFO Club in London. Then, as head of music for Warner Brothers Films, he organised the scoring of Clockwork Orange, Deliverance and McCabe and Mrs Miller and co-directed Jimi Hendrix, a feature-length documentary. He later went into partnership with legendary American movie producer Don Simpson to develop film projects and later still was Executive Producer on the British movie Scandal.

Last night, he was at the Sohemian Society in London, reading from his autobiography White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s. He also shared a memory from 1965, when he was one year out of Harvard University and working at the Newport Folk Festival.

A Newport Folk Festival had been held on Rhode Island in 1958 and 1959 – a commercial event staged by producer/promoter George Wein, who already organised the Newport Jazz Festival.

It then stopped for three years and re-started in 1963, run by a non-profit foundation which put money back into preserving traditional culture in America.

Joe Boyd had gone to the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and now, aged 23 in 1965, he was production manager at the festival, working for George Wein. This is what Joe said last night:

_____________________________

Joe Boyd remembered the 1960s last night in Soho

When Dylan appeared at Newport in 1965, the Beatles’ songs were all still about love – boy meets girl. They released Rubber Soul later that year. The Rolling Stones were still doing R&B-inflected pop music; they were dressing up to do Top of the Pops. They were part of the world of pop music. The word ‘Rock’ as a term was seldom used before 1965. There was pop music…

And then there was folk music, which was this whole other thing and the Newport Folk Festival was this very idealistic thing. Everybody got paid the same – $25 per day plus room and board. And Newport was this huge event. People, kids from all over the country came and camped out to go to it.

But it was a kinda elite audience – the kids who were most aware who would actually sit and listen to a fiddler from Texas who was 75 years old or prisoners from Texas doing something. They were glued to this. It was not a pop audience.

That summer, the airwaves had been suddenly… out of the blue… completely startling… there was Mr Tambourine Man by The Byrds, I Got You Babe by Sonny & Cher which had Sonny imitating Dylan – sounding and doing a kind of take-off of Dylan’s vocals, which indicated how important Dylan had become.

Then Dylan released his six minute single Like a Rolling Stone with drums and Al Kooper’s organ and everyone who arrived at the Newport Folk Festival was asking this question: What is Dylan gonna do? because he’d never performed with a band before and would he dare? Electric? Impossible! Not at Newport!

Well, maybe… Then rumours started going around. Really?

And then there was this divide between the older generation – the political folk music people – and the kids who thought Hey! We thought Bluegrass banjo was cool and exciting three years ago but now we think the Beatles are cool and exciting. 

And what Dylan was doing on his record was just unbelievable. And then the Paul Butterfield Blues Band were shoe-horned into the festival at the last minute.

So the idea that this guy would come and play a loud electric guitar at Newport was outrageous and shocking to a lot of people and transgressive really.

I loved the idea that he might play an electric guitar. I was kinda excited by Butterfield playing, because I’d helped sign him to Elektra.

And so the Butterfield band played the end of the Blues Workshop on the Saturday afternoon. There had been Son House and Robert Pete Williams and Skip James. It was authentic, real Blues singers from the Thirties suddenly reappearing out of the mists of time and then, at the end, we moved all these amps on stage and (traditional folk music collector) Alan Lomax was introducing the whole thing and he just looked at us with such hatred.

We got the thing set up and then he introduced Butterfield by saying You’ve heard these wonderful musicians singing authentic Blues now here’s some kids from Chicago who’re going to try and play the Blues with the help of all this equipment.

And then he walked offstage and walked right past (Bob Dylan’s manager) Albert Grossman, who’d taken over as Butterfield’s manager and Grossman said That was a real chickenshit introduction and Lomax just pushed him Get out of my way! and they started fighting. These two guys started throwing punches and they had to be pulled apart.

So there was this absolutely cut-it-with-a-knife tension, confrontation.

And the other thing that was going on was the Old Guard were walking round among the kids in the camp area and in the audience and among the stalls and there was this smell they hadn’t smelled before. And then somebody said It’s all Grossman’s fault, because Grossman was known as a real connoisseur of dope and he certainly was giving dope to favoured musicians backstage, so they tried to ban him from the festival and George Wein had to explain to them You can’t do it, because Dylan’s gonna walk, Peter, Paul & Mary will walk, Butterfield will walk. It’ll be a disaster.

So there was this huge tension and then Dylan came on, played, some people booed, some people didn’t. The Old Guard tried to get me to turn the volume down. I went out to the sound control. Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul & Mary) was there and he was on the board of the festival. He was sitting there next to Paul Rothchild who was mixing the sound and I said Lomax and Seeger want the sound turned down and he said Tell them the board is adequately represented at the sound controls and the board here thinks it’s just right. Oh and, by the way, tell them (raising his middle finger).

That was the atmosphere. It was so confrontational.

When Dylan played, some people booed, some people cheered. They only knew three numbers, so then everybody left the stage. He was supposed to do 45 minutes; he only did 15. Some people were cheering. Finally, he came back on with just his acoustic guitar and sang Mr Tambourine Man brilliantly, reclaiming the song from the shiny but shallow Byrds’ version. He finished with It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.

He didn’t close the show. He was in the middle of the first half.

________________________________

Joe Boyd book on making 60s music

As Joe Boyd says in his book White Bicycles:

The significance of many watershed events is apparent only in retrospect; this was clear at the time. The old guard hung their heads in defeat while the young, far from being triumphant, were chastened. They realised that in their victory lay the death of something wonderful. The rebels were like children who’d been looking for something to break and realized, as they looked at the pieces, what a beautiful thing it had been. The festival would never be the same, nor would popular music and nor would ‘youth culture’. Anyone wishing to portray the history of the Sixties as a journey from idealism to hedonism could place the hinge at around 9.30 on the night of 25 July 1965.

The eccentric UK cult of the Kibbo Kift Kindred & the Greenshirts of the 1930s

The Kibbo Kift Kindred were keen on costumes & ceremonies

I was at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1976 (yes, I am that old) but sadly I did not go to see a rock musical called The Kibbo Kift at the Traverse Theatre which was, as far as I can remember, at that time, a rather ramshackle room up some metal stairs.

I am very sad I did not see the musical, written by Judge Smith (his real name) who co-created heavy metal rock group Van der Graaf Generator in 1967.

But last night I went to a Sohemian Society meeting to hear Judge Smith (now bald – aren’t we all) extol the eccentric virtues of the now almost totally forgotten 1930s movement called the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift… and its highly charismatic leader John Hargrave – an illustrator, cartoonist, wood carver, thriller novelist, inventor and psychic healer.

By the age of 17, Hargrave was Chief Cartoonist for the London Evening Times.

After the First World War, he joined the Boy Scouts and, a charismatic outdoor man, he was soon appointed Commissioner for Woodcraft and Camping. In 1919, now calling himself ‘White Fox’, he married the leader of the Merry Campers – part of the Camp Fire Girls movement – called Ruth Clark (her ‘Woodcraft name’ was ‘Minobi’)

John Hargrave started the Kibbo Kift Kindred in 1920 as an anti-war breakaway from Baden-Powell’s more militaristic Boy Scouts. Hargrave’s aim was to encourage “outdoor education, the learning of handicrafts, physical training, the re-introduction of ritual into modern life, the regeneration of urban man and the establishment of a new world civilisation.”

These aims were to be accomplished by hiking and camping. “Picturesque and dramatic public speaking” was also encouraged.

The man sitting next to me in the Sohemian Society meeting last night had come down to London all the way from Leicester just to find out more about this extraordinary group.

During the Kibbo Kindred’s weekend hiking and camping extravaganzas, members were encouraged to make their own tents and wear handmade uniforms – long Saxon-styled hooded cloak , belted tunic and shorts for men; knee-length dress, leather belt and Valkyrie-style leather helmet for women. They liked a bit of elaborate ritual and ceremony, did the Kibbo Kift. At larger ceremonial meetings, the KK’s different Clans, Tribes and Lodges paraded with their tribal totems – everyone was encouraged to carve their own personal totem pole and parade round with it. Their tents were decorated in bright colours and their elaborate robes and regalia embossed with symbolic designs were somewhere between Hiawatha and Art Nouveau.

They used the native American greeting of the outstretched arm and raised open hand (to show you held no weapon) and Hargrave was “somewhat annoyed” when he discovered that the Italian Fascists’ raised arm salute looked exactly the same. Hargrave dropped the hand greeting when too many photos of Nazis in Germany with raised arms “caused confusion”. He did not like Fascists.

The Kibbo Kift sound like a bunch of amiable loonies but, involved in the Kibbo Kift, were suffragette Emmeline Lawrence, photographer Angus McBean, social reformer Havelock Ellis, biologist Julian Huxley and author H.G.Wells.

By 1925, Hargrave had switched his interest from ‘back-to’nature’ to the political Social Credit movement, which aimed to eradicate poverty and unemployment. The Kibbo Kift Kindred split when Hargreaves refused to recognise a new South London Lodge called ‘The Brockleything’. He formed the more political Green Shirts; the ‘back-to-nature’ diehards formed The Woodcraft Folk organisation (which still exists today).

In 1930, Hargrave formed a “Legion of the Unemployed” in Coventry. Wearing green paramilitary uniforms and berets, these political activists became known as the Legion of the Kibbo Kift and, by 1935, were known as The Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit, marching through the streets with their own bands of drummers. In 1935, they put up a Parliamentary candidate under the banner of the Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but lost their deposit.

As Judge Smith explained to the very crowded room above a pub last night, the Green Shirts were the largest uniformed paramilitary street-army in 1930s Britain. They supported and promoted the Social Credit movement which, basically, said the Western banking system based on massive debt (the economic system makes money by lending money) is mad and inevitably results in periods of boom and bust. They had more followers than Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, yet have been totally forgotten.

They were idealistic and had a particular dislike of ‘fat cat’ financial institutions, Communists, Fascists and the Governor of the Bank of England.

During the Second World War, Hargrave invented an ‘automatic navigator’ for aircraft. The RAF tested it, decided it worked well but, as it required a gyroscope and all the gyroscopes were being used for bomb sights, they never took up the idea.

After the War, Hargrave decided he had the power of psychic healing and dissolved his organisation in 1951, making a living as an author, illustrator and cartoonist for Vanity Fair and the Daily Sketch.

In 1967, he discovered that the new Concorde supersonic airliner had a ‘moving map display’ which sounded remarkably like the ‘automatic navigator’ he had invented during the War; but he had allowed his patent to lapse. Despite this, eventually, in 1967, he forced the British government to hold a full Public Enquiry which, basically, decided that Hargrave’s idea had, indeed, been nicked but he would get no money for it as he had let the patent lapse.

In 1976, now in his eighties, Hargrave went to see Judge Smith’s rock musical The Kibbo Kift in the Traverse Theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe and enjoyed it thoroughly though, Judge Smith said last night, this may have been because he was “pretty deaf by then and this very loud rock music may have been the first  music he’d heard for years”.

Before he died in 1982, Hargrave set up the Foundation of the Kibbo Kift Foundation.

All the paper records are now held by the London School of Economics; the costumes, banners and other physical stuff is held at the Museum of London.

Unjustly forgotten. As Judge Smith said last night, “one of the most unusual things about this very unusual man is just how little-known he and his movement are today. There’s no biography; there’s been no TV documentary. But he is far more interesting, significant and downright entertaining than many personalities of the time who are still famous today.”

On my way home from the Sohemian Society meeting, a girl opposite me in the tube train was making up her eyes with her right hand, using her Apple iPhone 4S in her left hand. She had it switched on to the camera, using it as a video mirror.

Times change. Lateral and creative thinking continues.

A very Irish police officer encounters and gives advice to Tofu Love Frogs

Al Mandolino, resident musician at the always-quirky weekly Pear Shaped comedy club in London, read my blog yesterday about Ireland and e-mailed me:

It’s jogged a fond memory from when I toured Ireland in a punk folk band called Tofu Love Frogs.

One summer’s night after a particularly riotous gig in Dublin I was driving an old VW camper full of ‘colourful characters’ through the city centre. Our drummer in the passenger seat was being very loud and animated with bongos, hanging out of his window and shouting stuff.

We stopped at a red light.

A motorbike drew up along my side.

The Garda officer stood up on it and his helmeted head filled my open window, inching into the van, sniffing.

“Have you been drinking?” he inquired.

“No,” was all I could manage.

“Good,” he said. “If you do, don’t let him sit in the front. He draws attention to you.”

Then he left.