Otley... Don Partridge and 'Homeless Bones'...

Once Don had made the initial breakthrough into the Biz after 'Rosie' became a hit, other offers presented themselves.  One rather obscure one was when he was commissioned to write the lyrics (Stanley Myers did the music)  for the opening theme over the titles for the film 'Otley.'  The resulting song was, 'Homeless Bones,' a quirky little ditty, backed by Don's one man band, heavily featuring harmonica and banjo rather than guitar, with some background orchestration - minimal strings and a tuba.  (He often used plectrum banjo on the street - as did Alan Young, his oldest friend - because it cut through the surrounding noise very efficiently).  'Otley' was released in 1968, with Tom Courtenay in the lead (alongside Romy Schneider) as a jack the lad about town in the 'Swinging Sixties.'  The movie is actually somewhat better than that description might suggest...
    

     'Gerald Arthur Otley (Tom Courtenay) is a born loser.While asleep,drunk,his host is murdered and Otley himself is taken and interrogated by two separate sets of kidnappers before he has a chance to talk to the Police. The bemused Otley blunders from one near-fatal crisis to another with no idea who is on whose side, and especially who is on his side. This spoof comedy-thriller combines elements of  ‘James-Bondery’ with the swinging London set as the confused Otley unintentionally finds himself keeping company with spies and murderers in all manner of comical situations.'
The opening sequences show Tom Courtenay walking along a busy london street and is a time capsule of late 1960s london, the people, the hair styles, the clothes and cars bringing memories of the era flooding back if you were in london at that time. Covertly filmed unlike many films you can see that most people are totally unaware they are being filmed as the actor walks amongst them. I find this part of the film alone fascinating. Shot in colour OTLEY is a must see for any British comedy film fan.'
(Taken from here).

The 'busy London street' is Portobello Road, one of those iconic London settings of the time.  Not sure who the busker is on the left as the camera follows Courtenay's progress through the crowds - could be John McCarthy ('Scouse')?  Height and moustache would be about right.

When the film opened in the US in March 1969, Vincent Canby, writing in the New York Times, was not overly impressed:
     '"OTLEY," the British comedy that opened yesterday at the Cinema I, is like one of Billy Liar's had dreams. An occasional antiques dealer and gigolo to Soho landladies. Otley wakes up one morning to find himself wanted for a murder he did not commit, and the prize of rival intelligence agencies, whose intentions he cannot fathom.
Like Otley, the movie is a bad risk. Everything in it is borrowed and badly used—actors (Tom Courtenay, Alan Badel), situations (the triumph of the fraudulent fool), and even settings, including a rather handsome Thames houseboat that reminded me wistfully of "The Horse's Mouth." "Otley" is the kind of movie that allows you to think about other movies, in those great gaps of time between the setting up of a gag and the moment when it is ritualistically executed.
Tom Courtenay, who used to appear in good, intelligent movies ("The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," "Billy Liar") plays Otley with a certain commendable desperation. ("Have a go at me psyche," he tells a hood who's about to beat him up, "but leave me body alone!") However, if he continues in films like this and "Dandy in Aspic," he's going to wind up as an actor who will be described—throughout his career — as "a rising young star," a talent as immobilized in mediocrity as a leaf frozen in recite.

You pays your money, as they say.  But the match-up between Don's song and ongoing street vibe with Courtenay's youthful roguish energy and good looks works well enough for this period piece.

Review of 'Don Partridge and Company,' by John Bentham...

Frank Brown and his old Gibson Twelve String.
Leicester Square 1968.

A very nice review of the book from John Bentham in the Tiger Folk Newsletter (not available on their site but via Dave Sutherland's monthly newsletter):

'Three years ago on a Friday night Don Partridge played the Pack Horse Folk Club in Loughborough. It wasn’t a turn up, perform and off down the road jobs, oh no. Saturday saw him busking in the Market Place; one of his old haunts from the 80’s when he was living on a narrow boat in the town. In the pub later in the afternoon, an old chum of Dons, Rod Warner broached the idea of writing a biography of Don. His response was that it shouldn’t be a biography but a book about buskers. After all both he and Rod were on the busking scene at the same time. It became more than a suggestion and the prospect of writing such a book started to become a reality. Perhaps the catalyst was when Don... contacted Pat Keene. Now Pat had also been earning his living busking but was also a photographer with rolls and rolls of film that he had taken at the time. Of course, busking was nothing new, there had always been street performers, but nearly all of them were “The Old School”, accordion players, banjo and spoon players, jazz bands, individual singers and their ilk but now, suddenly, there appeared in their midst young, guitar carrying lads and the busking world was about to change and Pat was there to capture it on film.

In the book we are taken, in photographs some of which have never been published before and through the reminiscences of Don, Pat and Rod, back to a world that the majority of people only saw or ignored as they passed by on their own journeys. And it would possibly have remained a twilight world if Don Partridge hadn’t have mackled up his one man band kit, worn a snake skin jacket and started singing a song called “Rosie”. The smart thing to say now would be;” And the rest is history”. Well, yes it is, and you can now read the first-hand accounts of that history. Because I know Rod quite well, I felt a little uneasy at times reading some of the intimate details of his life but also fascinated by them, is this just curiosity or voyeurism? Whatever it might be, it proves yet again that we might think we know someone but how much do we really know.

Life was good on the streets and life was bad on the streets. The streets weren’t just in London. They were up and down the country. They were up and down the Europe. They were east of Europe and west to Ireland. Sometimes travelling in style, sometimes bumming it, sometimes with money to burn, sometimes with a scarce two ha’pennies to rub together, sometimes travelling alone, sometimes with fellow buskers and bottlers, sometimes as a loner sometimes with a lover, travelling, travelling, always moving on. Even when the times were good the road would beckon and so they would up sticks and away. Bohemian, I guess it was.

The highlight was The Buskers Concert in 1969 when Don hired The Royal Albert Hall.....read all about it!

Sadly Don passed away before the book was finished but Pat and Rod were determined to complete the project in memory of their old mate and a damn good job they have done of it.

“If you don’t see me next spring, I’ll be in Berlin” 
“Transworld Blues”-Don Partridge.'

Form is what happens...

Meg Aikman - 'The Piccadilly Nightingale.'

The book is now launched, people are buying it, which is gratifying, with not too many problems so far.

Of course, after publication, one is always thinking of the material you wanted to put in, things that you might have approached differently, stylistic choices that were or were not made. The list goes on... Pat and myself hit the basic problem when Don suddenly and tragically died: should we continue or should we abandon the book in its planned form and try to resurrect it as something else?  In the end, we fell somewhere in the middle, deciding that, yes, the book would be incomplete from the original ideas that had been thrashed out, because we needed more of Don's input for that, and short of a Doris Stokes moment or two, this was not going to happen in this life. But what we had was maybe enough to justify the project. So we went with that. Three stories that elliptically reflect and refract on each other. The other issue was: time and mortality. With Don gone, the two of us not exactly spring chickens, the owld wingèd chariot was hurrying near behind us somewhat.  Et in busking arcadia ego... (I have a rather drunken fancy that after death, crossing the bar (to borrow from Tennyson) might be turned from the sombre process of changing continuum, so to speak, if the Pilot suddenly turned round and revealed himself as my old friend, professional loon and busking partner, Jumping Jack/Earl of Mustard/Norman Norris: 'I'm the guv'nor. Whorr hor hor.' I assume the old bugger has left this level sometime back and would like to think he found a good gig beyond... ).

In the end, the book followed one of the literary precepts which CharlesOlson appropriated from his younger friend and fellow poet, Robert Creeley: 'FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT .'.

Many years later, when asked about his famous quote, Creeley responded:

'I would now almost amend the statement to say, "Form is
what happens." It's the fact of things in the world, however
they are. So that form in that way is simply the presence of
any thing.'

.

From here...  (scroll down).

So the form of the book is created by what we had left to play with. 'Form is what happens.' Hopefully something interesting came of it.

Don Partridge and Company - the book - on sale now!

Finally we have arrived!  'Don Partridge and Company' is now on sale from my online store.
'Three young men hit the road with their guitars and music and became buskers.  One of them became famous...'

Go here to BUY...
 
The book is available in either paperback hard copy or pdf digital download.


 The photo above is one I found a few days ago and the last one I took of Don before his tragic death just over a year ago.  This was on my last visit - we'd broken from recording his interviews to go to Brighton for a few hours.  It was a glorious day and we drank too much.  But great fun... as time spent with Don always was...

The music we played...

It was always a mélange... Pat says that he started out playing under the influence of Rambling Jack Elliot but also had a lucky encounter in Paris with Ian Bennetts:

'… Ian Bennetts... was a shithot flatpicker... very good at playing American folk and who occasionally did some busking although it wasn't his main livelihood. He was one of three brother - the Bennetts – who were all guitar players. I knew Ian and John. (Les Bennetts, of course, was the guitar player in Lonnie Donegan's band¹). My hero Jack Elliott had been in and out of Paris quite a bit in the previous two or three years and Ian had watched and learned from him. To the extent that he became every bit as good, which was saying something – Jack was a master. I was transfixed watching Ian playing all these flatpicking riffs and tantalised because I couldn't work out how he did it. I practised and practised and kept watching, trying to unlock the mechanics of his right hand technique – which was probably one of the complications I found because I'm left handed. .. Finally I asked him if he would consider giving me a lesson, which he did. I was surprised but grateful and he charged me a thousand old francs, which in today's money is about twenty quid. He showed me the right hand positions for regular guitar players, the essence of what flatpicking was all about.'

Don Partridge's father had been a jazz guitarist in a dance band, Django style, but like Pat, Don looked more to the folk world initially for guidance:

'I had asked my dad if he would show my the rudiments on guitar but he said that he would only do it if I studied properly and learned music. Which was no interest to me – I just wanted to learn enough to start me off and figure the rest out for myself. So I went elsewhere. Bought myself a guitar and had a few folk guitar lessons from a teacher called Peter Grauner who showed me some basic finger style playing.'

Me? Started out trying to play jazz piano then got a guitar for its portability – and also because I was also becoming interested in folk music:

'A folk club had started up in Loughborough, run by three art students. One of whom was the mighty Dave Evans,¹ a few years older than most because he had been a merchant seaman before he came to do an art degree. Dave was a phenomenal guitarist already and he kindly showed me some fingerpicking techniques and tunings which helped me to make a quantum leap in my guitar playing... a mighty stroke of luck. The piano was cumbersome, the guitar the ideal portable instrument for a naïve, would-be troubadour who had suddenly experienced wider freedoms through his hitch-hiking adventures. So: time to be a traveller and a busker... '

Despite mastering finger-picking, for busking you needed a strong, rhythmic plectrum style in the days before portable amps became prevalent. I learned a lot watching at Keene and Don when they played together and Alan Young, another gifted player and busker, Don's best friend and frequent sidekick. Despite our common origins in folk music, this wasn't the only source of the street repertoire. Skiffle was one, the others blues, American bluegrass, various pop songs of the day, old jazz standards like 'Bill Bailey,' and by 1966 – Beatles/Rolling Stones/Animals. Whatever worked. Everything got blended into your style...

1 Lonnie Donegan 1921-2002. 'The King of Skiffle,' Donegan left his gig as banjoist/guitarist in Chris Barber's Jazz Band to go on his own and sell a lot of records during the 'Skiffle' craze and onwards. Les Bennetts played lead guitar in his band for a time.

1 Dave Evans - one of the true greats of acoustic guitar, Dave never quite got the recognition accorded to his contemporaries: Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Davy Graham etc. Dave has lived in Belgium for many years, where he makes pots and ceramics, living in a converted brewery.

Backstage Norman... in drag...

This image is Norman Norris AKA as Jumping Jack/Earl of Mustard, taken backstage at the Albert Hall Busker's Concert.  Bizarrely - but there again, Norman was never remotely normal in his interactions with life in general - he decided that he would go on in drag.  The old school busker who was supposed to accompany him flatly refused when Norman got into his women's clothes.  He asked Don and Alan for help but it it was obvious they could not do it, Don headlining and Alan with his specially prepared act.  So that's how I ended up playing twice on the bill - once with Aidan Agnew (as 'African Jack and the Matabele Uprising' - well, we were young!) and once with Norman.  Not so much of a chore as I had by that time worked extensively with the old rogue - but he came slightly unstuck as he hadn't figured out that a long dress might inhibit his tap dancing.  It didn't really matter - the overall image of this gnarled loon in a dress, dancing with golden boots that had cut-down skis on the bottom was always going to impress!

Proof OK!

I've had the proof back and it seems ok. It seems that the changes I made to the images worked. Ordered another as a last check - if that comes back without any problems - we shall roll on 27th September!

Good News - and some more old video...

Looks like the master document has printed ok and I should receive the final proof copy in a couple of days. If it's ok, I'll put another through to do a last check - then hopefully we will go on 27th September...

In the meantime - here's a couple of film extracts from 1969. No sound, unfortunately. The first is from the Albert Hall Buskers' Concert rehearsal at Max Rivers rehearsal rooms off Charing Cross Road, here...
I think this was taken from the documentary that was filmed about the event and subsequently disappeared down the years.  You can see me on the beginning, on the right, playing with my compadre Aidan Agnew (he's on banjo).
The second clip, here, is from the British Pathe News archive, shot at the concert and on the street.  The tall guy standing on the neck of the escapologist Johnny Eagles is Pat Keene - co-author of the book.  He was there as a photographer rather than a musician that night - and his photos are the only record of this unique event apart from these scraps of footage and the lost movie.  It then cuts, rather oddly, to footage shot in Leicester Square - the first busker is the American, Dave Parker, also known as Dyon Parker and Dave Helling.  Then me, resplendent in side burns...  Playing to the queues on the Warner cinema, synchonistically - my surname, but no relation...
Finding these two clips when I was researching the book and looking at my younger self, over forty years ago, was a strange experience...

New Publication Date...

There has been a small glitch in the publishing - some corruption in the photo image files embedded in the master document has led to problems printing. This should be sorted fairly quickly but I have put back publication date for a couple of weeks so that I can run some test copies through the publishing web site to make sure that there are no problems. Belt and braces - new publication date hopefully Tuesday 27th September...

Publication looms...

Pat Keene sent me the final corrections to the proof copy so we are almost ready to roll. Publication day is set for Wednesday 14th September, if all goes well. The link to the internet store is already on the side panel of this blog but I will flag it up prominently as and when...

Some clips... tap dancers and geniuses...

Norman Norris, AKA 'Jumping Jack' and 'The Earl of Mustard,' was one of the old school buskers who performed round Leicester Square and beyond.  Yet, after initial confrontations with the new breed of guitar toting street musicians, he was quick to join them.  There is a special section in the book dedicated to him.  All three of us worked with him at various times: for me especially, as the youngest, he showed me much and I had a great affection for him, despite his craziness and relentless need for attention.  Here are two clips from the film 'The London Nobody Knows,' with Norman and Alan Young playing and talking.   

Extracts: four, five, six...

Photo is proof copy (for obvious reasons!): Jumping Jack and 'Scotty' busking in Leicester Square, 1968.  (Copyright Pat Keene).


Don:

I met a character named John Sidfall in Dublin back in 1964. I walked into O' Donaghue's bar⁵ in Baggot Street and asked if I could play. The barman was hesitating, he wasn't sure so there was John sitting with three or four old drunkards stuffing their faces with Guinness. They said: 'Let him play.' A pause. Then an afterthought: 'What do you play?' I said: 'Skiffle' and gave them 'Freight Train' and a couple of similar songs. Afterwards I sat down with John and had a couple of drinks. He seemed to live on Guinness, which he swore by, saying that, as in the advert, Guinness was really good for you...

5 O' Donaghues – famous bar in Dublin that features traditional music, home to the Dubliners and many others.

Pat:

Back now in Devon, I was practising every day and managed to get a couple of spots on Westward Television as it was then by the simple procedure of walking in and saying: 'How about a gig?' You could in those days, television was more informal and they had a show called 'Westward Diary' which I appeared on. So I'd play them a song, £12, I think I got paid. Didn't get any further work, mind you. But I was involved in the embryonic folk scene that was down there, playing in the clubs. I was doing American stuff which was frowned on by a lot of the folky purists. But I made a few quid, got some guest bookings here and there and started up the Paignton folk club with a guy called Max Eastley⁶ who went on to be a good guitar player and we played together quite a bit, people liked us. And that's where I first met Don Partridge and Alan Young who were busking in Torbay at the time. I somehow bumped into them and got them a gig in the folk club. All kinds of people – John Renbourn⁷, Martin Carthy⁸, they'd do a circuit, Exeter, Newton Abbot, Sidmouth, Exmouth – we'd get them a week's work to make it worth their while to come down and it was good for us because it would pull people to the club. 

 

6 Max Eastley - musician who later became famous through his innovative explorations of kinetic art, sound and sculpture combined. A pioneer in the field of sound art and installations.

7 John Renbourn 1944 – Superb guitar player who solo and in tandem with Bert Jansch took acoustic/folk guitar to another level. Founded the folk rock band Pentangle with Jansch.

8 Martin Carthy 1940 – Another pioneer of folk guitar. He took the route back into the tradition and became one of its finest singers and interpreters, tailoring his guitar style to match the material, moving away from the blues and skiffle influences. His playing undergirded his singing in novel ways for English folk music.

Rod:

I had played guitar in various places round the country, doing some occasional busking and even a couple of floor spots in folk clubs. My transition from would-be jazz pianist to folk strummer/finger picker/singer had been fairly swift – probably because I realised on my first forays on the road that a guitar was more portable. Also the influence of the country blues musicians I had come to via my interest in jazz – then Bob Dylan. With Woody Guthrie standing somewhere at the back of it all...  Now I was encountering the London buskers – the Young Turks who had forced their way onto a rough old scene in a generational putsch, Alan, Don and Pat, with the collaboration of two of the older buskers, Megan Aikman and Norman – AKA Jumping Jack the tap dancer. Maybe Norman had been too crazy for his generation anyway. He fitted right in to the London of the Sixties, about to enter its own era of craziness.

The making of a busker... extracts one, two and three...

(Alan Young and Don Partridge in 2008)




From 'Don Partridge And Company,' pages 11-12.

Don:

I became aware of buskers from an early age as I often saw the Happy Wanderers Jazz Band¹ plying their trade when I was about seven and out with my parents in London when we lived in Earls Court. Also, my father and my uncles would dress up as the Hollis Brothers², an old school music hall act, in home-made jellebahs and fezes and do the sand dance to 'The Old Bazaar in Cairo' which my uncle Nobby would play on piano or accordion at every wedding or party held by the large and widespread Partridge family, affairs which, as a small boy, I enjoyed to the full. About that time, my father, a guitarist who was playing in a dance band when he met my mother, gave me a ukulele banjo and a couple of old music books with songs like 'Old Folks at Home,' 'Streets of Laredo,' and the George Formby standards. I became quite proficient: at future parties and weddings I would be included in the performance. I have always thought that one of my better personal traits was my ability to digest something and hide it away for future use, so I was already forming ideas about busking, albeit whimsically, at that tender age. When I was considering possible ideas about employment after school, along with engine drivers, firemen and pilots, occasionally the idea of busking would cross my mind, not as a job alongside the other stereotypes but more as a way in which I thought that, if I ended up a tramp, it could be a way to feed myself.

Notes:

1 The Happy Wanderers Jazz Band – A group of middle-aged and older musicians who played traditional jazz in the West End of London in the 50s and 60s.

2 The Hollis Brothers – Albie and Harry, street buskers who did the sand dance, aided and abetted by Charlie Hilliard on accordion, known as the Roadstars. Ronnie Ross also worked with them although he later went solo. Played the West End of London. Harry Hollis was allegedly in the Guinness Book of Records for being London's 'most arrested man.'

From page 35:


Pat

Terry and I were were doing very well [in Paris] on the queues, making a comfortable living. Occasionally we would hook up with another musician, whoever might be drifting through. Which is how I met Dick (Richard) Farina², who was a brilliant harmonica player. He became famous later as a writer but we knew him as a musician. He was married to Carolyn Hester, the famous American folk singer but had met Mimi Baez³, Joan Baez's sister, who became his girlfriend. Mimi's father had come to Paris to work for UNESCO and brought his wife and younger daughter. I saw her a couple of times in the Bar Monaco: like her elder sister she had lovely long hair and was very beautiful. Later they were married after Carolyn Hester divorced him and they had a few records out before his tragic motor bike crash in 1966, a couple of days after his book, 'Been Down So Long It LooksLike Up To Me,' was published and subsequently became a counter-culture classic. Dick came and played the queues with Terry and myself a few times and we clicked pretty well. This was when I was becoming more competent, in every kind of way, learning new stuff all the time.

Notes

2 Richard Farina 1937- 1966. American singer/songwriter and author of cult classic 'Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.' Married celebrated folksinger Carolyn Hester and came to Europe on tour with her – where he met Mimi Baez...

3 Mimi Baez 1945-2001. American singer/songwriter and political activist, overshadowed by her more famous sister, Joan. She met Farina in Paris where she lived with her family at the time. They subsequently married after his divorce to Hester and made several albums together back in the US before his tragic death in a motorcycle accident.

From page 75:

Rod

By entering the busking universe I started to live in a world that was at right angles both to straight society and the coming of new colourful times – a part of them, to be sure, but allied to some older outlaw way of life... When I eventually worked with Jumping Jack I was to see this more clearly.

And I wandered from the old to the new and back – from West End to East End, North to South – although South of the river was a territory I only came to know better many years later. As pirate stations cranked up the volume of the soundtrack, London was dancing to new tunes. Some of which were supplied by the buskers – especially the new young breed of street musical anarchists, Don Partridge, Alan Young, Pat Keene. They stood above me in years and experience, but I could about hold my own musically. And I was willing to learn from them.

 

Don Partridge and Company... the book is about to be published!

At last! We made it! Welcome to the 'Don Partridge and Company' blog. Launched to publicise the forthcoming book written by Don Partridge, Pat Keane and Rod Warner: three interlocking narratives that start in 1960's Paris, move to London and Don's elevation to pop stardom culminating with the triumphant Busker's Concert at the Royal Albert Hall, London in 1969 that Don put on with the help of his manager Don Paul and Max Clifford. With some aftermath/further escapades ranging from the UK to Europe to Canada and back... 

Unfortunately Don died last year – but the material I recorded during our interviews was just enough to go ahead with the project...

… which started many years ago, when I repeatedly asked Don if he was interested in writing his biography. To which he always replied: no. Until 2008, when he was in Loughborough to do a gig and we discussed it again. This time, he agreed – if we did it together and I added my story to his. Given that he was the more famous, I was not that keen at first until he convinced me that it could work. So we planned on writing this book – then Pat Keene came on board, after a conversation with Don in which it emerged that Pat still had all the negatives to photos he had taken in London in the late sixties, of buskers, young and old, on the streets plus a series of shots taken at the Albert Hall Concert. Don's wife Pam unfortunately died in 2009 which understandably delayed the project. I persevered with recording Don's reminiscences and editing them until we were hit by the shock of his death last year. A while later I went over the last recordings I had made a few weeks before his death and realised that we probably had enough to go with. I had also been trying to find a publisher – to no avail. Some interest was expressed but the economic climate was against anyone taking a risk on the far-out reminiscences of ageing bohemians or the unique photographs that went with the stories. So we decided to publish via my internet outlet Rawmusics on Lulu.Com – good quality paperbacks on demand plus the option of digital downloads. The project is about to be launched – with the first week in September 2011 as the planned date. Watch this space, as they say... When the book is published I will upload the link...