“People came to listen”
Remembering the “intimate, smoky” liberation of 1960s folk crucible, Les Cousins
NEXT month, the spirit of Soho’s fabled ’60s folk club Les Cousins will be revived for one night only, as Martin Carthy, Bridget St John, Wizz Jones and Diana Matheou – the singer who married the club’s manager Andy Matheou, then ran it herself until its 1972 demise – convene for a tribute night at Hackney’s Moth Club. A new Les Cousins boxset also honours the basement haunt at 49 Greek Street where Nick Drake, Paul Simon, John Martyn, Roy Harper, Michael Chapman, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Al Stewart honed their craft, Dylan, Joni and Hendrix sat in, and folk expansively evolved.
Les Cousins was situated beneath a restaurant called Dionysus (formerly Soho Bar And Grill), ran by Andy Matheou’s parents Loukas and Margaret. “There was a sidedoor to the restaurant,” Diana Matheou recalls. “You’d go down cellar steps, through this dark corridor, then into the club itself. To your right there was the stage, about 18 inches high with a chair and mic, with a piano behind it, church pews on three sides, and at the far end was the bar, selling Coke, coffee and beef and cheese sandwiches. It was small, packed, intimate, smoky.”
Matheou first visited Cousins as a 17-year-old folk singer in 1965, when she spent the night swapping hopes and dreams with Cat Stevens. She and Andy, “a wild, beautiful soul”, soon fell in love. Jackson C Frank, among others, found a refuge in Matheous’ nearby Frith Street flat, becoming “family”, while the restaurant fed impecunious folk singers: “Even when it was closed, Lou put a huge roast on the table and fed whoever came to the door.”
Bridget St John played her first gig at Cousins in August 1968. “You didn’t know who was going to come, especially for an all-night jam,” she says. “And because there was no alcohol, people came to listen.” The club’s open-minded music policy positioned it to catalyse the scene’s ’60s shifts. “The folk revival was mainly spirited by very traditional people like Ewan Maccoll,” says Wizz Jones, “then you had people like me, playing guitars and influenced by American music. Cousins was very important in breaking that barrier down, because it gave a platform for anybody. John Martyn plugged an electric guitar in with his Echoplex, and used Cousins to try out all his latest ideas.”
All-nighters encouraged a liberated social scene. “Young people hitchhiked down for them,” Jones says. “It was a way of being yourself and hanging out with your friends with no restrictions.”
Matheou reckons that 80,000 Cousins membership cards ended up in circulation. By the early ’70s, though, its mainstays were migrating to the better-paid college circuit. “This huge burst of energy was going,” she says. “Bert [Jansch] and John [Renbourn] had formed Pentangle and opened another club nearby, Davey [Graham] got whacked out on cocaine, and people died, for Christ’s sake. It’s a natural process.” Les Cousins closed quietly in 1972.
Andy and Diana Matheou went on to run a Barking fishmongers, where Les Cousins’ spirit improbably endured. “Andy would be talking to people about life, and musicians would come through,” she says. “In a way it didn’t matter what we did.” Meanwhile, Bridget St John moved to New York in 1976, getting to know great Greenwich Village clubs such as Gerdes Folk City. “I would put Les Cousins up with all of those,” she says. “It was an important beginning for a lot of people.”
“John Martyn used Cousins to try out all his latest ideas” WIZZ JONES