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Sleeve Notes
Only one performer on the entire British folk scene ever polarised opinion to anything like the degree that Alex Campbell did and that was Ewan MacColl. People tended to view Campbell as a model of a mouthy menace. Many ruled out the possibility of betweenity. Like MacColl, Campbell was many things to many people and many people on the folk scene viewed him with a mixture of suspicion, alarm and admiration. Yet, for decades he was the act that folk club organisers booked as a crowd-puller, especially if opening a new club or relaunching after a seasonal break. Moreover, as he was fond of quipping, not only was he cheaper than Ewan MacColl, his Scottish accent was more authentic. Bob Neuwuth, who would enter the European consciousness through his sidekick antics with Bob Dylan in Don't Look Back, knew him from Paris. Casting all pomposity aside, Neuwirth hailed him as "the great Alex Campbell".
Alex Campbell (1925-1987) was larger than life and, as they say, twice as loud. He spun the story of his life with so many colourful variations that nobody quite knew how to untangle the yarn of fact from the yarn of fiction. Only somebody who lived through Britain's post-war austerity, conformity and drabness can truly comprehend the allure of springtime in Paris. Campbell had plumped for the security of the Civil Service, rising to the relatively lofty grade of higher executive officer. Following an unpleasantness involving two junior members of staff who, as the quaint English idiom puts it, just asked to be hit, he was asked to resign. In 1956, France represented glamour and a level of sophistication undreamed of by the man on the Clapham omnibus. He lit out for Paris intending to study at the Sorbonne. Our prodigal son promptly burned his way through the nest egg intended for his studies. He had taken his guitar with him so he took up busking to earn his croissant, competing with, he told Karl Dallas in 1978, fire-eaters, sword-swallowers and chain-breakers for francs and centimes. Few buskers were French. When the police arrived (and some Parisian gendarmes were extraordinarily baton-happy) to move them on, foreign buskers could feign innocence and surprise at the illegality of street-singing. Campbell polished his showmanship — and buffoonery — in Paris.
A natural firebrand and an accomplished entertainer, he was also a paradox. He could be insensitivity personified if hell-bent on delivering a punch line, a put-down or getting a laugh. Some of it was pure front. In 1959, he proved uncommonly gallant when he assisted his 'arch rival' (as some painted him) by entering into a marriage of convenience with Peggy Seeger, then pregnant by the already married MacColl, so that she could join MacColl in England. He could also be extraordinarily supportive and encouraging of new talent. The then stripling songwriter Robb Johnson remembers being invited on stage to jam. Campbell applied the lessons learned on Parisian streets and his ramblin' round to hold audiences spellbound in folk clubs from the Troubadour in London to the Folk Club of Denmark in Copenhagen, just as he had the captive audiences he tapped outside cinemas or theatres or relaxing in a pavement bistro or down London's Oxford Street.
When he fetched up in Denmark in the summer of 1965, Campbell had an international reputation and a string of recording credits to his name. That July, the writer Stephen Sedley provided a pen portrait of Campbell. As succinct as it was accurate, it described him "as a relatively uncomplicated bloke who simply wants people to be as fond of him as he is of entertaining them." Behind him was a jumble of albums of American folksongs and Bahaman music, recordings with Sandy Denny, Colin Wilkie and Shirley Hart, cowboy hokum and Jacobite songs. In the process, Campbell had compromised his reputation by knocking out too many quick records. He had to overcome his reputation as a 'budget album artist', one of those people who made cheap and cheerful records for second-string, supermarket labels. The year before he had started recording for Transatlantic and by the time he made Alex Campbell in Copenhagen he was back on a roll. He had a lot to go for.
Campbell made no claims to be, as Sedley wrote, a "truly original artist". When Storyville recorded him on 16 August 1965, he had a song bag that was bang on the money. Although Cy Nicklin and Maia Aarskov, two thirds of the multinational folk trio Cy, Maia & Robert, joined him on some songs, Alex Campbell in Copenhagen is his show and above all else Campbell understood the meaning of show time. Donovan's "Colours" is a brilliant opening strategy. That July it had peaked in the British top ten (and would only appear on Donovan's Fairytale album that October) and was an international smash. Tom Paxton's "Rambling Boy" and Campbell's own "Been On The Road" (a song to which he returned in 1967 with Sandy Denny adding high harmonies) perpetuates his roving image. Mixed in are songs of social commentary such as Cyril Tawney's wistful "The Oggie Man" (oggie or oggy was the Plymouth dialect for a Cornish pasty) and Woody Guthrie's "1913 Massacre", a song that Ramblin' Jack Elliott had introduced him to. With one eye cocked on posterity, he includes the McPeake Family of Belfast's "Verdant Braes o'Skreen" and the traditional Scots ballad "Lang A'Growing". With the other on the money, he sings "John Riley", a song popularised by Joan Baez (that would appear next year on the Byrds' Fifth Dimension) and, of course, "Colours".
In some quarters, entertainment was a dirty word but entertainment was Campbell's forte and what he did best all his life. Alex Campbell in Copenhagen was more than a return to form. It was a milestone event in one man's love affair with Denmark. That love affair would endure to his dying breath, that day in January 1987 when he died in the south Jutland town of Åbenrå.
Ken Hunt
June 2002
Ken Hunt is the author of Prince Heathen: Martin Carthy and the English folksong revival (2003)