Les Cousins (music Club)
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Les Cousins (music Club)
Les Cousins was a folk and blues club in the basement of a restaurant in Greek Street, in the Soho district of London, England. It was most prominent during the British folk music revival of the mid-1960s and was known as a venue where musicians of the era met and learnt from each other. As such, it was influential in the careers of, for example, Jackson C. Frank, Al Stewart, Marc Brierley, Davey Graham, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Sandy Denny, John Martyn, Alexis Korner, The Strawbs, Roy Harper, The Young Tradition and Paul Simon. Several albums were recorded there. Origins Les Cousins was opened on Friday 16 April 1965 in a basement venue at 49, Greek Street, Soho (some sources give the address as 48 Greek Street) which had earlier served as a 1950s skiffle club. Upstairs was the Dionysus restaurant owned by a family called Matheou, whose son, Andy Matheou ran the basement club. The club was reputed to have taken its name from Claude Chabrol's film '' Les Cousins'' (1959), the ...
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Greek Street
Greek Street is a street in Soho, London, leading south from Soho Square to Shaftesbury Avenue. The street is famous for its restaurants and cosmopolitan nature. History It is thought to take its name from a Greek church that was built in 1677 in adjacent Crown Street, now part of the west side of Charing Cross Road. The church is depicted in William Hogarth's 'Noon' from ''Four Times of the Day''. Although the street has several houses from the 18th century and earlier, it is mainly 19th-century in appearance. No. 1 Greek Street is the House of St Barnabas, built in 1746. It became the offices of the Westminster Commissioner for Works for Sewers in 1811. This is where Chief Engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette started to work on the construction of the London sewerage system. By 1862 the house had been taken over by The House of Charity, which was established in 1846 to provide temporary accommodation for homeless people. Charles Dickens used the house and gardens as a model fo ...
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Noel Murphy (musician)
Noel Murphy (born 27 November 1943, died 26 November 2022) was an Irish folk musician, actor and entertainer. His family moved to Dublin when he was seven years old. At school he was a keen actor and played drums. He was also a gifted Association Football goalkeeper, being chosen to represent Ireland Schoolboys XI. In 1962 he moved to England to work in various jobs and began to visit folk clubs in London, where he would often sing "floor spots" as an unpaid support act. In 1964 he began his career as a professional singer and became the first resident singer at the renowned Les Cousins club. Here he compered and performed alongside many celebrated acts including Ralph McTell, Sandy Denny, Bert Jansch and many other notable musicians. He busked his way to Greece and back in 1965, his first recording being released the following year. In 1968 he was joined by young Scottish banjo player Davey Johnstone; they toured as Murf & Shaggis for two years until they added double bass ...
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Julie Felix
Julie Ann Felix (June 14, 1938 – March 22, 2020) was an American-British folk singer and recording artist who achieved success, particularly on British television, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She later performed and released albums on her own record label. Early life and education Felix was born in Santa Barbara, California, to a father of Mexican and Native American origin and mother of English and Welsh ancestry. She graduated in 1956 from high school in Westchester, Los Angeles. Career Felix grew up in a musical household -- her father was a professional mariachi musician and her mother was an amateur singer who loved the music of Burl Ives. Her father taught her to play ukulele and then guitar, and she wrote her first song at the age of seven. After studying speech and drama at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Felix worked as a sports mistress at a school for disabled children. At this time she began her music career, singing at night in coffee shops ...
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Linda Thompson (singer)
Linda Thompson (''née'' Pettifer, born 23 August 1947) is an English singer-songwriter. Thompson is one of the most recognised names and voices in the British folk rock movement of the 1970s and 1980s, in collaboration with fellow British folk rock musician, guitarist Richard Thompson, to whom she was married for ten years, and later as a solo artist. Biography Early years Born in Hackney, London, she moved with her family to her mother's home city of Glasgow, Scotland, at the age of six. Actor Brian Pettifer (born 1953) is her brother. Around 1966 she started singing in folk clubs, and in 1967 began studying modern languages at the University of London, but dropped out after four months. She changed her name to Linda Peters. By day she sang advertising jingles, including one with Manfred Mann. She recorded the Bob Dylan song "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", released as an MGM single in 1968 by Paul McNeill and Linda Peters, McNeill being another friend of Sandy Denny and Alex Cam ...
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Martin Carthy
Martin Carthy MBE (born 21 May 1941) is an English folk singer and guitarist who has remained one of the most influential figures in British traditional music, inspiring contemporaries such as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, and later artists such as Richard Thompson, since he emerged as a young musician in the early days of the folk revival in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s. Early life He was born in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England, and grew up in Hampstead, North West London. His mother was an active socialist and his father, from a family of Thames lightermen, went to grammar school and became a trade unionist and a councillor for Stepney at the age of 21. Martin's father had played fiddle and guitar as a young man but Martin was unaware of this connection to his folk music heritage until much later in life. His vocal and musical training began when he became a chorister at the Queen's Chapel of The Savoy. He picked up his father's old guitar for the first time after hearing ...
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Cat Stevens
Yusuf Islam (born Steven Demetre Georgiou; ), commonly known by his stage names Cat Stevens, Yusuf, and Yusuf / Cat Stevens, is a British singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. His musical style consists of folk, pop, rock, and, later in his career, Islamic music. He returned to making secular music in 2006. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. His 1967 debut album and its title song "Matthew and Son" both reached top ten in the UK charts. Stevens' albums '' Tea for the Tillerman'' (1970) and ''Teaser and the Firecat'' (1971) were certified triple platinum in the US. His 1972 album '' Catch Bull at Four'' went to No.1 on the ''Billboard'' 200 and spent weeks at the top of several other major charts.Billboard – Catch Bull at Four
Allmusic. Retrieved 20 Oc ...
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The Incredible String Band
The Incredible String Band (sometimes abbreviated as ISB) were a Scottish psychedelic folk band formed by Clive Palmer, Robin Williamson and Mike Heron in Edinburgh in 1966. The band built a considerable following, especially in the British counterculture, notably with their albums ''The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion'', ''The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter'', and ''Wee Tam and the Big Huge''. They became pioneers in psychedelic folk and, through integrating a wide variety of traditional music forms and instruments, in the development of world music. Following Palmer's early departure, Williamson and Heron performed as a duo, later augmented by other musicians. The band split up in 1974. They reformed in 1999 and continued to perform with changing lineups until 2006. History Formation as a trio: 1965–66 In 1963, acoustic musicians Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer began performing together as a traditional folk duo in Edinburgh, particularly at a weekly club run ...
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Long John Baldry
John William "Long John" Baldry (12 January 1941 – 21 July 2005) was an English musician and actor. In the 1960s, he was one of the first British vocalists to sing the blues in clubs and shared the stage with many British musicians including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Before achieving stardom, Rod Stewart and Elton John were members of bands led by Baldry. He enjoyed pop success in 1967 when " Let the Heartaches Begin" reached No. 1 in the UK, and in Australia where his duet with Kathi McDonald "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" reached No. 2 in 1980. Baldry lived in Canada from the late 1970s until his death. He continued to make records there, and do voiceover work. Two of his best-known voice roles were as Dr. Ivo Robotnik in ''Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog'', and as KOMPLEX in ''Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars''. Early life John William Baldry was born at East Haddon Hall, East Haddon, Northamptonshire, which was serving as a makeshift wartime maternity ward, o ...
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Nick Drake
Nicholas Rodney Drake (19 June 1948 – 25 November 1974) was an English singer-songwriter known for his acoustic guitar-based songs. He did not find a wide audience during his lifetime, but his work gradually achieved wider notice and recognition. MacDonald, IanExiled from Heaven. ''Mojo Magazine'', January 2000. Drake signed to Island Records when he was 20 years old and a student at the University of Cambridge. He released his debut album, ''Five Leaves Left'', in 1969. He recorded two more albums—''Bryter Layter'' (1971) and ''Pink Moon'' (1972). Neither sold more than 5,000 copies on initial release. His reluctance to perform live, or be interviewed, contributed to his lack of commercial success. There is no known video footage of the adult Drake; he was only ever captured in still photographs and in home footage from his childhood. Drake experienced depression, particularly during the latter part of his life, a fact often reflected in his lyrics. On completion of his th ...
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Joni Mitchell
Roberta Joan "Joni" Mitchell ( Anderson; born November 7, 1943) is a Canadian-American musician, producer, and painter. Among the most influential singer-songwriters to emerge from the 1960s folk music circuit, Mitchell became known for her starkly personal lyrics and unconventional compositions, which grew to incorporate pop music, pop and jazz music, jazz influences. She has received many accolades, including ten Grammy Awards and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. ''Rolling Stone'' called her "one of the greatest songwriters ever", and AllMusic has stated, "When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century". Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and throughout western Canada, before moving on to the nightclubs of Toronto, Ontario. She moved to the United States and began touring in 1965. Some of her original songs ("Urge for Going", "Chelsea ...
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Wizz Jones
Raymond Ronald Jones (born 25 April 1939), better-known as Wizz Jones, is an English acoustic guitarist, singer and songwriter. He was born in Thornton Heath, Surrey, England and has been performing since the late 1950s and sound recording and reproduction, recording from 1965 to the present. He has worked with many of the notable guitarists of the British folk revival, such as John Renbourn and Bert Jansch. Early days Jones became infatuated with the bohemian image of Woody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac and grew his hair long. His mother had started calling him Wizzy after the ''The Beano, Beano'' comic strip character "Wizzy the Wuz" because at the age of nine Raymond was a budding magician. The nickname stuck throughout his school years and when he formed his first band, "The Wranglers", in 1957 the name became permanent. Bert Jansch later said, "I think he's the most underrated guitarist ever." In the early 1960s he went busking in Paris, France, and there mixed in an artistic ...
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Alex Campbell (singer)
Alex Campbell (27 April 1931 – 3 January 1987) was a Scottish folk singer. Described by Colin Harper as a "melancholic, hard-travelling Glaswegian", he was influential in the British folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s and was one of the first folk singers (in modern times) to tour the UK and Europe. His nickname was "Big Daddy", and was known for his charisma, story-telling and singing. Biography Campbell was born in Glasgow to a family who originated from the Hebrides. Both of his parents and his two sisters died from tuberculosis in the same year; Campbell spent some time in an orphanage before being taken in by his grandmother. During World War II he met American, Polish and Australian servicemen who were based in Glasgow and he developed an interest in the songs they sang. On leaving school, he worked for the Civil Service and had a successful career until an occasion when he lost his temper and had to leave. With the savings from his employment, he enrolled for a ...
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