The history of Les Cousins

Named after a 1959 Claude Chabrol film, Les Cousins operated as a folk club from 1964 to 1972, having taken over a basement in Soho run by John Jack as the Skiffle Cellar during the 1950s. On the ground floor was the restaurant of Loukas and Margaret Matheou, immigrants from Cyprus. Les Cousins, down a steep staircase, was run by their son, Andy. On stage at 49 Greek Street every night of the week he presented singers and musicians whose work would create a platform for the folk-rock and singer-songwriter movements of the late 1960s and early ’70s.

There were other important folk venues in London, notably Bunjie’s, just the other side of Charing Cross Road, and the Troubadour in Earl’s Court. But the Cousins had a special place in history, very well memorialised in a new three-CD box from the Cherry Red label, compiled and annotated by Ian A. Anderson, the singer, guitarist and editor of fRoots magazine.

It is, as you’d expect, a splendidly varied selection, starting and ending with big names — Bert Jansch and the Strawbs — and containing both even bigger ones (Paul Simon, Al Stewart, Ralph McTell, Nick Drake, Roy Harper and Cat Stevens) as well as many more of those whose reputations never really escaped the folk world, like the brilliant guitarists Davy Graham, Mike Cooper, John James, Sam Mitchell and Dave Evans.

So far I’ve mentioned only male performers, but the Cousins was a place where women shone: not just Shirley Collins, Sandy Denny, Bridget St John and Maddy Prior but Dorris Henderson, Jo Ann Kelly, Beverley Kutner (later Martyn) and Nadia Cattouse. And, of course, the sublime Anne Briggs. They’re all here, represented among the 72 tracks licensed from labels such as Topic, Island, Transatlantic, Village Thing and Harvest.

There are the traditionalists: Bert Lloyd singing “Jack Orion”, the Watersons delivering “The Holmfirth Anthem”, and Dave and Toni Arthur’s “A Maiden Came from London Town”. And there are the influential Americans: Jackson C. Frank (“Milk and Honey”), Dave Van Ronk (“Baby, Let Me Lay It On You”), and Tim Hardin (“If I Were a Carpenter”).

You can hear the music going off in all sorts of directions, with weirder stuff coming from the Third Ear Band, Kevin Ayers, the Incredible String Band and Dr Strangely Strange. Ron Geesin’s “Two Fifteen String Guitars for Nice People” is in a class of brilliant weirdness all by itself.

The well produced brochure includes facsimiles of a couple of pages from Andy Mattheou’s diary in April 1965, listing the people he’s booked: Sandy Denny for £3 on a Wednesday night, Davy Graham for £15 on the Saturday, Van Morrison for £3 on a Tuesday, the American guitarist Sandy Bull on a Friday for £10 against half the door takings. Sandy Bull! How I wish I’d been there for that.

The programme isn’t predictable. There’s no “Scarborough Fair”, no “May You Never”, no “She Moved Through the Fair”. The sequencing is thoughtful: tracks from John Martyn and Duffy Power follow immediately after those by their respective mentors, Hamish Imlach and Alexis Korner. I’d only quibble with the inclusion of a small handful of songs — including Drake’s “Northern Sky” and Beverley’s “Get the One I Want To” — where the presence of orchestral arrangements takes them away from the mood of a basement folk club.

If I had to pick some personal favourites, the first would be would be the dazzling violin and guitar of Dave Swarbrick and Martin Carthy on “Byker Hill” and the second would be the magical guitar interplay of Jansch and John Renbourn on “Soho”. The third would be the intense voice and bottleneck guitar of Sam Mitchell’s “Leaf Without a Tree”: a hellhound stalking the lanes of Soho, half a century ago.

* Les Cousins: The Soundtrack of Soho’s Legendary Folk & Blues Club is out now on the Cherry Red label. The image is the club’s logo, the wagon wheel a reference to a feature of its décor.