Transatlantic Records: 1961–80
Introduction
Transatlantic Records began with a trilogy of pseudonymous sex education records in 1961–62 – Dr Keith Cammeron’s Live with Love (catalogue numbers TRA 101, 102 and 103) – and ended in 1980 with the John Renbourn Group’s Enchanted Garden (TRA 356). It was conveniently symbolic – a last hurrah for 1970s folk-rock of a sort at the tail end of that era, before the machine-driven sounds of the 80s, and a record by John Renbourn, one of the label’s mainstays from the heady days of the mid-60s – someone whose oeuvre testified to Transatlantic’s eclecticism and adventure.
Three years before that, however, the label’s founder, Nathan ‘Nat’ Joseph (1939–2005), had cannily sold it on. So if we calculate Nat’s departure as the spiritual end of Transatlantic, its last hurrah becomes ‘The Floral Dance’ by the Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band (BIG 548) – a November 1977 No.2 hit single, more than a year after release. And that would also be a fitting end, a slab of ebullient absurdity on the one hand but a celebration of a venerable British tradition on the other – working-class brass band music from an institution founded in the nineteenth century, thriving in the popular entertainment world of the modern age and a freak smash from a label hardly known for its singles.
This combination of quirkiness, a regard for tradition, a sense of fun, a slight leaning to the left with a hearty embrace of commercial opportunities and yet a tendency to release records by people who might have struggled to get a deal elsewhere – many of them musically brilliant and, in the longer term, culturally important – was all part of the Transatlantic ethos, if there was such a thing. Nat himself might have nodded in recognition at those observations, but he would have denied it was that thought-through:
‘It’s easy to romanticise Transatlantic Records as an idealist dream which logically progressed from A to B and indeed Z,’ he wrote in 1998, in a rare piece of retrospection. ‘In fact it was a largely unplanned series of eclectic and sometimes opportunistic leaps from one thing to another, which only in retrospect seem to encompass logically most that was innovative, interesting and exciting in British music (particularly acoustic music) and comedy in the 1960s and 70s.’
That series of leaps would give the world not only classic early recordings by distinctively British songwriters like Ralph McTell, Gerry Rafferty and Steve Tilston and ‘British fingerstyle’ guitar heroes like Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Gordon Giltrap, it would facilitate the transition of Scottish comedy genius Billy Connolly from a low-level music career to mass-selling solo stand-up albums. It would document the ‘British folk boom’ of the 1960s but also release controversial albums from across the Atlantic by Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and Lenny Bruce, British satire by the team at Private Eye magazine and John Bird, ‘jazz and poetry’ by Annie Ross & Christopher Logue, pioneering British R&B by Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, spoken-word albums by British TV personality David Frost, US Civil Rights icon Malcolm X and beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and all sorts of things beyond easy category.
Along with originating recorded content, a big part of Transatlantic’s business model and identity as a label – sometimes overlooked, given its success with an easily codified coterie of 60s British folk acts – was its licensing in for UK release jazz, folk, blues and classical music from abroad. Sometimes these records warranted full-price release under ‘Transatlantic’ proper, sometimes they would appear on its mid-price label XTRA.
Early in its journey, Transatlantic licensed for British release folk and blues records from Mo Asch’s Folkways label in the US (from the New Lost City Ramblers to Big Bill Broonzy) and modern jazz from Prestige (from Miles Davis to Mose Allison). Occasionally, Nat would license in intriguing records from other labels, like Ravi Shankar’s A Sitar Recital (ZCTRA 182) from Odeon’s Indian imprint in 1968, at the height of Swinging London’s interest in the man’s exotic Beatles-endorsed sounds. Similar to this, Nat demonstrated his canny awareness of trends and marketing opportunities by licensing in, from Jimi Hendrix associate Alan Douglas, in 1969, two earlier albums by that year’s Woodstock Festival sensation Richie Havens, to which Douglas had added hip new electric instrumentation. Another canny catching of the way the wind of interest was blowing was Transatlantic’s UK release of controversial American free jazz iconoclast Albert Ayler’s Spirits (TRA 130) in 1966, seemingly licensed directly from the artist. That year, Ayler was filmed by the BBC in concert at the LSE in London, but notoriously, in a controversy played out in the pages of Melody Maker, the film was erased before it was ever broadcast, the performance being deemed too far out. Such public brouhaha would have been catnip to Nat Joseph’s entrepreneurial instinct. Two albums by the Fugs licensed from Reprise in 1968 probably ticked that same controversy box. On the other hand, some of the records licensed in has the feel of being music that Nat simply liked and wanted others to hear – a Jean Sibelius Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (SDBR 3045) licenced from Everest in 1967, and an obscure 1959 album by US lounge pianist Don Shirley (Piano, AFSD 5897) licensed from Audio Fidelity, also in 1967, probably fall into this category.
As an originating label, Transatlantic recorded the godfather of all troubadours in Britain, Alex Campbell, along with many of his compatriots from the thriving Scottish folk scene – Archie Fisher, Hamish Imlach, Josh MacRae and others – along with significant Irish artists like the Dubliners, Finbar & Eddie Furey and Sweeney’s Men, introducing Irish balladry and instrumental music to what was to become a vast worldwide audience. In terms of English traditional music, Nat was no snob – early on, he gave a platform to trad purists Dave & Toni Arthur at one end of the spectrum and experimental folk-rockers Mr Fox at the other, with the hearty folk club singalongs of the Ian Campbell Folk Group somewhere in the middle.
The label would support almost the entire recording career of Pentangle (five of their six albums) and Gryphon (four of their five albums) – two acts that fused folk, jazz and early music in their own ways to create a low-volume progressive folk/rock artistry of a sort that had staying power in the hearts of many. Both bands would reform decades later for Indian summers on stage and on record.
Deeper in the catalogue are all sorts of curios providing an early platform for several artists who would hit their fullest commercial and creative stride a few years on – among them, Alan Hull (pre-Lindisfarne), Ron Geesin (pre-Pink Floyd) and Mike Oldfield (pre-millions).
As the 60s became the 70s, Transatlantic branched out into rock music with acts like Stray (five albums), Jody Grind and Peter Bardens, and occasional ventures into progressive British jazz, such as Amalgam’s uncompromising Prayer for Peace (TRA 196) in 1969 and Mike Westbrook’s luxuriant Love/Dream and Variations (TRA 323) in 1976. The label also became increasingly focused on repackaging the better-known elements of its past in a torrent of single-artist and various-artist compilations. It had, though, previously been innovative in this area.
Ralph McTell Revisited (TRA 227) in 1970, for instance, was both a ‘best of’ and a new album – comprising material from the Croydon-born songsmith’s three previous Transatlantic albums and some singles, remixed and added to with additional instruments here and there. The project had been undertaken as a killer Ralph McTell album solely for the US market, but Nat was so pleased with the results that he issued it in the UK too. Ralph thought this ‘a bit cheeky’ at the time but went along with it, gaining terrific press coverage and ending his time with the label on a high. That said, when he went on to have a surprise 1974 hit single with a new recording for Reprise of ‘Streets of London’ – first recorded for Spiral Staircase (TRA 177) and then revamped on Revisted – Nat was not slow to release a new compilation called, of course, Streets of London (TRA SAM 34). But in the concept of remixing an artist’s earlier works for enhanced sound and, frankly, to sell the same thing to fans all over again, Nat had anticipated the era of Steven Wilson-remixed deluxe editions by a good 40 years.
Another area in which Transatlantic was ahead of the game in terms of reissues was in the concept of ‘bonus tracks’. While the label never reissued albums proper with tracks added, it did in a number of instances add previously unreleased outtakes to compilations. For instance, two previously unreleased items appeared on Box of Love: The Bert Jansch Sampler Vol.2 (TRA SAM 27) in 1972 and one on So Clear: The John Renbourn Sampler Vol.2 (TRA SAM 28) in 1973, tellingly after both artists had left the label (though Renbourn would later return). Two Billy Connolly offcuts appeared in 1974 on the various-artists album of Scottish comedy songs If It Wasnae For Your Wellies! (XTRA 1144) – again, just after Billy had moved on. Sometimes, non-LP singles made their way on to compilations, like the Pentangle’s ‘Travelling Song’ on Listen Here! A Transatlantic Sampler (TRA SAM 2) in 1968, and sometimes album tracks might appear in exclusive edits on compilations – again, the Pentangle providing a good example with two tweaked tracks on The Contemporary Guitar Sampler Vol.2 (TRA SAM 15) in 1970. While XTRA was the mid-price imprint, TRA SAM denoted a budget release, around 99p at the time.
Occasionally, Transatlantic created themed compilations with exclusive tracks from artists otherwise not on Transatlantic at all – including future John Otway sidekick Wild Willie Barrett and former Yes man Peter Banks delivering exclusive tracks to Guitar Workshop (TRA(D) 271) in 1973 and Guitar Workshop Vol.2 (TRA 315) in 1976.
Perhaps the most extraordinary compilation, of sorts, in the Transatlantic canon is 1971’s Innovations (TRA 229) – a stunning collection of previously unreleased publishing demos recorded between 1965–66 by first-wave British rock’n’roller turned blues magician Duffy Power, backed by a host of subsequently great names including the future rhythm sections from both Cream and Pentangle and fusion guitar hero John McLaughlin, already by then making waves in New York and about to unleash his Mahavishnu Orchestra. Duffy’s career as a singles artist on first Fontana and then Parlophone had run out by this point, and a 1970 album for CBS had been stillborn. A sensational talent, Innovations became Power’s first album, selling 30,000, generating media interest and leading to a new recording contract with GSF before Power slipped away again for a few years. Further Duffy Power archive trawls in the CD era of the 1990s and 2000s delivered still more fabulous gems from the past – but Transatlantic had got there first, and provided a rare example of a collection of unreleased tracks by a living artist becoming a viable commercial and artistic proposition long before the ‘reissue industry’ of the 1980s and beyond.
There is no other label of the period that did quite what Transatlantic did. Very loosely, Jac Holzman’s Elektra (1950–72, after which it merged with Asylum) in the US might be an analogue – a label beginning with one man’s vision around folk, blues and esoteric curios, with both a budget imprint and a main catalogue – but Transatlantic never managed to find artists to match the mainstream success of Elektra’s Doors, Love and Bread in the field of pop/rock. Transatlantic did, however, distribute some Elektra titles in the UK – as well as distributing other US labels including Tony Bennett’s Improv, and legendary cottage-industry UK folk labels Ian A. Anderson’s Village Thing and Bill Leader’s Leader/Trailer – and consequently both Elektra/Nonesuch and Transatlantic did well out of Joshua Rifkin’s albums of Scott Joplin rags, ably assisted by the smash hit 1973 film The Sting, peppered with Joplin compositions.
Looking back on his Transatlantic adventure in a box set essay in 1998, Nat stated: ‘It was a magical yet frightening time. There were few if any artistic compromises. I put out what I liked and what I wanted, advised principally by Bill Leader, John Whitehead, Martin Lewis and Laurence Aston. Sometimes I and they were right, sometimes horribly wrong. If there were few compromises there were many risks, which were often shared by a stressed bank manager. Luckily for him and for me the ‘hits’ outweighed the misses.’
1961–63: Beginnings
In 1960, a zestful young Nat Joseph – born in Birmingham and, like JRR Tolkien, an alumnus of King Edward’s School – graduated in English from Queen’s College, Cambridge. With the offer of a junior teaching post at Columbia University, New York, he flew to the States and, for the first and only time in his life, ‘freaked out’. It was a pent-up reaction against years of academic grind: ‘I decided I really didn’t want to do that anymore,’ he told me, in 1992. ‘I decided to cut and run and bummed around America for the best part of a year, I suppose, doing various things but earning enough money to get right round the States – which was a lot less easy then than it is now. Towards the end I was thinking “Well, when I get back, what the hell am I going to do?”’
Nat had always been ‘mad on showbusiness’ and harboured vague aspirations to be a writer. Words rather than music were his thing and, in both script and performing capacities, he had a reputation on the university revue circuit. He and a friend, Stephen Sedley, later Lord Justice Sedley, had a cabaret act that was purportedly the only one better paid than future TV sensation David Frost’s on that scene at the time. ‘I didn’t have enough confidence in my writing or enough contacts to do that professionally but I could see, going around America, that something big was happening with gramophone records, as we knew them then.’
Nat made contact with a number of record companies, particularly in the spoken-word field, wrested 90 days’ credit from them and, having no real capital whatsoever, shipped their product over the ocean, dashed back himself and feverishly trawled samples around the record shops of southern England, to whom he gave 60 days’ credit. He did well enough to keep the process going, particularly with a language series, Conversaphone, but he nevertheless realised that real money would only be made through marketing his own products: ‘I had to come up with some idea that would not necessarily be what I wanted to record but would make enough money so I could then actually start a bona fide company. I remember thinking “What interests the British public?” and I put three things down: money, sex and royalty.’
The Queen was unavailable, money was dull – although he did consider monologues by millionaires – so sex it was. Nat recruited a controversial sexologist, Dr Eustace Chesser, under the pseudonym Dr Keith Cammeron. Chesser/Cammeron was a master of self-publicity – the pages of the Daily Mirror and various women’s magazines during 1960–61 were full of his stuff, with publications usually describing him as ‘a famous psychologist’, ‘outspoken’ or ‘one of Britain’s most expert advisers on love and marriage’. His advice in these columns seems, today, remarkably homespun and entirely devoid of anything remotely controversial.
Nat recorded three albums with the fellow entitled Live with Love and pressed them up as catalogue numbers TRA 101, 102 and 103, releasing them in November 1961 – the first three releases on the grandly named Transatlantic Records. The plan worked: ‘We got about a million pounds’ worth of publicity for nothing,’ said Nat, ‘including the front page of the News of the World. There were discussions on the radio about sex records and how evil they were but actually they were so tame it was unbelievable. Wouldn’t cause a ripple in Woman’s Own today but they sold what in those days was an enormous amount, nearly 100,000 records.’
The next record, in April 1962, would be a flexi-disc EP called No Smoking (TRA 104) – again featuring Cammeron’s common-sense advice and released on the back of publicity for a Royal College of Surgeons’ report on the evils of tobacco. ‘Whenever you feel the need to smoke, play the record over and over again,’ was Cammeron’s advice to the readers of the Daily Herald.
Bill Leader, a gentle chap from Bradford, had come to London to try and pursue his interest in recording, and had begun doing so for Topic Records – a shoestring operation founded in 1939, allied to the Workers’ Music Association and generally putting out traditional music in small runs to avoid Purchase Tax. Bill was also the manager of Collet’s record shop at 70 New Oxford Street ‘and this little fellow with a squeaky voice came in’. It was Nat.
‘He tried to sell me some albums on sex education which he thought were going to be a sure-fire winner,’ said Bill, ‘and I seem to remember he had an EP on how to give up smoking… I remember he rang up the press agent in charge of getting the smoking EP off the ground and gave him such a mouthful of abuse it quite made my hair stand on end. He then suggested that maybe I should like to help him produce some records.’
Bill also had vague aspirations to run his own record company, and would finally take the plunge in 1969 with Leader/Trailer, two labels designed as outlets for pure traditional music and for folk club singers respectively, which would be distributed by Transatlantic. In the years in between, Bill would engineer or produce many of Transatlantic’s most legendary records, and in several cases bring the artists to Nat’s attention. Relying mostly on rooms lined with egg-boxes, a microphone, a two-track tape machine and a good instinct – only occasionally enjoying the luxury of a genuine recording studio – Bill initiated a process that would almost single-handedly document the ensuing ‘folk revival’ years.
When it came to the music business, Bill was a people person, a friend of the artist, a softly-spoken idealist with a well-developed mechanism for co-existing stoically alongside the more preposterous individuals and situations that life in the music game has to throw at one; Nat was a hyperactive pragmatist and businessman of cultured accent and literary bent who would make, by and large, the kind of records he liked and could retain a certain pride in releasing, but who was nevertheless – within the confines of his determinedly non-pop music focus – always chasing the next trend and the big return. For the rest of the decade, with Bill freewheeling along in a freelance capacity and Nat blustering ahead as the archetypal entrepreneur, the pair would build a unique catalogue of work by artists who in many cases would have looked long and fruitlessly to have found another outlet.
Combining popular TV/film actor Tony Britton and Isla Cameron, one of Britain’s earliest professional folksingers, also known from TV appearances, with Nat’s old pal Stephen Sedley on guitar, Songs of Love, Lust and Loose Living (TRA 105) continued on the sex bandwagon. TRA 106, Putting Out the Dustbin, was a quirky collaboration between quirky songwriter/evangelist Sydney Carter and TV comedy actress Sheila Hancock – again, with Sedley on ‘guitar, lute and what he euphemistically calls “arrangements”’, as the sleeve note put it. One song from the album, ‘My Last Cigarette’ (smoking again…), was cannily licensed to Decca as a single.
TRA 107, released in March 1963, was the ingenious Loguerhythms, pitting jazz singer Annie Ross and the Tony Kinsey Quintet with the poetry of Christopher Logue. With a keen eye on trends, as ever, the album was subtitled Songs from The Establishment, referencing the groundbreaking new London satire nightclub founded that year by Peter Cook. Ross had performed some of the numbers there, but that was the only connection – the album itself was recorded in a studio. TRA 108 was Folk Songs and Cool Songs, an LP by satirical calypsonian Cy Grant, a fixture on TV’s Tonight show and at that point also enjoying a high profile on David Frost’s That Was the Week that Was.
The Cy Grant album was a toe in the shallow end of ‘folk music’, with Cy backed by London jazzers, but the next release, This Is the Ian Campbell Folk Group! (TRA 110), was the deep end: the debut of a popular Birmingham five-piece who ran their own club and performed an unapologetic repertoire of folk songs and tunes from the British Isles, recorded at London’s Olympic Studios.
Bill Leader had been part of the team since TRA 105 (Sheila Hancock), engineering the records with Nat credited as producer. From TRA 107, designer/photographer Brian Shuel would also become a key part of what gave Transatlantic records their identity.
Brian had started as a freelance photographer in 1960, working particularly with his father-in-law James Boswell, who edited a magazine. ‘The plan was for me to art edit and take photos for the magazine,’ he recalled, ‘a cosy arrangement which continued until he died in 1971, and which kept us alive very nicely while we got on with more important activities on the folk scene!’ Boswell was friendly with Topic Records supremo Gerry Sharpe, and sent Brian around the country to dig the emerging folk scene with a view to a piece on it in the magazine.
The first stop was an Alex Campbell show in Croydon, May 1962, and the jaunt continued through Teesside, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Dunfermline and back to London, where Brian soon became a part of the scene he was documenting.
Brian became known to Bill Leader, and when Nat wanted pictures of Annie Ross, whom Brian had already photographed, for an LP sleeve, Bill put them in touch. ‘When I went to see Nat in his flat in Finchley Road,’ says Brian, ‘he showed me the record sleeves he had already done. I remarked, in my tactful way, that they were complete crap – which had the surprising result of my designing all his sleeves for the next six years!’
On Monday 3 June 1963, just after University Challenge, viewers in ITV’s Midland region could see Nat Joseph, playing his born-in-Birmingham card, interviewed for half an hour by Noelle Gordon in Midland Profile. Nat was described in the TV listings as the ‘director of a recording company who has been responsible for successful discs by a number of well-known stars’. This would certainly be the case in the future but quite how he convinced anyone that this was the case in June 1963 was doubtless testament to Nat’s promotional skills.
Through the licensing out of the Sheila Hancock single, Nat had established a friendly connection with Decca, one of the five major labels in Britain at that time, and this would prove indirectly pivotal in Transatlantic embracing the fast-emerging British folk scene:
‘There was a wonderful man called Hugh Mendl who was head of A&R there at the time,’ Nat recalled. ‘He liked the idea of folk music ‘coming up’ but didn’t know anything about it. Somehow, I persuaded him to give me a lot of money to go and record the folk music at the Edinburgh Festival [in August 1963]. “Why don’t you go and make some records for us?” I think I’d originally gone in there looking for some sort of distribution deal or something…’
Thus, Nat Joseph, Bill Leader and Brian Shuel all trekked off to Edinburgh. On arriving, the priority was to find out what was going on in the way of folk music. In terms of the Festival proper, not a great deal, but there was plenty going on around it. Perpetual troubadour Alex Campbell was there; from Ireland, future members of the Dubliners and Dominic Behan were around; from Edinburgh, there was Ray & Archie Fisher, Owen Hand, Jill Doyle, Dolina MacLennan, Robin Williamson & Clive Palmer; from Glasgow, folk comedians Hamish Imlach and Matt McGinn; from England, Lou Killen, Nadia Cattouse, Anne Briggs, Jean Hart and the Ian Campbell Folk Group.
All would be recorded for the two Decca albums, entitled Edinburgh Folk Festival Vols. 1 & 2, and almost all would end up making records for Transatlantic for years. It was practically a one-stop recruitment drive for the label’s roster.
‘There was a whole load of people up there,’ says Nat, ‘most of whom Bill knew, so Bill took me around saying “This is the chap who’s conned Decca, etcetera, etcetera”, and everybody thought it was a huge laugh. They were wonderful people, and the parties were incredible. Somebody said there were 100 different kinds of malt whiskey and I seem to remember we got through 52. It was a bloody good trip! I guess that’s where I met Ian Campbell and the people who later formalised themselves into the Dubliners.’
Nat and Bill put the word out and the entirety of the Edinburgh folk scene and a horde of people turned up for the session – initially at Dolina MacLennan’s flat (until Dolina turned up and wondered what on earth was going on), then at the local Craig Hall Studios. The live audience comprised the roster of acts, waiting their turn at the mic.
According to Ray Fisher: ‘Alex Campbell makes all the noise in the audience! You can hear him shouting. I think Nat Joseph must have thought they were all nut cases.’ Strangely, Alex wasn’t on the records themselves, and nor were a few others known to have been recorded – the most exciting of which, in retrospect, was Bert Jansch. Bert would become one of the label’s most prominent artists, but that was two years down the line.
Nat’s advance from Decca for the two albums would remain a mystery, but each artist received somewhere between a fiver and tenner, with no royalties. Nat returned to London with enough profit to buy premises in Hampstead – acquired from Collet’s and refitted as a record shop and distribution outlet – and establish Transatlantic Records as a serious enterprise.
They had a ready-made roster of acts just waiting for the call. ‘I remember saying to Bill “These people aren’t signed up’’, says Nat. ‘I don’t think I actually said “This is the basis of a label” but that’s what I felt at the time and Bill, I think, saw that he was running into a bit of a dead end at Topic.’
The first to be signed were the Ian Campbell Folk Group. Nat had developed a great affection for the group, visiting their Jug of Punch club in Birmingham. He was particularly impressed by Ian’s ‘spikey but very intelligent’ character and his preference for ‘intelligent’ songs with sociopolitical messages. For all his capitalist instincts, Nat was on the left wing of the Labour Party at the time. ‘I really was very into the kind of political lyrics that Ian liked,’ said Nat, more than 30 years later, ‘and the fact that he sang Ewan MacColl’s songs, which I, generally speaking, loved. I thought, and still do, that Lorna Campbell is one of the great voices.’
Instrumentally, the Campbells would be the blueprint for all the British folk-rock groups of the later ‘60s – indeed, their fiddler Dave Swarbrick would go on to be the mainstay in the biggest of them, Fairport Convention.
Bill, by this point, had also introduced Nat to folk music: ‘I was soon hooked,’ Nat later wrote. ‘Visits to Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger’s club in London and Ian Campbell’s Jug of Punch in Birmingham made me into an immediate enthusiast. Particularly Campbell’s club, where I sensed a more joyous and modern approach.’
The Ian Campbell Group would be Nat’s first signing from the folk scene, and Brian Shuel’s first Transatlantic commission proper was the sleeve photography for their first album: This Is the Ian Campbell Folk Group! (TRA 110), released in late 1963. In fact, taking a punt on the Campbells was a well-trialled proposition: Bill Leader had already recorded two Ian Campbell Group EPs for Topic, the second of which had boasted one of Brian’s striking images of the group in action. The group would release six albums and a ‘best of’ on Transatlantic over the next six years, along with several singles – some released on Transatlantic, others produced by Transatlantic and licensed out to Decca.
So while it was hardly a wild shot in the dark, it was a definite line in the sand – it was where the story of Transatlantic, as the home of contemporary British folk music, really begins.
1964: Consolidation
The exquisitely titled My Name is Jean Hart and I Sing (TRA 111) by, well, Jean Hart, future wife of TV personality Bill Oddie was next – another post-Edinburgh signing, delivering a mixture of jazz, folk and cabaret, with arrangements by Richard Rodney Bennett. It would be Jean’s only record, although in 1970 she did a week at Ronnie Scott’s club backed by jazz-rock sensations Ian Carr’s Nucleus – which sounds like somebody should have recorded it. Like many albums in the Transatlantic catalogue, it never made it to CD. Perhaps the current era of digital streaming will allow this and other lost gems from the catalogue to be heard again.
Nineteen-sixty-four saw Transatlantic consolidate with two more Ian Campbell Group releases, its first licensed-in product (an Ed McCurdy album from Elektra), the first release on its XTRA mid-price imprint (a New Lost City Ramblers album licensed in from Folkways), a British modern jazz album by the New Departures Quartet (effectively, the Stan Tracey Quartet) – which had been gaining attention in various ‘jazz and poetry’ happenings around London – and a groundbreaking British blues album, Red Hot From Alex (TRA 117) by Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. There was also a topical comedy album Vote for Us (TRA 120), in a year of two national elections – with Nat writing one number himself and Stephen Sedley back again on guitar, along with political songwriter Leon Rosselson and a team of pseudonymous comedians.
Aside from the Campbells, these were all one-offs. Of more consequence was the first album by the Dubliners (TRA 116) – a none-more-Irish balladeering institution beginning its long road in England, of all places.
Following the Edinburgh experience, after a long period of trying to arrange a meeting, Nat and Bill had made a trip to Dublin and thereon to a pub in the Wicklow mountains, contract in hand, with the sole intention of bringing back the boozy balladeers to a civilised recording studio. Remarkably, the trip was successful. ‘The idea of the five of them ever actually managing to be in the one place and mildly sober at the same time – I mean, it just didn’t happen,’ said Nat. ‘But I think the boys actually signed a contract on that trip.’
The group solidified as a unit and, like the Campbells, they would make several more records for Transatlantic – three albums, seven EPs/singles, a ‘best-of’ and half of a live album recorded in a London pub and sold on to Decca as Irish Folk Night. All of these would sell well and go a long way towards allowing the label’s A&R policy to expand into less obviously commercial areas. And 1965 would see the opening of those gates.
1965–66: Adventure
The middle years of the 1960s – when the focus of the world was on ‘Swinging London’ as an engine-room of colour, creativity and innovation – saw Transatlantic expand its view of what ‘folk music’ was and give the world some of the earliest examples of the modern British ‘singer-songwriter’. The variety of this creature that was coming to prominence in the late-night Soho folk club Les Cousins (established: April 1965), especially, was instrumentally dextrous, bohemian and poetic in an unschooled fashion. Some of the six-string wizardry might have been inspired by Davy Graham (who recorded for Decca, in between perambulating around the Middle East), but the songs were all their own.
Bulwarked by an astonishing amount of product from the Campbells and the Dubliners (three LPs and two EPs and two LPs and four EPs, respectively, plus a load of singles between them) during 1965–66, plus roughly 20 albums of modern jazz greats licensed in from Prestige, Nat was able to provide a platform for the first of many hitherto unknown British songwriters and acoustic guitar pioneers. Symbolically (in retrospect), a 45rpm release for bittersweet anthem ‘Been on the Road So Long’ by Alex Campbell (TRA SP 4), who had in many ways created the template of the travelling British folksinger and was usually the first guest artist at any new folk club, would be among Transatlantic’s releases in 1965, but the first of the ‘new generation’ would be taciturn Edinburgh sensation Bert Jansch. His self-titled debut (TRA 125) would be his first of seven for the label, would inspire a legion of other songwriters and guitarists and would never be out of print.
Bert’s album had essentially been recorded on spec and on the cheap during 1964 by Bill Leader, acting on encouragement from Anne Briggs – a young Nottinghamshire traditional singer with a remarkably free spirit, who had been recorded in Edinburgh for the Decca albums in 1963 and who had also recorded an EP for Topic that year. A compelling singer, Anne had been offered a deal with Transatlantic by Nat Joseph, but her response was probably unique: ‘I turned him down,’ she says. ‘He was flashing money about, but I felt a certain loyalty to Topic and, quite honestly, although they never had any money, I felt they had discretion.’
By mid-1964, to Bill Leader’s recollection: ‘There was a big swell of opinion about the importance of Bert and what he was doing, but it was Anne Briggs really who took me firmly by the throat and said “Look, for God’s sake you must do this record”. At that time I was working mainly for Topic: bedroom recordings went to Topic; studio recordings were commissioned by Nat Joseph. But this was a bedroom recording and it was done on spec. I always think of Bert, and Annie Briggs too, as archetypal. I suppose there were people like that before them. There certainly seem to have been hundreds since, but they were the first.’
Around August/September 1964, Bill agreed to make a record with Bert Jansch and to try and persuade a record label, any record label, to release it. It would be recorded in the kitchen of Bill’s flat at 5 North Villas, Camden. As 1964 passed into 1965, Bill continued his periodic process of recording the strange and indefinable music of Bert Jansch. With Bill emphasising to Bert that the essence of what he did was in his own material, this was a necessarily creative period: a time when Bert’s stage repertoire would increasingly shift from borrowed blues to original compositions. Once Bill felt that his recording of Bert was representative and complete the problem became one of where to place it.
‘There we were with this tape,’ says Bill, ‘and nobody was interested: Topic weren’t interested in this ‘drug stuff’ and Nat Joseph wasn’t interested because he couldn’t see that there was a market for it. People who were tuned into Bert were into the totality of text, music and performance – all three added up. Nat was a lyrics man. I came across this several times in trying to sell him ideas, that if I typed out the words, I’d be more likely to get a contract than actually playing him a tape. He probably did recognise the quality of Bert’s songwriting, but he certainly didn’t act very quickly.’
‘Bill came in to the shop one day,’ says Nat, ‘and said “I’ve done this record, I’d like you to listen to it and I’d like to sell it to you”. I remember listening to it and thinking some of the songs were terrific, really terrific. I was less struck than everybody else was on the guitar work. To me it was always the words that communicated. I don’t think Dylan became great because he played great harmonica – Dylan became great because his words said something to his generation. The same could be said of Bert Jansch.’
Nat did not immediately commit himself. A period of time elapsed and Bill became edgy. When the subject arose again it transpired that Nat had been lobbied by the fearless Anne Briggs and was aware of the ‘word on the street’. He was prepared to take a chance. The deal that was agreed, an outright sum for the purchase of the recording with no royalties subsequently payable, is perhaps questionable only in hindsight. Going on to sell in excess of 150,000 by 1975, in the early months of 1965 it was not a question of what was fair but whether Bert wished to have a record released or not.
‘It was important for Bert,’ says Bill. ‘There comes a time when a record has to be released for an artist and if you miss that you bugger up his career. So we did a deal and it was a hard bargain. Nat bought the rights for a hundred quid, which I passed across town to Bert, and that was the end of that.’
Subsequent to the deal, Nat felt the record was a little short and asked for three more songs, duly provided. When the record was released, Bert would receive mechanical royalties for those three tracks alone. Nat arranged to meet Bert in a pub and a long-term contract for his publishing was signed with Transatlantic’s publishing arm Heathside Music. Some years later, when the contract was examined, it was noticed that only part of Bert’s signature had been caught. Somewhere in London, there is a bar table with a reasonable claim on the Transatlantic publishing royalties of Bert Jansch.
‘Artists who recorded were very rare then,’ Bert recalled. ‘Bill said this was probably the best offer I could get. I had no idea about royalties or anything like that in those days and so I said yes. The songs on there are instant snapshots. I was just fooling around doing gigs, not thinking about these things. On reflection, I was a bit annoyed about the deal…’
‘People saw him as a rival to Bob Dylan,’ says Martin Carthy (who recorded for Topic). ‘When his first album came out it really was a big day. People had been waiting for it like mad.’ Bert Jansch was released on Friday 16 April 1965. Adverts were taken out in a number of magazines, and Nat was now confidant enough to push the hyperbole boat out for Bert:
‘A remarkable, unusual, intriguing new talent with rare magnetism and originality. Jansch is a young writer-singer-guitarist producing some startling contemporary British folk-blues. His songs are mainly autobiographical but always universally relevant. He writes of love, running away from home, drug addiction. He plays the guitar with incredible dexterity. He is probably the most original folk-blues guitarist in Britain (Davy Graham included). Around the folk clubs of Britain, Bert Jansch, his songs and his guitar playing are fast becoming the brightest legend of the more way-out fans.’
The ‘drug stuff’ that had bothered Topic Records – specifically, ‘Needle of Death’, a song about the dangers of hard drugs, not an advocation of them – proved to be a topical calling card for Bert and not a million miles away from the topical/controversial wheezes with which Nat had begun Transatlantic. It was the lead track on an EP (TRA EP 145), was played in full on a 1965 BBC TV programme Meeting Point, about a Soho social worker among drug abusers, and was performed live by Bert on his first TV appearance, on ITV’s Hallelujah the following year.
Around the same time as he agreed to take a punt on Bert Jansch, Nat bumped into Owen Hand – a good pal of Bert’s from Edinburgh, and another veteran of the Edinburgh Folk Festival albums – and offered him a record deal. Nat had a publishing interest in one Jo Mapes, and convinced Owen to record his material for an album titled Something New (TRA 127), designed to project Owen as a contemporary singer and songwriter, and destined to be released and promoted as such in tandem with Bert’s debut. When the record came out, Owen hated it and was consequently ‘so intent on making amends that I rushed into making my second album, and in doing so made all the same mistakes’. That album, I Loved a Lass (TRA 138), was released in 1966 and reveals Owen to have been a very harsh judge of his own work. Like Alex Campbell, with ‘Been on the Road So Long’, history has shown Owen Hand to have authored one truly outstanding song, ‘My Donal’ – a whaling lament that was destined to ‘enter the tradition’ and outlive its author’s own career as a musician.
Other young songwriters with guitars would make their first appearances on Transatlantic during 1965-66: Harvey Andrews, a discovery of Ian Campbell, was given a self-titled EP (TRA EP 133) to reflect on introspective matters; Guianese songwriter David Campbell got a self-titled album (TRA 141), on the back sleeve of which Nat Joseph himself held forth on how everyone would come to know David’s songs (he was wrong on that one); Glasgow’s Josh MacRae got a self-titled album (TRA 150) to expound in talking blues form on topical matters; Marc Brierley, a future psych-folk icon with two albums on CBS, got a self-titled EP (TRA EP 147) for his love songs, like ‘heartbreak painted by Van Gogh’ in the words of the sleevenote; and John Renbourn, a dextrous folk-blues sidekick of Bert Jansch, got a self-titled album (TRA 135) and an instrumental duo set with Bert (Bert and John, TRA 144). At least nobody was having to waste time thinking of titles. Bert himself would record two more albums of his own in this period: It Don’t Bother Me (TRA 132) and Jack Orion (TRA 143), with Renbourn guesting on both.
Further releases in those packed couple of years for the label included Private Eye’s Blue Record (TRA 131), topical satire and comedy from Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and their pals, and cut-price albums by popular folk club acts the Black Country Three, Sandy & Jeanie and Alex Campbell – ironically, this latter was not recorded by Transatlantic but licensed in from Folkways in the US. A compilation, Second Wave (TRA 126), featured four young acts whom Nat decided deserved hearing, among them Bob & Carole Pegg, who would later form Mr Fox and record two highly distinctive drummerless folk-rock albums for the label (Mr Fox TRA 226 and The Gipsy TRA 236). Carole (as Carolanne Pegg) would go on to record a solo album for Transatlantic in the mid-70s, while Bob would manage two.
The licensing in of a record from Folkways was significant – it would be the first of many, and the connection with Mo Asch and his venerable US label would be a matter of pride for Nat:
‘Mo Asch was like a guru, a second father to me, and gave me a lot of encouragement,’ he reflected. ‘I used to absolutely idolise him because he built up this extraordinary catalogue – there were over a thousand records on Folkways. He was the first person to record Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. He was the only person to record Lead Belly and Big Bill Broonzy and all these great people and he had never before licensed a record to anybody. I said to him , “Look, young people in Britain cannot afford to pay [import prices]” – I mean, Folkways records to them were incredibly expensive. I said he would be better licensing them to me – and to everybody’s amazement he said, ‘”Okay, Nathan”. One of the things I liked about him was that he was one of the very few people to call me by my proper name! He was just the greatest.’
Back on home turf, perhaps the most significant find for Transatlantic during this period, aside from Bert Jansch, was the Young Tradition – Peter Bellamy, Royston Wood and Heather Wood, three unaccompanied singers who would bring a bit of Swinging London glamour and dynamism to English traditional songs. They would record three albums and EP for Transatlantic and the first of these, in 1966, was (of course) self-titled (TRA 142).
Bert Jansch’s music had been developing in this period from introspective, if compelling and highly original, songwriting to embracing traditional music and eastern sounds, with bits of jazz thrown in. It was often modal and freewheeling instrumentally. But Nat took it all in his stride:
‘I don’t recall being shocked,’ he reflected, of Bert’s new sound. ‘I was never shocked when I heard anything other than when it was very bad. Bringing in the traditional material was something that seemed to me extremely interesting.’
There was a great deal of factionalism within folk music in Britain at that time, but Nat had no problem in seeing the good in pure traditional music, pub ballads, singer-songwriter material and political songs. All that mattered was whether a thing had quality within its field – an ethos later espoused by Tony Stratton-Smith’s Charisma label:
‘We were often accused by people who were very ethnic of being pop orientated,’ said Nat, ‘and, I suppose, from their point of view we were – but as I saw it, we weren’t. I have always been a believer in quality and I think one of the things that 90% of pop music lacks is quality. Most of the lyrics are an insult to the intelligence… The folk music scene was self-destructive because it was so splintered. Very few of us – I was, Bill Leader was – were prepared to say “This is music. Who cares if the guy has his hand over his ear when he’s singing or whether he’s playing guitar with drums in the background?” I was quite able to listen with pleasure to the Dubliners, the Young Tradition and the singer-songwriters – and I couldn’t see why anybody couldn’t.’
1967: The Summer of Love
Anyone glancing at the Transatlantic discography for 1967 would come away believing the label to be almost entirely a modern jazz operation. A flood of releases licensed in from Prestige – Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane and many more great and then current names – dominated the year that pop magazines were telling readers about ‘Flower Power’, with the Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ at the start of the year ushering in a new wave of colourful sounds (and clothing).
The folk music offerings on the label that year were few but diverse: two more from the Young Tradition, an uncompromising trio of declamatory voices singing traditional songs dressed in Carnaby Street finery on the record sleeves, in So Cheerfully Round (TRA 155) and the Chicken on a Raft EP (TRA EP 164); a second and last punt on songwriter David Campbell with Young Blood (TRA 153); a one-off album by Irish trad ‘girl band’ the Grehan Sisters (TRA 160); and The Best of the Dubliners (TRA 158) – happily cashing in on the group’s surprise UK hit single for another label, Major Minor, that year with ‘Seven Drunken Nights’.
Transatlantic’s press adverts in the 60s often used the phrase ‘Transatlantic – where trends begin’. Laying the groundwork for artists who went off and fairly quickly enjoyed mainstream hits elsewhere was certainly something of a trend for the label – the Dubliners would be followed by the likes of Ralph McTell, Gerry Rafferty, Gordon Giltrap, Billy Connolly, Mike Oldfield, Paul Brady and others in having significant hit singles and/or albums only after moving on from the label.
There were also two albums and an EP in 1967 from Hamish Imlach, a portly, cheery Glasgow folk/blues singer and comedian who delighted in advertising himself as ‘the biggest thing in Scottish folk music’, including Live! (XTRA 1050), recorded at a club in Paisley. Hamish was hugely popular in Scotland and the north of England – an influence on both Christy Moore and Billy Connolly in terms of entertaining a boozy crowd, and an early influence on Bert Jansch in terms of guitar playing. Like Matt McGinn, another Glasgow ‘folk comedian’ on Transatlantic, albeit with a more political bent, Hamish rarely needed the bother of travelling to London just to get his name in the Melody Maker. Transatlantic would release seven Hamish Imlach albums and three by Matt McGinn, all on the XTRA imprint. As with fellow Scot Alex Campbell, these were artists whose popularity was firmly based on live appearances, so records were not so much markers in a progressing career (as with the likes of Bert Jansch) as souvenirs of a great night out.
Dave & Toni Arthur’s Morning Stands on Tiptoe (TRA 154) was another notable debut in the small clutch of folk/traditional releases on Transatlantic that year. Like the Young Tradition, Dave & Toni dressed in hippyish garb and sang exclusively traditional material, and would be a popular grassroots club act for several years, with Toni also becoming in demand as a presenter on children’s TV programmes and BBC folk music programmes on radio. As musical artists, their career comprised five albums on five labels, but this didn’t mean that Nat Joseph lost interest in them. He would remain their agent for several years and his first venture into theatre production, shortly after leaving the music business, would be TV Playtime, featuring Toni Arthur, at the Greenwich Theatre around Christmas 1978, touring other venues around Easter 1979. It would provide a soft transition from running a record label to producing theatre shows, which is the field in which he succeeded thereafter.
‘The main contact we had with Transatlantic Records was with Bill Leader,’ says Toni. ‘Bill had heard us singing and suggested to Nat Joseph that we should make a record. I know Nat was keen on the material. He seemed particularly fond of the nature of my voice. I don’t think he really liked the unaccompanied style of folk music at the time but he was an excellent business man and knew it would sell well. I was scared stiff in the studios as it was all so new to us both. The power in my voice meant that it was difficult to record and sometimes I had to stand a long way off the microphone for them to record it. I suppose this was because none of the folk clubs had microphones for the performers to use and I learned to project my voice so that the people at the back could hear.’
The cover of Morning Stands on Tiptoe was particularly striking – a classic of the era – two Carnaby Street folkies in what appeared to be a very chilly early morning on the hillside by the ancient Uffington White Horse:
‘Brian Shuel came to pick us up early one morning, about 3.30am, to drive us down to Oxfordshire. We had to arrive there as the Sun peeped over the Vale of the White Horse. This was Brian’s romantic idea to go with the title of the record. His car had no heating in it and we arrived there frozen. We had to climb up a long way to get to the exact spot. As you can see, it was the days of the mini-skirt. I was so very cold. I didn’t mean to wear the cloak but I couldn’t do without it. The cloak was one I was given by a policeman at a policeman and nurses ball. I don’t know who he was or why he gave it to me but it became my winter coat for years! All I can remember about the shoot was the cold and the fact that Brian kept us there for such a long time to get the shot he liked. When he had got his shot, I tried to walk away but I was frozen to the bone and literally stumbled over and nearly rolled all the way down the hill. We all thought this very funny at the time. Dave always looked glum in photos at that time as it was the thing to do then. He had been told he looked very much like Paul or George in the Beatles and so he adopted the current trendy look. I just grinned like a clown.’
Dave & Toni’s Transatlantic debut was their first of five albums together, and it was a significant opportunity:
‘Before that we had only made a single [as the Strollers] of two American songs, ‘The Cuckoo’ and ‘I’m a Rich and Rambling Boy’, from the singing of Jack Elliott, who was Dave’s favourite American singer. We even guest starred on Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go! On our photo shoot for that, [50s guitar hero] Joe Brown lent me his black leather jacket to wear. I’ve no idea why I remember the clothes so well. It was a dreadful record but it got to the lower reaches of the pop charts, I believe. Morning Stands on Tiptoe made sure that we were truly of the English folk scene and we sang mainly unaccompanied songs at that time. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seager ruled the waves then and they stipulated that no English folk song should use guitars or banjos. I thought that was a load of rubbish – but then I’d only just heard of folk music and didn’t know that when Ewan spoke you did as you were asked.’
*
Singer-songwriters backed by strings was in vogue in 1967, spearheaded by Judy Collins’ collaboration with Joshua Rifkin on In My Life (Elektra, 1966) and, closer to home, Al Stewart’s Bed Sitter Images (CBS, 1967). Nat thought he would try a similar approach with Bert Jansch – who was fast rising from the folk clubs to become a solo concerts artist, purely by word of mouth. The resulting album, Nicola (TRA 157), recorded over several studio sessions with Nat Joseph as producer and future Jethro Tull member David Palmer as musical arranger, was an intriguing curio.
‘I think it was his least successful album,’ said Nat, ‘but you have to try. You can’t just go on making the same album. It got a lot of knocking at the time, but it was an interesting experiment. We had a comparatively limited number of artists in the earlier days, and I always felt that they shouldn’t stand still. I always tried to push them to do something different – some responded and some didn’t – and also one tried to introduce them to new talents coming up in other areas, like David Palmer.’
Five of the album’s tracks saw Bert fronting a 15-piece orchestra: ‘These were live sessions,’ Bert recalled. ‘It wasn’t as if they put the orchestra on later. I’d do anything at the time, just out of interest.’
The Palmer/Jansch collaboration yielded one real triumph: ‘Woe Is Love, My Dear’. A masterpiece of pathos and execution, Palmer’s arrangement of Bert’s paean to unrequited love was lavish but wholly sympathetic to the tenderness of Bert’s sentiments. Recorded a month after the release of the Beatles’ ‘Penny Lane’, the piccolo trumpet solo can hardly be coincidental. And it also fitted perfectly with the exquisitely melancholy and quasi-baroque moods of chart-bound sounds of the time, like Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’.
Nat wanted to release it as a single. Somehow, it didn’t happen. Inexplicably, the single that finally appeared was ‘Life Depends on Love’ / ‘A Little Sweet Sunshine’, two interesting but less convincing Palmer/Jansch concoctions. It did become DJ ‘Baby’ Bob Stewart’s ‘single of the week’ on the influential Radio Luxembourg, but the public stayed home in droves.
Transatlantic had tasted low-level chart success with the Ian Campbell Folk Group’s ‘Guantanamera’ (TRA SP 7) the previous year and would tickle the low end of the charts in 1967 with the Purple Gang’s ‘Granny Takes a Trip’ (BIG 101), produced by Joe Boyd, and the following year with the Johnstons’ ‘Both Sides Now’ (BIG 113), but the 45rpm format was not its natural territory:
‘I have to say, we were pretty bloody useless at promoting singles,’ said Nat, ‘and that was something that I was always furious about. But on the other hand we didn’t have enough material that was singles material to justify what you really had to do, which was have a whole singles promotion team. But I always thought ‘Woe Is Love’ was a potentially major song. I remember saying to everybody “That’s a hit single”. The principal problem was the title.’
*
If Nat had raised his eyebrows at Bert’s titular disconnect from the ‘Summer of Love’, he probably did so about most aspects of experimental tape manipulator, pianist, madcap and future Pink Floyd associate Ron Geesin, whose first and only album for Transatlantic was rare in not being self-titled. Instead, it was called A Raise of Eyebrows (TRA 161). Currently a fine mastering engineer with an autobiography on the go, Ron has fond recollections of his time with Transatlantic:
‘Having escaped from Scotland via the Original Downtown Syncopators jazz band in 1961,’ he says, ‘I had made it to Notting Hill, London, by 1965 and found I had then to escape from the jazz band to earn a living. From posing about in velvet waistcoats and horn gramophones, I moved roughly into performing at the intervals in the jazz clubs that had previously known me. These wild eruptions were to prevent as many customers as possible from going for a beer or a pee and, coincidentally, to provide a training course for performing techniques and ideas. Further armed, I began to explore the potential of the contemporary ‘folk club scene’ and was soon up there, shouting at the world. In parallel, during the day, I began investigating tape recorders and electronics and started to make sound pieces, both pro- and anti-musical.
‘Through all the folk club engagements I met Ralph McTell, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and other leading, and some leaden, lights of that world. By this time it was 1967 and I had actually managed to make the music for some TV commercials on my semi-pro equipment, and constructed a demo-reel of four longer pieces. Looking round for a record company to approach, one with obvious connections to my merry bunch of chancers was Transatlantic.
‘Nat Joseph, a short fellow with a high voice, seemed intrigued by my offering. One track was called ‘Turn Around and Face Your Destination’, so he did. I was contracted for £25 to make an album, and he wished it to be Transatlantic’s first stereo one. I had just discovered the baby version of the unaffordable industry-standard Swiss Studer tape recorder, the wonderful Revox, and had managed to afford three of these for which I built a plywood desk. The subsequent cover for A Raise of Eyebrows shows the desk with a blank space because that machine was away for repair. So, I had the machines, but no stereo mixer, so no proper panning and other sophisticated signal routing and control. Somehow, I fiddled it all. The eyebrows that were raised could well have been those of Nat Joseph, but he took the chance – at a time in the 1960s when that could happen, and at the right price!
‘At that time, Nat had also imported some Russian and American classical records, mostly mono. They were untidily scattered about in the basement and I, being an avid consumer of this more interesting material, was soon off with composers Prokofiev and Rachmaninov, and performers such as Rostropovich and the Oistrakhs, whether with covers or not – and some of those Russian covers were already turning to cornflakes – great music on shit vinyl.
‘Well, we’re all survivors, Nat Joseph being one of the more adept. For a further £25, he had signed me up for publishing too. Through the mist of manic creativity, I could just see that I might do a lot more work, particularly for documentary and feature films, so I bought myself out of his publishing deal – not a minute too soon!
‘But Nat gave me a great start. A Raise of Eyebrows did alright – no second pressings though – but it came to the attention of John Peel who championed me for a few years and put my feet on the next rung or two.’
1968–71: Progressive Music
During 1967, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn had been experimenting every Sunday night at the Horseshoe Hotel on London’s Tottenham Court Road with a new band, the Pentangle, bringing together folk, blues, jazz and other influences. Jacqui McShee, who had guested on John’s Another Monday (TRA 149), joined Bert and John on vocals with experienced jazzers Danny Thompson and Terry Cox on bass and drums, respectively.
The group took a while to get its sound and repertoire together, but this was no bad thing. In August 1967, a show at the 7th National Jazz & Blues Festival at Windsor, on a bill with Jeff Beck, P.P. Arnold, John Mayall, Fleetwood Mac and Cream was designed to move the band into the sunlight. It proved premature.
‘It was nearly the end of the band,’ John recalled. ‘I’m afraid it was just a disaster. Nat Joseph had been against the idea of the band doing it but Bert told Nat that the band must definitely do it, for the publicity. But the publicity was terrible! The [Melody Maker] review simply said “Bert Jansch was dire”.’
Although progressively minded, Nat had not been enthusiastic about the group: ‘I had long felt that Bert and John could become the nub of a folk-rock band but the kind of music the Pentangle turned out was just the kind of music I didn’t think they would – it was far too bland. I’m not denying that it wasn’t successful or good, but I always felt they could have done something much more exciting.’
Despite his reservations, Nat had supplied sound equipment for the Pentangle’s Horseshoe Hotel residency, had arranged the Windsor booking, funded some (unsuccessful) studio recordings in August 1967 and arranged a November 1967 college tour for the group. In retrospect, 1967 was a year of stumbling around for the group and its unconvinced benefactor, but it would all come good in the end.
Nineteen-sixty-eight was a watershed year for the group. Acquiring a bullish manager and publicist in Jo Lustig, and a fervent BBC radio champion in John Peel, things started to coalesce. With hit-making American producer Shel Talmy (known for his work with the Who and the Kinks among others) on board, there would be two Pentangle albums that year: The Pentangle (TRA 162) and Sweet Child (TRA 178), the latter a double album. While touring energies would be put wholly into the band for the next few years, both John and Bert would continue to make solo LPs for Transatlantic.
Nat was more excited, however, about the latest John Renbourn album Sir John Alot of Merrie Englandes Musyk Thyng & Ye Grene Knyghte (TRA 167) – released within a month of the first group album. With Ray Warleigh on flute and Terry Cox on percussion, one side was jazzy, the other reflected John’s growing fascination with Early Music. It was an exciting and dextrous fusion:
‘John was a brilliant musician,’ Nat recalled, ‘very articulate and always a pleasure to work with, and when he started playing what would be called folk-baroque, he sold better than Bert. Sir John Alot was his peak – I loved that album and it sold wonderfully well. I used to play it a lot for personal pleasure, which is always a good test! We shared the same interest in medieval literature so there was plenty to talk about. I think back on all my associations with John with pride and pleasure, because he wasn’t an easy artist to promote. There were plenty who would have taken a risk on Bert at the beginning, but not that many on John. After all, who wants to know about a guitarist who starts off singing very derivative blues and then goes on to being what amounts to a half-bred classical act?’ As it turned out, quite a lot of people.
Press ads were taken out for The Pentangle, proclaiming ‘It took a year to create – a generation will treasure it’. Nat Joseph, however, didn’t need quite so long to feel a trifle disappointed: ‘I can’t remember the exact sales figures. I do remember feeling at that point, though, that in comparison with the solo albums it didn’t have the same impact, in terms of sales. In the initial months, as far as I recall, it didn’t justify its cost. The real turning point for the Pentangle was the Take Three Girls television show. The absolute key to the Pentangle sales were those two series and at that point, of course, the whole canon started selling.’
Take Three Girls (1969–70) was the BBC’s first drama series in colour and the Pentangle provided theme and incidental music. A version of the theme tune, ‘Light Flight’ (BIG 128), became a minor hit single and its accompanying album, Basket of Light (TRA 205) made No.5 in the album charts. By that stage, the group, when not touring internationally, were regularly to be seen and heard on BBC TV and radio – managing the rare feat of being simultaneously a hip ‘underground’ act (in the parlance of the time), a folk act and a Light Entertainment act, which helped the publicity (and sales) opportunities enormously.
Several of Transatlantic’s growing roster of artists in this period fell into roughly the same bag as the Pentangle – dextrous guitar-pickers like the prolific and entertaining US folk-blues-ragtime sensation Stefan Grossman and the Welsh equivalent, John James, and future instrumental guitar star Gordon Giltrap (unusual in favouring a pick rather than playing fingerstyle). Related to this cohort was enigmatic ‘American primitive’ guitarist John Fahey, whose Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (TRA 173) was licensed in during 1968 and proved a successful title, no doubt assisted by a rare visit to Britain and a session for John Peel’s Top Gear on Radio 1 the following year
‘I first heard of the label and Nat Joseph from Chris Wellard, who owned a specialist folk/blues/jazz record shop next door to Goldsmiths College in South East London,’ says Gordon Giltrap. ‘I had such romantic notions about the label because of the legends that recorded with it, so it was for me an honour to be signed. My memories of the small offices in Marylebone Lane are pretty faded now since 1966, but it was there that I met the diminutive Nat Joseph and the great Bill Leader. I remember they had a sort of shop window display at the front of the building and the warehouse/ storeroom at the back. Magic days for me way back then!’
Roughly in the same territory – in the sense of being one man with wood and strings and a singular artistry – was the only album for Transatlantic by Edinburgh legend Archie Fisher – Archie Fisher (XTRA 1070), in 1968, a majestic collection of traditional songs with deft guitar and sitar from Archie, and subtle violin and woodwind decoration. It is a kind of companion volume to Bert Jansch’s entirely solo masterpiece Rosemary Lane (TRA 235) in 1971, also produced by Bill Leader, which shares the same ‘air’ and spirit as his one-time mentor’s album, with ‘Reynardine’ the one song common to both.
Mr Fox, Storyteller and Jan Dukes de Grey all dealt in differing shades of folk-rock, while Unicorn and Gerry Rafferty dealt in a more luxuriant harmony-laden form of folkish pop music. Rafferty would find international success in the later 70s with both Stealers Wheel and his ‘Baker Street’ era solo albums, but the signs were all there on his 1971 Transatlantic solo debut Can I Have My Money Back? (TRA 241) and his contributions before that to two Humblebums albums – shared with duo partner Billy Connolly. Unicorn would be less successful but their 1971 single of Jimmy Webb’s classic ‘P.F. Sloan’ (BIG 138) was another possible chart hit that got away.
Less likely to be receiving airplay was It’s So Hard to be a Nigger (XTRA 1063), a one-off, and now rare, 1968 album by African-American singer Mable Hillery. It was an album of blues and social comment, backed by London jazz players and notable for being produced by Shel Talmy and future Gerry Rafferty producer Hugh Murphy along with Pentangle manager Jo Lustig. One assumes it was a pet project of Lustig’s, but the combination of visceral, challenging material and two producers known for creating hit records is intriguing.
One of the most talented artists, and ultimately one with a very wide appeal, to be signed to Transatlantic in this period was singer-songwriter Ralph McTell – but rather than Nat Joseph having a ‘Eureka!’ moment, it was all very touch and go:
‘I was down in Cornwall with Wizz Jones [playing in a jug band],’ says Ralph, ‘and I was noticed by an ex-publisher who had taken the semi-hippy route out of London and become a postman. He’d seen me play a couple of times and one day he asked me “What was that song…?” I was doing other people’s material but I’d slipped one of my own in – it was probably ‘Nanna’s Song’ – and I said “That was mine…” “Have you written anything else?” he said. Anyway, he asked me to send a song or two to David Platz [at Essex Music publishing]. I went to Ron Geesin’s house, whom I knew from the jazz days, and we did a four-song demo and sent it to David, who passed them on to a guy called Graham Churchill. Graham called me into the office – I was very excited, my heart pounding – and he told me he didn’t think much of ‘em! So I went and carried on in Cornwall. We recorded another song live – and when they heard the audience reaction, they mentioned my name to Nat – who [also] wasn’t at all sure about me.’
It seems extraordinary that Nat, a connoisseur of lyrics, had to ponder at length the question of whether or not Ralph McTell was any good, but he had a remarkable holding mechanism:
‘He made me sign a contract to say I wouldn’t sign another contract till they’d made up their mind about whether they wanted me to join the label. So I was held on a contract for six months! I was quite upset at the time, but I couldn’t see anyone else knocking on the door. Frankly, it’s hard to look back and see how potless we were – I had no money and a little baby boy. We’d been living in a caravan in a field in Cornwall with one cold water tap and we’d moved to a council flat in Croydon. I was at teacher training college, I wasn’t happy – this was my ‘moment’. The halcyon summers of ’66/’67 were in the dim and distant and I was facing life with a family. When they said “Will you sign this contract?” I thought, “Well, it’s better than nothing.”
Just as Anne Briggs had bent Nat’s ear about Bert Jansch, Ralph believes that another good Samaritan – conveniently, Nat’s secretary Sheila, who was ‘extraordinarily exotic – upper-class Brazilian, but with striking European features, a wonderful, crazy sort of girl’ – did the same on his behalf. Ralph was given a £12 advance for what became Eight Frames a Second (TRA 165), released shortly after the first Pentangle album. Sheila had suggested that her husband, Gus Dudgeon, a tape operator at Decca, was the man to produce it, while Tony Visconti was brought in on string arrangements. Ralph’s first album was a milestone at the start of several careers, and friendships that lasted – Tony, for instance, being involved in Ralph’s most recent album Hill of Beans (2019).
Both Essex Music (who had signed Ralph for publishing) and Nat, on behalf of his own publishing company Heathside Music, had obliged Ralph to record songs from their catalogues – Tim Rose’s ‘Morning Dew’ and the Purple Gang’s ‘Granny Takes a Trip’. Swallowing the pill, Ralph obliged – in the bigger picture, it was a small price to pay for the life-changing opportunity he was being given. Still at teacher training college when the album came out, its success led to an inevitable crossroads:
‘The folk club thing was such a thriving circuit,’ says Ralph. ‘Before I left college, which was two or three months into the album [being out], I was driving everywhere for gigs overnight, driving back and going into college next day until I was falling asleep in the classroom. I just said to [my wife] Nanna, “I think there might be a future for me in music.” And Nanna said, “Well, then you’ve got to do it.” And the rest is history.’
*
Three Irish acts, each very different, made their marks on Transatlantic in this period: the Johnstons, Sweeney’s Men and Finbar & Eddie Furey.
Both the Johnstons (a fairly polished close-harmony quartet that eventually became the duo of Paul Brady and Adrienne Johnston) and Sweeney’s Men (a more bohemian vocal/instrumental trio) had enjoyed hit singles on Pye in Ireland before making the move to working in England and recording for Transatlantic. Although the Johnstons would record no fewer than six albums and six singles for Transatlantic – comprising Irish ballads and more current American fare from the pens of Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot – the band is chiefly remembered as an apprenticeship for singer/guitarist Paul Brady, who would go on to much greater success as a solo artist and soft-rock songwriter.
While Sweeney’s Men made only two albums – Sweeney’s Men (TRA 170) in 1968 and The Tracks of Sweeney (TRA 200) in 1969 – the group would become legendary. Not least, it was a wellspring for a slew of progressive Irish folk bands in the 70s and beyond – Planxty, the Bothy Band, De Dannan and others. Sweeney’s members Andy Irvine and Johnny Moynihan would both feature in a couple of these while Terry Woods would go on to both Steeleye Span and the Pogues. A brief unrecorded line-up in between the two albums, featuring electric guitarist Henry McCullough, which played at the 1968 Cambridge Folk Festival is often cited as the beginnings of British folk-rock.
With Bill Leader producing, the legendary Sweeney’s Men LP was cut at Livingstone Studios in Barnet, with the group working in a concert at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls and their first BBC radio session (My Kind of Folk) beforehand: ‘It was made on pint bottles of stout and, god help us,’ Terry Woods recalled, ‘Johnny’s father [a doctor] gave Johnny a load of Dexedrine to keep us awake – and we did it in 36 hours straight. I came back to Ireland with Andy on the Wednesday and I remember the two of us were sitting in an air terminal – and Andy couldn’t shut up, his eyes wouldn’t close and his mouth wouldn’t stop! And we sat there for hours waiting for the plane to come home, because I was getting married on the Saturday – May 18th 1968.’
Andy was best man at the wedding. Days later he played his farewell gig at Liberty Hall in Dublin – a symbolic event, with one line-up playing the first half in uniforms and the new one, with Henry McCullough, coming on in far-out threads for the second.
By the time the next UK tour arrived, in November 1968, Sweeney’s Men were a doomed-from-day-one duo of Woods and Moynihan – each man idiosyncratic but in different ways. However, with NEMS and then Blackhill Enterprises handling bookings in England the machine rumbled on. Johnny was living in a caravan with Anne Briggs in Sussex with Terry – not knowing where Johnny was between gigs – sharing a flat with Melody Maker writer Tony Wilson in London. There was another LP to deliver, and this time the sessions dragged on, periodically, over six months. The pair had decided to feature more of their own songs, giving the record a more progressive feel.
Johnny was unsatisfied: ‘When we heard the thing, we wanted to remix it and they wouldn’t let us. I remember a particularly crushing phone call from a call box somewhere in England, myself and Terry, talking to Nat Joseph and getting nowhere: “We have this tape, now fuck off.”’
The Tracks of Sweeney was issued to little fanfare in December 1969, but it was the fascinating afterglow of a great experiment. Moynihan’s dreamlike ‘Standing on the Shore’ – a woozy folkish equivalent to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ – and Terry’s achingly evocative ‘Dreams’ were instant classics and the triple-tracked polyrhythmic arrangement of the traditional ‘The Pipe on the Hob’ and the thoroughly cosmic ‘Brain Jam’ were extraordinary.
Sweeney’s Men bowed out with a London club gig on 22 November, a fortnight before the second album’s release. But the tale has a curious coda: Ashley Hutchings, godfather of British folk-rock, had just left the critically and commercially successful Fairport Convention. His plan: to join Sweeney’s Men.
In truth, it was the first album line-up of Sweeney’s Men that Ashley wanted to reconstitute: Irvine, Woods and Moynihan. Cutting a long story short, it didn’t quite happen, nor did a ‘Plan B’ in which Andy was offered the opportunity to replace the recently departed Sandy Denny in Fairport Convention. Instead, Terry Woods and his wife Gay created a new band with Hutchings, Steeleye Span, albeit moving on after one album.
Finbar And Eddie Furey (TRA 168) appeared in the Transatlantic catalogue in August 1968, in a huddle with the similarly self-titled The Johnstons (TRA 169) and Sweeney’s Men (TRA 170): three Irish vocal and instrumental groups, albeit in differing degrees and styles. Finbar & Eddie, an uilleann pipes and guitar/vocal duo from Dublin who had been causing a sensation on first the Scottish folk scene and then in England, would effectively break open the British and European market to the sound of virtuoso uilleann piping – which would define a number of successful touring Irish bands in the 70s and beyond.
While the members of Sweeney’s Men already knew Bill Leader from trips to Ireland, Finbar & Eddie first met him for the recording session of their first album. They would meet him again around March 1969 for the recording of two further albums: the second duo album The Lonesome Boatman (TRA 191) and Finbar’s solo Traditional Irish Pipe Music (XTRA 1077).
Nat Joseph had most likely seen the brothers on BBC TV’s Degrees of Folk in December 1967:
‘We didn’t just travel to London – we were asked and begged to do these albums,’ recalled Finbar, who is far from sentimental about his Transatlantic experience. ‘We wouldn’t have done those albums only we needed the money. It was 60 quid we got, for those two albums: £30 each. But £30 to me and Eddie was a lot of money in those days. So we don’t look back with sour grapes: we needed the money, they paid us… We wanted somebody to help us build something, you know… But they couldn’t see beyond the nose of a quick buck.’
Eddie Furey was more positive – and the albums would certainly go on to be influential, with Finbar’s ‘Lonesome Boatman’ tune a classic in Irish music – but felt that more might have been done:
‘We wanted to get a bit more backing music on it for the songs. I was thinking of the studio being a studio and all the things we could do in it, you know. With Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick we’d done the very first festival up at Cleethorpes and the four of us got up on stage at the end of the festival and I got the drummer and bass player out of the High Level Ranters from Newcastle – and that was the first time there was ever jigs and reels played with drums and bass. And I thought this was a bit of a breakthrough. Before The Lonesome Boatman I went in and I said to Nat Joseph, “The next album we make, can we have a lead guitar, a drummer and a bass player?” And he told me, “Look, your last album’s selling pretty good at the moment and we don’t want to spoil that by bringing something different out.” Nine months later on the Fairport Convention started and I went in and put my hand to my nose and said, “Ah, you slipped up there, didn’t you?”’
Two other Irish acts that might have been signed by Transatlantic in this era but didn’t quite make the cut were solo balladeer Christy Moore and nascent Celtic rockers Horslips in 1971. Christy was taken on instead by Bill Leader, who recorded the classic Prosperous – featuring Andy Irvine and others destined to come together as Planxty – for his own label Trailer, launched in 1969. Barry Devlin from Horslips recalls Nat Joseph having a very convivial meeting with them at a gig in Ireland but feeling that they ‘weren’t ready’. He was actually right – the classic Horslips line-up wouldn’t coalesce until 1972, after which they swiftly became a national sensation and international touring act, controlling their own record releases.
*
The years 1968–71 were ones of huge growth for Transatlantic. Its roster of artists and output increased substantially, with the emphasis moving outwards to the new ‘underground’ rock and, to a lesser extent, the ‘free improvisation’ worlds. In this latter field, saxophonist Trevor Watts’ Amalgam, with John Stevens on drums and Jeff Clyne on bass, would record Prayer for Peace (TRA 196) in 1969 – a classic of its kind. A less coherent amalgam of London free-jazzers would have ‘seven extracts from a continuous performance’, recorded in 1968 and ‘produced’ by the Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts (no relation to Trevor) released as The People Band (TRA 214) in 1970.
In terms of rock, Nat had perhaps surprised people in May 1969 by taking on the Mothers of Invention’s controversial Uncle Meat album for UK release. Under the headline ‘Shock rock’, he told the Newcastle Chronicle ‘We feel that in this day and age people aren’t offended by the use of four-letter words’.
The release of hard rockers Jody Grind’s Far Canal in 1970 was surely a pun not lost on Nat, though whether he would have countenanced the mooted title for an unmade third album Far Queue is unknown. Jody Grind, although not especially successful, were a high-quality progressive rock band of the period and their releases are among the label’s less known and appreciated output. Debut album One More Step (TRA 210) in 1969 featured arrangements from David Palmer while Far Canal (TRA 221) in 1970 was a power-trio classic featuring Bernie Holland on lead guitar. The 1971 single ‘Plastic Shit’ (TT 2050) was a great deal better than its title might suggest.
Aside from Jody Grind, several hard rock acts were signed to Transatlantic circa 1969–70: Peter Bardens, the Deviants, Circus, CMU, Marsupilami, Little Free Rock and Stray, with CBS veterans Skin Alley signed in 1972.
This new streetwise, eclectic Transatlantic spanning singer-songwriters, acoustic guitar wizards and progressive rockers, with one or two other curios besides, was perhaps best summed up by the label’s 1971 double album sampler Heads & Tails (TRA SAD 18), with a sleeve illustration depicting a caricature dragon with a spliff.
Most of the rockers would record two albums for the label although Stray, led by Del Bromham, went on to deliver six. Del continues to front a version of Stray to this day:
‘Back in 1970, we were all about 18 years old, says Del. ‘Our two managers at the time had presumably been doing what managers do – looking for a record deal. Transatlantic had been predominantly a folk label but I believe they’d just signed up Jody Grind and another electric band. We were told they breaking into ‘progressive rock’ so we, as kids, just nodded our heads, ‘Where do we sign?’ and off it went! John Whitehead and John Cooper were the two guys liaising with us, mostly. I did meet Nat Joseph – I thought he was a very nice chap, actually. He always reminded me of Napoleon!’
‘The first two albums we did, Stray (TRA 216) and Suicide (TRA 233) were done with Hugh Murphy, part of Shel Talmy’s production company. So Nat was sourcing a producer that he felt would be a good match with Stray – and we got on really well with Hugh. We made both of those albums within a week. It was like going to work – 10 in the morning till 6 at night! But that combination brought out something in the sound.’
One anomaly about the first album was the only appearance in print of ‘Derek’ Bromham, the members’ names having come straight to the sleeve designer from the contract. ‘Even my mum never called me Derek!’ Although inexperienced in studio work, Stray had been together since 1966 and were very well-rehearsed when that first album was made:
‘I feel a bit of a bighead saying it,’ says Del, ‘but a lot of people seem to think that that first album still stands up today and has a ‘sound’ to it that other albums don’t have. With the third album, Saturday Morning Pictures (TRA 248) we were more confident about what we wanted and had ideas for it. This time Transatlantic said, “We have another engineer for you, who we think is going places” and his name was Martin Birch – and he was great. That’s probably my favourite Stray album.
‘We’d changed management by the fourth album and things were never quite the same. By then, we felt that we should be on a different record label. With Saturday Morning Pictures we really thought we were going to break big. All our peers on the music scene – Uriah Heep, Status Quo, Genesis – it seemed that with every album they were going up the ladder.’
Changing management at this point, Stray’s new manager decided not to seek a new label with perhaps more clout in the rock music world but to renegotiate the Transatlantic deal, so nothing but the accountancy changed. After the sixth album, they moved to Pye’s imprint Dawn ‘and they didn’t know what to do with us either!’
Although he felt a bit frustrated at the time that the combination of Stray and Transatlantic didn’t have enough heft to make the band a bigger concern, Del is more sanguine these days. He is grateful that Stray had the opportunity to at least make a tranche of records – recently released on Esoteric as a CD box set – in the 70s, and that they were dealing with decent people:
‘One thing I used to like, you could just drop by to Marylebone High Street and say “Hi”. I’d be out in London down Carnaby Street and think, “I’ll just nip over to Transatlantic and see John Whitehead”. You didn’t need appointments. It was nice – it was small, it was ‘comfortable shoes’, as I would put it. They weren’t faceless people behind big doors.’
*
Stefan Grossman, a part of the blues revival scene in America that had seen legendary pre-war figures like Reverend Gary Davis, Son House and Mississippi John Hurt ‘rediscovered’ and given new performing opportunities late in life – would base himself in Europe for much of the 70s, releasing eight albums through Transatlantic between 1970–76 – four as a contracted artist, four as a licensor – beginning with a solo set of blues and rags, Yazoo Basin Boogie (TRA 217).
‘With Ralph [McTell] and Bert and John, everyone was saying “Go to Transatlantic”, so I went to Nat,’ says Stefan. ‘Everyone was saying “You gotta really be careful with Nat because he screws you with contracts” – but my dealings with Nat were great! I found the best way to do it was, whenever I was doing office meetings to Nat, to take my first-born son David with me – two or three years old. Nat just softened up, I guess.’
That simple ability to take ownership of one’s business interests as an artist was something that, ultimately, others or their representatives seem not have been so adept at or focused on. Having previously had two albums released on Fontana, Stefan had a certain amount of experience as a recording artist prior to negotiating with Nat, although he suggests that establishing a good rapport may possibly have been influenced by a shared heritage:
‘One thing which I’m hesitant to even mention was that Nat and myself were two Jewish boys. I’m sorry to say, it makes a difference – like an Irish artist coming in to see an Irish guy behind the desk.’
The low-key first album was followed later in the same year by a sumptuous double, The Ragtime Cowboy Jew (TRA 223) – a daring title with a stark sleeve design, not far removed from the Beatles’ ‘white album’ – and a spin-off single ‘Pretty Little Tune’ (BIG 133), notable in featuring Sandy Denny and the entirety of her band Fotheringay. Also on the album were Peter Bardens on keys, Jody Grind’s Bernie Holland on lead guitar and blues icon Son House (who happened to be touring Britain for the last time). It was also only the second originated double album (two others had been licensed in) on Transatlantic, the first having been Pentangle’s Sweet Child (1968). Stefan’s offering would present a similar wide range of styles, but it was entirely accidental:
‘I didn’t say I wanted to do a double album,’ Stefan explains. ‘What happened was, initially I was supposed to go into the studio with Derek and the Dominoes but they didn’t show. So on the day, I had to very quickly get other people in – and there were some great people who came for the week of recording. When I came over to England, I wasn’t doing that much original material, or songs, but after hanging out with Bert and Roy Harper and Al Stewart and John Martyn, I was writing a bunch of songs. Within the amount of time that a single album could have been recorded we did enough material for a double album.
‘The album was received well, I think, because it was a cross-section. I thought, “Wow, that’s cool…” And then with the next album, Those Pleasant Days (TRA 246), I was living in Italy at the time and [damaged my right-hand thumb in a door] so all I could do was strum – and that album got panned. I thought my ‘public’ was into my creativity or whatever, so with my third album, Hot Dogs (TRA 257), I went back to doing blues and ragtime, but with Alastair Anderson on squeezebox, my friend Big Jim Sullivan on guitar and Alan White on drums and so that was a whole different thing – and it was received well.’
With blues scholar Sam Charters producing, a double live album was next – Stefan Grossman Live! (TRA 264), drawn from five shows in Europe and America:
‘When I was onstage, I would tell stories and jokes – and Sam initially programmed it as a comedy record! I freaked out – I said “I’m not a comedian. I’m not Woody Allen playing a guitar!” So he re-programmed it, and for the audience [thereafter], that’s what they expected and that’s what they got. There are still the stories in there, but not front and centre! That concluded my contract with Transatlantic as far as being a signed artist. So after that, living in Rome, I set up a closet, literally, with blankets and a mono machine and sat there recording instrumentals or improvisations made up on the spot, and what I was able to do with Nat was license them to him for seven years – which I don’t think he did with any other artist.’
*
The Pentangle along with Bert Jansch and John Renbourn as solo artists would leave the label in late 1971, which marked a sort of ending of an era for Transatlantic. Circumstances had developed during 1971 wherein the financial relationship between Transatlantic and the Pentangle changed markedly – in Transatlantic’s favour. Some of the group felt Nat Joseph was in the wrong; Nat quite validly referred them to their manager, Jo Lustig, whose responsibility contractual niceties surely were.
‘Lots of Transatlantic artists have cried on my shoulder about the way Nat’s treated them,’ Bill Leader recalled. ‘But he’s treated them absolutely squarely within his rights. Nat was fair. Nat was very well-informed on business matters and Nat had an ‘unfair’ advantage over artists who were not. He’d be quite merciless in the arrangement he’d come to with you, but having come to an arrangement he would stick to it. He was a very successful businessman. Now, Jo Lustig was also supposed to be a successful businessman…’
Nat was scrupulous as a businessman and daring as a pioneer, but was he also wise and pragmatic enough as the builder of what could have been an empire as critically and commercially brilliant as those created by Chris Blackwell at Island or Richard Branson at Virgin?
‘Everybody eventually fell out with Nat and left him,’ recalled Dave Arthur, of the duo Dave & Toni Arthur, in the 90s. ‘It’s a shame because I love Nat dearly. He’s a really sweet guy but a very, very hard businessman. Friendship doesn’t come into it with Nat. He would send you a bill for 25p. He was our agent for a while, and if some ancient TV thing we did is being repeated the fee goes to Nat: he takes his 25% and sends on a cheque for £8.35! You’d think nobody would do that, but he does.’
Sometimes this hard-nosed business reputation influenced the decisions of artists who might have signed to Transatlantic. Robin Dransfield, of the duo Robin & Barry Dransfield, whose The Rout of the Blues, recorded for Bill Leader’s label Trailer, went on to become Melody Maker’s ‘Folk Album of the Year’ in 1970, was one:
‘I do remember when we were recording Rout of the Blues being called to the phone at North Villas by Bill because Nat Joseph was on the phone trying to get us to do it for Transatlantic instead. I’d heard stories about Nat and didn’t fancy it and said, “No, we’re just going to stay with Bill”. Whether that was a good idea or not, I don’t know.’
Six years later, Robin and Barry would regroup as the band Dransfield to deliver a one-off late classic in the folk-rock field to Transatlantic, The Fiddler’s Dream (TRA 322) – a masterpiece on a shoestring budget. Being careful with money was something that Nat was known for. Bob Pegg would always feel that Mr Fox, his own electric folk band, might have done better had Nat invested in a decent PA for them, while singer-songwriter Dave Cartwright – who recorded three albums for Transatlantic 1972–74 –was no match for Nat’s thrifty logic:
‘After recording and mixing my first album in a day and a half,’ Dave recalled, ‘I went down to see Nat Joseph with a view to getting him to spend a bit more money and doing the job properly. Needless to say, Nat’s smile and guile talked me round, and I was never to recover.’
‘There was a lot of bitching and moaning [among some artists] about the royalty rate,’ says Stefan Grossman, ‘but I never bitched and moaned because I negotiated my royalty rate and it was fine.’
The Pentangle had known and accepted that Reflection (TRA 240) – a magnificent production by Bill Leader – was to be their last album for Transatlantic prior to its release, but it was not quite the last from the Pentangle family. That honour goes to John Renbourn’s Faro Annie (TRA 247), an underappreciated gem, released in January 1972 and a return to his folk-blues rocks (with added electricity).
‘I remember with quite a lot of fondness and gratitude,’ said Renbourn, ‘the fact that I made any records at all. I saw Nat as being quite a benefactor and I developed a genuine respect for the type of music that came out of the Transatlantic company as a whole. All those people that recorded for Transatlantic – they were an interesting bunch. I think it was quite a legacy. I had one more record to do for Transatlantic and in a moment of some wistfulness, thinking back to the old days, I decided to make a record that was going to be, in my view, like the first one, just to make it a complete cycle. I was going to get all my mates in and make a bluesy record. By that stage I was able to afford an electric guitar! Basically, we got it together and played a bunch of bluesy things, which I felt was an appropriate way to say, “Well, I came in this way and I’m going out this way too!”
Into the Sunset: 1972–80
The last five years of Nat Joseph’s stewardship of Transatlantic, 1972–77, and the period after that before the name was retired in 1980 by the new owners, Olav Wyper and Geoff Hannington of Logo Records, are marked by fewer album artists, more one-off singles (usually by folk comedians, like Mike Harding, plus a few pop music punts) and a lot of mercilessly cheap-looking repackagings of material from the glory days. This period was also, however, marked by the label’s biggest commercial successes by far – Joshua Rifkin’s Piano Rags by Scott Joplin, originally imported and then licensed in from Nonesuch and ignited by the success of film The Sting in late 1973, and Billy Connolly’s Solo Concert (TRA 279) in 1974. These two albums sold a quarter of a million copies each, the cash-flow implications of which ultimately changed the company and led to its ending.
As Transatlantic staffer Laurence Aston recalls of the Rifkin album, ‘it had already hit the US charts on the back of the release of the film there, but MCA, who had the soundtrack album rights in the UK (Marvin Hamlisch’s score and performances of the main themes and Joplin rags), failed to release it in time. We had a big-selling top 20 album in the key weeks before Christmas. It’s example of how a small independent, fast-moving company can out-manoeuvre a major.’
A more obvious-to-all change to Transatlantic had taken place in early 1971 when the company moved its physical location from cramped and increasingly inadequate space in Marylebone Lane to much larger premises on Marylebone High Street. Laurence Aston joined the company in late 1969 and vividly recalls arriving to a place where ‘you couldn’t move for boxes of [the Pentangle’s] Basket of Light – it was all hands on deck. At that point, there were around 12 staff members running a label from three rooms.
Laurence pinpoints 1970–72 as the period in which changes more significant than having box-free offices occurred. ‘Independence was a key word to Nat,’ he says. ‘We’d suffered from doing deals with some bigger labels that distributed us and treated us like dirt. Around 1970/71, Nat took the decision to become the first ‘vertically integrated’ label – distribution, sales, delivering to shops direct, PR, A&R… all under one roof.’
By 1972, Transatlantic was one of the first record labels to employ a professional advertising agency (The Creative Business) for marketing – with finely crafted adverts now appearing on tube trains as much as in the music press – and rebranding. ‘People used to say “My God, your ads are brilliant!’,” says Laurence Aston. ‘I don’t know if Nat would say they made much difference, but I think they really helped sell many of our albums, for example, Gerry Rafferty and the Humblebums.’
The ad agency had created a stunning new logo for Transatlantic, which won an industry award and remains the image most associated with the label to this day – a dazzlingly colourful roundel depicting the globe and modes of travel across the Atlantic, in the evocative ‘British railway poster’ style of the 1920s, from fish to bird, steamer to aeroplane.
A Spanish single release of Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Can I Have My Money Back?’ in 1972 seems to have been the first use of the new design on a record label, with the Johnstons’ ‘Continental Trailways Bus’ (BIG 501) its first use in Britain. It was given front-cover prominence on a sampler album The Acoustic Side / The Electric Side that year – albeit released only in parts of Europe and in New Zealand – presenting ten current acts from each ‘side’ of the company’s musical offerings. For the time being, it was still full speed ahead.
*
Billy Connolly – Gerry Rafferty’s former partner in the Humblebums – was in the process of dropping the songs from his comedy routines entirely on the huge-selling Live! (TRA 258) in 1972, aided enormously by TV appearances on Parkinson and the like. As Andrew Cronshaw recalls: ‘Billy Connolly’s double live solo stage show completely took them unawares by selling hugely in Scotland – they were stuffing LPs into sleeves in the van up to Scotland.’
One of Nat’s protégés on the label’s staff, Mike Watts, recalls this period well:
‘I worked for the company from 1973 to 1977 – first in artist promotions, then as Nat’s assistant and then as international manager. It was my first job after university and a brilliant place to start. I loved working for Nat – he was entertaining, generous with his time and taught me a lot about contracts and the business. He became a mentor and good friend.
‘Billy Connolly was booked on the Parkinson show only after the producer heard Billy on a radio interview we arranged as part of a lightning promotional trip to London to introduce English audiences to the Solo Concert album, which was doing incredible business in Scotland but not yet shifting south of the border.’
Providing a more cerebral, or annoying, form of comedy was the Portsmouth Sinfonia – an orchestra of non-players led by Gavin Bryars that was somewhere between an art statement and absurdity. ‘William Tell Overture’ (BIG 515) was released as a single in 1973, followed by two albums and a sold-out Albert Hall. Laurence Aston was key to the whole thing becoming something much more than an in-joke in art music circles:
‘I had seen them in performance at a QEH concert in which they opened for the premiere of one of Gavin’s minimal works,’ he recalls. ‘I got hold of a demo they had made and presented it to Nat, who immediately got the joke and the anarchic philosophy behind them. He gave me £200 to ‘produce’ the album and told me not to discuss it with anyone else in the company till it was ready. I then ‘co-produced’ their first album with Brian Eno, at a gallery space in the Royal College of Art – we switched on a 2-track Revox directly linked to a stereo pair and just let the tape run! The album and single were a huge success in the UK and US, with the head of CBS Classics sending Nat a telegram after receiving his copy, saying Leonard Bernstein insisted it was released on the Columbia label and that he was wiring a (then) large royalty advance cheque to secure the US licence rights.’
At the tail end of the Nat Joseph era, a comedy rock band, Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias, had two albums on the label and a flurry of interest on the touring circuit. As with the Portsmouth Sinfonia, it probably helped if you were ‘there’.
Along with ‘folk comedian’ Richard Digance, who recorded four albums for Transatlantic in the 70s and remains active in that field (sometimes literally, in the festival season), one comedy offering that went on to have a rather ‘longer tail’ was A Poke in the Eye (with a Sharp Stick) (TRA 331) in 1976 – recorded at Amnesty International concerts with Monty Pythons, the Goodies, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Eleanor Bron and others. It was the first such Amnesty record and film venture. After he left Transatlantic, staff member Martin Lewis continued his Amnesty relationship with The Secret Policeman’s Ball concerts, records and films.
‘Aside from Billy Connolly the most successful act on the label in that period was probably the Pasadena Roof Orchestra – five albums and various singles,’ says Mike Watts. ‘Weekend residences at the Biba Roof Garden in Kensington, a general revival of interest in 1920s music and endless tours of Europe moved a lot of records. The springboard for those tours was that in January ‘74 their manager, with our support, talked them on to the closing night gala at the annual MIDEM music industry sales fest in Cannes. Transatlantic’s licensees who were present saw the ecstatic response from the well-watered crowd and immediately started booking the band for dates and TV appearances. It happened very quickly. Through the early to mid-70s the company acquired distribution rights to the entire Blue Note and Milestone jazz catalogues – very much a testament to Nat’s reputation amongst US labels and the success the company was achieving with Nonesuch, the Joshua Rifkin/Scott Joplin albums in particular.’
As Stefan Grossman recalls: ‘The company changed when all of a sudden, they started having records that were really selling. Mike [Watts] was great, and Laurence Aston was like Nat’s assistant and then he brought in someone else to be head of A&R – John Whitehead. And he really upped the game, started getting albums promoted and everything became much more like a record company and less like a reflection of Nat.’
On the one hand, Transatlantic in the 70s was ploughing a comedy furrow, on another it was standing firm with Stray on the rock front, on another it was staying loyal to fingerstyle guitar peddlers like John James and Stefan Grossman, and on another it was seeing if there were legs in various forms of post-Pentangle folk-rock – with the likes of Decameron, the John Renbourn Group and, perhaps most promisingly, the unique progressive-rock/Renaissance music hybrid Gryphon.
Gryphon were signed by Laurence Aston, who was at point Nat Joseph’s assistant, with a roving brief across label management, marketing and A&R. Laurence also produced the band’s first album, which went on to sell thousands of copies in the UK in its first year and many thousands overseas.
‘Gryphon’s first encounter with Transatlantic Records was in early 1972,’ says Dave Oberlé, percussionist/vocalist with the band and later founder of Kerrang! magazine, ‘straight after a gig where we were approached by Laurence Aston who was head of A&R at the label. He said that Transatlantic were interested in signing the band and of course we were over the moon as it was everything a young band could wish for. The prospect of being on the same label as Pentangle, John Renbourn, Gerry Rafferty, Ralph McTell and Bert Jansch was very exciting.
‘It wasn’t long before we were taken to meet Nat Joseph who was a small and quiet man (and strangely we thought bore a strong resemblance to Napoleon) and he seemed to be full of great ideas for the band’s future. Laurence was tasked with looking after us and co-produced the first album. We signed to the label on the 4th September 1972 and shortly after produced the Gryphon (TRA 262) album which was then followed by Midnight Mushrumps (TRA 282), Red Queen to Gryphon Three (TRA 287) and finally Raindance (TRA 302).
‘During the Mushrumps era, Nat took on Martin Lewis who had moved from WEA to become publicist for the label. Martin was very instrumental in shaping the future of Gryphon, managing to get the band into the national press and getting us on to Radios 1,2,3 and 4 all in the same week, as well as persuading the Old Vic to let us do the gig there after we had written the music for Sir Peter Hall’s production of The Tempest. We are still the only band to have ever played a live gig there.’
While Transatlantic was providing less of a platform for Scottish and Irish traditional music in the 70s – bar reissues of such material from its 60s catalogue – a one-off album by Ireland’s legendary Kilfenora Céili Band (TRA 283) in 1974 – their first since 1959 – was notable. So too were four albums spanning 1975–78 by the more youthful Boys of the Lough, a band comprising both Scottish and Irish members, who were ‘upgraded’ to Transatlantic after two albums on Bill Leader’s label. A 1977 album by Na Filí was in similar territory to the Boys of the Lough – pure traditional music. Although not as widely celebrated today as the likes of the Bothy Band, whose music and performances remain the benchmark for most Irish trad players to this day, both Na Filí and the Boys of the Lough received regular airplay and session opportunities from John Peel on Radio 1, and their albums are surely ripe for rediscovery.
There was still room for grassroots folk club artists – people like George Deacon & Marion Ross, whose album Sweet William’s Ghost (XTRA 1130) was released in 1973:
‘Marion and I were signed up at Cambridge Folk Festival by John Whitehead,’ says George. ‘I think we went to Nat’s office to sign. In the studio, I got involved in the production and John suggested that they credit me. We recorded at Riverside; which Transatlantic used a lot. Nat later asked me to record a demo of a song he had been sent. He had hopes that it would suit Johnny Cash. It didn’t and was so awful that I found it almost impossible to learn and only got through the recording with the help of Miriam Backhouse. I have never been able to forget it, and I live in fear that my recording will one day surface.’
As Mike Watts recalls: ‘One area of folk recordings that the company championed from 1973 were the recordings by the murdered Chilean artist Victor Jara, released as the album Manifiesto (XTRA 1143) [winning the Grand Prix du Disque at Montreux in 1974] and albums on XTRA by exiled musicians Inti-Illimani and Quilapayun. Laurence Aston, working with Joan Jara, was responsible for those. Of Stefan Grossman’s many albums, the most successful by far was How to Play Blues Guitar (XTRA 1113), which never left the catalogue.’
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A few one-off classics from this period worth mentioning are concertina/guitar/vocal duo Lea Nicholson & Stan Ellison’s quirky but compelling God Bless the Unemployed (TRA 254) in 1972, Accidentally Born in New Orleans (TRA 269) by Alexis Korner’s Snape and Collection (TRA 252) by Steve Tilston, incongruously produced by blues connoisseur Sam Charters. Transatlantic had previously distributed Tilston’s debut album, An Acoustic Confusion, on Village Thing, and while he never attained the notoriety of Bert Jansch or Nick Drake, he knew both and had elements of each in his highly literate, instrumentally sophisticated music. Like Jansch, Tilston would be an artist with a long career.
Also instrumentally sophisticated, though harder for any marketing man to place, was Andrew Cronshaw. His debut album A is for Andrew, Z is for Zither (XTRA 1139), with a badly drawn sleeve illustration of the zither man, appeared in 1974:
‘I was living in Wester Ross when I made my first album,’ says Andrew, ‘released on XTRA (because, I guess, they didn’t know where a zither player would fit, and never really did). I was signed and produced by Laurence Aston, at Adam Skeaping’s studio in west London, and Transatlantic took care of everything including the dreadful cover! It’s a long way from Torridon to London, so I only occasionally made the trip, until after a while I moved to London, when I dropped in occasionally to make sure they remembered me! I met various other artists who happened to be in the press office when I dropped by. They did get me a gig or so – a couple of supports to Renaissance, and some radio interviews, including with Tony Palmer (at Radio London or LBC).
‘There was a considerable throughput of press officers, each with their own ideas, but on the whole they weren’t there long enough to really follow through. They were nice people, but I do remember one saying “Andrew, we need an angle”. In retrospect, if they couldn’t come up with an angle on a long-haired electric zitherist, with leather leaf-patches all over his trousers, who lived in a remote climbing hostel in Torridon, one does wonder how much of an angle they needed! But I was young and clueless, it was my first album and first encounter with the London-based music-biz. The person in the Marylebone Road office who saw and seemed to be interested in everyone who passed her desk near the front door on the ground floor was the receptionist.
‘Up on the top floor dwelt Nat – I only saw or heard him in passing. I nearly made it to the third floor when there was talk of a deal for more albums, but that didn’t happen – as far as I can remember the move to being called Logo, and take-over by Granada, was happening, so the people on the top floor had various considerations as to direction.
‘My next albums were for Bill Leader, but Leader/Trailer was taken under the wing of Transatlantic for distribution, so I was sort of partially back there, and the Transatlantic press people arrived at the Roundhouse, downstairs, where I was doing a gig, with the second album (Earthed in Cloud Valley, 1977) line-up. During the afternoon soundcheck, I heard the sound of a staple-gun and found that they were stapling sleeves of the album to the walls on the stair down. And they released, but didn’t promote, a sort of promo EP of tracks from that album. By then, after the first album, I’d taken charge of the sleeve design, and also quite a lot of the production in conjunction with Bill.’
Although Andrew was ostensibly with Leader/Trailer, his third album, 1978’s Wade in the Flood (LTRA 508), actually did appear within the Transatlantic canon – the catalogue number reflecting the partial shift to ‘Logo’ at that point.
‘I do remember they [by then] had Streetband (Paul Young et al., with the novelty number ‘Toast’), Tourists (Annie Lennox et al.), both before they moved to other labels and had greater success. I have to say that, perhaps understandably, Transatlantic never knew what to do with me, and their promotion was patchy. I probably expected too much of ‘being signed’ to a label in terms of career support, promo and follow-up, given that they couldn’t see how to make me a big-seller. I was never treated badly, and it was an interesting experience, and it got me into being a ‘recording artist’.’
An artist with a very different level of experience by the mid-70s was Mike Westbrook – an acclaimed British jazz composer, pianist and leader of ‘progressive’ big bands, incorporating influences as diverse as Duke Ellington, free improvisation and jazz-fusion. Westbrook was a one-off and, having made a series of ambitious records for Deram and RCA, most recently Citadel/Room 315 (1975), his new direction was a stripped-down ‘village band’.
‘The RCA thing was over,’ Mike recalled. ‘Citadel was just a one-off deal with them. Meanwhile, we were going around all the record companies with the brass band – the new thing on the block. We had some tapes which we took around. Most of the companies didn’t give us a second glance but Transatlantic did. A guy called John Whitehead was their A&R man and Laurence Aston was also there. At last, we found somebody who understood what the brass band was all about. So we recorded that album but Transatlantic offered me a deal – only time I’ve ever had anything like it: I was paid a monthly advance. Not a fortune but a retainer, against two albums a year. So the second album was Love/Dream & Variations (TRA 323) but then Transatlantic got bought up by somebody else and that all came to an end.’
Both the Mike Westbrook Brass Band album, Plays ‘For the Record’ (TRA 312), and Love/Dream & Variations – this one credited to the Mike Westbrook Orchestra and effectively a companion volume to RCA’s Citadel/Room 315 – were released in 1976. The latter, in featuring Mike’s 1960s protégé John Surman guesting, on sax, as the lead instrumentalist, felt like a last hurrah in what had been a ten-year run of large-scale works for ensemble carved out the melting pot of Soho jazz.
Throughout this ‘sunset era’ Transatlantic was certainly retaining its reputation for eclecticism. There was political cabaret act the Sadista Sisters, US bluegrass group Country Gazette, reggae band Greyhound and the London Cast Recording of The Black Mikado (TRA 300), a Gilbert & Sullivan revamp featuring TV stars Patti Boulaye, Floella Benjamin, Norman Beaton and Derek Griffiths – which Mike Watts recalls as ‘a very successful show, which I believe Transatlantic invested in’.
One artist, the epitome of ‘eclecticism’, who almost had a Transatlantic released in this era was Wild Willie Barrett. As Laurence Aston recalls: ‘Wild Willie was actually signed to the label by John Whitehead and made a fantastic album of parodies of other bands and singers. Unfortunately, our lawyers advised us not to release it, as it contained several potential copyright infringements and included one or two lyrics that bordered on libel and what we would now call ‘parental advisory’… However, John and I were still able to get Willie to record a track for Guitar Workshop 2 (TRA 315, 1976).’
Honourable mention should be made here of Metro, a futuristic pop act featuring songwriters Duncan Browne, Peter Godwin and Sean Lyons, whose 1976 single ‘Criminal World’ (BIG 560) was later covered by David Bowie on his Let’s Dance album – which can’t have done their bank balances any harm.
*
As mentioned earlier, the surprise successes of the first volume of Joshua Rifkin’s homage to Scott Joplin and Billy Connolly’s second album led to a circumstance that required existential changes. In spring 1974, Nat realised that retailers owed Transatlantic more than the company was capitalised, potentially creating a serious cash-flow problem. If any major chain of retailers went bust or delayed payment, Transatlantic was in trouble and might not have been able to meet its artist royalty obligations. The only way forward was to bring substantial new capital in, and the only way to do that, Nat felt, was to sell to/merge with a much larger entity. Laurence Aston recalls roughly a year of stress for Nat as he negotiated with Granada, a firm primarily involved in television and motorway services.
Nat Joseph began his long exit from Transatlantic in 1975, selling 75% of his shares over the next two years to Granada. While he had been involved personally in many of Transatlantic’s releases in the 60s, he very rarely ‘produced’ albums in the 70s. After Dave Cartwright’s A Little Bit of Glory (TRA 255) in 1972, his only production credit (bar a Billy Connolly live album, which was more in the realm of executive production) was a 1976 single ‘Romeo & Juliet’ (BIG 563) and 1977 album Side by Side by Side (TRA 346) by Scottish folk group the McCalmans. In a way, he was bowing out personally with creative involvement in music very close to the stuff that had made Transatlantic’s name in the mid-60s. One project that eulogised that era was The Electric Muse, a 4LP set charting the ‘British folk revival’ from the singer-songwriters of the 60s to the folk-rockers of the 70s, curated by journalists Robin Denselow, Karl Dallas and Dave Laing, which was released in November 1975 as a one-off joint project with Island Records. It was a significant achievement as a collaboration and sonic companion to a book of the same name, though sales – as was always the case with the whole British folk into folk-rock movement – were on a scale slightly less than the critical acclaim.
Having dipped his toes in the waters of theatre production in 1973 with a musical play called Agincourt, with the libretto by himself, music by David Palmer and direction by Ian McKellen, Nat would throw himself wholeheartedly into theatre projects. (He hoped to bring the musical to the West End, but this never eventuated.)
Transatlantic’s heyday had been in the 1960s, in and around music that Nat could relate to personally and was, in many cases, creatively involved as producer. Although able to outsource A&R and production in the ‘rock era’ of the 1970s to protégés in the company like John Whitehead and Laurence Aston, and with besuited ex-RCA business manager Jack Boyce coming in during 1975 to be general manager and present a familiar frontage to Granada suits, Nat had less personal interest in the music. He also had his own theatrical interests as well as an industrial concern in the Midlands left to him by his father. Asked why he decided to sell up, Nat’s widow Sarah Joseph immediately said ‘Because he didn’t like the music at the time!’ But as she went to explain, it was slightly more nuanced than that:
‘He was a person of many, many interests. He ran a metal business [inherited from his father], and then a theatre business, and he wrote all the time. I think he had so many interests that in the scheme of things he wasn’t going to continue doing something that wasn’t where his heart was. He was much more interested in Stephen Sondheim at that time [than rock music]. My children would vouch for that: ‘All dad ever listened to was Stephen Sondheim.’ He loved musicals; he wrote a lot…
‘[But also] he realised that unless he got ‘bigger’ he wouldn’t be able to do the things that he really wanted to move into [in the music industry], and one of the possibilities was the signing of Paul Simon’s music, its publishing. What he wanted to do was extend Heathside [Transatlantic’s publishing arm]. We were very friendly with Paul Simon’s lawyer. And when he approached Granada with the possibility of this, Granada wasn’t interested – all they wanted to do was invest their money in motorway services. So although they bought Transatlantic and promised him that they would be investing in really exciting projects, they didn’t.’
Mike Watts has clear recollections of the unfortunate folding of Transatlantic into the Granada empire:
‘I was with Nat in New York when Paul Simon’s lawyer played us the rough mixes of Still Crazy After All These Years – the publishing from that album and the subsequent solo records was available. On the same trip we were also offered the publishing of Boz Scaggs – similarly rejected by Granada. Another bad decision given how popular he would soon become. We did pick up the international publishing for then unknown Patti Smith for such a modest advance that it snuck in under the wire. The Granada management really didn’t understand Transatlantic – certainly not the notion of investing in artists over a number of releases until they become successful. John Whitehead did try to bridge the gap in understanding by producing albums with Granada talent – The Two Ronnies, Bernard Wrigley, even the Wheeltappers and Shunters Club – but they still didn’t get it. Management meetings with Granada reps present quickly became miserable affairs.’
During this unhappy period of two incompatible businesses in the futile search for a common culture, Laurence Aston was given the opportunity – suggested by Granada executive Denis Forman – of developing a major classical music imprint within Transatlantic. He spent six months on the project only to be told by Nat that the Granada board had decided to cancel it. The writing was on the wall.
To Sarah’s recollection, Granada realised after one board meeting at which Nat (still retaining 25% of the shares in Transatlantic at that point) was present that ‘he was going to be more trouble than he was worth’.
In 1977, Granada and Nat divested all their shares in Transatlantic to Geoff Hannington and Olav Wyper, founders of Logo Records and the latter a hugely experienced industry veteran who had founded legendary progressive rock label Vertigo. (The catalogue would subsequently be sold on to Sanctuary in the 1990s and BMG in the 2000s.)
While Sarah and Nat remained personally friendly with many of Nat’s former staff, who went on to their own careers in the music business, ‘He was terribly saddened by how it ended. It was really nasty, the end. For a year at least, I think, we lived in the country, he wrote and we never had anything to do [with the music business].’
As Nat himself told me in 1992, 15 years after the event: ‘When I left the record business, I didn’t read either Melody Maker or Music Week, which had previously been my Bible. Not deliberately – I just got wrapped up in other things. I developed more of a liking for classical music and show music, which has always been one of my great loves. I kept in touch with people like Jac Holzman of Elektra and Mo Asch of Folkways until he died.’
During 1978, it was reported that he was working on a book about the music industry, but sadly this never appeared – though Sarah still has the handwritten text. By the end of that year, he had launched Freeshooter Productions Ltd. and dived deep into the world of theatre, within which he would blissfully remain.
‘He didn’t live in the past,’ says Sarah. ‘His identity wasn’t tied up in Transatlantic, it was in himself and the creative side of himself, and Transatlantic was just part of that. Nat gave a chance to a lot of young people [at the company], like Mike Watts and Laurence Aston. He was a person to give people a chance. They were all much younger than him, and he wanted talent – he didn’t like second-raters. In its time, [Transatlantic] was wonderful. It wasn’t that he wasn’t proud [in later years – but he moved on.’
Mike Watts himself suggests Ray Cooper (not to be confused with the tambourine man of that name) as a prime example of Nat’s ability to spot talent: ‘Ray really was the ultimate example of the young people that Nat encouraged and who gave the company its personality. He started in ’73 as a van driver in the basement warehouse of Marylebone High Street and by the end of ’75 he’d become Head of Sales. He was probably the record industry’s sales manager with the longest hair and certainly the most talented. He went on to have an illustrious career – Jet Records, Island, his own label Circa and Virgin UK – culminating as Co-President of Virgin Records Inc. in North America.’
When I interviewed Nat in 1992, he could say that he’d met a handful of former Transatlantic artists – Stefan Grossman, Ralph McTell, John Renbourn – a few times since those days, and had attended a reunion event for the Ian Campbell Folk Group (one of the few Transatlantic acts that Sarah enjoyed), but by and large his life had moved in a different direction to the folk world that had been the basis of Transatlantic. He was now a casual observer, happily involved in the theatrical world that he had been a part of at Cambridge University in the days before Transatlantic.
‘Nat was one of the nicest men you could meet,’ says Toni Arthur, who almost uniquely worked with him in both record and theatre capacities. ‘He seemed a bit ill at ease with what he called ‘hippies’ but he was always so very nice and kind to us. He would laugh easily and thought a lot of the things we did were preposterous – especially when I learned to clog dance, and in part of our act I would jump on a pub table and dance. He and his wife Sarah became my close friends for a while. It was such a shock when he died so young. He was a magnificent business man and was really devoted to his family.’
*
Between 1978–80, the new owners of the catalogue, Logo, would keep the Transatlantic identity going in tandem with bringing new acts on board with yet more compilations of past works but also with new albums by two artists very much associated with the great days of Transatlantic: Dave Swarbrick and John Renbourn.
Dave Swarbrick, the fiddle sensation from the Ian Campbell Folk Group and then in a duo with Martin Carthy, had gone on to become the front man and driving force behind British folk-rock institution Fairport Convention, who had been recording during the 70s for Island and then Vertigo. He would release two solo albums on Transatlantic, exploring his artistry more fully – backed by all of Fairport Convention at that time along with Martin Carthy, céili pianist Beryl Marriott and many more. The two albums were recorded during the same sessions and released as Swarbrick (TRA 337) in 1976 and Swarbrick 2 (TRA 341) in 1977.
Having left the label in 1971, John Renbourn returned with solo instrumental masterpieces The Hermit (TRA 336) in 1976 and The Black Balloon (TRA 355) in 1979 – effectively, the high watermarks to this day of the ‘British fingerstyle’ genre of artistry that he had helped create in the 60s. Why he opted to return to Transatlantic, after the royalties controversy during the Pentangle era, is intriguing:
‘Isn’t that crazy?’ says Stefan Grossman, who worked with John as a duo in the late 70s and 80s. ‘It’s strange, I never understood with John and with Bert [Jansch] as well – “Why aren’t you licensing stuff?” They just felt that their role was to be an artist, not involved in the business that much.’
In between John’s two solo classics was A Maid in Bedlam (TRA 348) in 1977, by the John Renbourn Group – an entity featuring former Pentangle colleague Jacqui McShee on vocals and which explored further some of the jazz/folk/Early Music fusions of the Pentangle. A second album by the group, The Enchanted Garden (TRA 356) in 1980, would provide a fitting end to the Transatlantic story – bowing out with one of the artists who had defined the label in its late 60s heyday.
Postscript: The Name Rises Again in the 90s
In 1993, purchasers of a new Groundhogs live album Groundhog Night might have been intrigued to see it appear on the Transatlantic label: TRACD 319. During the mid to late 1980s, Geoff Hannington (Olav Wyper having moved on from their joint Logo/Transatlantic in the early 80s) leased a number of classic 60s/70s Transatlantic titles to Line Records in Germany, which gave the world the first CD transfers of many of these works – in an era before bonus tracks, remastering and booklet essays. In the early 90s, Hannington leased albums and tracks to UK label Demon, and this is the point that booklet essays and fresh compiling entered the picture (though not remastering).
The really significant entry into the CD era for the Transatlantic catalogue came when it was purchased in its entirety in the mid-90s by Castle Communications, which became Sanctuary Records in due course. Castle’s mid-90s reissues of classic-era Transatlantic titles tended to be ‘two albums on one’ CDs. The Groundhogs album had been a toe in the water for revitalising the name as an imprint within Castle for new works by ‘current’ artists, broadly within the rootsy territory of the label’s best-known 60s output. From 1995, a torrent of new releases by the likes of Four Men & A Dog, Big Country, Steve Earle, Barbara Dickson, Jessie Dayton, Mike Peters, Kimmie Rhodes and Energy Orchard flew under the Transatlantic banner – with both Ralph McTell and the Dubliners being Transatlantic artists from back in the day who both released new albums on the imprint. In 1999, Peter Banks, who had just about recorded for the original Transatlantic, with a couple of tracks on a compilation, finally managed a full album for it (Instinct, TRACD 309). Further ‘new’ artists issued under the Transatlantic flag in this period were 70s survivors like Ashley Hutchings, Caravan, Wild Turkey and Amazing Blondel, all inherited from Castle’s purchase of the HTD label.
The most significant celebration of the Transatlantic of old by its new owner was The Transatlantic Story (1998) – a finely crafted 4CD set compiled by Laurence Aston and with a foreword by Nat Joseph, no less. Just prior to that, two 3CD sets, New Electric Muse – The Story of Folk into Rock (1996) and New Electric Muse II (1997), had also referenced the past in being re-imaginings and expansions of the original 1975 Electric Muse 4LP collaboration between Transatlantic and Island. (In 2008, Universal – which had just purchased the Castle/Sanctuary/Transatlantic assets – had a go itself with The All New Electric Muse.)
From 2001–2007, Sanctuary Records as it now was – with legendary personalities of the record reissue scene Steve Hammonds and John Reed at the helm – delivered a splendid series of expanded remasters of some of the gems of the original catalogue – from the likes of Bert Jansch, Pentangle, Ralph McTell, Gerry Rafferty and John Renbourn. The last in the series, before Sanctuary itself and all its Transatlantic assets were bought by Universal (which is more or less too big for anyone to buy), was, appropriately, I’m Resigning from Today (TRRDD403) – a 2CD compilation of Harvey Andrews’ complete works for the label. Universal continued to maintain the best-known titles on CD, and within a few years divested its Transatlantic assets to BMG Rights, where they currently reside.
Afterword: Transatlantic Longevity
Some of the music, and artists, recorded by Transatlantic would be trapped in amber – intriguing period pieces, capturing a moment. While the Dubliners went on to have a long career, with a certain timelessness attached to their rumbustious repertoire of Irish pub songs, the Ian Campbell Folk Group didn’t pull off the same trick for their English repertoire and ‘sound’. It was an influential and popular sound in its time, but that time essentially ran out at the end of the 60s. Back in 1965, Nat Joseph would surely have been surprised had a time-traveller informed him that the recordings of Bert Jansch would be among the catalogue’s most valuable and in-demand assets in the present day.
Despite the lack of any plan, and with many bumps in the road, Bert (d. 2011) would go on to have an increasingly revered career, becoming a sort of living legend in the 21st century. His Transatlantic canon, the artistic bedrock of that legend, would be constantly re-presented. Bert’s Pentangle cohort John Renbourn (d. 2015) would also enjoy a long career and legendary status, albeit of a more connoisseur-based kind, among fingerstyle guitar buffs. The Pentangle would reunite in 2008 and 2011 for a series of swansong live performances, with a last album, Finale (2016), culled from these shows being a posthumous tribute to Bert, John and the band itself.
Gryphon would similarly reunite decades after their heyday, performing live with aplomb and delivering sensationally good new albums in 2018 and 2020, picking up precisely where they had left off.
The original line-up of Stray reunited for a sold-out 50th anniversary show in 2016. Del Bromham had continued to keep the name going for some years before that and continues to record and tour with an evolved Stray to this day.
‘I used to think that by the age of 30 I’d have ‘made it’ with Stray and be taking it easy, maybe doing solo albums,’ says Del. ‘But when I think about, I’m still playing because I still get the same enjoyment out of it as I did when I was a teenager. I didn’t play then because I might be getting a fiver at the end of the night: I did it because I enjoyed it. And, sometimes to my financial detriment, that’s still how I feel now. I still love playing music. As we speak, I’m planning the next album and the next bunch of gigs – whenever they may be.’
Of the label’s other singer-songwriters and guitar wizards, Ralph McTell has enjoyed a truly international and productive career. Performing ‘Nanna’s Song’ – the first track on his first album, Eight Frames A Second (TRA 165) – on BBC2’s Later… with Jools Holland in 2018, 50 years on, is but one testament to the quality and longevity of his work.
Gordon Giltrap has remained a popular touring and recording artist, with a very individual and distinctive style of playing and composition and a quintessentially English aspect to much of his work. The same could also be said of Steve Tilston, who has played a very long, somewhat relaxed game in music-making, with 2018’s Distant Days – a sublimely played, sung and rearranged selection of his own songs spanning 50 years, freshly recorded. A new song on the album, ‘Along the Road When I Was Young’, is more or less the story of all the 60s British fingerstyle artists who had made it that far.
Stefan Grossman has also enjoyed a long career as a performing and recording artist – more blues-based than his English peers on Transatlantic, though he is somewhat stoic about this, like an audience expectation that he can’t quite get away from – and also as an acclaimed guitar/blues educator and owner of labels himself, from the mid-70s onwards. ‘To me, the Transatlantic experience was totally positive,’ says Stefan, ‘except for the critical rebuff for Those Pleasant Days! But dealing with Nat was always positive. He was very encouraging. I went from being a signed artist to licensing in albums, which means that now, at 75, I own all my material except for the four albums I did with Transatlantic.’
Ralph McTell has fond recollections of an evening spent with Nat, shooting the breeze over a bottle of whisky. He would have further rough and tumble adventures on the high seas of the music business with labels and managers before his career settled down to an even keel, but he remains proud of his early albums and grateful that beginning his career at Transatlantic was not unlike starting a long voyage from a safe harbour, even if the mooring fees seemed a bit on the pricey side at the time:
‘It was my introduction to business, this whole episode. I heard a lot of people who were mealy-mouthed about Nat – who I found always erudite, charming, very able to express himself. And let’s face it, he took risks with some people that paid off. And that’s business, which we didn’t all understand at the time. I don’t think many of us were ripped off – you made your agreement, Nat stuck to his side of it and that was it. There were others in the business who didn’t do that.’
Vocalist Jacqui McShee, long in the shadow of others in the Pentangle and the John Renbourn Group, has proved her own artistry and staying power over the past 25 years – had it ever been in doubt – regularly touring and recording in various formats including Jacqui McShee’s Pentangle and Jacqui McShee’s Take Three.
Although some artists and albums in the Transatlantic catalogue would be exhaustively mined and re-mined for reissues and compilations, from the vinyl era to the CD era and back again to vinyl for the 180-gram deluxe market in recent years, a surprising amount of the catalogue would never make it into the digital era at all. Some examples of classic albums that remain locked in unwarranted second-hand vinyl obscurity are Lea Nicholson & Stan Ellison’s God Bless the Unemployed (1972), Steve Tilston’s Collection (1973), Andrew Cronshaw’s A is For Andrew (1974) and Mike Westbrook’s Love/Dream & Variations (1976) and the Pythons/Goodies live album A Poke in the Eye (With a Sharp Stick) (1976).
Many other significant albums have only briefly or obscurely been available on CD – the New Departures Quartet (1964), the self-titled Archie Fisher (1968), Amalgam’s Prayer for Peace (1969) – and several classics that did make it on to CD 15–20 years ago are now out of print and pricey: John Renbourn’s Faro Annie (1971) and Divisions on a Ground (1975), a solo album by Gryphon’s Richard Harvey, being good examples. The Annie Ross and Jean Hart albums (1963), the Mable Hillery album (1968), and many of the lesser-known singer-songwriters, folkies and rock bands on the label have also been overlooked. So there is plenty yet to discover and rediscover in the digital streaming era.
Colin Harper, February 2021Author’s Note: I had the great pleasure of interviewing Nat Joseph in 1992 for what eventually became Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British folk and blues revival (Bloomsbury, 2000). Some of the material in this piece has been adapted from that book and from interviews and research carried out for Irish Folk, Trad & Blues: A Secret History (Collins Press, 2004), The Wheels of the World: 300 Years of Irish Uilleann Pipers (Jawbone Press, 2015) and for numerous other journal pieces and CD booklets over the past 25 years. I revisited that 1992 interview with Nat for previously unpublished quotes and did extensive research using online discographic resources and the British Library’s subscription newspaper archive. Plus, it was great fun to seek out completely new and revealing recollections on Transatlantic from Sarah Joseph and several of the musical adventurers who jumped aboard its hot-air balloon for a while – and from Barry Devlin (Horslips) who almost did, and Ian A. Anderson, who experienced the pros and cons of Transatlantic distribution for Village Thing. Thank you to Sarah and to Toni Arthur, Laurence Aston, Del Bromham (Stray), Andrew Cronshaw, George Deacon, Ron Geesin, Gordon Giltrap, Stefan Grossman, Ralph McTell, Dave Oberlé (Gryphon) and Mike Watts. Special thanks to both Mike and Laurence for looking over the final text and fine-tuning some of the detail.