‘A night that ends on Greek Street to the rising of the sun’—remembering Les Cousins
January 27, 2024
Andrew Curry writes: The ‘60s Soho club Les Cousins is like the Ur-myth of modern British folk music. It was a basement Shangri-la where musicians traded songs and stories through the night, lived, laughed, and loved together, before stumbling out into a rosy-cheeked dawn.
The name helped in all of this. Les Cousins was taken from a French New Wave film by Claude Chabrol, but the unwary might expect "Les" to greet them at the door.
As Richard Williams writes in his terrific music blog The Blue Moment:
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.
In his recent In Conversation tour, Martin Carthy talked about Les Cousins as “a school for guitarists”. His interviewer on that tour, the writer and guitarist Jon Wilks, who is much too young to have been there at the time, opened that show with a song, Greek Street, that imagined what it might have been like to have been there in the ‘60s:
There were other clubs, of course, several of them also important for the development of the folk scene, but Les Cousins is the one that is remembered. Richard Williams’s post was prompted by the release by Cherry Red Records of a three-CD compilation, simply called Les Cousins, that includes tracks from a wide range of the performers who played there. As Williams notes, the booklet that comes with the compilation includes some pages on the artists who played there in the mid-sixties, and their fees:
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.
And how young they must all have been!
The selection of artists on the compilation does convey the sense of the breadth of the music and the musicians who came through the doors. It includes the now well-known folk performers, such as Martin Carthy, Sandy Denny, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Nick Drake and Davy Graham.
There are the visiting Americans, Paul Simon, Dave van Ronk, Jackson C Frank, and the expatriate Julie Felix. Cat Stevens, the Strawbs, Long John Baldry and Donovan all went mainstream pop. I’ve hardly scratched the surface here. And looking through the list, one of the pleasures is the performers who I’d forgotten about, like Nadia Cattouse and Bridget St John.
Salut! Live doesn’t really do reviews anymore, but a copy of the Les Cousins compilation is on its way to Chateau Salut, and we’ll probably say some more about it when it gets here. It’s also worth going back to Ian Evans’s piece from last year in which he recalls his time hanging out at Les Cousins and elsewhere. In the meantime, it’s here’s Bridget St John.
There’s a sampler from the full compilation on Spotify.
https://open.spotify.com/album/2N4WiDxVRvQcINMR4pnX9b?si=NKH4Y2KwQxyVYhUnTANpZA
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